Inheritance (Genesis 15: 1-12; 17-21)

     Our passage is either the first of two or the second of three recounting of the giving of the Abrahamic Covenant to Abram the Hebrew, who is not-yet Abraham.  In fact, it’s in the final covenant-giving story, a couple of chapters later, where Abram is renamed.  Why so many retellings of the same thing?  Well, scholars believe that the author of Genesis—traditionally, but probably not actually Moses—that author of Genesis edited together writings from multiple sources.  And in traditional Liberal School scholarship—that’s liberal with a capital L, as in a scholarly, not political, movement—the two primary sources of Genesis can be distinguished by the name they use for God.  And sure enough, in this version of the covenant, the word “Yahweh” is used, which English translations render as Lord, and which I will not say again, in deference to our Jewish friends for whom the name cannot be said at all.  In the final covenant-giving, where Abram is renamed, the word for the almighty being is Elohim, which we translate as God.

Now all this is fine and dandy, and I wouldn’t bring it up, only it got me thinking when I compared the two covenant stories . . . because the sources that use “Lord,” our translation of that unutterable name, are considered to be older than those that use God.  That’s one reason that the first creation story in Genesis, the story in chapter one, is considered to have been written later than the second one, which begins in chapter 2, and tells of the temptation of Adam and Eve by that wily old serpent.  In the same way, this version of the covenant-giving is likely older, and perhaps more primitive, than the final one.

And indeed, it has a primitive feel, doesn’t it?  A dark, bloody and primordial feel . . . Abram is ordered to perform some acts that are disturbing to our modern sensibilities . . . he cuts the heifer in half—and I wonder how he got it done?  Did he have a holy chain saw?  Bones are tough to get through, ask a butcher . . . but he cuts the heifer in half, and the female goat and the male goat, then he lays the pieces against one another—symmetrically, I think, like the top of a hand-made guitar—look at Jim’s or Bob’s Martin next time they play—or opening your hands up like this—and then he stood by and waited for further orders from the Lord . . . and while he was waiting, he shooed off the vultures and hawks and all the other scavengers that might want a little more protein in their diets—I love the Hebrew here, which says he made them blow away—but before further instructions could come, a deep sleep fell upon Abram and a terrible darkness fell upon him as well . . . and the darkness is so bad it takes multiple adjectives to describe it, the darkness is terrifying and very, very deep.

My Hebrew professor, Walter Brueggemann, from whom you will hear through the magic of video in Sunday School, says that Hebrew is a language of verbs: to understand what an author is trying to convey—especially its subtext—you have to pay attention to the verbs.  And right here, we have an excellent example: the deep sleep falls upon Abram and the darkness falls upon him as well . . . the verb is repeated, and in Hebrew, perhaps more than other languages, the repetition drives the point home.  The author wants us to be sure that it’s no ordinary darkness, no normal sleep, they descend upon Abram as if they are beasts of prey, come to rip him apart, or like a great weight that falls crushing upon him, keeping him immobilized . . . they are not normal conditions, this darkness and this sleep, and because in the ancient mindset all things—good or bad—come from God, we know where they have come from.

But the verb “to-fall” is not the only one that is repeated in our passage . . . the reason Abram is filleting the livestock is a response to a promise from God . . . and the story of how it comes about uses two more important verbs—“to give” and “to become an heir” swhich can be translated “to inherit”—and it uses these verbs over and over. The Lord comes to Abram and says:  don’t worry, for I’m your shield, I’ll protect you, and your reward will be great.  (Abram had been doing a little work for the Lord on the side).   But Abram doesn’t buy any of it, he says—with a fair amount of bitterness—where’s the evidence?  You haven’t GIVEN me a thing, I’m childless and Eliazar of Damascus will INHERIT.  And to drive home the point, he repeats his complaint: You have GIVEN me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house will INHERIT.  Note the use of the two verbs in both sentences.

Abram is asking “Where’s the proof that my reward,” and in Hebrew it is wages, “Where is the proof that my wages will be great?”  He doesn’t believe him, and whereas in the final covenant tale he falls down laughing, in this version he demands proof.  You haven’t rewarded me before this, how am I supposed to believe it now?  And the Lord—I imagine with a heavy sigh—says “This man won’t be your heir, won’t inherit, but a son of your own—and the Hebrew is “out of your inward parts”—a son out of your innermost being will inherit.”  Notice the repetition of the verb for inheriting, twice in just this one sentence.

