Sermon for Epiphany 5, February 9, 2025
Grace, mercy, and peace be yours, forever, from God the Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit. Amen.
Isaiah 6:1-8 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw
the Lord sitting on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe
filled the temple. 2Above him
stood the seraphim. Each one had six
wings. With two they covered their
faces. With two they covered their feet. With two they flew. 3One called to another and said,
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Armies!
The whole earth is full of his glory!”
4The foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of the
one who called, and the temple was filled with smoke. 5Then I said, “I am doomed! I am ruined, because I am a man with unclean
lips, and I dwell among a people with unclean lips, and because my eyes have
seen the King, the Lord of Armies!” 6Then
one of the seraphim flew to me, carrying a glowing coal in his hand, which he
had taken from the altar with tongs. 7He
touched my mouth with the coal and said, “Look, this has touched your lips, so
your guilt is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.” 8Then I heard the Lord’s voice,
saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go
for us?” Then I said, “Here I am. Send me!”
(EHV)
Holy,
holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.
Dear friends in Christ,
In a time
of great turmoil in Israel and Judah, God gave Isaiah a strange and powerful
vision. Isaiah was invited, you might
say, to look into the throne room of heaven.
The sight of the majesty and holiness of God, and the appearance of His
angels attending Him, caused Isaiah to shudder in terror. It was all too much to comprehend at a
glance. Yet, there is a message of hope
for us just as there was for Isaiah, because Holy, holy, holy is the Lord
Almighty.
At the time Isaiah is reporting this, the
Kingdom of Israel is entering its death swoon as the unfaithful kings leading
it often ruled for a very short time until ultimately Israel is led off into
captivity never to return. Likewise, the
death of Uzziah is the beginning of the end for Judah, for its final kings are
mostly like unto Israel’s in their rebellion against God. Isaiah would be given the task of prophesying
warnings to both nations plus some others around them. At the same time, God gave His prophet
messages of hope for those who remained faithful to our God, the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Isaiah “saw the Lord sitting on a throne,
high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each one had six wings. With two they covered their faces. With two they covered their feet. With two they flew.” It was a scene of great glory and
majesty. We will get to Isaiah’s
response in a minute, but what strikes us immediately here, is that even God’s
holy angels, these seraphim that serve Him day and night and sing praise to
God’s glory, even they recognize that they are not equal to the Lord’s glorious
presence. Two of their wings cover their
faces to shield themselves from God’s overwhelming glory. Two wings cover their feet to shield the Lord
of Glory from their lowliness, and with two wings they proceed with their
service.
“One called to another and said, ‘Holy,
holy, holy is the Lord of Armies! The
whole earth is full of his glory.’” The
foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of the one who called, and the
temple was filled with smoke.” Everything in the universe is testimony to
God’s glory and power. No other being or
force could create the world and everything in it solely from the power of His spoken
Word. The smoke, Martin Luther
explained, shows God’s presence just as it had filled Solomon’s temple at its
dedication. It shows “that God dwells in
faith and that He is not served except by faith which confesses and praises
God.”[1]
Isaiah was overwhelmed by this sight. He said, “I am doomed! I am ruined, because I am a man with unclean
lips, and I dwell among a people with unclean lips, and because my eyes have
seen the King, the Lord of Armies!” If
the angels of heaven deem themselves unworthy to stand in God’s presence, how
may a mere mortal, a sinful man, be able to see God and live? Scripture testifies throughout that no sinner
can stand before God without receiving eternal condemnation.
However, it is in this scene that we see the
true glory and holiness of our God.
Though God is perfectly holy and without compare in any way, shape, or
form, God is also perfectly just and perfectly loving of His creation. God’s holy justice requires that no sin, nor any
person polluted by sin, may ever enter His presence. Anything less than perfect righteousness and
holiness will not be allowed. Thus, if
you and I examined ourselves with holy honesty, we too would be crying out in
desperation, “I am doomed! I am
ruined, because I am a man with unclean lips, and I dwell among a people with
unclean lips.”
