Sermon — May 26, 2024 — Trinity Sunday
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There’s an emotion that our ancestors sometimes called “fear,” and which we’re more likely to understand if we call it “awe”: a feeling of reverence and wonder mixed with dread, inspired by finding yourself in the presence of something you can’t even begin to wrap your mind around. It’s something I remember feeling when I was ten years old or so, standing on a transparent footbridge above a waterfall, and suddenly realizing that there was nothing supporting me but some long-retired engineer’s calculations and a prayer. It’s what I felt when we were sent home from the hospital with a newborn baby, just a couple days old, and all the nurses and the helpers were gone, and I just remember thinking: “You’re leaving this thing with us?” It’s what I felt the first time I got the phone call to plan my first funeral, as a new priest; to be the one to bear witness to a family’s grief and to be with them through their process of mourning and remembrance.
When our ancestors talked about “the fear of the Lord,” this is what they meant—not that God is scary or intimidating. Not that we should be afraid of God’s eternal punishment. But that our God is an awesome god, in the full sense of the word—because the vastness and the strangeness of God has the power to fill us with awe.
Awe is what Isaiah felt, more than 2500 years ago, when he was confronted with the prospect of speaking the word of God to the people of God, and that same awe is what many modern preachers feel when we step into the pulpit: “Woe is me! I am lost. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips”—no offense— “yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5) How could we presume to follow “The Word of the Lord” with any word of our own?
One of my go-to prayers on a Sunday morning comes from a Lutheran book called the Minister’s Prayer Book, a set of daily devotions for pastors. In good Lutheran fashion, this book has a relatively low view of human perfection and a high view of God’s grace and mercy, and so in a section entitled “Prayers of Preparation for Ministry, On Sunday,” my favorite prayer reads: “Lord God, you have appointed me to be a…pastor in your church. You see how unfit I am to undertake this great and difficult office, and were it not for your help, I would long since have ruined it all. Therefore I cry unto you… Lord, use me as your instrument, only do not forsake me, for if I am left alone I shall easily bring it all to destruction. Amen.” (The book rotates between my desk and the sacristy, throughout the year, but it’s never far away.)
I don’t say this to fish for compliments. (I know you all think I’m great.) And I don’t think it reveals some hidden psychopathology. I say it because it’s true for me. Congregations entrust their pastors with many things—not just an hour of your time on Sunday mornings, which we’d better not waste, but the most precious and fragile moments in your lives, and a pastor who mishandles that trust can be just as devastating, in his own way, as a structural engineer whose hand slips on the slide rule. And so I approach my work with a certain sense of awe. But this isn’t just true for priests. I think it might be true for you, as well. The things we do in our lives are really important. Some of us are nurses or doctors entrusted with people’s health; some of us are teachers, or parents, entrusted with the care of children—all of us are human beings living as neighbors of one another and as stewards of God’s creation, and in these roles we are entrusted with incredible, precious, and fragile things. And from time to time I suspect we all feel that overwhelming awe—that reverence mixed with dread that comes when we suddenly doubt that we’re not quit up to the task.
Life is a series of challenges we are not adequate to face.
And yet.
Isaiah despairs. How can I be a prophet? How can I speak on God’s behalf? I am a man of unclean lips. But God does not despair. God doesn’t put Isaiah on a Performance Improvement Plan, and fire him if his prophecies don’t work out. God doesn’t criticize Isaiah from afar, or judge him for his many imperfections. God doesn’t say, “Stop worrying, you’ll be fine!” God sends a seraph with a coal from the altar and touches his lips. And you might think this is a painful thing, and maybe it was. But it’s not about the pain. It’s not a punishment. A sacrifice in the Temple would be made by burning incense, or grain, or meat at the altar. This live coal is the instrument of that sacrifice, the means of making an offering to God. God sees Isaiah, in all his imperfection. God sees him unable or unwilling to approach the holy place, and God reaches out. God brings the holy place to him, and marks him as holy, and says, You are worthy of offering yourself to God. And so when God asks, “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah has the strength to answer that call, with confidence—and maybe still with dread—“Here am I.”
In his Letter to the Romans, Paul proclaims the same cycle of God’s grace, the same invitation to become something greater than we think that we can be. None of us is Jesus, Paul readily admits. None of us is perfect; earlier in the letter, Paul reminds us that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) But even though we are not the perfect Son of God, we are children of God; not by nature, but by adoption.
And this is an extraordinary thing to say. “You have received a spirit of adoption,” Paul writes, and the Spirit itself bears witness that you “are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:16-17) Jesus is the incarnate Son of God, the loving, perfect God-made-flesh who has always been God’s equal and heir. And yet God has chosen us, sometimes loving but rarely perfect, to be the siblings and equals of Christ. God has chosen us, God has chosen you, to inherit the kingdom of God. That awesome God, that One whose voice breaks the cedar trees, whose voice splits the flames in fire, so majestic that even just the hem of his robe fills the whole Temple, so vast that the overwhelming expanse of the Milky Way is just a drop in his Creation, has chosen you, in all your frailty, or inadequacy, or imperfection, to be a child of God, a sibling of Christ. And you are.
On the Sunday after Pentecost every year, we observe Trinity Sunday, a day devoted to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, to the proposition that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet they are not three Gods, but one God. And this somewhat technical subject can sometimes drain that sense of awe. But the Trinity is not the doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinity is God. And what’s so interesting about Christianity is not the doctrine of God; what’s interesting about Christianity is God, and what touches us the most is not what we think about God, but what God does in our lives.
So think, for a minute: Where do you feel the way Isaiah feels? Where is that sense of inadequacy for you? Where do you feel unworthy, or imperfect? If God appeared to you, and said, “I need you to—[fill in the blank],” what is it that would make you respond, “Woe is me!” because you were certain that you could not?
The Holy Spirit, is working in you, even now. The Spirit is working in you to bring about new life. The Spirit bears witness with your Spirit that you are a child of God, that you are good and you are loved. In your Isaiah place, whatever it is, in all your feelings of dread, in the sense that you’re not quite up to the task, God reaches out. God sends a seraph with a live coal in its hand, to say that you are worthy to offer yourself to God; that God knows your imperfection and God wants you nevertheless, and when God asks “Whom shall I send?” you are enough to answer, “Here am I; send me!”