Then God tells him to look up and count the stars if he’s able to count them—note the repetition of the verb “to count”—and that thus will be his offspring, they will be as countless as the the stars above, and to his great credit, Abram believed him, which the Lord duly calculated to be righteousness.

But that’s not all, as the late-night-TV-hucksters say, because there is one more part to this promise: not only will Abram’s descendents be many, they’ll get some land as well.  “I am the Lord your God,” God says, “who brought you out of the Land of Ur to give”—there’s one of our verbs again—“to give you all this land to possess”  And even though our translation renders it “possess,” guess what verb it really is?  You’ve got it: it’s inherit.  What will the Almighty give to Abram?  God will give all this land for his offspring to inherit.”  And  oy vey!  That’s a lot of giving.

So a preliminary guess might be that this passage is all about inheriting, about becoming an heir on the one hand, and about the fact that God has given the inheritance—all this land—to the offspring of Abraham who, of course, became the Israelites, ancestors of the modern denizens of Israel.  In fact, this passage is ground central of the religious claims that have led to much warfare and strife over the years, and it all revolves around inheriting and giving:  the Israelites have inherited, and the Lord God Almighty has given.  And who in the world could argue with that?

Well, Abram, for one . . . though he believed the Lord when he was told he’d have lots of offspring, can’t quite swallow the inheriting the land part.  “How shall I know that I will possess it?”  And once again it’s the verb inherit translated as possess.  How shall I know that I will inherit it?  And that’s when the Lord—again I imagine with a heavy sigh—orders up the split livestock, and causes Abram to fall into a deep and terrible sleep.

And it is when it is fully dark, when the sun has fallen into total submission, that Abram learns the fate of the butchered animals:  a smoking firepot passes between the halves of the heifer and the goats, followed by a flaming torch, and Abram knows that the Lord is there, invisible but present just the same.  And as the firepot and the torch float eerily between the blood-soaked pieces, he hears the Lord’s voice one more time: “On this day, to your offspring, I give the land from Egypt’s river to the great Euphrates, the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.”  And we’re to understand that with the sliced animals, God has made a covenant with Abram and his descendants, and in fact the Hebrew for “to make a covenant” is to cut a covenant, and indeed anyone of the era would recognize this bloody scene as a covenanting ceremony, with God as the covenanter, the promiser, and Abram and his descendants the promisees.

Now, I know the tendency today, in these more, ah, refined times, is to shudder at the image of the slaughtered livestock, as we imagine the smoky, blood-soaked scene, and to thank God that it isn’t like that anymore, that we are more sophisticated, less primitive and well, less gross than that.  Then after thinking this, after shaking our heads fastidiously at all the dark brutality, we take communion in which we say “the body of Christ, broken for you” and “the blood of Christ, shed for you”  and we quote Christ as saying “this is the new covenant in my blood,” just like God’s new covenant in the blood of those heifers and goats.  The origins of our faith are no less bloody than those of the Hebrew faith, all those thousands of years ago, no matter how we have smugly modernized it.

In fact, that’s why we read this at Lent, because the new covenant in Christ’s blood bears a striking resemblance to the old one in the heifer’s and goat’s.  And we’re supposed to correlate the two, meditating upon the sacrifice of the animals, and comparing them to that of our Lord.

But the heifer and the she- and he-goats aren’t the only sacrifices in our story, are they?  What about the sacrifice of those whose land the proto-Israelites usurped?  What about the Kenites and the Kenizzites and the Kadmonites?  What about the Hittites and the Perizzites, the Rephaim and the Amorites?  The Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites?  What about their sacrifice, which was as unwilling as that of the livestock?  In our passage, God promises the Hebrews their land, which means death for an agrarian peoples.  And it wasn’t all second-hand, through the potential loss of their land, either.  The Bible says that the Hebrews invaded these peoples to seize it, and this meant loss of life.  Listen to this excerpt from the Book of Joshua, describing what happened during the invasion take some of that land, what happened in Jericho after the walls came a-tumbling down:  “They”—that’s the Israelites, led by Joshua himself—“They devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.”  And when they take the city of Ai, they do the same thing, and it is written that “The total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand—all the people of Ai.”

