God Calling (May 26, 2024) Isaiah 6.1-8

When my mom died last year, my sister and I were trying to take care of the funeral arrangements. One of the questions asked of us was what, if any, jewelry did we want mom to be wearing. Ruth Ann brought a bracelet that she said mom liked and would go well with what she would be wearing. The man from the funeral home looked at it and asked if it was special as it looked very fancy. We did not know and said so, but we would look at it and find out for him. After he stepped out for a moment, we tried to see what kind of bracelet it was because it did seem to have a name on it. Being older, we could not read the tiny print, so we took a picture of it with a phone and then enlarged the word written on the bracelet. There we saw the word NOVA. Well, we were perplexed. Neither of us had ever heard of NOVA and wondered if this was a rare piece of jewelry that mom kept all of these years. And then we turned the picture over and the writing became clearer. It said AVON. My sister and I both burst out laughing because we thought this was a special bracelet to mom. And maybe it was.

I tell this story because, 1. It was funny, 2. It tells how we all get confused sometimes and 3. I remembered how AVON representatives always announced themselves: “AVON calling!” You might be a bit confused about this, but when you think about it, this ties into the text for today. God is calling for someone to go and tell God’s people a message. Isaiah is the one who says, “Here am I, send me.” And so, one of the most well-known call stories is told. And in this call story we see a brief glimmer of one of the most perplexing doctrines of the Christian Church.

Today might be a bit confusing for many of us. See, the Sunday that follows Pentecost is one of the most difficult to preach. Not because there is a text that is not well commented upon or one that brings up something uncomfortable. Well, maybe the uncomfortable part. It is a Sunday in which we celebrate a mystery of our faith. It is the mystery of the Trinity.

Now there are some places where the senior pastor will hand this Sunday off to an associate. The senior minister has something else to do or has an “important conference” to attend and therefore can skip out on preaching about this doctrine. It might be because this person does not feel up to the job or it might be that they have preached a mystery already for Pentecost. Whatever the reason, there is a reluctance to preach the Trinity in many places.

And rightly so. This doctrine is unlike the Incarnation where we state that God came down and was born a human and lived among us as Jesus of Nazareth. It is not like the doctrine of God, something where we realize there is a creator and ruler over the cosmos. And even the Holy Spirit, one who comes and dwells with us and leads us in ways we are to go, even that is sometimes not so hard to understand. But put them all together and say that they are three persons, one God and well, you see what I mean. When asked what the Trinity is, I often quote the immortal words of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof when asked where the village got its traditions: he says to the audience,“I don’t know.” And that is true of most, if not all of us. We do not know how to explain the Trinity. When I think about why Pentecost and Trinity Sunday are back-to-back Sundays in the lectionary, my wholly unscientific notion/personal opinion of this is that those who developed the liturgical calendar put these two weeks back-to-back so that two of the most confounding pieces of Christianity , the Holy Spirit and the Trinity, are in one package, can be dealt with quickly, and not brought up again until next year.

The first thing to understand is what the Trinity is not. The biggest three heresies that exist that are applied to the Trinity are Arianism, Tritheism and Modalism.

Arianism says that God the Father was, is, and will always be eternal, while Jesus and the Holy Spirit were created by the Father; “there was a time when he was not” as Arius was fond of saying in regard to Jesus. Tritheism is what it sounds like, three gods who perform different roles but who work together. Finally, there is Modalism in which is God fulfilling purposes in three different modes. Each of these is trying to preserve the divinity of God or the distinctiveness of the Trinity, but wind up denying the other part. And even today we have this issue. Shirley Guthrie has this to say in his book Christian Doctrine: “Because everyone tends to emphasize either the unity-oneness or the distinction-threeness of God, we all tend toward one or another of these heresies. Which tends to be your heresy?” (Guthrie, 81). Because we are humans, we all fall into a heresy of the Trinity. As Guthrie asks, which one is yours?

But that is not the end of all this discussion. We can now move on to a more positive note and discuss what the Trinity is. One of my favorite definitions is from Dr. Philip Cary. I have used this example before and it is worth using again: The doctrine of the Trinity is the distinctively Christian conception of God. It is not about how God is three and one, but about how the one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Trinity and Incarnation are the two fundamental doctrines of Christian theology. Both arise because of the uniquely Christian insistence on the divine identity of Christ. Hence the doctrine of the Trinity does not often use the human name “Jesus” but rather speaks of his divine identity using the terms “Word” and “Son of God.” Unlike the doctrine of Incarnation, the doctrine of the Trinity focuses strictly on the divinity of Christ, not his humanity.

St. Augustine showed that the fundamental logic of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity can be stated fairly simply in seven statements. The first three statements about the Trinity are “the Father is God,” “the Son is God,” and “the Holy Spirit is God.” Three more statements differentiating the Trinity are “the Father is not the Son,” “the Son is not the Holy Spirit,” and “the Holy Spirit is not the Father.” Then to cap it off, the seventh statement says, “There is only one God.”

