“ISAIAH: Ducking Worship”

A Sermon Based Upon Isaiah 6: 1-8

By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Sunday,   June 22^th, 2014

Jesus said, “Those who worship God must worship him in Spirit and in truth” (John 4).   We know what Jesus said, but what did he mean?   Of course, we say we worship God every Sunday, but how can know we have truly worshipped God in the Spirit?   

Soren Kierkegaard, the great Danish pastor and Christian philosopher from the 18^th century was so deep and profound of a thinker and way ahead of his time, his thought is still important today.  He was also so simple and practical sometimes, that not just philosophers could gain from him, but so could the average Christian.   Kierkegaard loved to tell stories and give truth in parables.  Once he told parable of a community of ducks waddling off to duck church to hear the duck preacher.   The duck preacher spoke eloquently of how God had given the ducks wings with which to fly.  With these wings there was nowhere the ducks could not go, there was no God-given task the ducks could not accomplish.  With those wings they could soar into the presence of God himself, if they wanted to.   Shouts of "Amen" were quacked throughout the duck congregation.  At the conclusion of the service, the ducks left, commenting on what a wonderful message they had heard -- and waddled back home.   They talked about flying, but they never flew. (http://www.ldolphin.org/Provocations.pdf.).

Now, listen carefully:  Do we duck worship by having “Duck Worship?”   Do we sometimes waddle away from worship in the same way we waddled in -- unchallenged and unchanged?  Week after week, we come to the same place and sit in the same pew, following an order of service we know by heart, while listening to a sermon (and often not listening) because we wrongly assume the message is primarily for someone else.

I wonder what would happen, if something really happened.  It could be dangerous, couldn’t it, if we took the worship and the sermon seriously.  Anne Dilliard, a Christian writer once wrote:  “Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”  (Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41).

Do we ‘get it?’  Can we really get beyond ‘duck worship’?  

AN INVITATION TO SEE DIFFERENTLY

Isaiah did.  Isaiah was a very professional prophet of the court of Israel who was used to going through the motions and playing the professional games, doing what was needed for him to keep his job and get ahead in the world, then something incredible happened.  It was, as our text says, “In the year that King Uzziah died” (Isa 6.1).   Imagine being on the President’s cabinet and then having a new president from another party get elected.  The death of a good King was an even greater concern when most Kings were not good.    It was the kind of concern that would bring a person to their knees.

When I was a Baptist pastor in Germany, as the congregation arrived for worship, they would often find their seat, then bow on their knees and say a prayer to prepare to worship.   Perhaps that was their custom learned during the time of Communist rule and oppression.  You would worship differently when you are being oppressed, don’t you think?   Barbara Taylor says, you only learn true faith when you 'walk in the dark.'   What brings you to your knees in worship?   Something eventually will.   It could be a diagnosis, a new awareness of your mortality, a broken relationship, or you may be facing some insurmountable problem in your life.  We often forget about God when things are going well, but then, something happens that brings us back.  

True worship is often born out of human need as we realize our own vulnerabilities and our very real limitations.    Sometimes, such realizations come slowly, but others times its more sudden.   Our need for God comes unplanned, unrehearsed and uncontrollable.   That’s certainly how it was for Isaiah.  In a ‘low’ moment of deep despair he ‘saw the LORD seated on a throne, high and lifted up….’.    Through a moment of true worship, Isaiah received a ‘new’ and encouraging way to see God, to see his life and to view the world.   I guess you could say he had been ‘waddling from worship’ most of his life, ducking the true God, ducking his real self, and ducking the kind of worship that could change his life, but now everything becomes different when Isaiah “saw the LORD seated upon a throne.”

Let me you about a time I began to see some things differently.  It was the time when Henry Blackaby was going around the country talking about his Bible Study, “Experiencing God”.  He can come to the mission learning center outside of Richmond to help prepare missionaries for work overseas.  During his study, he taught a 7 point method for getting closer to God.  I was skeptical.  It sounded too much like Babel, where people were building a tower to try to reach God.  I was not impressed with any method that reduced spiritual life to a human approach.

