Sermons

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Charred Lips
November 2, 2003
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
1st in a series “Images from Isaiah”
Isaiah 6:1-13

This summer, I met someone at a conference whom I had known only by reputation. His name is Jim, and he’s a bit older than me, more experienced as a pastor and something of a scholar. As we got to know each other, we did the “pastor thing” and exchanged ideas about sermons.

Jim had just finished preaching through Ephesians, and we were just starting. We had finished the gospel of Matthew not too long before, and he was just beginning. So we had lots to talk about, and then my brain said, “Hey, you’re going to begin Isaiah this fall…get some ideas from Jim!”

Thinking he would be a wealth of information, I said, “Jim, what have you ever done with Isaiah?” There was a long silence.

Then he answered, “Nothing. I never really understood Isaiah!” Thanks a lot, Jim!

But he is right in one sense…Isaiah isn’t easy. You can read through a gospel, and get the “Story of Jesus,” and understand most of what goes on. It’s fairly chronological. But Isaiah is a very large (66 chapters) collection of prophecies, speeches and history over a long period of time. We’re going to have to do some extra work this morning to make sure we understand…who Isaiah is, situations he spoke into. But I can promise you this: The Isaiah literature is some of the most profound, richest, most challenging in all of the Bible. It is well worth the work. We’ve called this series Images from Isaiah, because among other things, Isaiah is something of a poet…each chapter has a strong image or two that grab hold of us.
Let’s listen for God’s word together: Isaiah 6:1-13

The Middle East. War, unrest, invading armies, the constant re-drawing of national boundaries…this is not a new phenomenon. It did not just begin with the settlement of WWII. In the 8th century BC…almost three thousand years ago…

God’s people who were descended from the Patriarchs, who had been united under King David and his son Solomon (around 1000 BC)…found themselves in a precarious situation. The people had split into two: Israel, the northern tribes. And Judah, the southern ones, based out of Jerusalem. [This is so important to know in reading Isaiah!] And the land that they both occupied was essentially a freeway or buffer that lay between the superpowers of the day: Egypt in the south, and Assyria to the northeast. All of the countries in between: Israel, Judah, Moab, Edom, Gaza, Samaria, the land of the Philistines…were weaker pawns continually under threat. Israel, the north, and Judah, the south, were continually faced with difficult decisions. Who do we align with? Who do we resist? Who do we allow to enter our country, and under what agreements?

In the midst of this most unsettled situation…strides this guy Isaiah. We don’t know much about his background, really. He took on the mantle of the prophet around the year 740 BC, and worked for the next 50 years or so. He came from the south, based in Jerusalem, and most of his prophecies were concerned with Judah. There’s a good chance that he was from an upper class family, perhaps even a relative of kings…certainly in his career as a prophet he was able to have access to the royal household of Judah many times, including the ear of the king periodically.

Isaiah was a prophet. The role of the prophet in this Old Testament time was complicated. When we hear “prophet,” we tend to automatically think of someone who can foretell the future. This was sometimes a part of a prophet’s work. But there were also things like giving wise counsel to leaders, calling people to look for God’s involvement in their lives, modeling out counter cultural living, and calling people to account for the decisions they made. The most helpful description of a prophet, perhaps, is as a messenger or mouthpiece of God…a person who spoke God’s word. Thus the Old Testament is full of words of prophecy that begin with “This is what the Lord says:” and what follows is God’s voice, speaking through a human person, to the people of his/her day. So a prophet bears the word of God…but there’s more: The prophet bears the Word without regard for the potential costs to himself…he was constrained to speak God’s Word.”

And so a prophet who did his job well was, almost by definition, a pain in the…side, of the leaders of the day. Prophets tended to attach themselves to kings.

• King Saul, earlier in Israel’s history, had the prophet Samuel who ended up pronouncing his demise as king for disobedience to God’s will.
• King David had the prophet Nathan attached like glue to him…and it was Nathan who called David on the carpet for his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband.
• Isaiah worked with perhaps four different kings, but was most involved with two: Ahaz and Hezekiah.