Sisters and brothers, at Lent we are to meditate on our part in the salvation story, and upon the sacrifice of God’s son so that we might be free from the bondage of sin.  But at this Lent, I invite you to think upon the other sacrifices, unwilling sacrifices, so that peoples and nations can have their way.  I invite you to think about the sacrifices for that first covenant, the innocent lives lost so that Israel could have their land, and whether perhaps in our Scripture—with all its talk of God giving the land to the Hebrews to inherit—there isn’t just a touch of justification for actions that a loving God would never condone.  I invite you to think about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and how the lives of Palestinian and Jewish people are still being sacrificed, in part, for that covenant.

But lest we concentrate on the systemic sins of others, and ignore I invite you to think about our own sacrificial offerings . . . the lives of people sacrificed in wars using Christianity as an excuse, from the first Crusade, where 30,000 Jews and Muslims were slaughtered—ten times the number lost at 9/11—in the name of Christ, to the slaughter of heathen Indians in South America—supposedly to bring them to God!—to the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland.  I invite you as well to think about how Western societies sacrifice whole classes of people for the comfort and wealth of others, people who work for minimum wage at multiple jobs, sacrificing their lives and the lives of their children so we can have cheap goods and services, the employees of the Wal-Marts and K-Marts who go without health care and other benefits so we can have low, low prices, and so CEOs can acquire even more gold in their parachutes.

Philosopher and theologian René Girard has said that Western culture is sacrificial in nature, and at this Lent I invite you to consider what that means, and what our part in that systematic sins we play.  And doing that, think on the differences between those sacrifices—most of them unwilling—and the one we await, that of Jesus Christ, our Lord.  Amen.

The Devil Went Down to Naz’reth (Luke 4:1-13)

     Today is the first Sunday of Lent, a time of self-examination, when we look at ourselves, our faults and our sins, when we look at our place in the human world, with all it’s systematic sin and disillusionment.  At the same time, it’s a time of hope, of expectation, because we also await our Savior.  And like at Advent, when we look forward to the coming of the Christ, at Lent we await his coming as well, only this time it’s his coming death and sacrifice, which in some way we don’t fully understand, set us free from oppression by that guilt and shame.  And so this season we enter has two sides, like a Janus-headed bust, one that looks back at us in our human condition, our condition of bondage to the evil we call sin, and forward to our freedom from that captivity, a freedom made possible by an horrific death 36 days from now.

     And as we traditionally do, we begin with an accounting of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.  Temptation stories are rare in the Bible; in fact, there are precisely two:  the temptation of the first man back in Genesis and our story today.  As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, the first, the story of Adam, is the “temptation that led to humanity’s’ fall,” while Jesus’ experience is “the temptation which led to Satan's fall.”¹  And it’s important to remember this as we talk about the wilderness:  it’s not about temptation in general, not about ours or our neighbor’s or Christians as a whole.  It’s about the temptation of Jesus, who was the Christ.

     The Holy Spirit – the same spirit that came upon him at baptism, mind you – leads him into the trackless waste.  And there he’s met by Satan, that symbol of all that is evil in the world, that personification of our separateness, our alienation from all that is God.  And the devil comes up to him, looking dapper, and fit, like he’s been spending a lot of quality time with a Stairmaster, and he looks like the very model of a modern human being, a successful yuppie with tasseled loafers and an Izod shirt, and he’s got a Starbuck’s in his hand – or maybe a frozen margarita – and he holds it out to Jesus, and when Jesus refuses, takes a big old satisfied gulp and lets out a mighty sigh of contentment: “Ahhhhh . . . that hits the spot.  Now then” – and he unsnaps his briefcase – “Now then: we’ve got some business to attend to.”  And he pulls a humongous rock out of the case, and says “If you’re the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”

     And without hesitating, Jesus replies: “It is written: ‘One does not live by bread alone’” and you can’t quite see it, it’s almost as if you’ve imagined it, but a look of naked fury crosses the devil’s unlined face, but only for a second, and then it’s a broad smile and he says: “OK, OK, you got me . . . how about this.”  And he holds up the briefcase, and Jesus looks inside, and suddenly, it’s as if it expands to engulf them, and it becomes their whole reality, and they’re standing on top of the world and all its kingdoms are spread out below . . . they can see lions knifing through the African veldt, buffalo covering the plains of North America like a muddy blanket . . . they can see Rome and its Emperor who thinks he’s a god and – in New York city – glittering towers containing CEOs who think the same . . .  All of the world, past and present and future, is laid out at their feet, and the devil looks smug, now, like this is a pretty good trick, and he says “Alright – I’ll give you glory and authority over all of this – because it’s been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I like – if you’ll just fall down on your knees and worship me.”

