Sung Eucharist and Matins, Christchurch Priory, 10th February 2019
Isaiah 6.1-end
1 Corinthians 15.1-11
Luke 5.1-11
Good morning everybody.
I was going to start with a question but instead, let me begin this way. When we gather together like this, Sunday by Sunday, the tradition that we’re a part of expects that in our act of worship we will encounter God.
This encounter is to happen in two ways. Firstly, when we listen to the Bible, we hear the Word of God proclaimed. In that moment, God speaks to us. Secondly, when we eat the bread and drink the wine, in that moment we receive into our very being Our Lord Jesus, the Son of God.
Now, of course, this isn’t to say that these are the only ways we encounter God in our lives. But when we gather to worship, these are the two primary ways.
But I find that when we do this week by week, I often end up taking it all for granted, little by little detaching myself from the encounter both emotionally and spiritually. I’m here, yes, and I am worshipping, yes. But I forget that at the heart of our worship of God is an encounter with God.
Maybe the same’s true for you. If it is, then together we run the risk of forgetting the sheer enormity of what we are actually doing here. The writer Annie Dillard, says that if we really did understand, when we came to church, we’d all be wearing protective crash helmets.
And you can understand why when you hear readings like the one we had from Isaiah. Some 730 years before the birth of Jesus, Isaiah sees God in the temple, the place of worship. The Lord is sitting on a throne, surrounded by angelic beings, seraphs, calling out to one another a familiar refrain, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory’. The temple shakes. Smoke fills the house of God. Isaiah is overwhelmed.
And no wonder! He is standing in the presence of the creator of the cosmos, of all that is seen and all that is unseen. And creation doesn’t just include billions of stars — and that’s just our galaxy— it also includes Isaiah, and you, and me.
Before God, Isaiah feels totally worthless. ‘Woe is me! I am lost,’ he says, ‘for I am a man of unclean lips’. Painfully aware of his own failings, his own sinfulness, he also knows that it’s not just him who falls so woefully short of the mark. ‘I live,’ he says, ‘among a people of unclean lips’. Isaiah knows that his sin does not exist in a vacuum. It is deeply implicated in the sin of all those around him.
We find something similar in our gospel reading. Peter has spent the night fishing but has caught nothing. Jesus comes along and tells him to go back out on the water and let down the nets once more. This Peter does, doubtless muttering to himself when Jesus is out of earshot that this isn’t going to work — the sun’s high in the sky already and the fish are now at the bottom of the lake. But it does, and Peter’s boat is overwhelmed by the catch. So much so that more boats are needed. In that moment, Peter realises that he’s in the presence of someone extraordinary. What does he say? ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man’. The presence of Jesus prompts the same reaction in Peter as Isaiah experienced: a painful awareness of our sin, of how we miss the target, of how we fall short of who we’re meant to be, every day.
So when we encounter God, we have this intense experience of our sinfulness. But the good news is that God does not leave us there in our sin. And we were given a wonderful image of this this morning. One of the seraphim flies to Isaiah holding a glowing coal taken from the altar. Holding it with a pair of tongs, he brings it to Isaiah’s mouth, and says, ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out’. God does not leave Isaiah in his sin. He purifies him. He heals him.
In this act of the seraph touching Isaiah’s mouth with the coal, several of the church fathers down the ages saw Christ. Christ is the burning coal—the fire of God—that purifies and heals. And they also made connections between Isaiah receiving the glowing coal – Christ – to his mouth and the Eucharist. The Eucharist, too, of course, is an act of healing. Before we approach the altar, we say, ‘Lord, I am not worthy’ — there’s that sense of sinfulness again, our unworthiness to be in the presence of God—‘but only say the word, I shall be… healed’. When you come forward this morning to receive the bread and the wine, remember that this is an act of healing as you receive God, the Son of God, to your mouth. ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’
With Peter, the healing of his sin comes by way of Jesus commissioning him. Jesus transforms Peter’s life. Once a fisherman, now a fisher of men. In the eyes of Jesus, and so therefore in the eyes of God, Peter is now worthy to undertake the task that Jesus calls him to, simply because Jesus, the Son of God, has called him. By doing so, he blots out the sin, he puts it away, he forgives. Peter’s new life can begin.
It’s the one who calls us who makes us worthy and in their encounter with the living God, Isaiah, Peter and later Paul, are all utterly transformed. Not only that, they are all given a message. Isaiah’s message is a hard one. As we heard, it’s as if God doesn’t want those who hear Isaiah’s message to repent and be healed. It is perplexing in many ways. But what it does capture is that not everyone’s going to want to hear the message that God gives us to share, the good news of Jesus and the kingdom of God. With some it’s going to hit a brick wall. And when that happens, we just hand it over to God. Ultimately, it’s for God to sort out how it all shakes down. Our calling is to follow Jesus and when we’re asked why we are the way we are and do the things we do, we tell people about Jesus and our encounter with him.
So from our readings, we can see that when we encounter God, we first experience a deep sense of our sin, of our unworthiness to be in God’s presence. But then we also learn that God doesn’t leave us there. God purifies and heals us. Think of Isaiah with the glowing coal. Think of the bread and wine. Having done so, God then commissions us. He sends us on our way with a message to proclaim. As Jonathan will say at the end of the service, ‘Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.’ And then out we go, in the name of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit, transformed by our encounter with God, to live and serve Him in our families, our places of work and leisure, and our community more widely. And bit by bit, Christchurch becomes more shaped like the kingdom of God.
That question I was going to start with? The one that I mentioned at the beginning? Well, it’s this, and it’s a question that I’ve hinted at in what I’ve said. And trust me, this question is as much for myself as it is for all of us.
Do we, you and I, in our act of worship together, do we want to keep God at a safe distance or do we really want to encounter Him?