Holy, Holy, Holy

Introduction

Isaiah 6:3–7 ESV

And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

Psalm 19:14 BCP1928:P

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be always acceptable in your sight, * O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Trinity Sunday

Today is Trinity Sunday, when we celebrate the revelation of God as three persons in One God

The Father Almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth

The Son, Jesus Christ our Lord who died for our sins and rose from the dead for our hope of victory

The Spirit, who the Father and the Son sent to the Church to reveal all truth and to dwell with faithful and redeemed humanity

Today is about knowing God, so let’s consider what it means to know someone

Today is also Father’s Day, so for a moment, consider how you came to know your earthly fathers, or the person who best fulfills that role in your life — knowing that sometimes our earthly relationships become complicated

Most of us knew our fathers as caregivers and providers from a young age

We came to know them through how they spoke with us

We saw what made them happy or angry based on their instructions and their reactions

We came to know their strengths and faults as we grew up and became adults alongside them

Our relationships and knowledge of our fathers evolved over time, they didn’t stay static

Some of us have had very good relationships with our fathers throughout our lives

Some of us have had conflict with our fathers for much or our adult lives

Ultimately, we know our fathers through our interactions and the stories they tell us about themselves

This is the same with God!

He shows us who he is, he tells us the story of him and us

We know him because he shares himself with us

The chief difference between our heavenly Father and our earthly fathers is that while our earthly fathers sometimes fail us or don’t live up to our expectations, our heavenly Father has no faults and is always faithful

Seeing this, how does God reveal himself to us, how should we respond, and what difference does it make for our lives?

God’s Revelation to humanity

In our passage today from Isaiah, God is revealed as supremely and completely holy

The threefold cry of “Holy!” from the seraphim speaks to this completeness

Holy here means set-apart from the common things, utterly worthy of respect and honor

As I preached the last time I was up here, God is holy and calls his people to be holy

The mighty and powerful beings of the earthly and heavenly realms serve and worship him

In Isaiah’s vision, the seraphim that attend the LORD are the highest rank of heavenly created beings

In John’s vision which we heard read, we hear of the 24 elders who surround the throne and place their crowns before the throne in submission

God’s glory fills the whole earth

We see this in the description of “the train of his robe filled the temple”

This picture is of his robe descending from his heavenly throne trailing to the earthly temple

Also, the seraphim announce that his glory fills the earth

We understand this to mean that there is nothing on earth that can escape the gloriousness of his presence

The praises of God cause earthly strongholds to tremble

In Isaiah’s vision, he says that when the Seraphim cried out in praise, the foundations of the Temple were shaken, and the very doorframes of the Temple shook

The Temple was built as the greatest building in Jerusalem, and a sign of God’s power and favor towards Israel

It had become corrupted through the uncleanness of the people, and the sinfulness of the kings of Judah

Instead of being a beacon of the hope of God and his salvation, it increasingly became a symbol of earthly power and self-righteousness

Shaking the foundations of the Temple with God’s praise recalls the original intent for the Temple and shows how far things had gotten off course — think of Jericho, whose walls were cast down from the praises of the people

It is dangerous for humans, in our uncleanness, to even see God

Isaiah counted himself as “lost” or “destroyed” or even “doomed” to have looked at “the King, the LORD of hosts!”

He is probably thinking of when God tells Moses that he cannot see God’s face and live

For Isaiah to have seen God and lived means that God must have provided a way for him to see the glory of God and not be destroyed

One reading of this may be that the Person of God that Isaiah sees in the vision is the Son of God, whose mission is to reveal the Father to the created realm

Another reading is that God protected Isaiah from destruction so that he could see the glory and receive the cleansing from the Seraphim

Either way, Isaiah rightly understood his peril and because of his humble confession of uncleanness received grace to be in God’s presence and not perish

Humanity Desires to Know God

We know from the rest of Scripture that various peoples have attempted to know and have a relationship with divinity

Idolatry wouldn’t be such a problem if this weren’t the case

The central conflict between Christianity and second-temple Judaism was over the legitimacy of Christ’s revelation of himself as the Messiah and God’s Son

The manipulation of false teachers in the warnings of the letters from Paul and the other apostles is rooted in exploiting a desire to know the truth of God

So we know that there is a desire to know God rooted in humanity

Since we see that God has revealed himself to humanity, how do we see humanity responding?

With utter rejection of the truth

Preference for human-derived reason

Atheism, materialism, secular humanism

Heretical Christian cults

Preference for comfortable tradition

No interest in the truth, just following what has always been understood

Ancestor worship, animism, “spiritualism”

Embracing satanic idolatry

Outward acceptance of Scripture, but inward indifference

People who are complimentary of the Bible, who lean on cultural Christian norms, but are fundamentally unchanged by the Gospel

People who exchange the free gift of grace for legalism and works based salvation

People who are more interested in how the Church serves them rather than whether they receive truth and meet the Lord Jesus in the community of his disciples

Total acceptance of the truth as revealed in Scripture

“Small-o” orthodox Christianity which confesses and proclaims the Triune God

Gospel based living — I have been afforded grace and mercy, so I shall extend grace and mercy

Living the mission of the Church — participating in the revelation of God to humanity, proclaiming the Gospel, taking on the ministry of reconciliation, doing works of mercy not for salvation but because of the fact of receiving salvation

The only way to know God is to know we are not God

Humans are not “basically good”

Though we were created Very Good, humanity as a whole has fallen in the muck and mire of sin and death

We constantly see and hear violence, injustice, vicious and hateful speech, disregard for fellow human beings, indifference towards suffering, factionalism, greediness, gluttony, and an almost never-ending litany of deadly sins

