Luther Seminary Chapel, Saint Paul, MN, June 10, 2009

Text: Isa 6:1-8 (Holy Trinity)

Preacher: Frederick J. Gaiser

Here I Am!

Most of the prophets didn’t seem to read the chapter in the preaching manual on creating common ground with their hearers. They started right out offending. So, what the heck. Why not follow their lead?

So, here’s the offense: Despite the fact that “Here I am, Lord” has become a favorite hymn of many, it gets this text fundamentally wrong. I suppose it’s not Daniel Schutte’s fault, the hymn writer. He’s just following the text the way that church generally gives it to us, as indeed it does again in today’s lectionary reading, ending with “Here am I; send me,” as though that’s the point of the text. It’s not.

I don’t want to say that our “Here I am” response is never a legitimate emphasis. In fact, when I showed a draft of this sermon to my wife, she said, “Hey, hearing that ‘Here I am, send me’ was one of the things that eventually brought me to seminary.” Fair enough, a legitimate emphasis, and far be it from me to deny the importance of human agency in God’s work. Especially in Isaiah—I wrote that essay a few years ago.

Still, in its present context the text is not primarily about the response of the prophet; it is rather about the interaction of this unsuspecting prophet of unclean lips with the majesty—even the terror—of God. The terrifying vision of God in the text we just read seems like overkill just to convince a poor guy he should go be a preacher. But it is needed to support the terrifying message the prophet is called to deliver, mercifully left unread today, as it usually is.

The passage doesn’t end with “Here am I, send me”; it goes on, as most of us probably already know, to include perhaps the sharpest word of judgment in the entire Bible: dull the minds of this people; stop their ears; shut their eyes; close them down until the whole land is empty, forsaken, and desolate.

“Holy, holy, holy,” indeed! If this text is appropriate for Trinity Sunday, and it may be, it is not primarily about that accidental threefold doxology. True, countless generations of Christian readers and liturgists have heard a Trinitarian emphasis here—but, of course, only because they first knew there was a Trinitarian emphasis. Nobody would have gotten there from the text itself. That’s okay. We didn’t know the “unto us a child is born” line in the next chapter of Isaiah was about Jesus until after the fact either. Once we see what God has done, we develop 20-20 hindsight into what God was up to in earlier texts. And that’s fine. It is always both a surprise and not a surprise to see where God goes with the words and the promises given in an earlier generation.

So, what is the text about, now that I have set myself up as critic and guru? How about this for at least one response: the text exists in order to be overturned. To be sure, it’s harsh judgment is true and does its terrible work. Because of their rebellion against God and their neglect of the poor, Israel and Judah are, in fact, destroyed, as the prophet announced. We need to hear that and cower for awhile. Acts have consequences, and we are not immune, neither individually nor nationally. The wages of sin is death.

But the book of Isaiah doesn’t end with part one, the book of disaster. It includes, as we know, part two, the book of comfort. And in part two, everything that was closed down in part one is opened up. Death happens in Isaiah, but so does resurrection. And the book is set up to make that point. The opening up in part two comes in direct literary parallelism, direct verbal correlation, to the closing down in part one. This is no accident. It’s what the book is put together to do. Eyes, ears, minds, cities, the land itself—everything closed down and laid bare in part one is explicitly opened up and restored in part two.

And then back to our “Here I am.” That gets turned around later in the book, too. And that, too, I am increasingly convinced, is deliberate. We’ve heard the “Here I am” before. It’s what you say in the Bible if you hear the voice in the night. It’s what you say when God calls. It’s what you say when a parent or child calls out in need. It is the quintessential human response to authority, to need, to God: “Here I am. I am at your disposal. I can do know other.” We hear it from everyone from Abraham to Samuel, from Moses to Mary, and in this text from Isaiah: “Here I am.”

But that isn’t the last time we hear these words in the Isaiah book. Later on, once things are turning around, God takes this most human of all responses into God’s own mouth—a turnabout that happens only in Isaiah, but here it happens three times! Perhaps an even more profound Trinitarian reminder than the thrice holy hymn of our text.

“Therefore my people shall know my name,” God will say later in the book; “therefore in that day they shall know that it is I who speak; here I am” (52:6).

“Then you shall call,” says the prophet, “and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am” (58:9).

Finally, God laments our unwillingness to hear this divine offer: “I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ to a nation that did not call my name” (65:1).

Hearing these human words in God’s mouth, the reader is, I think, clearly meant to remember Isaiah’s too eager willingness in today’s text, to remember the terror of First Isaiah’s message, and to know that everything is now turned around, that God has made all things new. We see that, in the light of the whole book, the text is not about our taking Isaiah as role model, as we have so often thought, but about God taking us as role model, taking on our vulnerability, taking our voice in the divine mouth in order to invite us home.

Come home to my voice, says God. Here I am, at your disposal. Ready to make you mine. Ready to forgive, Ready to love. Ready to save. Ready to be your God.

Make no mistake: this is THE fundamental human voice of response in the Bible, and it is just that human voice, that human self-giving, that human laying down of self for the sake of the other that Isaiah’s God takes in God’s own mouth. There may be no more profound hint of incarnation anywhere in the Old Testament. Which, if this passage has a Trinitarian bent, is what makes it so. Here in Isaiah 6 we get the big God, the terrible God, who, then, later in Isaiah, gives up that claim to terror and takes a human voice. That only makes it binarian, I suppose, not Trinitarian. But, of course, who could believe such a thing, that God takes human voice—more, that God models human self-denial—save in the power of the Spirit.

Come home to my voice, says God. And so we can. Come home to the incarnate God, the voice made human, the body made bread, the blood made wine. All the majesty of Isaiah’s vision remains. All the awe of Isaiah’s huge God. But now, because of the divine humiliation announced in Isaiah’s gospel, our awe takes a different cast. Now we CAN look on the face of God and live. Come home to God. That God. Come, now. AMEN