St. Augustine once wrote, “It is a rare soul who knows what he’s talking about when speaking of the Trinity.”
So, I suppose I’m in dangerous water here… but I think it is safe to say that we Christians have experienced God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—three distinct persons, and yet we still affirm that we are monotheists, that, in fact, we worship the same God as our Jewish siblings, the same God who has been faithful since people where first full of faith.
The tension we find between the Godhead and the individual persons of the Trinity—between God the transcendent one whose name we ought not even utter, and God imminent seeking relationship with us at every turn, closer to us than our jugular vein—it is a big part of the mystery of the Trinity.
We gathered together today, naming just such a tension:
“To be in the Presence of Almighty God is to be lost, shouting with unclean lips “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
And yet Christ is our brother, the Spirit has made us Children of God, and we can cry “Abba! Father”
God transcendent and God imminent.
Prayer
“To be in the Presence of Almighty God is to be lost, shouting with unclean lips “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
There is a horrible strangeness to an unmediated experience of the divine…
-Ezekiel is left panting with post-traumatic stress and visions that would make an LSD trip seem tame…
-Job is enveloped by a whirlwind and finds himself repenting of repentance, mourning the very act of mourning, using ashes to indicate ashes are of no help.
-Luther reads the first five books of the Old Testament carefully and realizes that the only time Moses actually encounters God full on, God is mooning him.
-In the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis describes the lion Aslan, who represents Jesus Christ, saying, “He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion,” and “Safe? Who said anything about safe, of course he isn’t safe, but he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
And of course, in “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” when people come face to face with the glory of God—God’s transcendence—the are melted into little puddles of goo.
And today we read of Isaiah’s call story, he finds himself in the presence of God—he looks up to see the very face of God, and looks up… and up… and up and can not look that high.
Isaiah can only see the hem of God’s robe, this magnificent thing that fills the whole of the temple, this garment so great that it has neither beginning nor end.
And surrounding God’s throne are these Seraphim—that is flaming things—angelic beings swooping around the throne of God literally burningwith God’s holiness.
Not only are they aflame with God’s holiness, they are singing too of that holiness—that Holy Otherness of God, the total difference between God and the world, practically singing, “Different, Different, Different Lord God Almighty.”
The gap between Creator and creation, the tension between Redeemer and redeemed, the force between Sanctifier and sanctified shakes the very foundations of the temple!
The Prophet is overawed by God, struck by his own smallness, the difference between him and God there before him—he sees his own uncleanliness and realizes in a overwhelming way, he is lost.
Then those fiery angels burn away his impurities and brand his lips, marking him and setting him apart, so that they might speak God’s word to his people…
And today, we end with the words, “Send me!”
Yet, Prophets have been marked, have been changed, have been brought into the holiness in a way that puts them… or at least their message… on the other side of some invisible line—When Isaiah goes and preaches to the people, every world he speaks comes out as alien, as strange, as so different from their experience they can neither hear nor heed it—his calls to repent cause them to sin still more, everything he says, the people who hear him do the opposite…
And eventually, when Mark, and John, and Jesus’ whole crew are reflecting upon what the heck happened in their life those three years with Jesus—when they write the Gospel, they do so holding Isaiah’s words in their heart—the people did not hear Isaiah’s holiness, and so too the people in the Apostle’s time could not hear or see Jesus for who he was—they were all blinded by the holy presence of God among us, Jesus Christ.
This otherness of God is important—I know it doesn’t give us warm fuzzies, but
-we humans are idol makers, and we so easily confuse created as creator,
- we can so easily baptize actions and ideas as from God that are in fact godless—what arrogance!
-we want to be told that we can grasp utter certainty, because then we can use that certainty to beat down anyone who doesn’t think like us or look like us or act like us—what hubris!
-we wish to believe we can see as God sees, in total, yet we only see in part.
God’s imminence can protect us from this idolatry:
“To be in the Presence of Almighty God is to be lost, shouting with unclean lips “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
And yet Christ is our brother, the Spirit has made us Children of God, and we can cry “Abba! Father”
Yet God the Father is our creator, the Father has provided all that is good and nourishing for us, sustains the order of the universe and our place in it, and with open hands calls us to be co-creators in this world we inhabit, truly we may call out Abba, Father.
Yet God the Son is our redeemer, Jesus has dwelled among us, acted as a loving relative, freeing us from enslavement to any created thing, all that is his is ours and all that is ours is his, that we might live as he lives!
Yet God the Spirit is our sanctifier, the Spirit gives us faith, the adoption papers signed by God’s grace, the Spirit connects us to believers of this and every time, forgiving us daily for our sin!
The love of God, the immediacy, the intimacy, the imminence of God, God closer than we can ever know, and yet… we know… that too is so important in a world such as ours.
Christ is our brother, the Spirit has made us Children of God, and we can cry “Abba! Father”
“To be in the Presence of Almighty God is to be lost, shouting with unclean lips “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
And yet Christ is our brother, the Spirit has made us Children of God, and we can cry “Abba! Father”
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