SEND ME!
Chris Bell
14 November 2004

Reading: Isaiah 6:1-8

The Promised Land had become a divided land. After the glorious reigns of David and Solomon, the nation of the Hebrew people had been split in two: Israel in the North and Judah in the South. By the time of the prophet Isaiah in the mid 700s, a constant threat of war loomed, as the Assyrian empire to the north grew ever more powerful, sending soldiers and chariots into the Israelite territories with deadly regularity. Efforts to stem this advance had led to various political maneuverings and military campaigns that at times pitted the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah against one another, or required Judah to sell its soul, becoming a vassal state of Assyria just to stay alive.

The Promised Land had become a divided land in other ways as well. The rulers of wealth and power had abandoned the covenant between Yahweh and His people that demanded the seeking of justice, the rescue of the oppressed, and the defense of the orphans and widows. Idols were worshipped. The sacrifice of children to Moloch, the ancient god of death, resumed. Neighbor was turned against neighbor.

According to the faith of the Israelites, God’s covenants with Abraham and, later, Moses had given them this land forever, yet it was being relentlessly stripped away. Another covenant with David had promised the glorious eternal rule of his house, yet Jerusalem was depleted, weak and corrupt. In a great crisis of faith, the chosen people confronted their apparent rejection by God and struggled for answers. The very soul of the nation was at stake.

Sound at all familiar? The very soul of OUR nation feels at stake. THIS promised land smolders with uncertainty and fear, and appears to be more divided than anytime since the Civil War. OUR rulers of wealth and power have abandoned OUR covenant of equality and freedom. The capitol city of OUR nation is depleted, weak and corrupt, and has one of the highest murder rates of any urban center in the world. We’ve sacrificed over 1000 of our children to the god of death since March 20, 2003 . A man who justifies torture and the abandonment of international law has been nominated for Attorney General. The rules are changing too fast. Our basic civil rights are under threat. We feel lost, and what once seemed dependable is now uncertain at best. I mean, are you sure your vote was counted?

Like the ancient Israelites, we need prophets. Like the ancient Israelites, our covenant with one another is threatened. We need loud voices raising cries of protest and judgment against oppression and violence, and loud voices raising visions of peace and justice. Centered in a vision of what is right and true and lasting and holy and good, someone must preach a new way. WE are that someone.

I hear lots of people calling for liberal and progressive people to speak from a position of moral authority. I hear a thirsty cry from U.U. ministers for a reclaiming of religious rhetoric, for a more substantive language of reverence that can help convey our vision of what the world is about and how human beings are supposed to fit into it. Yet it is often so hard to take the plunge into actually using that language. It can be so difficult to find our voice. It’s one thing to say “the most ancient expression of this amazing saving love is the word God.” It’s another to say with conviction and authority “God is Saving Love.”

Unfortunately, the difficulty is no excuse. We cannot take ourselves off the hook of this demanding free faith of ours, as James Luther Adams makes clear:

“We have long held to the idea of the priesthood of all believers, the idea that all believers have direct access to the ultimate resources of the religious life, and that every believer has the responsibility of achieving an explicit faith for free persons… We also need a firm belief in the prophethood of all believers, where the prophetic function is not assigned merely to the few” but where all people “think and work together to interpret the signs of the times in light of their faith…with the intention of MAKING history in place of merely being pushed around by it.”

Adams had the great prophets of the Hebrew Bible – Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, Hosea and so on in mind when he wrote those words. And what Adams had in mind for our prophetic message – and what I think Bill Sinkford has in mind when he calls for a language of reverence – is akin to the message of those great ancient prophets: a critique of power, a critique of shallow appearances, a critique of lies, a critique of a religion without heart and soul. “What does God require of you? To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

This prophetic message, furthermore, must be spoken directly to the Powers-That-Be, and we have to speak it with Authority, the Authority that comes from facing our religious responsibility to truth and love and to one another seriously.

What makes the great prophetic books of the Bible, like Isaiah, so remarkable to me is the way they are, on the one hand, totally linked to a particular place and time (these are NOT magical predictions of the future), yet they are also possessed of such clarity and heart that we can still apply them to our own lives. Even this wild old story of angels and thrones and coals is still our story, too.

The story of Isaiah’s call shows us what is necessary to be a prophet:
1. A vision.
2. Acknowledgment of our limitations, both as individuals and as human beings.
3. A real taste of suffering.
4. Forgiveness.
5. Courage.

1. A vision
I saw the Master sitting on a throne--high, exalted!-and the train of his robes filled the Temple. Angels hovered above him, and they called back and forth one to the other,
“Holy, Holy, Holy is GOD whose bright glory fills the whole earth.”

The foundations trembled at the sound of the angel voices, and then the whole house filled with smoke.

Please let me be clear. I’m not trying to tell you or your children that God is a man or a king or sits on a throne. And even with “the flight crew,” as Gerry Krick used to call them, looming over my head I’m not going to spend any time arguing for angels. Not today at least… But there is still meaning for us in this vision of Isaiah.

First of all, how did he come by it? By practicing his religion with complete integrity. He sought answers in prayer and practice. His vision of God in the temple may have occurred in the temple.
For us, finding that vision in the might be described as a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, relentlessly pursued with integrity. It doesn’t really matter what precise form this takes – prayer, meditation, scientific inquiry, conversation and dialogue – what matters is that we pursue it wholly, with complete openness and abandonment. However we name it or however it is uncovered, we have to take our biggest thing, our ultimate thing, seriously.