     And again, Jesus answers him with scripture: “It is written, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him’” And now it’s clear: the devil’s mad – his perfectly coiffed and gelled hair begins to smoke . . . little wisps of flame dance around his fingers, so hot they melt his Harvard class ring, and abruptly, with no fancy tricks, no pulling anything out of his briefcase, they’re on the pinnacle of the Jerusalem temple-grounds, the epitome of religious power in the Jewish world, and they can see the temple itself, with its big, empty bowl and columns . . . they can see the sacrifices being offered, blood running into grates in the platform, and smell the greasy odor of burnt-offering, and the devil tries one more temptation: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here,” and this time, he quotes scripture as well: “For it is written ‘He will command his angels to protect you’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up.’”

     But for a third time, Jesus calmly answers him “It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” And with that, the devil’s eyes bug out, and he looks like he’s about to explode, and with a loud Bang! he does, he disappears into thin air.  But Luke cautions us that the devil is not finished, because he says that he departed “until an opportune time.”

     And the lesson we take from this depends on what kind of theology and view of Biblical authority we hold.  For many evangelicals – for whom scripture is inerrant and literally God’s Word – the story happened just as it is told here, and Jesus’ resistance to the temptations shows that he uses God’s written word – which they liken to a sword – to combat the devil.  That he wins proves he’s divine.  Other, more middle-of-the-road scholars, view it as an idealized story, a metaphor that shows that Jesus was sinlessness, and that also shows Jesus’ god-hood.

     But I kind of think it’s about the opposite, that it’s about Jesus’ humanity.  Tom Brown Jr. wrote a memoir about Stalking Wolf, the Apache shaman who was his mentor, and who he calls “Grandfather.”  Grandfather taught him that there are three demons: self-doubt, ego and distractions of the logical mind.  You can associate each one of these with of Jesus’ wilderness temptations.  When the devil tempts him to turn stone into bread, it’s a temptation of self-doubt – only here, it’s reversed.  Failure – succumbing to the temptation – would be to do it himself, to feed himself, instead of relying on God in heaven, whom he calls abba.  It would be like taking over God’s work, which is to care for God’s people.  Jesus, of course, doesn’t even consider it.  When the devil tempts him with power over the entire world, it’s a temptation of ego and pride, of considering himself above everyone else, of greed for power and control to feed his own sense of self.  Again, Jesus chooses the opposite, he chooses to worship only God, not himself.  Finally, when the devil tempts him to throw himself down, so that his abba would send angels down to rescue him, he uses logic – scriptural logic, like I used to put together this sermon – to offer Jesus an idea of what God was like, a God bound by scripture to save his life.  But of course, Jesus resists this final temptation, telling him that we’re not to put our God to the test, we’re not to require God to behave as we logically expect.²

     As Tom Brown’s shaman-mentor knew, these three temptations – doubt, ego and over reliance on flawed, mortal logic – are all too . . . human.  In fact, it’s a common practice in many religions – including Native American ones, where it’s sometimes called a vision quest – for shamans-prophets-wise-men or women to go into the wilderness for “final exams,” to see if they’re ready to go, ready to begin work at their vocation.  Thus what Jesus does is very human, something that’s common around the world, and very un-God-like at the same time.  Because really – what kind of test would it be for Jesus if his God-hood assured he would pass it, if there was no danger that he could fail?  It would be nothing more than a quaint story that tells us that Jesus was inhumanly impervious to what ails us.  And what kind of example would that be?

     Far from being about his sinlessness, far from being about his divinity, the story of the wilderness is about nothing less than the humanity of the Christ.  It touches that glorious, mysterious conundrum all over again – how can he be human and yet divine?  The mystery we affirm in a thousand ways, in the pews and in the creeds and in the songs – fully human, he was, and yet fully divine.

     And the humanity of it is what gives this story its great power to comfort us, to lift us up, and to instruct us.  For who hasn’t been enticed as Jesus was?  Who hasn’t been lured by the ego, by the hunger to satisfy our appetite for self-fulfillment, self-aggrandizement, self-glorification?  And who hasn’t been tortured by self-doubt, by an obsessive need to do everything ourselves, to be responsible for everything, to take it all out of God’s hands?  I know I have, I know I’ve succumbed to Grandfather’s demons and had friendships ruined by pride, had my stomach tied in knots by worry and I know that I’ve gotten things disastrously wrong by my own reckoning.