And Isaiah was a pain. A large pain. Tough as nails. Tenacious. And the word that he spoke…was almost never the word the king wanted to hear.

Isaiah’s calling was to speak a hard word. The history of these kings, Ahaz and Hezekiah, was that they were continually plotting and aligning themselves with strategic partners, watching the military situations unfold, and trying to acquire power to maneuver with. Foreign policy was everything. Isaiah’s call was a steady hum in their ears:

“Quit worrying about politics. Stop evaluating the might of your army against another. It is not in aligning yourself with the right partner that will save Judah. It is in aligning yourself with Almighty God. So long as you make alliances that pull Judah away from the worship of the One God…you will fail. God will use Egypt, God will use Assyria to take you low. You will be crushed and helpless.”

By now, we should be a little depressed. Isaiah is a prophet of doom. Over and over the word goes out, warning and judgment. So why is Isaiah such a popular prophet in the history of faith?

• Why does the New Testament quote 58 different passages from Isaiah?
• Why does Handel’s Messiah use Isaiah as a text?
• Why did Michelangelo include Isaiah with just a few of the prophets on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

I think it is because no matter how gloomy Isaiah’s words may be…there is always hope attached to them. No matter how heavy God’s hand may be, it is always connected to God’s heart…a heart that desires His people to turn back to Him.

The passage we read for this morning is Isaiah’s call from God to be a prophet.

Now, most of us would give anything to hear a specific call from God about almost anything…let alone a concrete word about our life’s work. So as we look at this story for a minute, be listening: What might Isaiah’s vision say to us about hearing God speak? How does it happen for Isaiah?

First: We know exactly when it happened. In the year that King Uzziah died was very close to 742 BC. The first thing that happens…is Isaiah finds himself in the middle of a worship service! I don’t know what style it was…Pentecostal, Episcopalian, contemporary, traditional, it didn’t matter… The Lord was sitting on a throne, high and lofty…the hem of his robe filled the temple. This is a big, big God. He may be present in the temple of Jerusalem, but he is not contained by it…only the bottom of his robe…fills the temple. Seraphs, winged angelic-like creatures, are in his presence, and while they cannot even look at the Lord…they worship him: Holy, holy, holy is the lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory! What a worship scene!

J.P. Allen once wrote,

“Worship is like entering a planetarium from a busy street. Suddenly, the lights are dim, the sounds hush, the universe opens up over our heads…the earth becomes one of the smallest planets, and we become one of its smallest creatures. And in that awesome moment, we focus on the greatness, the goodness, the grace of God.”

Something is going on; Isaiah is loving it. Isaiah is there, he feels God, he sees him, the temple shakes, it fills with smoke and Isaiah suddenly realizes…that he is in the presence of Almighty God, and he feels like…he is cut to the core. His own sin flashes before his eyes.

Woe is me, I am lost. I am a man of unclean lips AND I live among a people of unclean lips. I have laid eyes on Almighty God, and now I realize how unclean I am!

Isaiah is in a worship service, and he now he suddenly finds himself in the middle of confession.

We live in a “it’s-not-my-fault” world. “Don’t make me feel guilty,” “I left my church because they talked about sin too much…” Sin is viewed as a sort of nonfatal sickness that is someone else’s responsibility. But it’s no mere guilt trip that is put on Isaiah, he just realizes that his lips are unclean. Jesus once said,

“What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles a person: for out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, slander…”

The problem we have is a heart condition, and Isaiah realizes this when he says, “My lips, OUR lips are unclean.” He’s utterly lost.

At that moment, one of God’s angelic creatures flew near, with a red-hot coal taken from the altar in the temple (place of worship), flew near to Isaiah, sitting there moaning, “I am lost,” and the burning coal seared onto his mouth, his lips were charred and smoking, and a voice ringing in his ears said, “NOW your guilt is gone, your sin is blotted out.” Isaiah is a new man. Through absolutely no action of any kind of his own, no correct thought, no technique of confession… yet there he is, standing in the worship service, the rest of the congregation has gone home…but he is assured of his forgiveness.

