Weird

A sermon preached with the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, California.

Didja get that first reading? It’s the year 742, the year King Uzziah died. And the Prophet Isaiah has, what? A vision? A dream? A medical or drug-induced episode? We don’t know, but however it came to be, Isaiah is transported to another dimension, another world. It’s the temple in Jerusalem but also not quite the temple in Jerusalem.

And God sits on a throne, wearing robes so long and flowing they fill the whole space. And around God are three flying creatures called seraphim. They have six wings each: two cover their faces, two cover their feet and the two remaining wings, one supposes, keep them aloft.

And the seraphim call to another. And they do so by singing a song. And the song shakes the whole building, fills it with smoke. And it’s a song we know.  

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;

the whole earth is full of his glory.”

And then Isaiah, who isn’t quite sure if he should be here or not says, “I am sorry! I am lost, and I don’t know how I got here. I am seriously imperfect human being. I am embarrassed and ashamed and unworthy. I didn’t mean to, but somehow, I have seen God with my own eyes.”

And in response, one of the creatures flies down to the altar and uses tongs (I love this detail!) to pick up a hot coal. And presses it to Isaiah’s lips. “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.”

And God speaks: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

Is God asking Isaiah? Did God even notice he was there? Is it simply a hypothetical question? Is God thinking out loud? 

Whatever the case may be, Isaiah, newly freed of the demons that haunt him, cries, “Here am I; send me!”

So yes, friends — the first part of the Sanctus, the “Holy, Holy, Holy,” — those words we say or sing during our Eucharistic prayer, set to beautiful strains of music — come to us from the mouths of six-winged seraphs in this cinematic scene set by the Prophet Isaiah.

And lest we think (hope?) perhaps Christian tradition inherited something updated, something less, well, weird than the tale we get from Hebrew Scripture, remember that John picks the imagery right back up in the Book of Revelation. In fact, he adds the detail that the six-winged singing seraphim are “full of eyes all around and inside.”

Imagine. It is these feathered, multi-eyed beings who modeled worship of God in God’s presence for us. It is these feathered, multi-eyed beings who modeled the freely-given love and forgiveness of God. It is these feathered, multi-eyed beings who taught us to sing:

kadosh, kadosh, kadosh in Hebrew קָדֹשׁ

hágios, hágios, hágios in Greek ἅγιος

Shèng zāi, shèng zāi, shèng zāi in Chinese 聖哉

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus in Latin

Holy, Holy, Holy in English

And on and on, in all languages of the human heart.

Holy. Said three times over. Always, three times over.  

And while imagining this sanctuary filled with the kinds of angels we know from art and from movies and greeting cards as we sing this song is lovely, there’s something about including these slightly scarier, and much weirder and far more mysterious beings that adds a new dimension to the experience. The unknowable-ness. The awe-inspiring. The mystery. Of God and God’s love.

But okay, okay, it’s weird. I know. It’s weird! I have a friend who sometimes says, “I mean, are people hearing these stories we read in church???” It can even be kind of embarrassing. I am an educated person! A believer in science! What will people think of me when they hear I’m at church talking about supernatural beings flying around with tongs holding coal? I absolutely find myself feeling this way. Maybe some of you do too.

Nicodemus certainly did when he approached Jesus that night in Jerusalem about 750 years after Isaiah’s vision.

Nicodemus was a faith leader. A man of academic accomplishment and reason. And he knew how babies are made. And that once they get born, they do not get reborn. I mean, that’s science. Not even advanced science in the 1st century. 

And so he asks Jesus, “about this business about being, quote, ‘born from above” … “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”

And Jesus says, “Do not be astonished that I said to you you must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

And Nicodemus, along with Isaiah before him, along with all of us after him responds by asking, “How can these things be?” You’re not making any sense.

And Jesus says, “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?”

Rather than joining Nicodemus in trying to hash out God’s mysteries as though they are atoms to be split, Jesus invites Nicodemus to expand his worldview to include things earthly and things heavenly. Things mysterious. Things unknowable. Things weird. Jesus asks him to allow himself to see, or at least imagine, that dimension Isaiah found himself in. And, friends, I believe that dimension is the Kingdom of God.

We are invited to allow ourselves to see, to feel, and to embrace the reality-bending, freely-given love and forgiveness of God. The kind of love that knocks kings from their thrones, and lifts up the lowly. The kind of love that causes all systems of human oppression to melt away. The kind of love that comes to you in unexpected ways. Sometimes seems, at first, like a hot coal. And then turns out to be a blessing. The kind of love that wraps you up. That makes you know that God loved you first.

The kind of love that always “make sense.” Cannot really be explained.. Because God’s wonderful love is, well, weird. Our efforts to explain God and God’s love have resulted in some of humanity’s greatest works of art. Music and painting and poetry. Scripture itself — Isaiah and John’s Gospel alike — are the work of human hands trying to explain the love of God. This framework for God that we call the Trinity that we celebrate today – our understanding of God as three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Creator, Redeemer Sustainer. It’s beautiful and true. And, it is still, in the end, a human attempt at explaining the unexplainable. De-mystifying the mystery.

What we do here in church, in this place, as Christian community, I am actually proud to say that it is super-weird. It is different. Because our priorities and the way we live together in community are based on the values of God, whose values do not always (or, frankly, often) align with the values of our society. Because we dare to believe there is something far greater and more powerful than ourselves within a highly individualistic culture that prizes self-sufficiency above community.

Because we sit together and listen to the first-hand account of an 8th-century BC Israelite living through a time of great conflict and war, who experienced something that changed the course of his life, and ultimately brought us some of the most well-known prophesy and poetry in the history of the written word.

Because like Isaiah, we dare to imagine that different dimension; the coming Kingdom of God. Where all things are made new.

Because we try and try and try again to find words that do justice to name and worship our God of Love.

Because in the end we know that when words fail, we can always fall back on the simple formula handed down to us by a weird trio of six-winged, multi-eyed celestial beings:

Holy, Holy, Holy.