Thankful Memorial, Chattanooga
May 30, 2021
Year B, Trinity Sunday

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

“In the year King Uzziah died…”

So begins the sixth chapter of Isaiah. But before we can go on we need a reminder of the context here. The death of the king is just one of a host of other unsettling events that the ancient kingdom of Israel was experiencing at the time of Isaiah’s vision.  Political powers in and around the small nation were in conflict with one another and the Assyrian Empire bore down upon the inhabitants of its tributary states, inflicting trauma and terror.[i] 

And layered with such national tension is Isaiah’s sense of his and his people’s own sinfulness – their guilt and shame for failing to live up to God’s dreams for them and their suspicion that such personal sin is somehow at the root of their experience of public disaster.  “I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips,” says Isaiah.

Out of this context of anxiety, confusion and chaos, trauma, fear and guilt, Isaiah is called by a stunning vision into a new vocation as God’s prophet.  And though he doesn’t know the details of what this role will demand of him, though he must suspect that answering that call will lead to a different kind of self-sacrifice, Isaiah steps boldly into the space God has created for him, saying “Here am I; send me!”

And as for Isaiah, so too for us.  Like the prophet, we are still coming through a season of great trauma – both public and private, both global and local.  We have been apart from one another on Sunday mornings for more than a year because of the pandemic.  And during that time, our communities, our country, indeed, the whole world, have shifted drastically beneath our feet.  We have seen violence erupt in our streets and abroad and heard the calls for a reckoning around racial and ethnic justice.  We have participated in various ways in the continued deepening of division between ourselves and our neighbors.  We have watched helplessly – perhaps guiltily – as those in other countries have desperately struggled to get a vaccine while our supply begins to outpace demand.  We have suffered with sickness and isolation and loss, in our own lives and in our tight-knit Thankful community. 

But as for Isaiah, so too for us.  In the midst of our own fear, confusion, chaos and guilt, God calls us to new life – to a renewed commitment to God’s mission in the world.  And we hear that call right here and now in our own kind of divine vision. 

This is how Isaiah describes the glory of God that he sees before him: “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne […] and the hem of his robe filled the temple […] Seraphs were in attendance above him […] And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts’ […] The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke […] Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal […] touched my mouth with it and said: ‘[…] your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’  Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’”

Perhaps you hear such a description of God’s glory and you think it fantastical – beyond the realm of possibility for our own experience of the divine.  But I say to you: look around.  Do you not see seraphs dancing in the eyes of our children, so filled with gladness to be back among us once again?  Do you not smell the fragrant incense of this garden, this beloved place that we call Thankful, rising up to God even now?  Perhaps our hymns are not so beautiful as the angels’ cry in Isaiah’s vision; perhaps we won’t shake the thresholds of the buildings around us when we sing.  But the sound of our voices once again – after so long apart – seems thunderous to me and shakes my heart with joy.

And, in a few minutes, when we once again share in Holy Communion, though it may look differently from what it did before, we know that we are still the same Body of Christ that we have always been together, receiving that Body that still nourishes us and makes us whole.  When the host brushes past your lips, will you not feel Isaiah’s burning coal, healing us from what has been and equipping us for the new life to which we are called? 

Today, in addition to the joy of being together in person again, we celebrate also that we live within the mystery of God, who is Trinity.  It is, indeed, a mystery, one that cannot be parsed out or fully understood by the limitations of our human minds.  But there are some things we can say about the Trinity: God is defined by relationship, by the love that has always and will always exist in community – a love so abundant that it is not held within the Three-in-One but flows out in power to create, redeem and sanctify. 

So we can only grasp the real meaning of the Trinity through the experience of that ever-dancing, ever-flowing, ever-outpouring love between Source, Word and Spirit.  But we don’t need a fantastic dream-like vision to encounter the Triune God.  All we need do is look around with the eyes of faith to see and know that God is here among us, in the faces of those we have missed over these many months, in the love that kept us connected and connects us still – one to another, living and dead – even when we are apart. 

And by such knowledge, we, too, hear the invitation God gives us: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”   Gathered together once again in worship of one God in Three – nourished by the Body of the Christ who redeems us, reminded of our belonging through the Spirit made present among us, and responding in faith to the Mother who loves us, we, like Isaiah, can make our reply: Here are we Thankful Ones; send us!  Amen. 

_{[i] I am grateful to the commentary on WorkingPreacher.org by Juliana Claasens for this context: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/the-holy-trinity-2/commentary-on-isaiah-61-8-7}