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.
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