Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024
Isaiah 6:1-8
by Allison Courey
This is a yogurt bowl that belonged to Rachel’s sito, her grandmother. For years, it sat in our cupboard, holding generations of stories that can’t be captured with words. Although I never met Adeline Courey, when I saw this bowl I imagined her family coming to Canada from Syria. I thought of the conversations that might have been had around this bowl in Arabic, in French, and in English. I could almost see her there, eating her yogurt with little Rachel sitting beside her.
But it was just a bowl, after all, so Rachel insisted that we actually use it. And then one day, while I was putting it away, it smashed into a dozen pieces. I carefully picked up the bits of glass and placed them in a pile at the back of the counter. Rachel was sad, but realistic: just throw it away, she told me. It isn’t good for anything now.
But I couldn’t throw it away. Not with all those stories and feelings wrapped up in bits of broken glass. So it sat there for months as I wrestled with feelings of guilt and wondered how I could remake the broken pieces into something beautiful enough to be filled with stories again.
And then finally, when Rachel’s birthday came, I carefully glued all the pieces back together. It looked pretty pathetic. I chose some resin in a colour I thought her sito would have liked, and I mixed in flakes of gold, which were classy in the 70’s. I poured the resin into the bowl and turned it slowly for nearly an hour, watching it settle into the cracks and transform the broken pieces into something beautiful.
In our reading from Isaiah this morning, God’s people are just on the cusp of being broken to pieces. The king has died, and the nation has been thrown into political turmoil. Isaiah tells us the land is filled with corruption and injustice, and under threat of foreign invasion.
Most people in Israel are closing their doors and hunkering down, hoping desperately that they will get a new king who will restore things to the way they used to be. But not Isaiah. It is as if there is a tornado blowing outside, and instead of hiding in the basement, Isaiah goes out to meet it, because Isaiah knows that it is in the wilderness that we meet God.
In story after story throughout the Old Testament, Israel doesn’t encounter God when they’re sitting comfortably at home, when the monarchy was functioning as it should, and crops were abundant. It is when they are vulnerable and alone, standing at the edge of the wilderness, totally unsure about what was going to happen next, that they meet God. It’s when they’re willing to risk stepping into the unknown, trying something completely new, that they encounter a God who transforms them into something more than they were before.
Isaiah is different from the average Israelite because he isn’t afraid of the wilderness. Or maybe he is, but he embraces it anyway because he knows that God can take the broken pieces of their kingdom and make it into something more beautiful than it was before. And when Isaiah is brave enough to speak the truth and step into the wilderness, he has an encounter with the Holy One that is unlike anything in the entire bible.
Biblical tradition says that no one can see God and live, and yet Isaiah does. He describes God as being so magnificent that just the hem of God’s robe takes up the entire temple. The picture he paints for his ancient audience is of a God who is more beautiful, more powerful, and more victorious than the towering temple of Solomon. He is suggesting that all the temple can do is hint at God’s glory, in the same way that our liturgy today is designed to give us just the slightest insight into God’s majesty.
And as this magnificent vision unfolds, Isaiah does what I think any of us would do: he suddenly realizes just how small he is in light of the God he has come to worship: “Woe is me!” he says, “For I am a man of unclean lips!” Isaiah realizes that even though he’s a gifted prophet, he can never be good enough or wise enough. But then something happens that he doesn’t expect: an angel touches his lips with a coal from the altar and says, “your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Even though Isaiah himself messes up, can’t do it all, and is truly inadequate, God makes him enough. And from that life-changing encounter with God, Isaiah is sent out to use his gift of truth-telling to literally change the world, inspiring people like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
But standing up and proclaiming the truth when no one wants to hear it takes more courage than most people have. We are afraid to step into the wilderness, because we have no idea what life on the other side is going to look like. I don’t know what kind of wilderness you are facing in your own life, but I do know that this community has spent time in a desert kind of space. For almost five years, you have experienced what feels like a revolving door of clergy, and for two years, the pandemic completely changed how you did life together.
But this uncertain place is the kind of wilderness where our ancestors encountered God, and came out the other side transformed into something new. Now I know I’ve only been here for 10 minutes, but I know that you are a deeply gifted community, and some of you are even prophets, because I have seen you befriending the powerless, taking chilli to an encampment, and speaking truth to power. And I know that you are brave, because you have wrestled through an amalgamation, struggled to become more inclusive, and repeatedly allowed yourselves to try new things in order to be the hands and feet of Jesus in your community.
So as you move through this wilderness together, I invite you to be open to meeting God here. You are going to be called to try new things and to let go of some of the things you care about in order to make space for new shoots being born. If you’re usually standing off to the side of things, maybe it’s a good time to try sitting in the middle. Get to know folks you don’t normally sit with. Invite one another into your homes.
You know, these days, our little bowl gets more use than it did before, because being broken allowed it to become something more beautiful than it was originally. The wilderness can be a desolate place, but our ancestors saw the face of God here.
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