Sermon

Then I said, "Woe is me! For I am undone; because 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."

Isaiah 6:5

There are several stories in Scripture about appearances of God to particular individuals.

I have in mind five specific ones--to Moses at the burning bush, to Isaiah in our Old

Testament reading, to Ezekiel by the river Chebar, to Peter, James, and John on the mount

of transfiguration, and to John on the island of Patmos. There is a kind of pattern common

to all these instances, and it is no coincidence that it is also very much like the

pattern of our usual Sunday worship service.

There are five basic elements to this pattern, and they occur on a necessary sequence.

There is first of all a setting--in the wilderness for Moses, in the temple for Isaiah, by

the river for Ezekiel, on the mountain for the disciples, and on Patmos for John. This

"setting" includes a setting in time as well. For Moses, it was after his killing the

Egyptian and his flight. For Isaiah, it was in the year that king Uzziah died. For

Ezekiel, it was on a specified date during the Exile. For the disciples, it was just

before Holy Week. For John, it was on the Lord's day.

Then there is an appearance of the Lord--as a fire in the bush, sitting on the throne, in

blinding glory over the throne, in the radiance of the transfigured Jesus, or standing in

glory in the description at the beginning of Revelation.

Then comes the element I will be focusing on before we close. In each of these cases, it

is a response of fear, and I will put off listing them for now.

Following this, there is some form of divine reassurance. Moses is assured that God is

coming not in anger but in compassion, because "I have seen the affliction of my people

which are in Egypt, . . . and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the

Egyptians." For Isaiah, the two seraphs cleanse his lips with the live coal from the

altar, and assure him that his iniquity has been removed. Ezekiel is raised to his feet,

and his spirit is restored. Jesus touches the disciples and tells them not to be afraid.

The glorified Christ lays his hand upon John and tells him not to be afraid.

Finally, there is a commission. Moses is sent to lead Israel out of Egypt. Isaiah and

Ezekiel are sent with messages to the nation. The disciples, interestingly, are commanded

not to tell anyone until after the resurrection. John is commanded to write what he is

going to be shown in his visions.

Our own worship service begins with the second of these elements, and next Sunday I expect

to explore what we might do about restoring the first. The second element is the

appearance of the Lord, and this is what is intended by our opening sentence, "The Lord is

in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him."

It is a statement with many levels of meaning. Most literally, it is simply telling us

that the Lord is present in this place, that we are in the Lord's presence. On a deeper

level, it is saying that, as Paul tells us, we are temples of the Lord, and that the Lord

is present within us. On a deeper level still, it is telling us that the Lord is present

in the Divine Humanity, in the temple of his own incarnate body; and in so doing it

reminds us of the central and distinctive allegiance of our church. "We worship . . . the

Lord, the Savior, Jesus Christ, . . . who for our salvation did come into the world and

take our nature upon him. . . . He glorified his humanity, uniting it with the divinity of

which it was begotten."

We continue with responsive sentences which include a kind of description of the Lord, and

then come to our own response in the prayer of confession, "Have mercy upon me." The

reassurance comes with what we call the prayer "of absolution"--which is really more of a

prayer for absolution, recognizing that the Lord has promised forgiveness of sins to all

who repent and turn to him; and then we spend the rest of the service focusing on learning

what it is that the Lord wants us to do, that is, focusing on hearing the Scripture and an

application of it to our own lives. In this sequence, the offering is the symbol of our

own acceptance of responsibility, and shortly thereafter we are dismissed to go and do

what we have promised.

In each of the Biblical instances we have looked at, someone's life was radically changed.

Each of these individuals had an experience far more profound than ours here on Sunday

mornings. That is to be expected. Moses did not go to the burning bush every Sunday

morning at eleven o'clock. Exodus tells of a time when God intervened, when God chose the

time and the place. We can do no more than try to create a setting in which the Lord can

speak to us, and I believe we should be perfectly candid and unashamed in admitting that

at times we will simply be going through the motions. The announcement of the Lord's

presence will not always awaken a spontaneous sense of awe.

