Sermons for the Month
DATE: February 8, 1998
SERVICE: Epiphany V
TEXT: Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)
Sermons for the Month
"Duck Preachers in a Duck Church"
DATE: February 8, 1998
SERVICE: Epiphany V
TEXT: Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)
"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
Lutheran theologian, Soren Kierkegaard loved to tell a parable to his congregations about a community of ducks who each Sunday waddled off to the neighborhood duck church to hear the duck preacher. The duck preacher would speak eloquently of how God had given the ducks wings with which to fly. With these wings there was nowhere the ducks could not go, there was no God-given task the ducks could not accomplish. With those wings they could soar into the presence of God himself. Shouts of "Amen" were quacked throughout the duck congregation. Hymns would follow like "Quacking for Jesus" and "Rock of Ages, Quacked for Thee." Then at the conclusion of the service, the ducks would leave, all the while commenting on what a wonderful message they had heard as they waddled rather than flew back to their homes.
When I first heard this parable back in seminary, I was offended. The point my professor was trying to make was painfully obvious in spite of his humor. He was challenging me, all of us in his class, with the notion that most if not all of us had, at least up until now, spent most of our Christian life waddling away from worship the same way we waddled in -- unchallenged and unchanged. "But now my brothers and sisters in Christ, all that is going to change." And we knew we were in for it.
Perhaps it is because we all are creatures of comfort, creatures of habit, that we often waddle out the way we waddle in. Week after week, at 9:00 AM, Dad would drive my brother and I to Sunday School, my Mother to choir practice after which he would head to the hospital to make his Sunday morning rounds. Then at 11 AM he would return to sit with us boys in the same place in the same pew, following an order of service that we all knew by heart, quite frankly not too much different than what it is today, listening to a sermon which we assumed was intended primarily for everyone else. After church we would all go to the Hotel down the street for dinner then back home for the afternoon. One a month we would drive to Grandmother's house. It was our Sunday routine. Most others in our church had similar routines.
Occasionally, however, something would happen. A serendipity. Unplanned. Unrehearsed. Uncontrollable. In the midst of the worship service, a spark would ignite. Someone's eyes would opened to a deeper awareness of the grandeur of God by the majesty of the music, a turn of phrase in the sermon or an unexpected accent on a familiar text. And conversation would follow at home. Someone would recognize something of his or her life's story as the Scripture lesson was read, and a new insight would be born. Another would hear in the sermon, as if for the first time, the forgiving love of Jesus, and a renewed hope would come to life, a renewed commitment made. I sometimes wondered why such happenings occurred in one person but not another, why someone else but not always to me. I had been there too. Why didn't it--what "it" was--happen to me too? But experience has taught me that these events can't be explained, only described.
The central character in this week's text is Isaiah, whose call to prophetic service came during an annual celebration of worship. It was for him an encounter with God so profound that afterward he could no longer see himself or his people in quite the same way. To Isaiah it seemed that the entire building shook with the presence of God.
But what about the others who were present during that same worship service? Did they have a similar experience to Isaiah's? Did this act of worship affect how they viewed themselves? How they viewed God? How is it that two persons can hear the same music, the same prayers, the same sermon, and one of them be utterly transformed by the experience, while the other is unmoved? What makes the service of worship a profound encounter with God for one and a routine ritual for another?
The answer appears in a moment Isaiah describes in today's text, a moment when, as songs are being sung and prayers are being prayed and the high priest is intoning the greatness of God, unexpectedly, worship happens. It happened to him. As each of us yearns for our own worship-filled moments, listen once again to Isaiah's account of an encounter with God when worship happened.
(Read portion of OT Text)
Worship happens whenever God is radically present. "Rad" (shorthand for radical) is a popular expression used by today's teenagers. It carries much the same meaning as the terms "awesome," "cool," "neat" or "groovy" did for previous generations. Rad (-ical) is used to describe an event or an experience that transcends the ordinary, that is qualitatively and quantitatively different from other events or experiences of its kind.
