Attuned to God
A sermon brought forth from Revelation 10:1-2a, 8-11 and Isaiah 6:1-8 preached on June 11, 2023
Every Tuesday at noon during the school year, right here in the sanctuary you can find a bunch of 3- and 4-year-olds tugging on their ears. I ask them if their ears are attached to their heads, on and open. “Are you sure?” I’ll ask. And they all grab a hold of their ears and make sure. It’s a hearing test of sorts.
That’s a good first step. You have to start somewhere. So we start with the ears. Then they’re ready. “Good,” I’ll say, “because God has a story for us.”
No matter if we’re in preschool, long ago done with school, or somewhere in the middle, God wants our ears big and open, that way we stand a better chance of hearing.
Scripture makes much of call stories. They’re everywhere. Abraham hears and goes. Moses sees something peculiar, a bush on fire but not burning up, so we get this idea that call has something to do with more than hearing and seeing, but also with curiosity. Who will stop to see what’s going on?
Samuel too. Samuel has open ears. He hears God’s voice but doesn’t understand, so his mentor Eli tells him what he’s hearing and what to do the next time he hears it. Sometimes we need each other’s help to hear.
The same was true for prophets like Elijah, Elisha, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. It was true for Isaiah also. For all of them, there was a moment of encounter. And though they were all different, they had something in common. They came to a point in their life—some moment of encounter or clarity—when they discovered that no one and nothing other than God when they figured out that all their longing for something else never did satisfy. It became clear to them that their life was meant to be lived in God and that they could not be truly themselves until they discovered their deep desire for God and God’s deep desire for them.
Our calling begins there, too. Becoming attuned to God. Growing ears for God. This is for all of us, not just the prophets and pastors. God made all of us with what it takes to be attuned to God, in tune with Him—to hear, respond, and live in response to our Creator.
But here’s the thing: we need to arrange our lives for this. God is more likely to show up if we expect Him to, and when we make ourselves available for more. But we get our ears mixed up. So often we we’re taken over by what’s urgent that we never get around to tending to what’s essential. It’s so easy to spend our whole time being preoccupied with what’s urgent and never get around to really living.
Isaiah’s favorite word for God is “the Holy One.” For him, God was altogether holy. We have to be careful here. For some, the word “holy” means nothing more than goodness in a straightjacket; life with all the joy sucked out of it. Proper, stuffy, austere, uptight, prudish, puritanical, square. But that’s a mistake.
Holiness is not what we’ve made it out to be. Holiness is the opposite of all that. Holiness is a wild, furious opposition to normal, to blandness. Holiness is not safe. Holiness is Jesus tossing tables in the Temple. Holiness is Moses daring to step closer to a bush on fire but not burnt up. It’s Elijah daring to speak what his own people did not want to hear but saying it anyway. And it’s Isaiah doing the same.
Holiness is interior fire, and Isaiah trembles at its presence. God is holy, and Isaiah is not safe. Isaiah does say one word to refute God’s call upon his life, but you bet he has something to say about how small he feels standing in front of the Holy One. Isaiah doesn’t pretend for a moment that he’s got what it takes. God is holy and Isaiah is not, and there’s no sense in pretending otherwise.
Isaiah is the only prophet in scripture who accepts God’s call upon his life without trying to wiggle his way out of the responsibility, but that doesn’t mean Isaiah feels equipped. Isaiah’s response to the heavenly vision of God’s holiness is an awareness of his uncleanness, lack of qualification, and his inadequacy. “I’m ruined,” Isaiah cries.
Isaiah finds himself in a full-on sensory experience of God’s holiness. It’s immense. It seems like something he can hardly stand. His words “I’m ruined,” do the trick. Isaiah’s saying he’s come undone; he’s wrecked. These visions of God’s holiness have wrecked him. Isaiah will not emerge the same. He will no longer—can no longer—be himself. Isaiah has become unarranged in the sight of God. That way God had the chance to arrange Isaiah for holy purposes.
If you took all that God is—all His love, power, excellence, justice, and goodness—and you wrapped it all up into one and called it something, that’s His holiness.
We should pay some attention to how much ink Isaiah spills about King Uzziah. God calls Isaiah to become a voice for God to God’s own people, and that never happens in a vacuum. God speaks to his own right where they are—in all the small and large circumstances of their lives. Once King Uzziah stepped on the throne, he began to run things according to his own tastes and desires. He would only deal with God how and when he wanted, as one sovereign to another.
But God is holy, and we are not. We do not own the things of God, and we cannot use the things of God for our own purposes. King Uzziah walked into the presence of God asserting his own purposes. He was out of tune with God. But Isaiah was not in the temple to get something for himself but to pray and worship, to be present with the Holy One, to tune himself with God, to become attuned to God.
Isaiah’s call story is a hearing test of sorts. You have to start somewhere. So we start with the ears. God wants our ears big and open, that way we stand a better chance of hearing. God is the One who speaks His life into our lives, but we can create the conditions for our spirits and souls to hear God better when He does. King Uzziah was full of himself; there was nowhere left within him for God to arrive and make His home. Isaiah, on the other hand, came empty and in God’s presence presumed nothing, and he asked to be filled with nothing but who God is.
Here’s the most fantastic news, though: God puts his faith in us long before we put our faith in God. Who we are does not begin with us. Who we are begins with God. This is the Christian life. God speaks first, and we respond. We never make the first move, have the first thought. God does. Being faithful means seeing all of what we do and say—all of who we are—as a natural response to what God is doing and saying—who God is. All of Isaiah’s life, he kept attuned to God and responded to what God is doing. He arranged his life to hear God better.
The Christ-responsive life is one where we go about our days paying attention to the right things, using what the poet E.E. Cummings called “the ears of our ears and the eyes of my eyes.”
Are your ears attached? Are you sure?
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.