Go Away                          Isaiah 6, Luke 5, Epiphany 5 (c)

Annie Dillard describes how seriously some take their religion in her book For the Time Being: When the high priest enters the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, other men tie a rope to his leg so that if he dies they can haul him out without going in themselves. For when the high priest recites the holy name and the blessing, the divine bends down and smites him.

It may be difficult for us to comprehend such a thing, such fear of God. There are many things that we do fear but God is probably not one of them. Most of us would think that is a good thing. We are not taught to fear God but to love God who certainly loves us. We have been warned, given hints that perhaps we are missing something. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom comes to mind.  Maybe it's that we don't take God very seriously anymore. We have become more secular than we would admit or perhaps even than we know. God has become for us the proverbial old shoe, comfortable, unremarkable, pulled out when needed, familiar but unconsidered, unthought of most of the time.  Our children have been known to think that God is boring. And maybe we are bored too.

Augustine said to a group of people, "We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God.

Maybe we don't fear God because we don't know God. Just when we thought we understood everything, we don't understand anything. A 20th century Hasidic Rabbi is quoted as saying that In our time we are in a coma. Is that it? Are we in a coma? Is this numbness of heart and mind, this emptiness of soul, this absence of mystery, this dullness of vision because we are unconscious?

Maybe the strange words of the prophet are not so far-fetched after all: And (the Lord) said, "Go and say to this people: 'Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.' Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed." Huh?

Isaiah thought he was a goner when he found himself in the presence of God. Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips yet my eyes have seen the Lord God. As it turns out the only thing that happens is that burning coals are pressed to his lips and he is cleansed by fire. No big deal. He continues to live but then it happens. The voice of God says Whom shall I send? And it was then that Isaiah said those words that suddenly make life more interesting, Here I am, send me.

And that's when he got the strange message that he was to tell the people to keep listening and to keep looking even though he was also told they will not understand. We are witness to Isaiah being called by God to do something that will fail. A tough assignment I guess and he asked the logical question, How long? How long, O Lord, must the word be spoken and unheard? The answer should inspire the fear of God because God said in reply Until cities lie waste without inhabitants and houses without people and the land is utterly desolate; until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.

And God might as well have said, Go away, go far away! How ironic then that the very words Peter uses when God in the person Of Jesus says follow me are "Go away!" Peter does not really want Jesus to go away. These words in fact indicate that Peter recognized God in Jesus, and in so doing recognizes that he is not worthy to be in the presence of God, that in fact, like Isaiah before him Peter fears God, has a healthy respect for God's power, and a good understanding of the distance between what God wants humans to do and what humans do. There is some irony in Isaiah's message too in that God does not really want to send the people away but says so in frustration with the fact that even when they are near by they are far away from God in their hearts. There is irony but there is also some hard reality here.

In this particular case history intervenes. Trouble is coming, war and destruction and exile. Indeed they were going away, forced out of their own lands by invading armies. One commentator said that there is something to this idea that God uses the events of the day to draw our attention to God's will for human life. If this is so we have to admit that sometimes the lessons are very hard indeed. This is not the same thing as saying that God sent or caused these events to teach us a lesson but simply that God's message can be discerned in history as it happens if we are listening. In fact God is not really ever as silent as we have supposed but we are very often quite deaf. Of course it is much easier to discern how God may be working in history when we are looking back than when we are in the midst of it but history is going on even as we speak and God is speaking again in the events of our days. I wonder what God is trying to tell our literally terrified world today. If our world is coming apart perhaps we have not done enough to hold it together.  

In the case of Isaiah, God's terrifying words come from God's compassion for a people who have lost their way. The message is that God is both a God of justice and a God of compassion and God's people if they are to be God's people will be people of justice and compassion or they will find themselves exiled, alienated, desolate. Reconciliation and healing will not come easily but through struggle and suffering. In Isaiah's case as so often seems to be the case in this holy story, the people had to fail disastrously to learn what God wanted of them. Are we, too, to be enlightened only after we have failed? Must we suffer disaster and desolation before our ears are unstopped? Must we be broken before we can be healed? Are we to know God's love and justice only by rejecting it? Are we destined to awake from our "coma" only after the walls come crashing down around us? One of the symptoms of a people who no longer fear God is that they feel they can do no wrong. It is a terrible mistake for anyone to assume they are favored by God without fearing God for only then is arrogance tempered with humility and we are capable of hearing what God would tell us. Jesus said to those who only wanted to defend him from violence, Put your sword away for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.  This is not a metaphor.  We listen but we do not hear. We look but we do not see. How long, O Lord, how long?

Peter, like Isaiah before him was chosen because he feared God and recognized his own unworthiness before God but what he didn't know is that God chooses the unworthy, the failed, the weak, because they are the only ones who can know the truth that only God is good and God is not served by the self-serving but by the self-giving and we are not secured by our own strength but only in God's grace.  God has also chosen us to struggle for peace and justice and hope, in short for the reconciliation of the world to God. Such a thing cannot come easily. Sacrifice and suffering may be required but those who follow will know what love is.

Even though God through Isaiah said "Go away" and Peter, speaking to God in the person of Jesus, said "Go away" and who knows how many ways or why we have ourselves said to God. "Go away" or felt God saying to us, "Go away" or how many times we just turn our backs and go away from God, the good news today is that God will not go away and we cannot go away from God even if we want to. That's what Dillard meant when she said, There's no place to hide. And this, no matter what our failures are, is good news because it also means that no matter how lost we may be we are also found. To fear God is to obey God. To obey God is to know God. To know God is to love God. To love God is to discover eternal life, to live fully the life we have been given here and now and for ever. Then we will look and see, we will listen and hear, we will understand and be healed. I am not making this up. This is serious. In the heart of God we can never really . . .  go away.