I Saw the Lord

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty….” Can you imagine it? The year was 736 BC. It was a time of political conflict and turmoil. (Isn’t it always?) A man named Isaiah stood in the middle of a crowd worshipping in the temple. He could feel the heat from the roaring fire on the brazier, smell the burning flesh of the sacrificed animals, hear the sacred chanting of the priests, and see the rising of the clouds of incense. In the midst of the hubbub, Isaiah had an overwhelming vision of God’s presence. He could see God’s immensity, as just the hem of God’s robe filled the space of the temple. He could sense God’s power and holiness. He could hear the praise of the seraphs, those terrifying angels with three pairs of wings. He knew the world as God-filled, and he knew that he was in the presence of sheer and utter mystery.

Awed and terrified by his sense of God’s holiness, Isaiah immediately felt his own unworthiness. He knew that, despite all the sacrifices in which he had participated, that he himself was anything but holy. His people, still mourning the death of an arrogant king, were also unholy. “Woe is me,” he cried. What else could he say in the face of this totally unexpected vision? And then one of the angels, knowing his despair, transformed his mouth and his heart with a live coal from the sacrificial brazier. Still reeling from the angel’s touch, he heard God thunder, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And to his own surprise – but not to God’s – he answered, “Here am I; send me.” Converted, transformed by his encounter with the living God, Isaiah accepted God’s commission, without knowing what “here I am; send me” might entail, without any sense of the difficulties he would almost immediately face in his prophetic ministry. His life was changed forever by his encounter with God.

It’s hard not to gasp in awe ourselves as we share Isaiah’s sense of God’s overwhelming power and utter otherness. Perhaps we wonder what we would do if we had a similar experience. In fact, Scripture is full of similar stories of God’s breaking into the lives of humans. Samuel too had an encounter with God at the beginning of his ministry. As a young boy, serving the old priest Eli, he heard God calling to him at night in the temple. At first, he misunderstood and thought Eli was calling him. But then, instructed by Eli, Samuel finally answered God, saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Ezekiel too had a vision of God’s immensity, as he encountered God in a chariot surrounded by angels. He heard God’s command to go to the rebellious house of Israel, to speak God’s word to them. To reassure him that he would be speaking for God, Ezekiel was offered a scroll to eat. “Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was sweet as honey.” When God came to Jeremiah to commission him, Jeremiah tried to refuse God’s commission. He said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” But you know what God said? God said, “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy;’ for you shall go to all to whom I send you….” Then, just as the angel had touched Isaiah’s lips, God put God’s hand on Jeremiah’s mouth and said, “Now I have put my words in your mouth.”

Many saints have had similar unexpected encounters with God, grace-filled encounters that led them to understand in a new way God’s vision for their lives. Paul, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Francis and Clare, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, John Wesley, Brother Lawrence, Therése of Lisieux, William Booth, Evelyn Underhill, and countless others experienced God’s presence in a new and profound way. All of them came away from their experiences knowing that God had transformed them and had commissioned them for new work on God’s behalf, even when they were not yet ready to accept God’s commission.

Many ordinary people also have life-changing encounters with God, encounters where they know God’s utter mystery and their own unworthiness, and yet they sense that God has initiated something transformative within them. I don’t often speak about myself in sermons. Worship is not about me, it’s about us and our encounter with God. Even so, today I want to share with you an experience of God from my own life. It was March, 1998. I had organized a Saturday morning Lenten Quiet day at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens. Three meditations, two in the morning and one in the afternoon, were offered by Sr. Eleanor from the Community of the Transfiguration. We had started out in the living room-like lounge. I stayed there after the first meditation and wrote in my journal in response. However, in response to the second meditation, I went into the nave and knelt in one of the pews. Some of you know that Good Shepherd is a Georgian colonial that was built in 1952. It has high ceilings and bare windows, and in daylight there is always a feeling of a lot of light in the nave.

I was kneeling in the pew praying about what Sr. Eleanor had said, something about going into the desert to experience God more intensely. As I knelt there, I had a distinct sense of God calling me and asking me to consider ordained ministry. In March 1998 I had been at Ohio University only two years, I was immersed in my academic career, I still had ambitions for another career move, and, to top it off, I had two children in college. Needless to say, I was not thinking about ordained ministry. And yet, this voice was insistent about ordained ministry. The longer I knelt there, the more insistent it became.

Finally, I had to answer. Unlike Isaiah, Samuel, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Paul, Francis, Julian, Teresa, William Booth, and all the others, I said, “Forget about it, Lord. Not me. Priest? Who me? You gotta be kidding!” I remember clearly what I felt: not such deep commitment to my career that I couldn’t leave it, nor concern about two private-college tuitions. I felt what Isaiah had felt: I felt unworthy, totally unfit for the work of ordained ministry. “Leave me alone, Lord,” I cried. And God did. However, unlike other quiet days, in which I had experienced joy and peace, on that day, even after the third meditation, I felt destabilized and unbalanced, as if something in my world had suddenly shifted. Then in January 2004, God came back….

A true sense of God’s presence. Sometimes it is huge and overwhelming, and we are overawed by the immensity, otherness, and mystery of God. Sometimes we can sense the reality of Jesus’ presence in our lives, as many of us do when we share Jesus’ Body and Blood with each other. And sometimes God comes to us in silence, when God the Holy Spirit whispers to us. In our incessant 24/7 world, can we clear away some of the noise that hides the voice of God: the jangling of cell phones, the shouting commentators on talk radio, the deafening drones of leaf blowers and riding mowers, and the ugly shouts of partisan politics? Can we pause, sit, breathe, and listen? Although we can never control when God will show up, when we open our ears for even a bit, God may just take advantage of our openness, just as God did with Isaiah in the temple. God may just initiate in us an ultimately life-changing transformation.

In seminary I spent an entire semester studying the nature of the Trinity. And even though I now wear a collar, God is still, and will always be, ultimately a mystery. There is so much I still don’t know. But I do know this. We may not be able to put into words any coherent articulation of who God is. But we can point to our own experiences. We have sensed God as the ground of all creation, of all that is, seen and unseen, as the source of all. We have known God in the Word made Flesh and in the Body and Blood. And we have heard God in the silences of our own heart, as God’s Spirit nudges us and urges us into action for God’s sake.

And I know this too. God loves us so much that God relentlessly pursues us. God is “the hound of heaven,” as Francis Thompson called God, whom Thompson fled “down the nights and down the days;” “down the arches of the years; “down the labyrinthine ways/ Of my own mind…” I know that God always shows up unexpectedly, unbidden, always at God’s own initiative, to shower us with grace. And I know that God comes to transform us, to bid us partner with God in continuing God’s creation and renewal of the world.

As we stand in awe at the ultimate mystery of God, we can still join the seraphs, the saints who have gone before us, and the saints among us, as we say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”