For Goodness Snakes (Isaiah 6:1 - 8)

There’s a movie came out a few years ago called Snakes on a Plane, and it was exactly what the title says: there were snakes. And they were on a plane. A 747, to be exact, and its chief pleasure was Samuel L. Jackson, who I’d watch read the phone book, and who spent most of the movie finding creative ways to dispatch said snakes. Because they were on a plane. And don’t worry, animal lovers—no actual snakes were harmed in the making of that movie, just very fake-looking, computer-generated critters.

Anyway, if they were to make a movie about today’s about Isaiah’s vision they might call it Snakes in a Temple, because that’s what Seraphs were: snakes with three pairs of legs: one pair covering their faces, one pair doing the flying, and one pair covering their, uh, feet. And you say “Wait a minute, pastor, snakes don’t have feet,” and you’re right, they don’t, but “feet” is a Hebrew euphemism for their privates, so at least they were modest snakes, and not particularly stupid, either: they covered their faces so they wouldn’t look directly upon the Lord on his throne because it was well known that if you were to do so, you’d be burnt to a crisp, or undergo some other equally gruesome death. Even if you were a flying snake.

And I love this passage, for a variety of reasons, chief among them being the surpassing weirdness of it all. Here’s God, sitting on this huge throne, so big that the hem of his robe takes up the whole room, and puny old Isaiah is so small that all he can see is the big toe of the Lord—which is still better than Elijah, who only got to see his backside. And high overhead, flapping around where Isaiah knew the Holy Head must be, were those snakes, squawking and carrying on, bug-eyed and completely alien, screeching out their refrain: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God of Hosts!”. The sound echoed in the temple with a cadence all its own—“Holy, Holy, Holy! Holy, Holy, Holy!” Isaiah covered his ears, but he couldn’t keep the sound out: “Holy, Holy, Holy! Holy, Holy, Holy!” and it seemed that the wings of the snakes beat in time to the chant “Holy, Holy, Holy! Holy, Holy, Holy!”

And the whole throne shook with their screeching—“Holy, Holy, Holy!”—and the Temple was filled with the greasy smoke of the sacrificial altar, and it swirled around in torch-lit eddies, clogging Isaiah’s nose—“Holy, Holy, Holy!” Sweat ran freely down his forehead, stinging his eyes and staining his robe, and he couldn’t keep a tremor out of his legs, they were shaking like the palsy.

And the tremble in his legs crept into his voice as he said “Woe is me! I’m lost, ‘cause I’m a man of unclean lips”—“Holy, Holy, Holy!” —“and I live among a people of unclean lips!” His point being that such lips would be unfit to speak the Word God. But before we praise him for his humility, before we slap him on the back for his modesty, let’s remember that this was just the latest in a line of prophetic dithering, prophetic stalling . It was common knowledge that prophets weren’t the best-treated individuals on the block, they tended to have a short life spans and hard lives. That’s because they generally told the people—and often, their rulers as well—how God was going to get them, how God was going to punish them for some infraction or another. So almost-prophets tried to get out of they whole thing. Moses used the excuse that he couldn’t speak in public; Jeremiah tried something similar, saying “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” And Jonah just up and ran away, taking the first boat to Tarshish.

But of course, God wasn’t so easily dissuaded—God said to Moses “ok, if you can’t talk, get Aaron to do it.” He told Jeremiah “Don’t say to me I’m just a boy . . . get some courage, why don’t you?” And off course, he sent that giant fish to persuade ol’ Jonah. And no sooner had Isaiah said “I am a man of unclean lips” than a seraph peeled away from the flock, fluttered over to the altar, and grabbed at something with a pair of tongs. It soared up and up to the highest heights of the temple, to it’s pinnacle, as if to get up as much speed as it could, then folded it’s wings and dove straight at him. “Holy, Holy, Holy!”

And as it got closer, it seemed time stood still, and he could begin to make out snakey details: cold, beady eyes, staring without blinking. Tongues flickering in and out as if to taste the winds. Dry, reptilian scent, redolent of ashes and musk. Worst of all, he could see what it held in tongs grasped in its mouth: a live coal, fanned into white-hot brilliance by the descent. “Holy, Holy, Holy! Is the Lord of Hosts!”

And it’s funny: he didn’t feel the impact, he didn’t feel the shock as several pounds of reptile hit him in the head, but he certainly felt the heat as he was branded, full on the mouth, by the fiery kiss. Pain shot through his body and he fell back from the shock. And he hears the seraph say “Now your guilt has departed—your sin has been blotted away.”   . . . That’ll teach you to whine about being unclean, that’ll teach you to make lame excuses why you can’t answer the summons of God! Now you have none, no grounds to refuse . . .

And the reason we read this passage on Trinity Sunday is because it reveals a key attribute of that first member of that trio: the complete transcendence, the complete otherness of God the creator. When you get right down to it, it’s the first thing we can say about this God: he (or she or it) ain’t like you and me. At all.

In fact, that’s what kadosh—the Hebrew word we translate as “holy”—means: it means “different,” “set-apart,” “other.” So there in Solomon's temple, the flying snakes were singing of the oddness, the otherness, of God. “Holy, Holy, Holy!,” they sang. “Other, other, other.” But it wasn’t like you had to convince Isaiah of that, he was well aware of how strange everything was, how that humongous being could crush him like a grape if the whim were to take him. And it wasn’t like Isaiah hadn’t heard the stories of God doing just that, stomping on enemies like so many wriggling, messy cockroaches.

In his vision, Isaiah saw God as he was expected to: as a super-person, a super-sovereign, as it were, one that could take care of kingly business, protecting the people from their many foes—whether imagined or not. That was the Hebrew vision of the Lord, mighty in valor and deed. But in the fulness of time, in kairos time, we received another vision of God, did we not? A vision of God not as some far-off transcendence, not exhibiting Karl Barth’s unbridgeable gap, but right here beside us, walking the dusty, messy roads of life.

If Isaiah’s vision revealed the God who is so unlike us that it’s scary, Jesus reveals the God who’s so like us it’s . . . what? Comforting. Tender. Real. Jesus reveals the God who loves us so much that he came to share what we share, feel what we feel, suffer what we suffer. As Paul puts it, he emptied himself of god-hood and was born in human likeness, humbling himself even unto death on a cross.

But Jesus reveals something else about the divine, doesn’t he? He reveals that not only was God with us in human form, but that God is with us, even, as he says in Matthew’s last line, unto the ends of the earth. And although exactly how this is so is something of a mystery—it wouldn’t be very interesting if it wasn’t—Jesus hints at it, saying I in you and you in me, and that he will send the Spirit which—as Lee told us earlier—goes where it will.

And so—putting two and two together—the notion of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit was born. The Spirit dwells within . . . not only in us but in all of creation. Paul in Colossians puts it this way: in Christ all things hold together. All things, no exception. The divine—through Christ, through the Holy Spirit, through the creative act of the Father (they are all three the same)—dwells within all of creation. And it is this indwelling of the Spirit/Christ/Creator that is the continuing face of God. Amen.