Who Will I Send?
Isaiah 6:1-8
This Christmas we gave ourselves a gift that we’ve made tremendous use of since
we opened it. The game is called Rock Band 2, and it simulates the experience of
being in a rock band and playing at venues all over the world.
The game has dozens of familiar songs for you to play. It comes with an
electronic drum set that communicates wirelessly with the game system, and a
guitar that does the same. It even has a microphone so that your band can have a
singer.
You don’t have to know how to play guitar or drums to play this game. The game
tells you which buttons to press on the guitar or which drums to hit on the drum
set. As long as you hit the right notes at the right time, the music keeps
playing.
The game has different settings for difficulty. You start off on easy, then, if
you want more of a challenge, you move up to medium, then hard, then expert.
Emma and I and a friend of ours started a rock band with the game. We selected
characters, dressed them the way we wanted, bought the instruments we wanted,
and began touring.
It was easy in the beginning. The notes were easy to follow and the songs
weren’t too difficult. But as you progress and have opportunities to play in
various cities around the world, the game forces you to play harder songs and
makes you play them at a higher difficulty level.
I have been playing the drums at medium for a few weeks. But now the game is
starting to make me play the drums at the hard level, which, is hard. Imagine
sitting there, watching the notes start coming across the screen and thinking to
yourself, “I’d have to be hopped up on Red Bull to be able to play all those
notes!”
And if you don’t play the right notes the game starts lowering your rating, the
crowd starts booing, and in a matter of time you get kicked off the stage
because you obviously don’t belong at that venue. The world “failed” appears
across the screen and you lose fans and money. Slide.
It’s humiliating, in a video game sort of way, to realize that you don’t even
belong on the stage. But there’s one thing that might save you when you get in
trouble. If you play badly, the game makes you stop, but allows the rest of the
folks in your band to keep playing.
If they play well while the game gives you a little “time out”, the game will
allow them to “save” you, which means that you will get to join back in with
them on the song and keep playing. Your own bandmates can play well enough to
reinstate you. Slide. Buy if you fail three times in a song, the whole band
fails.
I mention this because I imagine that big red “failed” sign is how Isaiah felt
when he had this vision that he wrote about in Isaiah 6. When he found himself
in God’s presence, he didn’t believe he even belonged on the stage. But someone
“saved” him and reinstated him so he could keep going.
Like last week’s passage, this passage is what we term a “call narrative”. It is
the story of God calling someone to be a prophet and speak on God’s behalf. Last
week we talked about Jeremiah’s calling by God. This week we’re going to talk
about Isaiah’s experience of being called by God. But this week I want to focus
on Isaiah’s sense of guilt and how God dealt with it.
Isaiah lived during the late 700’s BC. He was probably involved with the temple
in Jerusalem in some way. He ministered during a time when Judah and Israel were
split from one another, and both of them were worried about a growing threat to
national security. Slide.
Israel and its neighbor to the north, Syria, were rightly concerned that the
Assyrians would come and invade their territories. They were so afraid, in fact,
that they tried to make the king of Judah join them in an alliance to defend
themselves against Assyria.
Isaiah told king Ahaz of Judah that he should not join the alliance, that God
would protect Judah from the Assyrians. But he also told Ahaz, as he had told
king Uzziah before, that the people of Judah had to stop the corruption that was
rampant in their society or they would also be destroyed by the Assyrians.
The legal system was corrupted by bribery so that those with the most money
could have a tremendous advantage over those with less. Those who committed
crimes would be acquitted for the right price. The wealthy could steal the homes
of the poor if they paid the right official.
The people observed the religious festivals that they were supposed to observe.
They gave their offerings to God on the right holidays. But what good do those
rituals do if there is no justice in society? The rules and rituals they were
supposed to follow were also meant to teach people to treat each other like
neighbors.
God was tired of empty rituals and corruption and injustice. And God needed
someone to speak a word to the people about it. Isaiah experience this sense of
calling during what was probably some kind of ritual he performed at the temple.