That was then.  About 5 years later, we were having Mission Meeting in Europe and guess who the main Bible Study leader was?  It was Henry Blackaby.  I didn’t want to go, but it was required.  I tried not to listen to what he was saying, because I’d heard it all before.  Even though I agree with most of the insights Blackaby had, the whole approach just seemed to contrived and artificial.   Then we came to the end of our session and Blackaby started to led our prayer time.  It was during that time of preparing for prayer that I began to see everything about Henry Blackaby differently.   Before we prayed, he asked if any of us missionaries had special needs.  One missionary stood and began to share his concern about a son who had just gone through a divorce and was very depressed and living alone in Alabama.  Instead of going on with a prayer,  Blackaby asked if there was anyone there who could help ‘answer’ this prayer of need for that ‘son’.   A missionary spoke up and said that he knew the pastor of a large church in that town and he would get on the phone immediately and  have that pastor or someone from that church visit the missionary’s son.  

With this ‘connection’ before us, Blackaby commented on all the had taught,  “Now, this is how you experience God.  First you must get involved in the things God is doing, and amazing you’ll then see how quickly you start to experience God.”    It was in that moment, that I saw God in Henry Blackaby, when he moved teaching us, to calling us to our knees in prayer.  It was the kind of life-changing prayer that took away our distance from each other and from God, and opened us up our own needs and the needs of others so that we would share them and care for them.  That was real prayer, the kind of prayer might even enable you to see a religion that matters---both to you and to God.  

SEEING OURSELVES DIFFERENTLY

What brought Isaiah to see differently was not just a fresh vision of God’s care, but it was also a moment of new understanding about himself.                      

“Know thyself.”  “Let me to my own self be true” are too great sayings of wisdom in the ancient world.   They are also part of what happened to Isaiah when he ‘saw the LORD’.  If you see God as he is, it’s not long until you see yourself as you really are.   But don’t let it happen the other way.  Don’t try to see yourself, until you catch a vision of understanding about a loving, caring, God or you could be in for trouble. 

A very high charged story is told in the recent book and Movie, Philomena.   It’s based on the true story of a woman who was taken in my catholic nuns into a girl’s home, when she accidently became pregnant.  The home was very strict, and sometimes harsh, as they often sold the babies to wealthy Americans in order to pay expenses.  Philomena’s son was suddenly seized from her without notice, and then sold so that she never saw him again.   After Philomena was retired, she wondered what happened to her son.  A news reporter heard of her situation and wanted to help her and do a story on the outcome of her search.   Philomena does find her son identity, but unfortunately he is deceased.   She wondered if he ever thought of her.  Ironically, in the end, she discovers that his body was returned to be buried at the home where he last saw his mother. 

The story is powerful alone, but what makes it even more powerful is that Philomena never loses her faith in God, nor does she ever lose respect for the nuns, even though they did not treat her fairly.  The reporter, who is an atheists, has no respect, but comes to question his own values (or lack of them), and even comes respect faith.   During the story, the situation calls them both to take a serious look at themselves and their attitudes toward faith and toward others.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2431286/.)  

Sometime or other, life has a way of forcing us to take the longest walk we will ever take, from our head to our hearts.  We all must, each one, come to grips with who we are, how we relate to others, and what kind of person we are, and also, to consider what kind of person we should be.   Life in our world has many ways to try to insulate us from the most important truth, but God has a way of showing up, getting through, and helping us come to grips with our true self.   This is exactly what happens in Isaiah’s vision, for no sooner does he “see the LORD high and lifted up”, but in the vision, his own life and living is challenged by the revelation of God’s holiness, and he must admit that he is “lost” and is “a person of unclean lips” and that he ‘lives among a people of unclean lips” (v.5).   Interestingly, we never really see who we are, until we first see how loving, graceful, and merciful God is.  Our sin is never fully revealed until we know that God loves us and forgives.   As an old song goes, “The one who knows me best, loves me most.”   This is the second thing Isaiah sees.  He not only sees the Lord, but when he sees the LORD as he is, he begins to see himself.    He no longer can ‘duck’ seeing himself as God sees him.