For Isaiah, God is vast, complete, supremely powerful, and shrouded in mystery. Even if we confine our sense of God to the natural world alone, that’s a fair description of things. Isaiah thought God was big, (robe, temple, glory) but remember – those ancient folk thought the sky ended a few miles above the earth.

Our knowledge of the size of the universe alone means that our vision of “Everything That Is” is far grander than anything Isaiah could have imagined.

Although I would never express my sense of the Ultimate with the imagery of Isaiah, I feel its inner spirit. And from that sense of the spirit in Isaiah’s vision I would add only a few words, and I really mean these: God is Everything. God is Love. God is the Creative and Sustaining Power of the Universe, It’s Ordering Principle and Unifying Process. God is a Verb. God is THE verb.

It is also very likely that God is a Red Sox fan.

It’s hard to do this, to find someway to express this sense I have of the beautiful, living, awake and loving Ground of Being, particularly since I’m supposed to be a Buddhist. Usually we don’t say anything about the Ultimate; in fact we’re so convinced it can’t be spoken of that we call it empty.

And yet we must take a stand. The Promised Land is a divided land. We must speak for the true and the good. We each must find and name what we can depend on. Whatever words you choose, make them your very biggest words.

But Lord knows, it ain’t easy. Which brings us to step 2 in our prophet-making recipe:

2. Acknowledgment of our limitations, both as individuals and as a single people.
The foundations trembled at the sound of the angel voices, and then the whole house filled with smoke. I said,
"Doom! It's Doomsday!
I'm as good as dead!
Every word I've ever spoken is tainted--
blasphemous even!
And the people I live with talk the same way,
using words that corrupt and desecrate.
And here I've looked God in the face!"

So Isaiah’s initial response isn’t “Holy, Holy, Holy,” it’s more like “Holy Moley!” [read: Holy Shit!]
From the Infinite we’ve been brought right back down to the finite, from the One we’ve returned to the Many, from the grandeur of God to the feebleness of a person, and the challenge that confronts all prophets is laid bare.

However fine our vision of the Ultimate, our response, our real lived response to it, is often a sense of inadequacy and fear and doubt. We lack faith in ourselves and we lack faith in others. We feel inadequate, because we are imperfect. No one knows our imperfections more clearly and more painfully than we ourselves. We also feel fear - fear of being wrong, fear of being misunderstood, fear of being hurt. Even just fear of being silly. And we doubt, because there is so much strife and tension and misunderstanding in the world. We worry that other people will not be able to hear our message, or often we’re simply nervous about offending other people. I think this is why we’ve often given up on our religious language all together.

There is another concern, however, as Marianne Williamson noted in A Return to Love. I’m sure you’ve heard these words:

“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.”

How then are we set free? What will move us to prophecy?

3. A real taste of suffering
Then one of the angel-seraphs flew to me. He held a live coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. He touched my mouth with the coal.

Facing our limitations and discrepancy between the ideal and what really is, hurts! We have to be touched by that pain.

Suffering is another way of describing what’s happening there in the bringing together of the One and the Many, which is nothing less than the human condition. EVERYONE feels the pain of human limitation, and the universality of that hurt breaks our hearts a little bit, it purifies us, and it connects us with others. Everybody’s in the boat together. Which means that we need…

4. Forgiveness (or compassion)
"Look. This coal has touched your lips.
Gone your guilt,
your sins wiped out."

This is the reward of trusting the Ultimate. One reason we know our vision is sound is that it offers this redemption. Again the name doesn’t matter, really. Do you believe in Love, really believe that it is the most powerful force in the universe? Then you are already forgiven, aren’t you? Do you believe in Truth? Then the will truth set you free! As long as you have:

5. Courage
And then I heard the voice of the Master:
"Whom shall I send?
Who will go for us?"
I spoke up,
"I'll go.
Send me!"

This little passage is one of my favorites in all the Bible. Brave Isaiah, finally able to hear the call quietly raising his hand to volunteer. Isaiah is actually somewhat unique in this regard – not every prophet demonstrates this courage too readily. Sometimes the prophet has to be talked into it. Moses gave all sorts of excuses, even claiming a speech impediment, Jeremiah tried to claim he was too young, and Jonah? Poor Jonah just turns and runs!

But it takes definitely takes courage to be prophet – when you engage people at work, at the coffee counter, when people make racist jokes that you won’t let slide – whenever and wherever we choose to respond, it takes courage to reclaim the language of moral authority. When God is seen as angry judge, it takes courage to say no – God is love. When religion is seen as dividing peoples, it takes courage to say no – my religion upholds the inherent worth and dignity of all, I mean ALL, people. When church-goers are painted as superstitious, or simplistic, or reactionary, it takes courage to say, “No way! I’m a church-goer and I’m as open-minded and liberal as they come.” When our so-called moral authorities are allowed to make war, disenfranchise people, and suppress human sexuality, it takes courage to stand up and say, “No. No way. Morality is about equality, justice, peace and love.”

But I know you can do this. I know you are prophets. I know you are. I know we will find our voices and our collective voice because the power of Love and Creativity and Freedom is real and it is good and it is ours for the taking RIGHT NOW.

“You are a child of God,” Williamson continues, “Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some; it is in everyone. And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

We’ve gotten the call. Our times and our hearts and our visions demand a response. My prayer for myself, my prayer for you, my prayer for all people of good will, is that we answer firmly: “Yes. I’m here. I’ll do it. Send Me.”