     There’s a story that’s become almost legendary in my family, about a vacation to Glacier National Park, where I – puffed up with adolescent ego – was assigned the task of navigator, or I assigned myself the position, I can’t remember which.  Anyway, I plotted out several routes between Seattle and Montana, carefully calculated the distances of each, and declared that it wouldn’t be all that much further if we went through southern Canada, and we’d see some places we hadn’t seen before.  Well, my parents took the bait, chose that route, and because I’d been off in my calculations by five- or six-hundred miles, and it took us a good day longer than it should have . . . which shows that Grandfather’s demons often gang up on us, and pound away in tandem, or even three-at-a-time.  Ego drives us to rely on our own wisdom, which makes us say “I can do it myself, thank you very much . . . I don’t need you or God to do it for me,” and then, more times than we’d like to admit – we fall flat on our faces.

     But in our story, Jesus chooses not to give in . . . he chooses, in fact, God the father, whom he called Abba.  He chooses to rely on God, not himself.  He chooses to worship God, and not the devil, or just as bad, himself.  He chooses not to define what God will or will not do, not to put God into a box of his own logical making.  Jesus shows there is a choice, there is a better way.  Paul tells us that the wisdom of the world is foolishness to God . . . and Jesus chose God’s foolishness over against the deadly wisdom of the world.

     And about now you’re saying “Righhhhht!  All that stuff about showing his humanity aside, this is Jesus, this is the Savior of the universe we’re talking about . . . and to paraphrase what Lloyd Benston said to Dan Quayle: ‘We know Jesus!  Jesus is a friend of ours!  And let me tell you something, we’re not Jesus!’”

     And that’s surely true, we’re not Jesus.  We have an awful lot of Adam and Eve in us, and when confronted by temptation, we often behave like it.  But as Christians, we also have Jesus in us – remember, he told his disciples “I am in you and you are in me,” I in you, you in me . . . And so, as Bonhoeffer put it, “Either we are tempted in Adam or we are tempted in Christ. Either the Adam in us is tempted – in which case we fall. Or the Christ in us is tempted – in which case Satan is bound to fall.”³  We have Christ in us, Christ who waits to take our temptations upon himself, who showed us the way, who didn’t argue or use violence or any other worldly means . . . he simply chose a new way.  In the face of each temptation he chose the authentic God, the God who would not be tested . . . the God who provides for God’s creation . . . the God who does not coerce, who does not use violence to control and dominate God’s subjects.  He did not choose the world’s God, not the false God of power and might that the devil held up before him, but the true God he had come to know as his Abba.

          Brothers and sisters, Christ is in us, he dwells right here inside, and through Christ, through his loving example and power, we are enabled to choose as he does . . . it’s not necessarily easy, we are bathed in the world, seduced by it, brought up in it, and it’s not easy to change the way we think.  But Christ is in us, by the grace of God, by Christ’s death for us not long from now and – yes! – by his glorious resurrection shortly thereafter!  And when temptation strikes, when that old devil comes to us with all the world at our feet, we can let Christ be the one who is tested, and he – and us – will choose the life-giving way.  Amen.

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¹  Bonhoeffer, D., Creation and Fall/Temptation (New York: Macmillian, 1978)

²  I am indebted to Michael Hardin and Jeff Krantz of preachingpeace.org for the shaman example and analysis

³  Bonhoeffer, op cit.

For Goodness Snakes! (Isaiah 6:1-8)

Call stories are  a dime a dozen in Seminary . . . we all got used to relating them upon demand.  Because I had a scholarship from a women’s group, one year I ended up getting on my best clothes and standing up in front of middle-aged and older ladies and relating how I came to be called into the ordained ministry.  This might have irritated me a bit, but because it was at a banquet, I didn’t mind:  in seminary, you learned never to turn down a free meal.   And so, we would scrub up real nice and stand up at the podium and tell—hopefully in a humorous, self-abnegating tone—all about the goings-on that led up to our call into the ministry.  And while our stories were doubtless mostly true, I daresay we tended to smooth them out so they sounded . . . well, humorous and self-abnegating, true, but most of all, fairly normal, as if being called by God to guide a church was a pretty ordinary, mundane occurrence.