SEEING THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY

When you see God as he is, then come to see yourself as you really are, you will then begin to see life and the world very differently too.  

This is exactly what the president of World Vision, Richard Stearns, suggests in his book,  “The Hole In Our Gospel”, when he asks, “Is our faith just about going to church, studying the Bible and avoiding the most serious sins---or does God expect more?”   When you see God, then see begin to see yourself, and it isn’t very long until you start to see that there is ‘more’ to the gospel than you originally thought.   You not only begin to see yourself differently, but you also begin to see the ‘world’ differently.

In this vision, after Isaiah sees the Lord and finds himself in need of cleansing, in the very next moment with the ‘cleansing of his lips,  heaven comes calling with a great question: “Whom Shall I send, and Who will go for us?”  To this heavenly call Isaiah answers in the affirmative, “Here am I Lord, Send me!”   Although in this text we have the unmistakable story of the ‘call’ of this prophet, we also have a picture of the voice of God that bears a burden for the world and this holy, loving, and compassionate God who asks us to carry that burden too.   For this is not only a call to be a preacher or missionary, but it is also a call to see the world as God sees it, in need of someone who “will go” and bring God’s message of love, redemption and hope.

When I was preparing to go on the mission field, I overheard my father having a question put to him, “Why does your son want to go overseas?”  My Father responded that he did not know.  Interesting, my Father was the finest man I’ve ever known.  He was a faithful Christian, deacon, Sunday School teacher with a men’s class larger than my first church.  Everybody loved my Dad.  My Dad was caring and compassionate, but he did not ‘understand’ why I was going overseas.  Ironically, I can’t say I understood it all either.   All  I know is that on a short volunteer mission trip to South America, something happened.  When I saw those poor children, and the faith of those people who were living in the slums, but having much more faith and enthusiasm for God than I’d ever seen in the U.S., something hooked me, caught me, or should I saw, was in some ways came to me in a way that was not unlike a ‘call from heaven’.   It made me see the world from a completely different angle. 

Jesus saw the world from this very different angle.  While the religion of Jesus day was stuck trying to figure out what was ‘right’ and what was ‘wrong’, Jesus basically showed them that all religion was wrong, unless it had a love, appreciation, and mission to the world.   As Mother Teresa once said,  “I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.”   That’s right.  We are not the message, and we don’t ‘write’ the message, but we communicate it.  “When we understand that, we might actually become useful to God.”    As another Teresa has written, “Christ has no body on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours.  Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion for the world is to look out; your are the feet with which He is to go about doing good; and your are the hands with which He is to bless us no.  (Both quotes in “The Hole in Our Gospel, by Richard Stearn (2010).

I find it interesting, to think about how this ‘calling of Isaiah’ , this calling to see and respond to needs of the ‘world’, changed Isaiah’s views and perspective about true faith and true religion.  In Isaiah 58, we read how God is not pleased with the religious ‘fast days’ of his people, but God encourages a whole different kind of religious activity:  

6 Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

 7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

 8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.

 9 Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

 10 if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.

 11 The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.   (Isa 58:6-11 NRS).

Unfortunately, I still hear some people saying that we should not be about a ‘social gospel’.    But when we truly get our hearts right, we not only see differently, but we do differently.   And the ‘different’ thing we do is to love our neighbor as we love God.    So, according to Isaiah, and to Jesus, the only true gospel is a ‘social’ gospel that loves God whom we haven’t seen, by loving our brothers and sisters we do see.   There is no true religion, without there also being a religion that causes us to see the world differently, just as we've come to see ourselves and the God who created us all for his glory.   Amen.