May 30, 2021 “Thrice Holy” – Isaiah 6:1-8

Isaiah 6:1-8
“Thrice Holy”
May 30, 2021 – Trinity Sunday

I first preached this sermon nine years ago, just after I’d delivered a similar message at my oldest daughter’s wedding. “You are different. You are male and female. You are extrovert and introvert. You are medievalist and classicist. You are Canadian and American!” That’s what I told Andrew and Susan, after naming some of the many things they shared in common, including a classical language nerds’ fondness for the future perfect tense. I was leading up to the point that marriage was meant to be a sharing of difference within unity. That’s what it means to be “one flesh.” And that’s also what it means for God to be the Trinity.

As we celebrate Trinity Sunday, it’s good to say it again, to remember that Christian doctrine is not just mind games or interesting paradoxes we’re asked to believe. It’s living truth about God that changes the way we live, especially the way we live with each other.

In our text, Isaiah’s encounter with God, and the truth about God, changed his life. Verse 1 tells us the date. It was “the year that King Uzziah died.” As far as the calendar goes, that’s around 740 B.C. But the event of Uzziah’s death is more than a date. It marks a dark change in the fortunes of God’s people.

Also known as Azariah, this king ruled Judah for fifty-two years. Isaiah came to the temple at a moment of extreme political and social uncertainty. Uzziah had been enormously successful. Judah prospered while he reigned. His policies brought both productive agriculture and military strength. People were well-fed and secure—for fifty long years, more than the life span of many at that time.

With the architect of their prosperity dead, the future was unclear. People were confused and apprehensive. The huge, cruel Assyrian empire was expanding toward them. In less than twenty years Israel, their sister nation to the north, would fall and be devoured. Judah itself would be invaded and only the intervention of God would save them from the fate of Israel. With the death of Uzziah, any sense of security was evaporating.

Isaiah was faced with his own uncertainty. He was a court prophet, appointed by the king. He spoke for God, but he was paid from the king’s treasury. Like any political appointee in the midst of party change, Isaiah’s job was in jeopardy. His response was worship. He came to the temple. In uncertain times, he sought the Lord. In the middle of national and personal worries, Isaiah acted on faith and came to the house of God.

He may have been seeking a vision of the future. Isaiah was, after all, a prophet. He may have wanted comfort. Psalm 84 says even the sparrow finds a home, a nest in God’s house. He may have been looking for some reassurance regarding his work. Yet regardless of his needs, what he found was God, a glorious, holy, terrifying God.

Isaiah tells us he saw the Lord, “high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple with glory,” as we sing it in the praise song. Our daughter wore a very traditional wedding dress. Back then we watched her navigate the chancel of their church in Toronto. It seemed like her long train was everywhere. We worried about whether she or Andrew or someone else would trip over it. But the hem of God’s garment really did fill the temple of Jerusalem, with His glory spreading out to encompass the whole space.

That vision of God alone would have shaken anyone, but there was more. Andrew and Susan in their high Anglican wedding were surrounded by a whole company of worship leaders: their priest, a deacon, a subdeacon, a thurifer, acolytes and a choir. God’s glory was surrounded by a heavenly choir, angels, “seraphs” who flew around Him to sing His praise.

Verse 3 gives us what they sang, the words that we sing together ourselves so often, that we say together every Sunday in our early communion service, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is filled with his glory.”

Though some fuddy-duddy Bible scholars might dispute whether we can read Christian theology back into the Old Testament, the long-standing tradition of the Church is that the seraph’s three-fold repetition of “holy” implies that Isaiah saw God as He is revealed through Jesus Christ, God as Father, God as Son and God as Holy Spirit. In other words, God as Trinity.

In fact, John 12:41 says that Isaiah saw the glory of Jesus the Son and spoke about Him, even though many human eyes around Jesus were blinded to that glory. In Exodus 33:20 and other places in Scripture, we’re told that no one can see God and survive. But it’s in and through the second person of the Trinity, through the Son, through Jesus, that God becomes visible to human beings.

“Holy, holy, holy” became an ancient hymn in the Greek church. They call it the Trisagion, the “Thrice Holy.” Their tradition has it that during the reign of Theodosius II in the fifth century, on September 24, there was a great earthquake. As the emperor, the patriarch, and all the people prayed for deliverance, a child was lifted into the air. They all cried out to him, Kyrie eleison, “Lord have mercy!” Then a heavenly voice came from the child telling them to pray, “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us!” That prayer became a constant and repeated part of Greek Orthodox liturgy.

But the “Thrice Holy” is not just a pretty chorus for angels and human choirs or praise bands to sing. It’s a keenly accurate description of the three persons of God. They are each and all completely and absolutely holy. The life they enjoy together is a perfect life. None of the evil or sin of our world contaminates God. The root of the Hebrew word for “holy” means something like “separate.” God’s life is above and separated from all that is wrong and sinful.

That’s just what strikes fear into the heart of Isaiah. He is confronted with the holiness, the perfection of God, and he realizes there is absolutely no place for someone like him in that perfection. As verse 5 says, he felt there was no place for anyone, no place for his whole nation before God. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”

Isaiah realized what Jesus taught, what James 5:8 tells us. A huge part of our sinfulness lies just in what we say, especially in what we say to each other. We wound and ruin each other constantly, just with our words.