Occasionally, we may hear it said that, as Christians, we are called to a "radical discipleship" or a "radical obedience" to Jesus Christ. What is usually meant is that, as believers, we are called to live lives different from the culture of which we are a part by taking seriously and intentionally the ethic of Jesus.
Therefore, to speak of God as radically present is not to deny that he is always everywhere present, but rather to describe those occasions when the reality of God's presence bursts upon an individual's consciousness in an unusually powerful way. It is to be overwhelmed by an encounter with the Divine that leaves us "weak-in-our-knees" in awe-filled worship. When this happens, God can be said to be radically present.
The radical presence of God cannot be controlled or programmed; it can only be experienced. And that experience can come to us anywhere, anytime. For Isaiah it happened in the temple, but God does not limit holy moments to holy places. It happened one night as Jacob was fleeing the wrath of his brother Esau who he had just cheated out of his rightful birthright. Behind him was an angry brother out for revenge. Ahead of him was an uncertain reception by an uncle he had never met. Stopping to rest for the evening with nothing but the stars for his blanket and a rock for his pillow, Jacob experiences in the night sky the radical presence of God. Filling his dreams with such stunning reality, Jacob could only respond, "Surely the LORD is in this place -- and I did not know it" (Genesis 28:16). The next morning as he arose, Jacob arranges the stones around him into a makeshift altar as a memorial and an expression of worship and continues his flight.
Last Sunday, several of you shared a similar experience but this time in broad daylight. Many of you commented on the beautiful jet contrails that were being lit up by the early sunrise. I could not help but think of the same majesty of God as I drove in from the west, facing the warm glow of the rising eastern sun as I came into church. In the same way, Moses discovered God's radical presence on the backside of a wilderness; for Elijah it was in a mountain hideout; for Saul it was on a bounty-hunting excursion to Damascus. And who would have thought that the most radical presence of God imaginable, the coming of God in the flesh would have begun among the distinctive smells of a Bethlehem animal barn and ended among the sweaty death throes of two criminals on crosses?
Isaiah's experience reminds us that the radical presence of God is found not only in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary as well. God can be as profoundly present in the sunset over a mountain peak as he is in a church or cathedral. He can reveal himself in a concert hall as vitally as he might in a moment of praise music. More important than where we are is our willingness to see God in what is going on around us. Isaiah was engaged in an ordinary service of worship, seeing what everyone else was seeing, hearing what everyone else was hearing, when God broke through the ordinary to reveal himself as radically present. Isaiah "saw through" the smoke and the haze of that Enthronement Celebration to the eternal reality which the ceremony represented. He was not content to experience only worship; he was open to an experience of God. We, too, are more apt to be surprised by the radical presence of God when our hearts are opened to seeing him in the ordinary events of life.
Such awareness, however, is made difficult for us because we have become a society that celebrates the sensational and the spectacular. If an event is not filled with more glitz and glamour and ostentatious hype than what came before, then, for many, it is a non-event. Nowhere is this seen more clearly, perhaps, than in Hollywood, where each succeeding production has to have more and better pyrotechnics and special effects than its predecessor. It was not enough for Bruce Willis to "Die Hard"; he had to return to "Die Harder." No one would go see Jurassic Park II if all that was offered were more Floc-raptors. In the sequel, the dinosaurs had to be bigger and bone-crunching scarier. And moviemakers are still scratching their heads over how to out-do the visual effects of Independence Day let alone Titanic.
This attitude can easily infect the church as well. It is already reflected in our architecture, in our church programs and in our annual celebrations. I daresay we all, myself included, have succumbed to the tendency to compare other churches to our church, their worship to ours, their programs to ours. It follows easily that we also can give in to the desire to want each worship, each sermon, each hymn to be more dramatic than the last, as though through our efforts we could command the radical presence of God. I am afraid that consciously or unconsciously we have been educating an entire generation to believe that God is only to be experienced in the ornate and spectacular. Overlooked is the possibility that in the ordinary, God can be radically present, and that here, too, worship can happen.
