Saturday 14th Week in Course
One of the most difficult features of the time in which we were all kept six feet from each other because of an epidemic was that we went about in face coverings. We were kept from intimate conversation because we didn’t recognize most people. Most of us relate visually; our mental voice-recognition software is not nearly as good. Even more than before we were frightened of COVID, people walked around with eyes transfixed by their cell phones. Our friends and family were becoming icons on a screen. And the habit has persisted, so that I can drive around my neighborhood now and no longer get a response when I wave to joggers and pedestrians. I’m reminded that C.S. Lewis saw hell as a sprawling suburb in which people stayed as far away from each other as possible.
So in the encounter with our God, the Lord of Hosts, recognition precedes intimate contact. Isaiah saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and lifted up. But we don’t see a description of what Isaiah saw of God. We see a picture of the seraphim, the two that flanked the Ark of the Covenant, but not the gilded images, the real things. Just the verbal details are awesome, so Isaiah is awe-struck. He realizes that the thrice-holy Lord sits in total contrast to his human sinfulness, and he is afraid. To see God, the ancients knew, is death for a human. But the seraph has the remedy–a burning coal to cauterize the prophet’s sinful lips. He is made sinless by the searing fire of God’s spirit, purged of every evil thing, and fit to proclaim the Word of God. That is the grace we all receive–without the fiery drama–when we receive the Holy Spirit at our baptism and profession of faith.
Jesus says this in a number of short epigrams that we have just heard. Each of us is challenged to recognize Christ as our teacher, our master. We are not in charge–Jesus is. The most we can aspire to is becoming like our teacher, Jesus. We’ll be like Him, first of all, by our sinful culture’s bad attitude toward us, the same as its attitude toward Christ. That mustn’t scare us, even if they have all the legal power and unjustly use it against us. The worst they can do to us without our consent is to murder us, and then we’ll be with Christ. After all, if God takes care of the sparrows for whom Christ did not die, then He will certainly take care of us who have died with Christ in baptism and confidently look forward to our final justification and resurrection. Our challenge is always to acknowledge our Redeemer so that at the judgement, He will acknowledge us and do so into eternity.