He was probably offering some kind of sacrifice or engaged in some kind of
ritual at the temple one day when he had this vision. He saw God, although he
really only saw God’s robe hanging down from heaven. Isaiah’s image of God was
like a king with a court of ministers who took care of God and did what God
commanded them to do.
Those ministers were obviously angels who themselves were unworthy to look at
God directly. Isaiah talks about a type of angel called a Seraph who had six
wings and used four of them to cover himself while using two to fly. Isaiah
heard the sounds of these angels praising God.
They sang, “Holy holy holy, Lord God almighty. Heaven and earth of full of your
glory.” It was so loud that the whole place shook with the sound. Now while this
was all interesting, Isaiah realized instantly that he had a real problem.
The Jewish people believed that a sinful person cannot stand in God’s presence.
In other words, Isaiah was in danger of dying from being that close to God’s
greatness. He was in danger of more than simply being kicked off the stage. His
life probably flashed before his eyes because he thought he was going to die.
Isaiah cried out, “Woe is me. I’m a sinful person. I’m unworthy to be here. I
represent a people who are unworthy to be in God’s presence.”
I remember watching Tom and Jerry cartoons when I was a kid before school. Some
of you may remember a scene where Tom the cat is chasing Jerry only to be
ambushed by some large dog. Tom is terrified, and sometimes he would start
writing his last will and testimony just as he was about to be clobbered.
That’s how Isaiah felt when he found himself standing in God’s presence. But
like my band mates, Isaiah had someone who stepped in and saved him. One of the
angels takes a coal from the altar where they were burning incense and flies
over to Isaiah, touching him on the lips with the hot coal.
The angel says to Isaiah, “your guilt is forgiven, and your sin is blotted out.”
Just like that. Isaiah didn’t have to do anything fancy or promise never to sin
again. All of the guilt he felt in his life was gone. And now he could focus on
speaking God’s word to people when they really needed it.
Now when I first thought about the way in which Isaiah’s guilt was taken away, I
thought to myself, “That’s too easy. I’m sure he felt bad about what he had
done, but God just has an angel touch his mouth with a coal and everything is
hunky dory again? That can’t be right.”
What I missed was the whole emphasis in this story. This story is not about
Isaiah’s sinfulness as much as it is about God’s greatness. God can erase
Isaiah’s guilt because God is as great as God appears in this vision.
It’s not the Isaiah got off too easy. It’s that God has the authority to say,
“Your guilt is gone. It’s not longer getting in your way. Now go and do what I
called you to do.”
This way of dealing with guilt is really foreign to us. When we think of how to
deal with guilt, we generally think about apologizing to the person we’ve
wronged and making restitution for what we’ve done and taking steps to make sure
we don’t do the same thing over again.
And that way of dealing with guilt has its roots in the Old Testament. It’s much
like the way the Israelites were told to deal with the wrongs they did to other
people. But there were also other ways of dealing with guilt, especially for
wrongs committed against God.
An animal was to be sacrificed, symbolizing the seriousness of sin and the
consequences of wrong and God’s demand for justice and holiness. Isaiah didn’t
go through either one of those methods for dealing with guilt. God simply
declared him innocent and said his wrongdoings were as though he had never done
them.
Is that right? Can we experience the removal of guilt in the way that Isaiah
did? Wesley White, a minister with a Wisconsin based ministry called Kairos
CoMotion says of guilt, “Guilt is very powerful. Whether it is appropriate or
inappropriate guilt, it has a controlling presence in our lives. We find
ourselves reduced when it is felt and monstrous when it is absent. In some
sense, guilt is something we can't live with or without.”
He’s right. People who live with guilt as their primary emotion are controlled
by it and find themselves unable to feel good about anything they do. They are
miserable, and their God is a tyrant.
