Worship for Trinity Sunday (May 30, 2021)
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty,
God in three persons, blesséd Trinity!
Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
Cherubim and seraphim falling down before thee,
Which wert, and art, and evermore shall be.
Holy, holy, holy! Though the darkness hide thee,
though the eye made blind by sin thy glory may not see,
only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
perfect in power, in love, and purity.
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth and sky and sea.
Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty,
God in three persons, blesséd Trinity.
Reading: Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)
The from the book of the Prophet Isaiah, chapter 6, comes from a pivotal, hard time in the life of the people. King Uzziah had been king for 50 years, and overall had been a good king – perhaps one of the top three of all the kings Israel ever had, ranking right up there with Solomon for faithfulness, wisdom, ability to lead, and for the way he built up the kingdom.
But as happens, over time fatal flaws appeared. Pride began to distort some of his decisions and actions. Instead of acting humbly as a faithful servant of God and doing well, he began acting like an entitled best buddy of the Almighty, and things began to go downhill fast. Uzziah was struck with leprosy, went into quarantine for the last ten years of his life, and when he finally dies, the kingdom is already coming apart at the seams.
In the midst of this national crisis, one day when the prophet Isaiah is in the temple, he is overwhelmed by an experience of the God of all heaven and earth who is true king of all, who holds together all things – high and low, light and dark, good and bad in ways beyond our comprehension and our best wishes.
There are 13 verses in the chapter. We usually read only the first 8:
In the year
that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne;
and the train of his robe filled the temple.
Above him were seraphim [angelic creatures of fiery glory] each with six
wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their
feet, and with two they were flying. And
they were calling to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
the whole earth is full of God’s glory.”
At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
[That’s the end of verse 8, where we usually stop. But the passage goes on, with the message the Lord Almighty gives to Isaiah to preach.]
The Lord Almighty said, “Go and tell this people:
“‘Be ever
hearing, but never understanding;
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’
Make the heart of this people calloused;
make their ears dull, and close their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears, understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.”
Then I said, “For how long, Lord?”
And he answered:
“Until the
cities lie ruined and without inhabitant,
until the houses are left deserted and the
fields ruined and ravaged,
until the Lord has sent everyone
far away
and the land is utterly forsaken.
And though a tenth remains in the land,
it will again be laid waste.
And as the terebinth and oak
leave stumps when they are cut down,
so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.”
Meditation
What an awesome and awful vision of God’s glory of
God, the kingdom’s devastation, and good news – of a kind, at the end of it. Before getting to Isaiah, though, let’s go
back to where we began our journey into worship today.
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee;
holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty,
God in three persons, blessed Trinity!
Did you notice the unexpected smiles and looks of delight on Karen’s and Brynna’s faces as they finished the hymn? That was because it was take number seven. In an email about the recording, Karen says, “One little thing: Brynna and I managed to skip a verse [verse 3 actually – the one about God’s glory hid in darkness beyond what the eye of what sinful man can see] …But it was the SEVENTH take, and the rest of the song was good, so we left it…For a song that I have sung in church most of my life, I can’t understand why it was so tough to tape. Of course, I only ever sang the first verse … Lol”
If you’re of a certain age, you may remember the measured words and stately tune of this hymn – at least the first verse of it, sung every week at the beginning of Sunday morning worship in churches across the land. On a good day, the windows might be open and the hymn would float out in all its gracious majesty into the community, and people around the church would know God was being worshipped in that place. They would know where faith was being fed, and where people of faith and a place of grace were to be found when needed.
I wonder, does our worship give us the same sense today of that deep and sure holiness of God holding all things together? Does our way of being church communicate to others around us, that same timeless grace of God over and above and through the heart of all things on Earth and in heaven?
Or, do we sometimes skip some of the verses and some of the fullness of the message?
Like the way we usually read only the first part of Isaiah’s vision of the overarching glory of God in and through all things in heaven and on earth. It’s an overwhelming experience of the glory of the Holy above and in all that is, and we like to stop at verse 8 – five verses before the actual end of the chapter, with that great question of God, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” and the ready answer of the prophet, “Here am I. Send me.” It’s so stirring, and a model upon which so many songs and stories of dedicated service and commitment to God’s purposes on Earth are modelled.
But by stopping there, and not reading the rest of the chapter, we miss the message God actually has for the prophet to give the people: that the destruction already beginning to come upon their kingdom is not going to be halted. God is not going to undo or reverse the course of events that has begun. God will not forsake them along the way, will never be far from them or leave them alone, and in the end will restore them. But the newness of life God promises will come only in the way that a new shoot comes from the stump of a tree that is cut down and burned.
That’s a hard hope to have. There’s no way to soften it, and make it sound or be easy. Maybe that’s why we don’t usually don’t read to the end of the chapter.
