I expect you’re aware of the custom whereby just before the Sunday service starts, the duty steward prays for the preacher in the vestry. Over the years, I have heard a variety of such prayers, the worst being one Good Friday where in his prayer the steward called the death of Jesus a mistake.
But another common one starts something like this: “Dear Lord, we gather here today to leave the world outside behind and concentrate on you.” Now I guess that could be interpreted more than one way. But is our worship really an escape from the world?
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord (verse 1a).
Is that just a date in Isaiah’s diary? I don’t think so. If all he wanted to tell us was the day on which he had a powerful experience of worship and commissioning, he would surely just have named the month and the day of the month. ‘On the twenty-third day of Nisan,’ or something like that.
No. Locating his divine encounter as happening ‘In the year that King Uzziah died,’ Isaiah affirms that worship takes place in the middle of what is happening in the world. The events of history do not drive our worship, for sure, but worship is located in the midst of politics, economics, and every power that competes to shape our lives.
What does this worship look like?
Firstly, glory:
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: with two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:
‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.’
4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
I once arrived at a church as a visiting preacher and was greeted by a member of the congregation who said, “I hope you’re going to entertain us today.” This brought out my Mister Grump side, and I replied, “Well, I hope we’re going to worship.”
We must get rid of this idea that worship is entertainment. It is a prominent heresy across all sorts of Christian traditions and worship styles. Worship is to give glory to the triune God, who is holy, holy, holy. We are here to honour his name and to give thanks for all he has done. Worship is God-centred or it is not worship at all.
Archbishop William Temple gave a famous definition of worship:
Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of the conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose–all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable.[i]
None of this is an escape from the world, for God is the greatest reality there is. Moreover, as the Creator of this world and its Redeemer, God is where our focus needs to be, without having an escapist mentality.
So while it’s not true to say that ‘the world sets the agenda’ – that was one of the heresies from liberals at the World Council of Churches – it is true that we come to focus our energies on God, who created the world we live in through Christ and by the Spirit, and who also redeems the world through Christ and in the power of the Spirit.
Secondly, confession:
5 ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.’
6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, ‘See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.’
If we truly encounter the living God in his glory in worship, then we shall realise quickly that we do not match up. That’s what Isaiah realises, and not only for himself. He admits not only his personal sin, but the sin of the nation. A true encounter with God will blow away once and for all the idea that we’re all good, decent people who merely make the occasional error in life. It will relieve us of the comfortable illusion that we are good enough for eternal life.
Furthermore, here our lives are calibrated not by the popular standards of the world but by God and his holiness alone.
Initially, this leaves Isaiah with a sense of hopelessness. He cannot get beyond ‘Woe is me! I am ruined!’ That’s desperate.
But God can get beyond it. A seraph brings a live coal from the altar, the place of sacrifice. It is God who provides for Isaiah and God’s people to know forgiveness and the removal of their sin.
If you remember the painful story in Genesis where God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, you may recall how Isaac asks his father who will provide the lamb for the sacrifice. Abraham replies that God will provide the lamb. And he does – mercifully not in the way he was expecting.
Ultimately, we believe that is what God supremely did with Jesus at the Cross. The Lamb of God was provided. Now our sins are removed as we confess them. They have already been atoned for at Calvary.
The regularity of our failure is why we confess and receive assurance of forgiveness in every Sunday service. It is God’s free gift. We have not earned it. God has reached out in love to the world at the Cross. Will we look at the worldly horror of the Cross and allow it to cleanse and transform us?
Thirdly, God’s word:
8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’
Following confession and forgiveness, the way is clear for us to hear God’s word. That’s why the reading of Scripture and the preaching come next in a typical Sunday service, by the way.
There’s no reading of Scripture in the Temple for Isaiah. It’s questionable what, if anything, they had in written form at this point – not much, for sure. But in any case, God speaks directly on this occasion.
If we are to be worshippers in the midst of the world, we need to hear God’s marching instructions to us. ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’
Therefore, the reading and proclaiming of the word is to have an honoured and central place in our worship. It is not that with a variety of preachers we get to hear a whole host of different opinions, because the job of the preacher is not to foist their sentiments or even prejudices on the congregation; it is rather to proclaim what the Word of God says.
Therefore, there is another steward’s vestry prayer that both encourages me for its meaning but also humbles me by reminding me of the expectation on my task. It is when the steward prays that the congregation may hear your word through me. That is profoundly sobering!
This is not to say that a congregation should be uncritical of what the preacher says, although I do note the old joke which asks what the favourite Sunday lunch in a Christian household is. The answer is, ‘Roast preacher.’
But it is to say that we should be like the Berean Jews, whom Paul encountered on his missionary travels. In Acts 17:11 we read of them,
Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
In some old pulpits, the preacher was confronted by a small plaque. On it were the words of the Greeks who came to meet Jesus before the crucifixion, where they told the disciples, ‘Sir, we would see Jesus.’ Our prayer and aspiration for worship needs to be that we see and hear Jesus, so that we know what he is expecting of us in the world.
Fourthly and finally, response:
And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ (verse 8b)
Isaiah responds to God’s word. He is willing to go into the world on behalf of his God. We learn in the subsequent verses that he can’t necessarily expect people to respond positively to what he has to say, but nevertheless someone must go, and then if there is no redemption there will be no excuse. People will not be able to say they were not warned.
How does this play out in our worship? Within the service, it comes in the intercessions, which are meant to be a response to the word. (I’m not sure they always are, but that is the theory.) If you were used to services where the sermon was the climax of the service before the final hymn and blessing, but then noticed a change, where the intercessions followed the sermon, well, this is why.
And so it’s right that in our intercessions we pray not only for ourselves and the church, but for those in power, authority, or influence. If you read the Bible carefully, you will realise that the divine commands are not limited to God’s people. You will hear prophets speaking to kings and nations and all in authority.
This is a holy task. In the early church, those who had not yet been baptised and professed faith and who were undergoing catechism classes would leave the worship before the intercessions. Why? Because intercession is a priestly task, and they were not yet part of what we later called ‘the priesthood of all believers.’ But for those of us who believe, we are acting as God’s priests when we intercede in response to the word.
But the response doesn’t stop with the end of the prayers or with the blessing at the conclusion of the service. The genuineness of our response to the word is tested by what we do when we leave. At the end of the Latin Mass, Catholics were effectively told in the liturgy, ‘The Mass is over: now go out!’
Isaiah did that. It’s our calling, too. Like him, we may or may not see success in response to our bearing God’s word to the world in word and deed. But Isaiah kept faithfully doing it in response, because to do so in the world was intrinsic to true worship. May we do the same.
[i] William Temple, Readings In St John’s Gospel, on John 4:24.
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