Particularly, though, the announcement may not awaken any vivid sense of fear. There are

times in our lives when we seem particularly aware of our sinfulness, when we are finding

some inner failing especially ugly and persistent, but not all times are like that. There

are times when we are at peace with the world, with each other, with ourselves, and with

the Lord. Our theology calls these states "sabbaths," and commands us not to labor on

them. This means that we should not undertake the ego-work of self-examination at such

times, because self-examination is one particular form of self-consciousness, and in our

sabbath states we should be turned outward and upward, not inward on ourselves. We should

"rest in the Lord," accept the gift of peace.

Our prayer of confession, then, with its focus on our iniquities and our sins, is not very

appropriate when we are in a sabbath state. It is a little like looking at a glorious

sunset and, rather than losing ourselves in the beauty the Lord is providing us for a few

moments, thinking that we don't deserve it. Presumably we don't deserve it, but that does

not necessarily mean that we should refuse it.

This brings us to the main point of this morning's sermon, namely that humility in the

presence of the Lord is not necessarily confession of what is wrong. It is also grateful

acceptance of what is good. In a passage I keep coming back to again and again (Heaven and

Hell 302), Swedenborg tells us that when we realize how we are related to the Lord through

influx, then we no longer blame ourselves for evil or take credit for good. When we are in

a sabbath state, in a state of inner peace, we do not mess it up by thinking that it is a

sign of our virtue or by reminding ourselves of our sins. We simply open out to its beauty

with the unquestioned assumption that it is no possession of ours, that it is a gift which

we do not control. It has nothing to do with our worth or lack of worth.

In the correspondential language of Scripture, this is expressed most clearly in the first

chapter of Revelation, where John falls at the feet of the glorified Christ "as one dead."

There is a profound almost literal truth to this image. In and of ourselves, we are dead.

Everything we are is flowing in, either directly from the Lord, from within us, or

indirectly from the Lord, through our surroundings. Until we realize this, we do not know

who we are. We live lives that are, in a way, imaginary or illusory, that seem to be what

they are not. We make believe that our strength is our own, that our freedom to choose is

our own.

The more resolutely we cling to this sense of our own significance, the more threatening

is the announcement that the Lord is present, and the more appropriate it is that we focus

on our inadequacies and ask for forgiveness. But the true wonder lies in the sabbath

response, when, in the presence of the Lord, we give up our whole sense of significance,

we so completely forget about ourselves that it seems we might as well not be there. If

this seems strange or impossible or unhuman, I would ask only that we recall those times

when we have for a moment lost ourselves in the presence of beauty. It can happen. It is a

kind of consciousness that is natural to us, however rarely it may surface. This is when

"all the earth keeps silence" before the Lord.

But that is not the end of the story. Again, we may turn to John on Patmos for the image

we need. We find that once John loses his life in the presence of the glorified Christ,

that Christ lays his hand upon him and raises him up. Or we might turn to Ezekiel, who

tells us that after he had fallen on his face and was commanded to rise, ". . . the spirit

entered into me when he spoke to me, and set me on my feet."

The threat to our identity is itself part of the illusion we labor under. The Lord wants

to give us to ourselves, so to speak, but the harder we cling to our own sense of who we

are, the more we close ourselves off from receiving that gift. Oddly, it seems that we can

do this just as effectively by clinging to a sense of guilt for our evils as by clinging

to a sense of merit for our virtues. It is an immense letting go that is asked of us, it

seems, but it is really only the letting go of an immense illusion.

The Lord tries to tell us this in many ways. Most concisely, he tells us that whenever we

try to save our life, we lose it, and that whenever we give it up to him, we save it.

Most completely, though, he told us by showing us--by living a life that was wholly

beautiful and wholly humble at the same time, a life of self-giving without taking credit.

Ultimately, there is no other way.

Amen.