It’s easier to hear and recognize the sin in other’s words. An angry mother in the grocery store calls her child “stupid.” One spouse berates another for some fault or past mistake. We pick apart political speeches and judge public figures for insensitive or false remarks. Yet honesty like Isaiah’s forces us to admit that our own lips too are unclean. We are unkind, we are prejudiced, we are cruel… in our words.

Part of the perfection of God, of God’s life together as a Trinity of persons, is that they speak to each other without any of the uncleanness which taints our lips. Father, Son and Holy Spirit speak to each other for eternity only with peace and love. God the Father speaks as we heard Him at Jesus’ baptism saying “This is my beloved Son.” God the Son speaks as we heard Him in the garden of Gethsemane saying, “Not my will, but yours.” And God the Holy Spirit is constantly speaking back, as we read last week in John 16, saying not His own words, but what the Father and the Son wish to say.

Imagine a life like that. Imagine a circle of friendship, a circle of love where everything said back and forth is gracious, peaceful, kind, uplifting and encouraging. As I wanted to say to my daughter and new son-in-law, that’s the kind of life God has. And it’s the kind of life He made us for, whether in marriage and family, or in our circle of friends, or in this blessed community we call the Church.

How do we get from here to there? How do we get from being people of unclean lips who wound and even curse each other with our lips to being people of holy lips who bless each other? If you and I want that kind of life we will have to get it from the One who has that kind of life. Clean lips and a life of love only come to us from God, from the Trinity who has lived that life from eternity.

God gave new life to Isaiah. In his vision, it came as an angel, a messenger of God, touching his lips with a burning coal and pronouncing, “your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Isaiah’s new life, his new way of speaking, began with the burning grace of God offering him forgiveness of his sins, forgiveness for all the ways he had misused his lips to hurt those around him in the past.

I like to joke about the clouds of incense which filled the church during Susan and Andrew’s wedding. That church was St. Thomas Anglican by the University of Toronto, but Andrew’s friend Elliot called it “Smoky Tom’s.” A little brass pot with coals and incense, a thurible, is swung back and forth to fill that sanctuary with sweet smoke, to recreate the Hebrew Temple where incense was burnt constantly. That smoke then and now symbolizes people’s prayers rising to the holy, holy, holy God.

With the fiery coal taken up by the angel, God forgave Isaiah and made him able to speak words and prayers that would rise up for God to hear. Isaiah with his new, clean lips would later prophesy God’s promise to provide grace, forgiveness, clean lips and a new life to us all.

Our Gospel text today is from John 3, where Jesus talked with Nicodemus about the work of the Trinity to forgive and save us. Jesus said forgiveness from God is being born again, being born into that Trinitarian life of peace and love. And God the Father sends that life to us through the Holy Spirit, who comes to us through Jesus Christ the Son.

God as Trinity is the new life we need, and God as Trinity is the way we receive it. God the Father loves us. That’s the starting point for John 3:16, the verse many of you memorized as children. “God so loved the world…” Out of love, the Father gives His Son, “so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” As Jesus said back verses 5 and 6, it is also by the Holy Spirit, blowing like the wind wherever He wills, that we receive new birth into that life. Father, Son and Holy Spirit cooperate together in perfect harmony to forgive our sins and lift us into eternal life.

Eternal life is God’s life. It’s the life which Father, Son and Holy Spirit have lived all along. Together they invite us to join them, to leave past lives of sin, to burn away unclean speech that hurts others, and to be part of what they have, a “holy, holy, holy” life of love toward each other.

When I was in college I was part of the choir that went on tour, riding a bus up and down the west coast. After we sang in a church each evening, we went to stay in people’s homes. Late one night after a concert in northern California, I met my hosts. They were a young couple with a baby. We climbed into a battered old station wagon and drove to their home with their baby crying all the way. They lived out in the country, in a tiny house with peeling paint. First thing in the door, I smelled a problem. Their dog had left a gift on the living room rug.

They cleaned up the mess and pulled a lumpy hide-a-bed out of the couch. They left me there to sleep with the odor still hanging in the air. I spent the night feeling sorry for myself and imagining all the nice places other choir members were staying.

The next morning, my hosts cheerfully set out a breakfast of cold cereal, which didn’t lift my spirits. But we sat down around their little table and it was time to pray. The father grasped my left hand firmly and I reached out gingerly to take a sticky little baby hand in my right. That young dad began to pray and thank God for His gifts to his family and to ask a blessing on me that day. Suddenly I felt part of them, felt at home.

I left feeling, “This is good. This is what I want. Someday I want a home like that, a life like that. A circle of love big enough to embrace a stranger and make him feel welcome. That’s a good life.”

God’s life is that kind of life. From forever, Father, Son and Holy Spirit have reached out and delighted in each other in a circle of love. But like that little family of three I met, God’s Three-in-One is not exclusive. God has a beloved Son and a perfect life. Yet through His Son, the Holy Spirit draws us also in to be God’s children, His family. He drew me, He’s drawing you. He wants to take my hand, take your hand and include us in that holy, holy, holy circle.

In verse 8, the last of our text, we hear the voice of the Trinity saying, “Whom shall I [God is one] send, and who will go for us [God is three]?” That same One-in-Three voice is asking you and I to respond like Isaiah, to go out and share the love of the Trinity, to speak the good news that the Father so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might receive the Holy Spirit and enter a new and eternal life. May you and I say yes with Isaiah, yes with the angels, yes in a rousing chorus of “Holy, Holy, Holy” sung to God the Three-in-One forever and ever.

Amen.