I find this definition one of the most helpful that I have read. But there is something more. The Trinity is not a mathematical equation to be figured out and explained. It is a personal experience with the one God. John Leith said it this way: “God is one personal subject, and within the personhood of God there are three personal existences. The unity of God is personal, not mathematical.”

One of the potential stumbling blocks that the doctrine of the Trinity poses is this: we as monotheists worship three gods (see tritheism). The reason for this is because we say three persons for the Trinity. This did not originally mean what it means today. Today we see the person as an individual. What the original meaning was that they were three who were of the same substance (everybody confused now? Good, so am I). But Karl Barth takes this and explains it as well as Cary does. His statement is that God is not three “I’s”, but one I three times over.

But how can this be so personal? In trying to explain this, Augustine used this analogy: He said that the Father is a lover, the Son is the beloved, and the Spirit is the love that binds them all together. I like that because then the love is extended to us by the Love of God, the grace of Jesus and the communion of the Spirit. Therefore, we know the love of God and the persons of the Trinity.

But back to Isaiah. Isaiah is in the Temple and is in the midst of worship. This story can be seen in how God encounters us in our lives. God encounters us in our historical context, God’s word is revealed in our worship, and God calls us to serve.

In the first, Isaiah is stating that this was the time that King Uzziah died. It was a time in the real world, a time when the nation of Judah was experiencing prosperity and good times. But the king became too big for his britches and tried to worship the Lord in the way that only priests were allowed to do so. It is said that he challenged the sacred worship of the Temple and lost. Uzziah, though a mighty king, was no match for God. He spent the rest of his days as a leper for trying to challenge those who were the leaders of worship. Isaiah is called to be a prophet: one who is called to speak the word of the Lord to those who have forgotten the distinction between holy and human in his time and place. Kristin Emery Saldine says this: “The sudden shift from the historical reference to Uzziah to the heavenly throne of God is meant to set us on edge: God is holy; we are not. This is the sad realization that hits Isaiah with such overwhelming force. We are sinners, we dwell among sinners, and we live in sin-filled times. Too often we do not recognize this until it is forced upon us, and there is nothing like an encounter with the divine to shatter our self-centeredness and bring us to our knees in lament. Yet it is this realization that opens Isaiah to the possibility of forgiveness. He is touched by divine intervention and made clean. Isaiah is now free to answer when God calls.”[1]

Second, Isaiah takes a journey through seeing his own sin, confessing that he is undone, being forgiven and receiving a commission in the context of worship. Worship is where we meet God and wherever God is there is worship. Praise to God is to be never ceasing. Saldine says this: “Indeed, the order of our Lord’s Day worship is similar to that of Isaiah’s experience before the Lord. We come together to praise the almighty God, confess our sin, and seek forgiveness. We ask God to allow us to hear the Word with discernment and respond to the good news. Our worship matters, just as it matters in the courts of heaven.”[2]

Finally, the encounter that Isaiah has with the Holy reminds us that we can never know God without being changed. This transformation almost always leads to service and to work in God’s name. We must be in careful discernment and prayer to hear the call of God on our lives. And this is not only individually, but also corporate. Isaiah stated that he was “…a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips…”[3]Discernment of God’s call is also to be found in the worshiping community.

We find God calling in all our lives and in our church. God is leading us as in Isaiah’s vision with the pattern of our own worship: praise, confession/forgiveness, listening to the Word, and responding to the Word. The question is how will we respond? Will we answer the call to confront our sins as well as the sins of the world? Or will we shrink from it?

The Trinity is confusing and a mystery. Even after studying and learning more about the Trinity, it is still a mystery to me. How do we apply this to our everyday lives is one of the most difficult questions that I face. The only way that I can apply is to remember that God is love, that Christ showed us that love and the Spirit unites us in love. Because of this love we are in the family of God and there is nothing that can separate us from that love. Even when we go through hard times, we have the love of God to uphold us in the grace given through Christ and in the Comforter of the Holy Spirit. When God the three in one calls us, it is through the Father, Son and Holy Spirit working together to make us who we are called to be. Isaiah’s answer was unlike most of the prophets: He did not say “God forbid! Find someone else!” He said, “Here am I, send me.” The good news is that God is still calling and wants us to go. How we answer tells us what we think of God the three in one. Amen.

[1] Bartlett, David L. and Taylor, Barbara Brown. Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 3, Pentecost and Season after Pentecost 1 (Propers 3-16) . Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition. [2]Bartlett, David L. and Taylor, Barbara Brown. Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 3, Pentecost and Season after Pentecost 1 (Propers 3-16) . Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition. [3] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989. Print.