Tag: glory

A Hope of Woe

(c) Katherine E. Brown

And I said, ‘Woe to me! I am lost! For a man of unclean lips am I, and in the midst of a people of unclean lips I dwell, yet the King, the LORD of Hosts, my eyes have seen!’

Isaiah 6:5 [see Isaiah 6:1-13, NRSVUE]

In this season of headlines blaring crises and woe, I am avoiding Isaiah 6. It is unnerving to read of cities laid waste and houses uninhabited and the ground (‘adamah’) itself desolate, burned-over, bereft of its God-banished humans (‘adam’). It is unnerving to read of this expected destruction when the headlines seem to report so much of the same: not thoughtful husbandry of resources, careful culling of dead trees or pruning of unhealthy growth, but the slash and burn of an entire forest, heedless of where trees and branches fall, uncaring that the damage ripples beyond the immediate crash. Is there no good to nurture? In our time? In Isaiah’s? Where is the end? What is the goal?

To my ear, God’s tone is implacable. The LORD does not bluster but aims straight towards God’s end. Calls for someone to go, to proclaim, and thereby to accomplish, the hardening of people’s hearts and eyes and ears, lest they should see and hear and understand and turn again to the LORD (Isa 6:9-10), the LORD who is source of healing (Exod 15:26).

How is it that God should want to prevent this? Should call for one willing to be the agent of this hardening? Does the prophet know what he is volunteering for? He cried ‘Woe!’ in seeing his sin — starkly visible in the light of God’s holiness — and, reading, I realize the prophet’s cry is not undone by the touch of that hot coal, seraph-carried to his lips. The coal comes with the word that his sin is covered over, his iniquity turned away, but not that there is no more “woe!’ For when the prophet, purified and emboldened to speak in divine counsel, hears the task for which he has just offered himself, he cries out again: ‘Until when?’ (Isa 6:10). And learns that the work is longer than his lifetime, is a work that he himself will not accomplish, nor see accomplished. It is a work larger than human possibility.

Is this why the LORD reserves it to God-self, forecloses the possibility of premature return? Lest the people, turning, imagine that they have cleansed themselves, healed themselves, can be trusted with total control? Those who join house to house and field to field (Isa 5:8), who “acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of his right” (Isa 5:23) — these may share a portion of what they call their own, may make edits around the edges and imagine it is their righteousness working. As if individual acts of compassion are sufficient substitute for just society. Not them. We, us. For this, too, is part of the passage: the prophet does not cry his first woe in repudiation of others’ sin but in recognition of his own, and in kinship with his people. Isaiah’s glimpse of God gave him truer sight of himself: not one set apart from his nation’s sinfulness but one who has a part in it. Isaiah is convicted to speak of himself and people as one, and seemingly stricken with equal parts horror and awe, Isaiah cries Woe! That recognition — not ‘them’ but ‘we ourselves’ — begins the process of cleansing, allows Isaiah to speak to God, and after that, to speak for God. Even as hard word spoken judged Isaiah as much as the earth’s kings to whom he was subject.

We cannot save ourselves. God knows this. Isaiah learns this. In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw The King, the LORD of hosts. Isaiah has seen and spoken with The King, yet Isaiah cannot prevent Uzziah’s grandson Ahaz from right-sizing his foreign policy, piously refusing to rely on God (Isa 7), sending to the foreign empire Assyria for aid. Isaiah cannot keep Judah’s king, who should have been as ‘son’ to God (Psalm 2), submitting to be ‘son and servant’ to Assyria’s king (2 Kings 16:7), setting a foreign altar in God’s own sanctuary (2 Kings 16:10-16).

Isaiah cannot prevent any of this. Isaiah’s work, it turns out, is not to prevent it (lest Isaiah imagine that his work was effective to save?) but to prophesy nonetheless. To proclaim what fidelity looks like, to decry injustice and evil and oppression — even to write a record of the protest, of the call, of the need for God, and to seal that writing as a sign to the future (Isa 8). That seal signs both that the people did not, could not, save themselves, and the seal signs that there will be salvation.

Our burning-over is destruction. God’s burning-over leads to new seeds opening. The proclamation meanwhile is part of the work. I am not expected accomplish it; I am not excused from proclaiming it. It is my work to acknowledge my sinful part in the larger human ‘we’ (not us/them, but only us, all of us ‘like God,’ but not ourselves God). Recognize that kinship, cry out the Woe!, then attest to the possibilities that God intends.