Worship happens whenever human inadequacy is met by the grace of God. The radical presence of God caused Isaiah to recognize, perhaps for the first time, the spiritual shortcomings of himself and his fellow Judahites. Under King Uzziah, the nation of Judah had experienced an almost unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. Life was good, the economy was robust, the polls showed high consumer confidence, and all of the economic indicators pointed to more of the same. What is more, all of this had been accomplished through human effort and ingenuity.
Is it any wonder that Isaiah's message fell on deaf ears? Who wants to listen to a naysayer rain dire predictions on a good-time parade?
Perhaps this is why so many, too, have such ineffective worship experiences. At the moment, the economy is good. Inflation is down. We are at peace. We are content with life, with career, with family. We have settled into a comfortable, if not totally satisfactory, routine of living. We certainly don't need God's radical presence revealing the inadequacies of our neatly manicured existence, challenging us to be what we were called in our Baptisms to become. Worship is fine as long as it helps us feel good about who we are and what we have accomplished or if it confines its focus to how others can reach our level of spiritual well-being.
One can imagine the spiritual satisfaction of Isaiah and his fellow priests, as they believed they had captured the essence of God in their religious ceremony. However, as Isaiah was soon to learn, when one confronts the radical presence of God, all claims to wisdom, goodness and self-sufficiency melt away, and one is left wishing for a pair of seraph wings to hide the nakedness. Isn't that, also, the message of the parable of the publican and the sinner? The one who stands to claim special privilege based on education, religious orthodoxy and meritorious behavior ends up talking to himself, while the other is met by the radical presence of God because he knows that in the presence of the Holy, mercy is one's only hope.
But Good News my friends: The reason why God reveals his radical presence to us is not to overwhelm us or to make us feel worthless. Rather, he wishes by that presence to mind us of his empowering grace that meets and transforms our already growing awareness of personal inadequacy. No sooner had Isaiah confessed his own and his generation's uncleanness than God impressed on him the grace that forgives sins. Indeed, in the text, we are led to understand that only because Isaiah was able to confess his inadequacy before God was God able to use him as a prophet to the people. For Isaiah, when human inadequacy was met by divine grace, worship happened.
Worship happens whenever a grateful response answers a divine call. It is important to note that God's question, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" was not directed to Isaiah, but rather to the attending seraphim. Isaiah simply overheard the question and immediately stepped forward. One might want to question his sanity. After all, God did not say where the "whom" was being sent or what the task was. Isaiah might have waited until more information was forthcoming before he volunteered.
So what could have prompted such a seemingly rash response? My opinion is gratitude! Gratitude for God's grace. Gratitude for God's forgiveness of sin. Gratitude for the experience of God's presence unlike anything he had known before. Gratitude that issues forth in positive action is the appropriate response to God's actions in the lives of his people, and in that expression of gratitude, worship happens.
Tony Campolo tells the story of a young woman named Nancy who gratefully responded to God's movement of grace.
Although Nancy has a handicapping condition and is confined to a wheelchair, she has an extraordinary ministry. Every week, in the personals section of her local newspaper, she runs an ad that reads, "If you are lonely or have a problem, call me. I am in a wheelchair and I seldom get out. We can share our problems with each other. I'd love to talk." She spends much of her day on the telephone talking with the more than 30 lonely and discouraged people who call each week. When Campolo asked how she came to be confined to a wheelchair, Nancy revealed that she had tried to commit suicide by jumping from the balcony of her apartment. Instead of dying, however, she ended up in a hospital room paralyzed from the waist down. One night in the hospital, she said, Jesus came to her and very clearly said, "You have had a healthy body and a crippled soul. From this day on you will have a crippled body, but you will have a healthy soul." She said, "I gave my life to Jesus that night in that hospital room, and I knew that if I kept a healthy soul, it would mean that I would have to help other people. And so I do."
No one so touched by God can remain still. No one who has experienced the grace of God can remain silent. No one who hears in their heart the divine call for service can do anything less than respond with gratitude, "Here am I; send me!" And in moments like this, worship happens.
AMEN