And NOW that he has worshipped, now that he has confessed, now that he has received assurance of his forgiveness (and we might pay attention to these three things for those times when we are clamoring for God to speak to us!)…Isaiah finally NOW hears God’s voice [he hasn’t heard God up to now, but finally he does]: Whom shall I send? Maybe God had been talking, but it’s been too noisy. But now Isaiah can hear the voice of God, and he’s all excited, and he hears God put out the call for volunteers, and he stands up and shouts out:

Here I am! Send me, send me…I’ll go! I’ll go! Choose me, Pick me!

[Take note: He does not yet know what the assignment is!]

And God accepts his generous offer. He says,

“Okay, you’ll do: Go and speak to the people. Go and tell them the truth. Go and tell them that they must stop trusting in the power of men, that they must quit their alliances, go and tell them. Tell them the bold, naked, horrible truth…that they must return to me.”

And

“Oh, by the way, Isaiah. They won’t listen. Try your best, appeal to their minds, to their hearts, to their sight, offer them the way that leads to me…and they’ll turn you down. But keep preaching anyway. That’s your call.”

What would you have said? “That’s so harsh! How am I going to grow spiritually if you give me such a hopeless task to fulfill? Let me reconsider, God…this doesn’t match up so well with my spiritual gifts inventory!”

In this day, we are told that if something we do in ministry doesn’t stir our passion…then we should get out of it as soon as we can. If a relationship is a hard one, then just end it. If we’re uncomfortable, it must be bad. Faith is supposed to be soft, easy, comforting. But that’s not what God says. It’s not what Isaiah says. It’s not what Jesus said in the passage we read earlier, “Take up your cross and follow me.” So God gives Isaiah the hard assignment: Keep speaking, even though it seems doomed to failure.

There’s a long silence. And the first word out of Isaiah’s mouth is one I could have spoken: HOW LONG, LORD? “I know I was all excited and everything, and I want to give my whole life to you Lord, but I didn’t think it would look like this…so how long? how long do I have to do this?” He hasn’t even started and he wants out!

One of my favorite writers, Frederick Buechner, imagines God talking to Isaiah here, and he calls God “Mystery,” with a capital M.

Mystery said, “Go give the deaf Hell till you’re blue in the face and go show the blind Heaven till you drop in your tracks because they’d sooner eat ground glass than swallow the bitter pill that puts roses in the cheeks and a gleam in the eye. Go do it.”

Isaiah says, “Do it till when?”

Mystery: “Till Hell freezes over. Do it till the cows come home.”

That, of course, is a good writer’s imagination. What God actually says, though, is not so far off.

“Go and speak for a long, long time. Call my people back to me. Call my people to leave all their solutions that depend on themselves, and return to me. Call them, even though they won’t listen. And because they won’t listen. It will get horrible. Empty cities, empty houses, empty land…people will be sent far away, because nothing else will bring them close to me. And if some survive all of this…they will also be devastated. Judah will be like a forest of cut down trees. Field upon field of stumps.”

If you go over Snoqualmie Pass on I-90, just on the other side, you pass Lake Keechelus, and when the water level of the lake is low, you can see that it once was land, and that hundreds upon thousands of trees were cut down…now just stumps. That’s what the people of God looked like to Isaiah. It’s how we must look to God sometimes, who tries and tries and tries to do something to get our eyes off of ourselves and onto Him.

I told you that Isaiah was a pain-in-the-side…he’s a prophet. He keeps speaking the truth. He’s not going to go away, is he? He just keeps preaching to the stumps like you and me and if we listen long enough, through the desolation and the emptiness (and maybe your life feels that way right now)…but if you listen long enough, eventually you hear the last line. Every tree is a stump, a huge field of stumps…But there’s a holy seed in those stumps. And to that seed, Isaiah points, over and over and over.

He’s not going to go away, until we see the seed. He’s not going to go away until we know God’s provision even in the darkest of days. He’s not going to go away until we see not just the stumps but the seed… and pick up our cross and follow after Him. He’s not going to go away, not until we open our charred lips, and croak out the words:

Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts,
the whole earth if full of his glory.

Let’s pray.