Which, if you think about it in generic terms, as just another species of call, it is.  If we Presbyterians believe in the priesthood of all believers, if we believe that we are all called into some form of ministry, then it is an every-day kind of thing: it’s just a different message from “come be a third-grade teacher” or “work with differently-abled children.”  Nevertheless, when we presented our calls to our benefactors, we’d make them as non-threatening as possible because, after all, these people were giving us money.

Not all call stories fit that bill, of course . . . one of my classmates swore that God got so tired of her not hearing the call that one day in the park, while she was minding her own business, she was lifted a foot or so in the air and then dropped back down to the grass.  Of course, she insisted that this happened to a friend of hers, but we all knew the truth . . .

But as weird as it is, her story doesn’t hold a candle to the tale of Isaiah’s being called as God’s prophet, God’s mouthpiece, if you will . . . even though it’s not the weirdest prophetic call story—see Ezekiel’s, if you don’t  believe me—it is certainly strange enough.  But like a lot of things, we can sort of glide over it without realizing just how strange it really is . . . we tend to normalize it, think it some sort of quaint, pre-modern way of expressing the notion of Isaiah’s call . . . maybe we suspect some sort of psychological condition behind it all or that, as Ebenezer Scrooge put it, there is more gravy than grave about the whole affair.

And I think that if we do, we end up being just as wrong as Scrooge, and you remember what happened to him . . . first of all, it is surpassingly strange . . . imagine.  He’s standing in the very heart of the temple, in the Holy of Holies . . . this is where the footstool of God is, and where  only the priests are allowed.  Most visitors had to remain in the main, outer court, most males, anyway: if you were female, there was a Woman’s Court to the East just for you.  But Isaiah is standing in the innermost Holy of Holies, and it is lit only by flickering torches . . . and although he cannot see the sacrifices—they’re in the courtyard outside—he can smell their burnt-meat smell . . . it crinkles his nose and threatens to gag him at times . . . the greasy smoke from the burning seeps under the entranceway and rises up from the floor, but through it he can see just the hem of God’s huge robe, with two giant feet sticking out, and they fill the shrine, and by this Isaiah knows that God is in the house, seated on his throne in the Holy of Holies.

And under, around and through the noisome smoke, in and out of the flickering light, winged forms flutter and glide, like vultures circling a carcass, and when they come near he can tell that they are seraphs, flying serpents, flying snakes with six leathery wings in three pairs: one pair covers their eyes—even they cannot look full upon the terrible glory of God—one pair covers their, uh, feet—and even as a man of God, Isaiah knows what that’s a euphemism for—and one pair that keeps the whole slithering thing aloft.

And as Isaiah watches the ungainly reptiles careen this way and that, he becomes aware that they are chanting something as they go, and their voices are an unworldly twittering, or—sometimes—a high, screeching wail, and when they are close he can see their bulging eyes and the lipless mouth as they chirp “Holy.  Holy.  Holy is the Lord.  Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord,  the whole Earth is full of his Glory.”  Over and over, a wild and utterly inhuman refrain

And Isaiah is scared right down to his sandals, terrified at his bizarre predicament . . . what if one of the serpents hits him?  What if they devour him with their snaky mouths and pick him apart, head cocked to one side like a giant bird,  gazing at him with those cold, lidless eyes?  But worst of all, what if the Lord God notices him, insignificant bug that is is? What if he is observed?

And underneath all the terror, all the impending dread, some part of him acknowledges that the snakes are right:  This whole deal is holy in the most basic, atavistic sense, for he knows that the word “holy” means separate . . . apart . . . other, and this is about as other, about as apart from normal happenstance as you can get.  lt as if the seraphs are screeching “Other . . . other . . . other is the Lord . . . other . . . other . . . other is the Lord!”

And on that subliminal level he gets it.  This isn’t some call to join the garden club or the Kiwanis . . . it isn’t an invitation to a birthday party or the Jerusalem chapter of the scroll of the month club—get six bestselling parchments for a denarius when you agree to buy ten more at regular club prices—this is a call to something completely different, completely other completely—and there was no better way of putting it—holy.

