Read Isaiah 6:1-5.

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. ² Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. ³ And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
    the whole earth is full of his glory.”

⁴ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

⁵ “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Let’s Pray.

This past week is one of my favorite weeks as a football fan. I know, I know it should be one of my LEAST favorite weeks as football is officially over for the year. But, the end of the season also ushers in a new season for the sport. The season of the armchair expert. This is the week where, no matter who your team is, you start talking about all of the things that have to happen for next year to be “the” season. We act like we all know exactly what needs to take place as if we’re all front-office experts and I am absolutely here for it. I get into as much as the next person because speculation is fun! Especially when its speculation that you know will never have to be proven so you can feel free to say the most absurd things trying to sound like the profound prophet that has been sent to lead your favorite team to the promised land if they would just listen to YOU.

Like I said… its fun. And, as a perpetually defeated Cowboys fan, my season began a few weeks ago, and everything that has happened since has only added further fuel to the fire. And that fuel has been added because… Dak has been in the league and has been the “one” for the Boys since 2016 and he has as many playoff wins as Mahomes has Super Bowl wins and Mahomes has been in the league one year less! But, see, I’m an admittedly beaten Cowboys fan, so I am not surprised when they suck, I almost relish in it just as much whoever we’re playing. I’m pretty sure it’s a defense mechanism and I should probably spend some more time diving into that, but we’re not talking about my problems right now, we’re talking about the Cowboys!

See, my father-in-law, God bless his weary soul, is a tried and true Boys fan and it pains him to watch this and we have been going back and forth on whether Dak is really the one. We’ve been talking about this for 4 years now, but this year I think he’s finally on my side. The word we keep using this year is that Dak was finally “exposed” this playoff season. Exposed in the sense that he had all of the tools, he had the o-line, and he had the defense. He just didn’t deliver and the offense sputtered around him. Meanwhile, Mahomes got it done with a lot of missing pieces and injured players.

So, as we like to say in the sports-fan world, Dak was finally exposed for his true self when the playoffs are on the line. He had a spotlight shined on him and he had the opportunity to show up like Brady or Mahomes or even Eli Manning, or to become another Tony Romo. That moment where the whole world sees whether you’re going to succeed and show you have what it takes, or fall apart in front of everybody.

That’s a really tough place to be, isn’t it? I don’t know about y’all, I’ve never had that kind of pressure on the professional level at the highest level, but I know I can recount at least a few moments in my life where I sat in that “exposed” space. We all have, right? A moment in school where you had to perform or present a speech. A high pressure moment in a sport, a putt you just had to sink, or just a moment where your life felt like it was on display for the world to see. Fortunately, for most of us, those moments don’t happen to often because we’d all die at a young age with a lot of bald spots. The stress is just too high, but sometimes those moments of exposure can happen when we least expect it. And, for many of us, one of those moments happens when we first meet God. Sometimes it can be the very threat of that moment happening that keeps us from the church to begin with… But, that’s the moment that Isaiah finds himself in for our scripture today. He’s not in a high pressure human moment, but he feels that expose none-the-less.

Now, to give you all an idea of what’s going on as we find ourselves here in the story, the book of Isaiah has just opened and preceding Isaiah’s commissioning here are 5 chapters of Isaiah delivering a message from God about how the people of Judah – the people of Israel and of David – have not been living up to their end of the bargain and asking the question of why would God live us to his? He warns them to turn from their ways and to stop taking the law of God for granted. They make sacrifices so often to cleanse themselves of sin that God says he’s tired of the blood because it means nothing to the people of Israel.

I don’t know about y’all, but we’re not even into the scripture yet and I’m already feeling exposed. I have to ask for forgiveness for the same impatience I display every time my tires touch 1488.

So all of this is going on and we’re about 750-800 years prior to Christ at this point. Foreign aggressors are pressing in on the nation of Israel as a result of their sin and God is letting them reap what they sew. Isaiah’s ministry would go on for about 40 years after this point and he would have been the one writing this book. Another interesting this to note is that Micah would have been ministering at about the same time and would have been writing his own text. It is actually believed that these two would have known of each other and been familiar with each other’s works.

But Isaiah tells us in the opening verses of his text that his book is written during the time of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. So the story has been going on prior to this point, but at the point of Isaiah’s commissioning from God Uzziah has just died. And as he died – ushering in a new time, a new reign, and a possibility for a new direction amongst the Judean people, Isaiah has a vision of God.

He see’s God and he is seated upon his throne and the train of his robe fills the entirety of the temple. At first this seems like a weird detail to add, but Isaiah is using a literary device to help us understand the mightiness of God. The train of the robe filling the entire room speaks to God’s majesty, to his might, to his capacity, and to his worthiness. That he is all of these things but that he is all of them so much so that his eminence fills the entirety of the temple so that there is only him.

Which absolutely makes sense. Doesn’t it? As a way of introducing God, he is helping us visually create a vision for ourselves of just how incredibly powerful God’s presence is and I think we can all resonate with that. We can resonate with those major moments where God has electrified our very being and we get those goosebumps and that sensation of God in us and amongst us and Isaiah shows his prowess as a writer by helping us feel that in a subtle and powerful way.