Isaiah sees the LORD’s presence filling the house, the LORD’s glory filling the earth, and writes the vision so that others too can be filled. Filled with awareness of God’s holiness, awareness of our lack, and awareness that there is work to which we are summoned beyond that first Woe! Work which may fill us with, and for, God.

A skim coat of glory

photograph (c) Katherine E. Brown

“And now, thus says the LORD, the one who is creating you, Jacob, the one who is forming you, Israel.

You shall not fear, for I redeemed you; I called you by your name. You are mine.”

Isaiah 43:1 (my translation); Isaiah 43:1-7 NRSVUE

I’m sitting up late Friday night and glance at the window, get up to move closer and look more carefully. Did I see some movement in the air? Has snow begun? I peer through the windowpane towards the porch light of the house opposite. No snow. Not yet. Perhaps the quiver I saw was a trick of my eyes, or my imagination, or even just my desire. Wanting snow.

We are due for snow. More snow, I should say: we already had a good fall this week, over six inches, the first good cover we’ve had in a while. My own snow yearning feels silly to me. Still, I dearly want it to come, longing not so much for added inches as for seeing the air quivering with snow magic, the shining of it coming down to cover the ground. It’s the sight of it that makes my heart leap. Becoming made visible.

That’s what it is. It’s not just the way the world is changed by the covering white: the shapes of things softened and mounded under the snow; surfaces smoothed; the colors of things not snow-covered altered by being set against such whiteness. It’s the way the transformation itself is visible in time. I can watch the flakes flurry and dance in swirling descent, can see them set the first skim-coat of white on the ground, lay successive layers on the first. Brightness falls through the air, makes earth shine with light rich and strange, and this wonder unfolds in the right time for my own eyes’ perceiving.

That’s what I long for: to be able to see re-creation occurring, to watch and marvel at its grace. Who wouldn’t want to be see glory coming? To tremble at its awful weight and to find rest in its wondrous love. To know — bone-deep — that the wheel of time is turning on towards redemption. That the years are not waste. That the losses are not the end.

‘And now, thus says the LORD — .’ God God-self speaking. God speaking to those who had passed through waters, had walked through fires [Isa 43:2]. God speaking even to those who had lost homes and livelihoods and loved ones to flood or flame, to war or exile. Name it Babylon or Gaza, Helene or Palisades, or the quotidian inequities still inadequately redressed. God speaks in these contexts. God speaks to us.

‘And now, thus says the LORD, the one who is creating you, Jacob, the one who is forming you, Israel — .’ Scanning the Hebrew, I recognize the participles, re-read the text as creation on-going, as formation unfolding. Jacob-Israel. Me-us. Becoming created and fully formed even as already we are called by name, already we are redeemed. The paradox of this juxtaposition: our redemption complete; our re-creation coming yet to be.

Oh, there’s a web of connections here! God who declares the LORD his name, who gives his glory (‘kabod’) to no other [Isaiah 42:8], calls being-created-Jacob, being-formed-Israel, ‘precious’ and ‘honored’ (‘kabod-ed’) and ‘beloved’ [Isaiah 43:4]. God speaks of and to ‘all who are called by my name’ [Isa 43:7] — a call-back to v.1, where God calls us by our names. Now, v.7, we hear that to call us by our own names is also to call us of-God’s. ‘To my glory (that word again, kabod) I created them, I formed them (more call-back to v.1), also I made them.’

A web of connections to unspool. But maybe for tonight, I’ll go back to verse 1. To the promise of that paradox. That already we are redeemed even as we are coming yet to be. That God’s own glory is bound up in our becoming, and that as the LORD will not give God’s glory to any other, neither will the LORD give us up to any other end but God’s own. I may pray to see the aim more clearly in my context, but meanwhile there is the promise of the text to ponder, and in its heart to rededicate myself, notwithstanding all that I cannot see.

Paul comes upstairs, goes to pull the window shade. ‘Oh!’ he says, ‘It’s snowing!’ For this, I scramble out of bed and hurry to the window. I lean near and look out and up to the streetlight, and in its brightness, I can see it! Fine stuff shifting down, each pinpoint mote distinct. The air moves and shines and already there is a fresh skim coat of glory on the ground.

Becoming made visible.