People who do not have a sense of guilt are also miserable because they see no
connection between the destructive things they do and the consequences they
suffer. Guilt always belongs to someone else.
But Isaiah’s situation was different. He was aware of his guilt, yet God removed
it from him. So it wasn’t an issue anymore. Is that something you and I can
experience?
You see, as Christians, our experience of guilt and forgiveness is always going
to involve the death of Jesus for our sin. So while we believe that our guilt
was taken away by Jesus’ sacrifice, his death always reminds us of the
consequences of our guilt.
But many people focus on the death of Jesus and their continued imperfection to
the point where they can’t experience what Isaiah did in this passage – the
feeling that the slate is clean, and the idea that there is no more slate. No
one is keeping a tally anymore. Jesus paid it all, as the hymn says.
There have been various times in my life when I experienced this sense that my
guilt was completely removed. But one that I’ll never forget was back in spring
of 2003. At the time I was both a student at Marquette and a member of the
Waukesha Choral Union. We have been rehearsing a glorious piece of music all
winter by Giuseppe Verdi called “Requiem.”
A Requiem is a Catholic funeral mass. Various composers over the years have set
the Latin words to that mass to music. We had prepared to perform Verdi’s
requiem with a high school choir from Oshkosh West High School. On the weekend
when we were to perform the Requiem, Frank Marose and I drove up to Oshkosh and
we joined everyone else for rehearsal with the choir and the orchestra.
The music was so fantastic. I’ll never forget it. They’re doing the requiem this
spring again and I’m thinking of joining again. But during that weekend I had
some along time to walk around the neighborhood near the hotel and think about
things.
One of the issues I was still wrestling with was feelings of guilt over things
that I had done when I was a teenager. Now I wasn’t a bad teenager, but I had
done things that I wasn’t proud of – things that hurt people and hurt myself and
embarrassed my parents.
You would think I would have forgotten about those things by 2003, but I hadn’t
because I couldn’t get around my own sense of responsibility for what I had
done. And there was no way I could make restitution either.
But I was thinking about the words in the Requiem. One portion of the Requiem
called the Sanctus contains these very words from Isaiah 6, “Holy Holy Holy,
Lord God Almighty. Heaven and earth are full of your glory.”
As you listen to the way in which Verdi put this text to music, you get a vision
of the glory of heaven and the sound of the angels singing back and forth to one
another. And it struck me just how much greater God was than my own sin.
Another thing I realized at this time was that part of the reason why I did the
things I did was because when I was young and vulnerable and not ready to make
certain choices in my life, there were others who did things to me that forced
those choices on me.
You see, I grew up with a very clear sense of myself as a man of unclean lips. I
thought that my misdeeds proved what a bad egg I was. Everyone in church and at
youth group made sure of that.
But what I couldn’t admit, what people never seemed to be able to acknowledge
was that I also lived among a people of unclean lips. Many of the things I did
wrong as an adolescent were done under the influence of people who should have
known better, careless adults whose bad habits and lack of morality even had
consequences for my own upbringing.
I’m not saying I was guilt free. Not at all. I’m saying that for the first time,
as I pondered these words from Isaiah 6, I, like Isaiah, saw my own sin in the
context of everyone else’s sin. And it allowed me to give myself some grace
about some things that had made me despise myself as a youth.
Up to that point I had thought that my mistakes were completely due to my own
personal faults. But as I walked around that neighborhood and sang the Sanctus,
I realized that God sees sin in its totality in the world. And because God does
so, God can and had removed my guilt.
I hope that as you reflect on this passage that you can consider God’s response
to your own guilt. What would your life be like today if God just said to you,
“It’s all over. Your guilt is history. Whatever you’ve done in the past is
forgotten. Now what can you do for me?”
Can you imagine that? As we sing the hymn of preparation and get ready for
communion, I want you to think about what God would have to deal with in your
past in order be able to call you and send you? Do you think God is great enough
to deal with it? Let us pray.