But he’s not finished. He tells us that God isn’t alone. He’s sitting on the throne in the temple and above him, flying above him in a posture of servanthood are seraphim with 6 wings covering their face, their bottom half, and using the remaining wings to fly…

This… this is a weird moment. Right? I mean, I’ve pictured God in my head a lot of times and He’s looked very different from time to time, but I’ve never pictured him surrounding by things with 6 wings covering themselves from head to foot and flying.

But, to top that off, this isn’t just trippy by our modern viewpoint, this is weird biblically as well. Seraphim is not usually used to describe the servants of God. Usually, it would be cherubim. Seraphim, if you remember your Old Testament stories, were the serpentine creatures that attacked the Israelites while they were in the wilderness. They were described as fiery serpents, and the word seraphim literally translates to “burning ones”. Seraphim are also associated with love in another prophetic text that was yet to be written – Revelation. But here we see Isaiah describe them as being burning ones who have wings and are covering their faces and lower half. He goes out of his way to help us understand that these are not serpents but burning ones on fire with Love as servants of God! Either way, it gives us this massive picture of God and the greatness and vastness that surrounds him, and we can almost feel, alongside Isaiah, how small he felt in that moment.

And in that smallness, he repeats the same thing that we see time and time again when people are presented with the presence of the Lord. He says, “Woe is me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips living amongst a nation of unclean lips.” He feels his own unworthiness and echoes the laments of Moses when he was before the burning bush, Job abhorring himself, Jacob’s feelings of unworthiness, and Peter’s future cry of, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” At the feet of Jesus himself.

Isaiah feels what we all feel at some point before God: EXPOSED. But, I don’t think it’s exposed in the same way I was talking about earlier. Not exposed for the world to see like Dak – although that claim still stands. He ain’t the one to take us back there. I’m sorry y’all, I have to speak the truth as I’m called to see it. – But that kind of exposure is more of an exposure where the world get’s to judge you and that’s one kind of exposure but this is a much more intimate exposure. One where you realize that you are in the presence of the true judge. In the presence of the only one who is worthy of judgment and is so above you that even the angels cry “holy, holy holy” A cry that we have muted, but in the Hebrew is no different than shouting “HOLY” at the top of your lungs. That is who you are in the presence of and it is an exposure that wounds deeply.

It’s not exposed like on a stage, it’s exposed like a wound is exposed after the arrow is taken out. Because meeting God is supposed to be like this in a sense. It is a space where our pride is wounded. That is one thing that humans all share in common. We are all guilty of pride and if you don’t think you are, then think about how proud that thought itself is that you are set apart from the rest. Pride is a natural state of man and the first thing that meets resistance when we encounter the almighty God who puts all of our pride in perspective.

It is a wound on our very humanity but it is a necessary wound that we need so that we can experience surrender needed to heal that wound with Jesus. To heal that wound with the only one who has the capability to heal not just our body but our very soul. The thing that we treat so nonchalantly, but is so, so important.

And that exposure of a wound is a really delicate space. It is a space where both Good and bad are able to get in. We can treat the wound with the treatment that helps, with the treatment that cures and restores, or we can allow that “bad” in. That dirt of the world that keeps the wound open and exposed and not only doesn’t allow the wound to heal, but turns it into something so much worse than it ever should have been from the beginning it was made.

Because this moment where Isaiah feels the presence of God his first words are “I am ruined!” Those aren’t small words. Those are impactful words for a huge moment and the tidal wave of emotions that follows that moment. And we can resonate with that. We’ve felt unworthy before God. We’ve felt small or almost like nothing at all before him and before the standards that we see he upholds. We’ve felt unworthy knowing how sinful we are. We’ve felt doubtful of the moment or of him altogether. Something this great can’t surely exist? We’ve felt these huge emotions and we know that if we stay in those emotions, if we hold onto them rather than giving them over to God like he desires, that they can drive us away from him

And these are the conversations, the feelings that we are scared to talk about as Christians. We aren’t supposed to feel negative feelings before God, right? We’re supposed to feel a warming of our heart or a so much joy that a thousand tongues should sing of it. And those feelings can drive us even further into the arms of the liar who wants those feelings to become our identity, Satan himself.

Fortunately for Isaiah and for most of us, we chose to give those feelings over to God. To let him take them and heal them. To let us know that, yes, we are people of unclean lips, but that he has cleaned them on our behalf and he loves us anyway. John Wesley would have called this Convincing or Convicting Grace. The grace the convicts us of who we are and who God is and that leads us into a heart of surrender and justification. It can be a time of wrestling and difficulty, and too often we can feel exposed on so many fronts. We feel exposed before God, we feel exposed and judged before the church, and in so many other ways we feel completely lost at times in our walk of faith. But that’s why we need this sermon series all the more. To know that exposure before God is expected and that those feelings that we experience in those moments are echoed by Isaiah, Peter, and others, and that God takes those feelings, those weaknesses and turns them into his greatest strength.

So, like Isaiah, let us profess our unworthiness before God. Allow ourselves to feel that in the exposure of immense capacity of power and grace, and let us surrender those feelings over to him so that he may heal us and make our spirits, our souls, whole once again. He is a good and faithful God, and he offers healing grace no matter what depth of exposure we bring to his feet.

Let’s pray.