And so, far from being an accident, far from being an artifact of a simpler, more gullible time, the weirdness of the scene is part of the point:  serving this God, answering this call is about as outside the realm of day-to-day discourse as one can get.  It is unutterably strange, completely different from the world, outside the ken of earthly existence . . . and I, for one, say thank goodness it’s not like that any more!  Thank goodness there are no more flying snakes, that we see no more fire-lit visions, smell no more the burning fires of immolation.   Thank the Lord that we are past that atavistic, primitive religion, that we are just like our neighbors, only we have less time to read the paper on Sunday morning . . . I, for one, would be embarrassed if it were to get out that we burned goats and swatted at giant flying snakes in the firelight.  It’s bad enough that we drink the blood of our leader, and that our symbol is an instrument of torture, even if we do pretty it up with silver and leaves and stuff.

And we have Constantine to thank for that, don’t we?  It wasn’t long after the resurrection that he legalized Christianity and used it to help shore up the fading Roman Empire, beginning a long, gradual process of accommodation of our faith to Western society.  Thus, a religion that was so pacifistic that Constantine’s soldiers were baptized with their sword arms sticking out of the water saw, jus a hundred years later, its main theologian Augustine formulating seven criteria wherein war was considered just.  A faith that had a huge component of passive resistance to authority—so much so that Gandhi could say he learned how to do it from Jesus—became all about what happens to us when we die.  Today, the otherness that Isaiah experienced in the dark confines of the Holy of Holies has vanished, replaced by a sense that our faith is just one thing in a series of things demanding our time, and worship something we adjust the start-time of, and make sure it doesn’t go over an hour, so that it doesn’t take up all our time on the Lord’s day.

Back in the Holy of Holies, Isaiah’s worst fears are coming true: one of the flying horrors veers away from its buddies, out of that ragged formation and heads straight for him!  And it all seems to happen in slow-motion, as if in one of those movies where the gunslingers square off in the streets, where it seems to take forever to get their guns out . . . the flying snake gets closer and closer until he can see its cold eyes, pupils shrunk to slits in the firelight, and smell it’s fetid snake-breath, and suddenly he sees a white-hot coal in its mouth, and he tries to get his hands up to ward it off, to shove it frantically out of the way, but it’s too late: the coal is pressed into his mouth, branding him with searing pain.he is branded on the mouth by the coal, and a searing pain spreads from where it has touched him to all parts of his being.

And such is his agony that he can hardly think, hardly feel, and he jerks backward, scrambling to get out of the way, and somehow through it all he hears the maddening chirp of the flying snake saying: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.”  And he understands that the fire has purified him, it has washed away his sins, and it is entirely fitting, for hadn’t he just been complaining it?  Hadn’t  he just been whining about his unclean lips, saying “Woe is me,” as of the God on that massive throne had ever really given a fig about unclean lips?

And after the cleansing fire, after the white-hot redemption, he hears the voice of the Lord, and he thinks “Rats!  He knows I’m here after all . . .” but far from upbraiding the soon-to-be prophet, he chooses him: "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And after giving only a millisecond’s  thought about who the “us” was—would he be working for the snakes, too?—Isaiah says said, "Here am I; send me!"

And wonder of wonders, God did, God did send Isaiah, didn’t he?  Even with his unclean lips, even though he was just a human, in the face of all of that holiness, God sent Isaiah, son of Amoz, to do God’s work.  And wonder of wonders, God has sent us to do the exact same thing, to be God’s mouthpiece, to spread the Word of God—branded into our mouths every bit as much as it was for Isaiah.  Only instead of purifying fire, God uses . . . water.  At our baptism, we are marked and set aside, made holy, made other for God’s work.  And despite our best efforts, despite two millennia of trying to fit in, to make God non-threatening and Ozzie  and Harriet safe, I don’t really think that things  have changed all  that much.  The God of Abraham, of Jacob, of Isaiah is the same as she ever was, completely, absolutely, incorrigibly other, and no amount of smoothing or leveling or sanding-down will make her any different.

But that’s the good news as well . . . because the God we serve has done something totally outside the norm, completely other, completely outside our worldly frame of reference.  I heard someone on some talking head show saying that he just couldn’t understand it, that it just didn’t make any sense that a parent would sacrifice their only son, send him to die a mortal death, and I thought: exactly.  The love that God has shown is overwhelmingly other, completely and utterly holy.  Because, after all, God sent his only begotten son, to become human and die a humiliating death, even death on the cross.  And how weird is that?  Amen.