A right response to God’s revelation of himself then is to see ourselves, on our own, in contrast to it

God’s glory fills the earth — our deeds and our names are forgotten soon after we die

God is holy and supremely deserving of praise — without God, we are common and unclean, deserving of scorn

God is praised by the powers of heaven and earth — we are harassed and threatened by earthly and spiritual adversaries who would overcome us if not for God’s intervention

The very praise of God causes the earth to shake — when we are praised, it is quickly swallowed up by our failures, usually soon after we receive a good word

Without God, we are men and women “of unclean lips, dwelling in the midst of a people of unclean lips”

Unless human beings fully and readily acknowledge this state of affairs, we are unable to be made clean, and whenever we encounter God it will be destruction and loss for us

Jesus Christ is the fullness of the Revelation of God

But thanks be to God — he has made himself known to us in Jesus Christ

God the Son presented himself to the creation as a human being, truly born of the Virgin Mary, and also truly begotten of God the Father

He was and is utterly righteous and completely sinless

When we were enemies of God, he loved us and was patient with us

He gave himself up to suffer the penalty of our sins to save us from that wrath and that punishment, and so that we could truly know him and the Father who sent him

With the Father, he sent the Holy Spirit to comfort us and guide us into holiness

Where Isaiah saw the King but did not describe him other than the train of his robe and the glory-cloud filling the Temple, humanity saw Jesus face-to-face through his disciples, even through his earthly enemies

When John later sees the throne room, he sees not only the one seated on the throne, but the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, seated in power in the heavens

It is because of Jesus Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit that we have any hope of knowing the Father, and of coming into community with God Almighty

God’s Revelation Demands a Change

So what then? Since God has revealed himself to us, and we esteem that our only hope to know him is on his terms, how does he call us to know him?

God is holy, and has called us to be holy

We do this by following the great commands to Love God with all our being and to love our neighbors as ourselves

In loving God with all our being, we reject the rule of power and money over our lives

Will following God make me politically and socially weak? Then I will be an outcast and a byword to people bound for destruction, while being welcomed by the only King that has any true authority.

Will following God make me lose money and business? Then I will be poor and destitute, and the kingdom of God will be mine.

In loving our neighbor, we don’t oppress or support others who oppress the vulnerable or otherwise abuse, mistreat, or act unjustly towards our fellow human beings

In the biblical idiom, this is the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the sojourner

In our current context, it is the man or woman experiencing homelessness begging for money, the child without a fatherly influence, the single mother, the migrant worker, and the refugee

If we want to truly know God, we have to submit our reason under the revelation that God has given us of himself through Scripture

God doesn’t provide logical proofs to reveal himself, he simply states what is true about himself

God’s word is infallible and incorruptible, it does not fail, and is free from deception

Rather than the end of human reason, God’s word is the starting point — all of our reasoning about God must flow from what he has given as truth

Our reasoning and contemplation of God is therefore judged by the standard that God’s self-revelation sets

To be made clean before God, we must come into the presence of God

In order to this, the change we must have if the Revelation of God is to have any impact, is to be humble before God

Isaiah’s exclamation of dismay, his confession of uncleanness and unworthiness before God, is what saved him in the moment from being destroyed at seeing God’s glory

The seraph touched the coal to his lips in response to his confession

This humility opens the pathway to God, and the humble in heart will always find their way into God’s presence

When we come into his presence, we find that God has provided the means of grace through his Son, which are mediated in the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist

Where Isaiah’s lips were touched by a coal and his sins and uncleanness were removed, we taste of the very body and blood of Christ, receiving his Real Presence, for our ongoing sanctification and renewal of our union with him

Practically, therefore:

We must remain constant in prayer

Prayer is how we stay in step with the Triune God. Prayer is not just our outcry to God, though that is part of it!

Prayer is our contemplation of God’s truth in Scripture

Prayer is our response in praise for God’s grace and mercy, and all the other benefits we receive at his hands

Prayer is the submission of our busy and agitated hearts and minds to the peaceful, pleasing, and good will of our heavenly Father

For us Anglicans, this is typically in the Daily Offices; though regular prayer stops throughout the day, special devotionals, or other prayer practices like the rosary, prayer ropes, or prayer beads are beneficial as well

We must acknowledge, lament, and repent our sins before God

For my own practice, I sit in silence for a few minutes at the confession in the daily offices, and name aloud the sins and errors that the Spirit calls to mind

I also seek regular confession to a priest at least twice a year

Other practices that may be useful are the Examen, a daily meditation focusing on where God led you, where you fell short, and how you resolve — with God’s help — to do better

Especially this week, but I commend this every time you make confession either to a priest or to God in private personal prayer, let us consider the ways our lips are unclean, and the unclean ways of the people we dwell among

Not for personal despair or for outward judgment, but to guide our repentance, our lament, and our resolution to amend our lives

We must proclaim the gospel to friends, neighbors, and even enemies so that the truth of God is known far and wide

For our friends and neighbors, we prioritize the Gospel as an invitation to walk with us; for our enemies it is a plea and warning that they do not get swallowed up by the twisted lion that seeks to devour the souls of men

Conclusion

Today is Trinity Sunday. We acclaim the LORD God as a trinity in unity, three Persons and One God.

At the core of the doctrine of the Trinity is the Revelation of God. We do not profess the Trinity because it is a good idea or because of warm feelings, but because the unmistakable and persistent witness of Scripture is that God is One, and the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are God.

If we are in Christ, then we have the privilege of knowing God as he truly is, and we have the benefits of being made worthy to know him.

May we always be a people giving thanks because our guilt is taken away, and our sin atoned for. Amen.