Unclean lips

a sermon on having faith in the time of tyrants

(sermon starts at 19:04 - please consider listening along if you can…preaching is a spoken art form!)

click here to read the stories from Isaiah and Luke.

Unclean Lips

I’m not gonna lie, this was an especially hard week to focus on writing a sermon. I kept getting distracted by the machinery of fear and then I’d snap out of it and try and read these two stories from Isaiah and Luke and then before I knew it I’d be in the trance again.

It was like a bad meditation experience you know where you sit and you try to focus on your breath and clear your mind and it works for like 4 seconds and then you’re thinking about that embarrassing thing you said in a meeting last week and what’s for lunch and I should check the expiration date on the mayonnaise and is so and so mad at me and then dangit. You return to the breath again and it last only 3 seconds this time and it’s back to the monkey brain. It was like that but for an entire week back and forth between the world and our texts for today. ICE raids in Aurora and Isaiah’s trippy vision of God’s throne and fiery winged creatures and the end of USAID to impoverished countries and Jesus on the Sea of Gennesaret, and the anxiety and fear of every single marginalized person in my life, and a great day of fishing in Luke’s Gospel.

But then suddenly yesterday something stood out for me – which is that our reading from Isaiah starts with the phrase – in the year king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.

In the year of political transition and uncertainty, Isaiah has a vision of God.

In the year that the peace and stability his people enjoyed for a long time and maybe even took for granted ended, a prophet had a vision of the Lord on his throne high and lifted up, the hem of God’s garment, just the hem, just the finely sewn edge of it filled the largest building he had ever seen.

To an anxious people wondering what the future would hold Isaiah is called to prophesy – and the whole thing starts with a vision of the glory and might of God. He prophesied to a fearful people, not by flattering them or boosting their self-esteem or giving them a list of action items but with a vision of God’s power.

But then I thought ok, sure, telling folks during a transition of power that God is on the only throne that matters worked back then, but things are different now.

For starters, we’ve had the enlightenment so unlike them we know how to make use of reason and scientific inquiry and we’ve had the industrial revolution so we can manufacture anything our brains can come up with, and we have the internet, what need have we of a God whose glory can knock you on your feet when we have chat GPT for that?

So compared to Isaiah and Simon Peter – we are practically god-like - I mean if those 2 guys could see what any one of us could do with our cell phones, they might bow down to us, so what need have we of the power of their God?

I’m far from the first to notice this. In his last stand up special, the brilliant comic Neil Brennan claimed that privileged white folks do tend toward a touch of atheism more than others because religion is like, can we interest you in an afterlife, and we are like “oh no thank you. I mean how much better could it be? We’ll just take our supplements and see how it goes.”

I don’t think he’s wrong, and I may get in trouble here but it feels like even some contemporary hymns seem to subtly lean that direction – several of which have us singing as God in the first person. Many of you may love these songs and I do not want to take that away from you, but I just don't feel like it’s good for me personally to have the words

I the Lord of sea of sky

come from my mouth. Why? Because if I share one thing with the prophet Isaiah, it is that I am a woman of unclean lips.

And I struggle enough with thinking I am God like, I do not need the hymns of the church colluding in this delusion.

But I’m not alone, the delusion is everywhere.

There’s a quote I remember hearing once that if God walked into the room the question today isn't so much would anyone even recognize God, the question today is would anyone even bother to bow down?

But that sure wasn’t the case in the texts we read today. In fact, in both our stories, the holiness of God is responded to with trembling. Simon Peter is just cleaning his nets and minding his business at the end of his work day when Jesus calls him to discipleship through what can only be described as a like, a boatjacking I guess. He commandeers Simon’s boat and then says go out to the deep and let down your nets there and it seems so silly because they had fished all night and caught nothing and yet in those freshly cleaned nets they pull up such an abundance of fish that Peter knew he was in God’s presence so he falls to his knees and says to Jesus go from me I am sinful man.

And when Isaiah sees the glory of the Lord filling the temple he responds by saying Woah is me I am lost – and a man of unclean lips.

Now a modern, liberal-minded, over-educated reader like myself might be like, oh buddy. No you’re not. You’re a great guy which both of them probably were. But this is not a case of low self-esteem. This is a case of being a mortal at the throne of the immortal, a creature in the face of the creator. A human in the presence of the Holy. A limited man knowing the difference between him and a limitless God.

This is humility.

Which is just not exactly in fashion right now. Arrogance and Anger are trending but humility is just sad and old fashioned at this point.

But would it be the worst thing in the world if it had a resurgence?

The idea that God is God and we are not might go a long way right now.

Even though I prefer to just have God on spiritual retainer – you know, there when I’m really in a pickle. Maybe we’ve all been foxhole Christians at some point. And I’m not really about trying to make any of us feel bad about that. I just am trying in this moment to remind myself that God is not limited to my limited view of God. That I am in need of a God that is more powerful than just being a pinch hitter or an occasional co-signer on my vanity projects.

And so, in this moment of anxiety….Is the power of God something we need now?

Is it now? Is now the time we shed our royal garments and fall to our knees before God and say have mercy? Is now the time we say Lord we are not worthy to receive you but only say the word and we shall be healed? I just think sooner rather than later because right now I feel out of other options.

Perhaps now is a good time to remember that we do not face what is to come alone, we face it with a God who is on the only throne that matters -

eternal, holy, gracious, merciful.

Perhaps now is a good time to also remember that this is far from the first time God’s name has been heretically drawn into human ambition. And that every Christian nationalist, or Jewish nationalist, or Muslim or Hindu nationalist movement that dares to claim God’s name in it’s delusional god-like dominance over another group of people has always failed eventually. The strength of God will always serve to illuminate the weakness of prideful people. These regimes have come and gone and yet God has remained.

And I am also trying in this moment to remind myself of the situations under which our ancestors in faith have called upon the name of God. They have called on the name of God when they were ruled by every variety of tyrant, and thrown in prison camps, and suffered through floods and fires. Throughout human history God’s name has been called upon by young soldiers and birthing women and by those who seek better lives on foreign soil.

Through food shortage and divorce and childhood cancer and every form or tyranny and terror humans have drawn upon the strength of God’s arm when their own have proved too weak for the task.

From where does our help come? Not from our cell phones, I’ll tell you that.

In other words, lift up your eyes, my sweet friends.

Our help comes from the Lord of power and might, who never tires of hearing our prayers, never tires of being our help in times of trouble and never tires of offering us comfort and relief. God has been our help throughout human history. And the best news I can think to give us all right now is that we aren’t that special. Thanks be to God. Amen.