The triple-action cleaning power of the Trinity

“Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

These words of Isaiah are often chosen to be read when a person is ordained to be a minister of the gospel, because they describe what God must do in every generation. God must reveal his glory to chosen witnesses so that they can understand and appreciate both the very real distance between themselves and God, between God and everything he has created, and the fact that only God can overcome that distance, and the good news that this is what God both wants to do and has done repeatedly, and most completely in the life, death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ. And this distance between God and us is not a physical distance, but a spiritual distance, a distance we create when we fail to recognize and acknowledge God to be God, seeking to take the place of God, and in so doing, polluting and corrupting the goodness of everything that God has made.

In the case of Isaiah, that distance, that spiritual pollution, the sinful mess that we have made of things, is overcome when a seraphim, one of the heavenly creatures nearest God’s presence, a creature that literally means “One Who Is Burning”, brings a live coal from the altar and touches Isaiah’s lips so that they can be cleansed so that he can speak a clean word, a pure word, a holy word, a godly word to those around him who also have unclean lips, so that their lips and their lives might also be cleansed.

God reveals his holy and cleansing presence and power to Isaiah at a critical moment in the life of God’s people. King Uzziah, the King of Judah, has just died, following a long and positive reign in which he has done more than anyone since Solomon to restore the glory of the nation, defeating Judah’s enemies - the Philistines to the west, the Edomites to the east and Mehunim to the south - and holding off, at least temporarily, the Assyrians, the world’s superpower to the north and Egypt, the other great superpower further south and west. Even Uzziah, however, for all the positive good he was able to accomplish through his faithfulness and loyalty to God, created a distance between himself and God by presuming to offer incense on the altar which was the sole prerogative of the priests. Because he overreached, God allowed his to contract leprosy, a kind of living death, visible form of physical pollution and corruption, to be a sign of his own sinfulness as king in seeking to take more authority than was rightly his from God.

Now that Uzziah was dead, Isaiah sensed that even with his faults, the next king of Judah was unlikely to rise to the same heights as Uzziah, and Tiglath-Pileser, the king of Assyrian, would no doubt take advantage of Judah’s vulnerability. So Isaiah goes to the temple to pray about this situation and God reveals himself more fully than Isaiah could ever have imagined: “Woe is me!” he declares, and rightly so, because apart from God, Judah and the people of God are truly lost. That is why the very essence of Isaiah’s subsequent message to the king and the people of Judah is to trust completely and solely in the majesty and glory of God, their Lord and King, and not to enter into any alliances with neighboring countries in the vain hope that doing so would make them any more secure from the threat of the Assyrians. God, and God alone, had the power and the will to protect his people and to deal with the king and nation of Assyria.

Isaiah gives us a hint of God’s majesty and glory and holiness when he records the words of the seraphim: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory,” and when he later records God’s question, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” As Christians, we can now look back on these words and recognize what we have now come to call the Trinitarian nature of God: holy, holy, holy – who will go for US?

What makes God, God, is the fact that he is super-personal, tri-personal. As great as Uzziah may have been, as super as Tiglath-Pileser may think he is, they are only individual persons. As much as we may rebel against God in an effort to take the place of God, we are not super-personal. We are persons to be sure, and in that sense we are like God. He has made us in his image. But we are not super-personal, at least apart from the Son of God and the Spirit of God, who make it possible for us to be united to God, so that God can even ask the question, “Who will go for us?”, in the expectation that a mere human person could actually carry out such an assignment.

What is true for Isaiah is also true for Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, the three young men thrown into the fiery furnace by the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, because they refused to bow down and worship him as somehow or as someone essentially super-personal or super-human, as someone who embodies in his individual person the might of the entire nation of Babylonia. Canticle 13, which we recited this morning instead of a psalm, is the song these three young men sang in the furnace when they discovered that their faith in God had been honored and God’s super-personal presence was more than enough to protect them from the fire of Nebuchadnezzar’s wrath. Even the king, when he saw the three children in the furnace, confessed his own arrogance and declared the God of Israel to be the true God, a king above all kings, including himself.

This same revelation of the super-personal, holy, holy, holy nature of God, is given to John when he is invited to go through a door in heaven and see the throne of God, having been exiled to the island of Patmos by the Roman Emperor Domitian, who was the first Roman Emperor to seriously challenge the claim of Christians that their God was above all gods, was super-personal: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that it was therefore unacceptable and impossible for them to put any earthly authority on par with the God and Father of their Lord, Jesus Christ, as the Roman imperial religion demanded.

Even the gospel this morning is Jesus’ reassurance, on the night before he suffers to remove the spiritual pollution of this world and the distance that separates us from God, that as he does this he will be returning to his rightful throne and that in so doing he will expose and condemn Satan, the ruler of this world, who continually tempts us to distance ourselves from our true King and Lord, the super-personal God. Satan is the original rebel, the original imposter, who will be consigned to his own miserable kingdom of hell along with anyone who persists in wanting their own will rather than God’s will to be done.

We are living in a time when we need a cleansing word from God, like that live coal of the seraphim on Isaiah’s lips. We are living in a time when many people would agree with Isaiah’s diagnosis, that we are a people of unclean lips living unclean lives and needing a power greater than themselves to have any hope of cleaning up the messes we have made, whether in the Gulf of Mexico, Wall Street, or in our own increasingly divided and often confusing and incoherent witness as the Body of Christ.

That is our opportunity and our challenge: to seek God and to remain faithful to God, trusting that he will reveal himself to us and will raise up leaders for us in our own generation, just as he did in the days of Isaiah, of the three young men, and of the apostles, leaders who will acknowledge the super-personal nature of God and will serve the world in the power and in cooperation with that higher, holier, cleansing and life-giving authority of the One who is Three-in-One and One-in-Three: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.