But I wonder if Isaiah’s honesty about the message is one of the things that makes him so attractive and believable as a prophet. And what makes the good news he brings so relevant, so deep, so unshakable and so good. Because it’s real and honest, and helps us to trust that no matter what comes, as Paul says in Romans 8, nothing shall ever be able to separate us from God, from God’s love, and from God’s greater good purpose for us and for all things. That’s one of the promises of God on the cross with us and for us, and Isaiah in his own way and his own time, knows it.
I think of people I have been touched and struck by in my life, who have seemed to me to be real people of God in the way Isaiah is – who by how they are able to hold together what seem on the surface to be conflicting truths, seem to know something of the overarching glory and a fuller truth of God.
The examples may seem trivial compared to Isaiah. Unlike Isaiah they’re more personal than political in their scope. No doubt it would be helpful to apply Isaiah’s message to our own political situation – to help us see that God is greater than just “our” God; to help us confess the lies our lips tell when we divide the world into us and them, and when we fail to speak honestly of the dark sides of our history and society; and to help us see that God’s will may not be to help prop us up as we have been, but to let us keep unravelling until there is a real chance of starting anew.
But … the ability to live with that kind of faith maybe starts with the personal, and in our own little experiences of God’s fullness. So that’s where I speak from today, hopefully finding a personal way into the kind of God-humbled and God-opened public faith that Isaiah knew, and that he brought to the larger stage.
One person whose faith struck me as bigger and more real and honest than mine is a little nun from Ireland named Maeve – maybe seventy years old when I met her over 30 years ago when I was attending my first-ever week of directed prayer retreat. I’d never been at anything like that, but I had just begun as a minister and already felt a need to learn more about how to pray. So, when I saw a notice about a week-long prayer retreat at Regis College, a Jesuit school in Toronto, I signed up. And when I got there, at the introductory session I was introduced to this little nun in Toronto on sabbatical from her house in Ireland, who would be my director for the week.
I wanted to do well – both to prove myself a good pray-er and to im-prove my ability to pray. The first few days were tough. We were assigned readings and times for solitary meditative prayer, and each time I met with Maeve to talk about what I experienced and heard God saying to me in my times of prayer, I ended up having to confess that when I began to read and contemplate, within minutes I grew drowsy and feel asleep. I felt like a failure.
Maeve just looked at me, though, and said, “Don’t be downcast. You must be tired. What a gift it must be, in your time of prayer to know yourself falling asleep in the arms of God.” She had such a gracious wisdom about the fulness of being human, of who we are and aren’t, what we need to be and don’t need to be within the grace and good purpose of God.
Years later, still working as a minister, and wanting to gain more skill as a pastoral leader, I attended a number of workshops over the course of a few years, in faith-based mediation and conflict resolution. In my own life, my practice around conflict was basically to avoid it, deny it if possible, just smooth it over if I could, and just escape from it if I couldn’t.
It seemed high time to learn a different way. And I was deeply struck by the leaders of the workshops who talked about conflict so easily and constructively, who saw it as a natural part of life. Instead of being just a problem we want to make go away, they saw it positively as a doorway to deepened relationship between people at odds, as a pathway to new truth if we have the courage to follow it, as a gift of God and God’s Spirit at work among us if only we have a large enough vision and deep enough trust in God’s gracious presence in all things – even all things at odds.
I have not yet learned to be a good mediator. But I have learned to value the vision of holiness hidden in conflict that those people knew, and I’ve learned to be not quite so afraid of the fullness of God’s Spirit that lies behind and through most conflict we experience.
More recently, one other person whose deep spirituality and awareness of the Holy I’ve been touched by, is an Advance Care planner at a local hospice – someone whose job, and whose calling is to help individuals and families to face and to plan for the endings of their lives. She speaks easily and naturally about things that many of us – myself included, find it hard to talk about, and hard to accept either in our life or as in any way within God’s will. Things like chronic illness, incurable disease, loss of function and dying, bereavement and grief, absence and legacy.
She doesn’t go out of her way to talk about God and heaven. Nor does she use any of the pious language we sometimes fall back on to make things easy and try to smooth over the pain, the sorrow, and the anger that we feel around things like that. But I can only believe that at the back of her ability to accept and to handle such hard things so directly, and to help others do the same, is a deep, hard-won vision of the goodness of life and the good purpose of God above and in and through all things, that she has grown to trust.
That’s a vision of God I want, a fullness of faith I pray for, and a kind of good news I would be happy to know and to share – because I can’t help but think there are others all around us who still want to know where God is being worshipped, where faith is being fed, and where people of faith and a place of grace are to be found in the midst of all the hard parts of life we face.
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