Sermon for Epiphany 5, February 9, 2025
Grace, mercy, and peace be yours, forever, from God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Isaiah 6:1-8 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2Above him stood the seraphim. Each one had six wings. With two they covered their faces. With two they covered their feet. With two they flew. 3One called to another and said, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Armies! The whole earth is full of his glory!” 4The foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of the one who called, and the temple was filled with smoke. 5Then I said, “I am doomed! I am ruined, because I am a man with unclean lips, and I dwell among a people with unclean lips, and because my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Armies!” 6Then one of the seraphim flew to me, carrying a glowing coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. 7He touched my mouth with the coal and said, “Look, this has touched your lips, so your guilt is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.” 8Then I heard the Lord’s voice, saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am. Send me!” (EHV)
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.
Dear friends in Christ,
In a time of great turmoil in Israel and Judah, God gave Isaiah a strange and powerful vision. Isaiah was invited, you might say, to look into the throne room of heaven. The sight of the majesty and holiness of God, and the appearance of His angels attending Him, caused Isaiah to shudder in terror. It was all too much to comprehend at a glance. Yet, there is a message of hope for us just as there was for Isaiah, because Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.
At the time Isaiah is reporting this, the Kingdom of Israel is entering its death swoon as the unfaithful kings leading it often ruled for a very short time until ultimately Israel is led off into captivity never to return. Likewise, the death of Uzziah is the beginning of the end for Judah, for its final kings are mostly like unto Israel’s in their rebellion against God. Isaiah would be given the task of prophesying warnings to both nations plus some others around them. At the same time, God gave His prophet messages of hope for those who remained faithful to our God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Isaiah “saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each one had six wings. With two they covered their faces. With two they covered their feet. With two they flew.” It was a scene of great glory and majesty. We will get to Isaiah’s response in a minute, but what strikes us immediately here, is that even God’s holy angels, these seraphim that serve Him day and night and sing praise to God’s glory, even they recognize that they are not equal to the Lord’s glorious presence. Two of their wings cover their faces to shield themselves from God’s overwhelming glory. Two wings cover their feet to shield the Lord of Glory from their lowliness, and with two wings they proceed with their service.
“One called to another and said, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Armies! The whole earth is full of his glory.’” The foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of the one who called, and the temple was filled with smoke.” Everything in the universe is testimony to God’s glory and power. No other being or force could create the world and everything in it solely from the power of His spoken Word. The smoke, Martin Luther explained, shows God’s presence just as it had filled Solomon’s temple at its dedication. It shows “that God dwells in faith and that He is not served except by faith which confesses and praises God.”[1]
Isaiah was overwhelmed by this sight. He said, “I am doomed! I am ruined, because I am a man with unclean lips, and I dwell among a people with unclean lips, and because my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Armies!” If the angels of heaven deem themselves unworthy to stand in God’s presence, how may a mere mortal, a sinful man, be able to see God and live? Scripture testifies throughout that no sinner can stand before God without receiving eternal condemnation.
However, it is in this scene that we see the true glory and holiness of our God. Though God is perfectly holy and without compare in any way, shape, or form, God is also perfectly just and perfectly loving of His creation. God’s holy justice requires that no sin, nor any person polluted by sin, may ever enter His presence. Anything less than perfect righteousness and holiness will not be allowed. Thus, if you and I examined ourselves with holy honesty, we too would be crying out in desperation, “I am doomed! I am ruined, because I am a man with unclean lips, and I dwell among a people with unclean lips.”
Who among us can say we have never sinned with our mouths? Who among us can say that every utterance we have ever made gave praise to our Creator? And even if we could say such a thing, we would still be doomed by the inheritance of a sinful nature. However, Isaiah’s vision shows us the glory of our God. God created mankind holy, in His image, without any sin or desire to rebel against His perfect will. At the same time, it must be said, that God created our first parents knowing that by making them perfectly in His image and free to live without restraint, they would fail to uphold His perfection and would earn His just decision against them. God knew mankind would rebel. God knew we could never measure up. Yet, God also had a plan to save us from our own deserved condemnation.
This is why the angels continually praise God’s holiness. Because in His love for us, God had already planned a rescue mission to thwart the wicked deceptions of Satan and rescue mankind from its own rebellion with salvation by faith. Here, in Isaiah’s vision, this is depicted as “one of the seraphim flew to me, carrying a glowing coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth with the coal and said, ‘Look, this has touched your lips, so your guilt is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.’” The glowing coal represents the gospel, the word of God given to take away our sin and guilt. Already seven hundred years before Christ would enter into human flesh to live and die for us, God is giving Isaiah the message of salvation.
For Isaiah, this meant he would be preaching a message of God’s judgment upon those who continued to rebel against the Creator of all things and the true King of all Abraham’s descendants, but Isaiah would also be preaching the Good News of the things God had planned from the beginning to rescue His people from death and damnation. From before He created the world and everything in it, God planned to send His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world.
When the devil led Adam and Eve into their spiritual grave by misleading them into give up their trust in God, God was already prepared, and at their fall He announced the curse and the promise that would restore the world: “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will crush his heel.” (Genesis 3:15)
A Creator who was only just wouldn’t have the love that caused Him to save. A Creator who was wishy-washy wouldn’t do anything to help, but only let mankind suffer their deserved fate. However, the God about whom the angels sing, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty, He brings His Son into the picture, “born of a woman, so that he would be born under the law, in order to redeem those under the law, so that we would be adopted as sons.” (Galatians 4:4-5) Our Creator, who is holiness personified, gave a message of hope to sinners the world over, so that by hearing the Gospel we may believe, and that believing “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Joel 2:32)
This text introduces us to Isaiah’s mission. His was the task to proclaim God’s Word to kings and ordinary people alike. As you heard in our epistle and Gospel lessons, this is the way God works to save sinners from the darkness of death. God sends out messengers with the powerful message of the Good News of all Jesus did to live holiness for us and to sacrifice His holy life to pay the penalty of death God’s justice and law demanded. Jesus did this for you and me, so that like those seraphim around God’s throne, we can spend our eternity proclaiming boldly and without shame, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Armies! The whole earth is full of his glory!”
Furthermore, we don’t have to wait. Because everything God promises is immediately as good as done, Isaiah could go out testifying to the world with the full confidence that his sins were forgiven and his salvation was assured. Likewise, we can tell anyone we meet that because God sent Jesus to save us, and because He washed away our sins in Baptism and connected us there with Jesus, we are saved. Because God gave His Son into death for our sins, our sins are forgiven forever. And with Jesus raised to life again, we are assured that we too will live and can tell the world by our actions, and our trust in God’s love and kindness, that there is nothing that can separate us from His love. We can live with full confidence just as St. Paul wrote, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, neither things present nor things to come, nor powerful forces, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)
Dear friends, like Isaiah, we too live in tumultuous times when many members of our society and world have abandoned the true God for the idols of their imagination. Though we too might sometimes have to deal with persecution and maybe even shunning by family or former friends, we have the truth that saves—that Jesus is our righteousness and our peace. In Jesus, we meet God personified, “For all the fullness of God’s being dwells bodily in Christ.” (Colossians 2:9) It is in Christ Jesus that we too see and sing, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. “The whole earth is full of his glory!”—filled with redeemed sinners—washed clean and through faith brought into peace with God by the blood of the Lamb. Amen.
Now may the God of hope fill you with complete joy and peace as you continue to believe, so that you overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works volume 16 AE, page 71.