Who among us can say we have never sinned with
our mouths? Who among us can say that
every utterance we have ever made gave praise to our Creator? And even if we could say such a thing, we
would still be doomed by the inheritance of a sinful nature. However, Isaiah’s vision shows us the glory
of our God. God created mankind holy, in
His image, without any sin or desire to rebel against His perfect will. At the same time, it must be said, that God
created our first parents knowing that by making them perfectly in His image
and free to live without restraint, they would fail to uphold His perfection
and would earn His just decision against them.
God knew mankind would rebel. God
knew we could never measure up. Yet, God
also had a plan to save us from our own deserved condemnation.
This is why the angels continually praise God’s
holiness. Because in His love for us,
God had already planned a rescue mission to thwart the wicked deceptions of
Satan and rescue mankind from its own rebellion with salvation by faith. Here, in Isaiah’s vision, this is depicted as
“one of the seraphim flew to me, carrying a glowing coal in his hand, which
he had taken from the altar with tongs. He
touched my mouth with the coal and said, ‘Look, this has touched your lips, so
your guilt is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.’” The glowing coal represents the gospel, the
word of God given to take away our sin and guilt. Already seven hundred years before Christ
would enter into human flesh to live and die for us, God is giving Isaiah the
message of salvation.
For Isaiah, this meant he would be preaching a
message of God’s judgment upon those who continued to rebel against the Creator
of all things and the true King of all Abraham’s descendants, but Isaiah would
also be preaching the Good News of the things God had planned from the
beginning to rescue His people from death and damnation. From before He created the world and
everything in it, God planned to send His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for
the sins of the world.
When the devil led Adam and Eve into their
spiritual grave by misleading them into give up their trust in God, God was
already prepared, and at their fall He announced the curse and the promise that
would restore the world: “I will put hostility between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed. He
will crush your head, and you will crush his heel.” (Genesis 3:15)
A Creator who was only just wouldn’t have the
love that caused Him to save. A Creator
who was wishy-washy wouldn’t do anything to help, but only let mankind suffer
their deserved fate. However, the God
about whom the angels sing, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty, He
brings His Son into the picture, “born of a woman, so that he would be born
under the law, in order to redeem those under the law, so that we would be adopted
as sons.” (Galatians 4:4-5) Our
Creator, who is holiness personified, gave a message of hope to sinners the
world over, so that by hearing the Gospel we may believe, and that believing “everyone
who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Joel 2:32)
This text introduces us to Isaiah’s
mission. His was the task to proclaim
God’s Word to kings and ordinary people alike.
As you heard in our epistle and Gospel lessons, this is the way God
works to save sinners from the darkness of death. God sends out messengers with the powerful
message of the Good News of all Jesus did to live holiness for us and to
sacrifice His holy life to pay the penalty of death God’s justice and law
demanded. Jesus did this for you and me,
so that like those seraphim around God’s throne, we can spend our eternity
proclaiming boldly and without shame, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of
Armies! The whole earth is full of his
glory!”
Furthermore, we don’t have to wait. Because everything God promises is
immediately as good as done, Isaiah could go out testifying to the world with
the full confidence that his sins were forgiven and his salvation was
assured. Likewise, we can tell anyone we
meet that because God sent Jesus to save us, and because He washed away our
sins in Baptism and connected us there with Jesus, we are saved. Because God gave His Son into death for our
sins, our sins are forgiven forever. And
with Jesus raised to life again, we are assured that we too will live and can
tell the world by our actions, and our trust in God’s love and kindness, that
there is nothing that can separate us from His love. We can live with full confidence just as St.
Paul wrote, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels
nor rulers, neither things present nor things to come, nor powerful forces,
neither height nor depth, nor anything else in creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)
Dear friends, like Isaiah, we too live in
tumultuous times when many members of our society and world have abandoned the
true God for the idols of their imagination.
Though we too might sometimes have to deal with persecution and maybe
even shunning by family or former friends, we have the truth that saves—that
Jesus is our righteousness and our peace.
In Jesus, we meet God personified, “For all the fullness of God’s
being dwells bodily in Christ.” (Colossians 2:9) It is in Christ Jesus that we too see and
sing, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. “The whole earth is full of his glory!”—filled
with redeemed sinners—washed clean and through faith brought into peace with
God by the blood of the Lamb. Amen.
Now
may the God of hope fill you with complete joy and peace as you continue to
believe, so that you overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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