Dragons

A sermon for Ivanhoe UCC, Mundelein, on February 9, 2025

hic sunt dracones

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Isaiah 6

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said:

‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;the whole earth is full of his glory.’

The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. 

And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’

Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: 

‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’ 

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ 

And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’ 

And he 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.’

Then I said, ‘How long, O Lord?’ And he said:

‘Until cities lie waste   without inhabitant,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.

Even if a tenth part remains in it,   it will be burned again,like a terebinth or an oak   whose stump remains standing   when it is felled.’

The holy seed is its stump.

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Good morning, sisters and brothers!

It is indeed a great privilege and joy to worship with you this morning. I have heard many good things about you, from my wife Henrieta, who has been with you a few times as part of her work with Intentional Energy 3. And today I’m finally meeting you in person. You are even more beautiful than I had expected.

Many years ago, I read a novel about knights, written by Sir Walter Scott. That happened when I still lived in Brazil, and there, the name of the novel was Ivanhoé. Later I learned English, and was told that it’s pronounced “Ivan hoe”. Now I’m here at Ivanhoe, talking about dragons and hoping to see knights.

This text that we just read is quite something.

Sometimes, familiarity is the enemy of understanding. This is such a well-known text, and also the source of a very-known hymn: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty. Because we hear it so often, it’s easy to gloss over the wild and crazy stuff. So let us read it carefully.

First of all, the unusual way to mark time: it was the year of the death of king Uzziah. We’ll get to that. But we usually count our time from when something started, as “on the second year of the pandemic”, not from the end. This is important, because as we are going to see, the death of Uzziah marked an important transition in the history of that country. I think we are well used, at this point, with zigs and zags in the history of our country too, so please keep that in mind.

So young Isaiah is in the temple, doing whatever he was supposed to do there, when all heaven breaks loose, literally. Technically, we call this an intrusion of the Divine into our world. Isaiah sees The Lord. In Hebrew, the first verse reads: “in the year of the death of King Uzziah, I say My Lord, sitting on a high and exalted throne, and the hem of his robe filled the Temple.” Notice the contrast between “King Uzziah” and “My Lord”. Also, the Temple was a lot larger than our sanctuary. What Isaiah saw was massively huge.

You may have heard the word Seraphim. In Hebrew, this “im” ending is a way to make a word plural. So, the singular is Seraph, and the plural is Seraphim. If you thought you weren’t going to learn anything in church today, you were wrong.

What is a Seraph? We don’t know for sure. But they are not the angelic baby-faced creatures that show up in traditional Christian art. The word seraph comes from the verb that means “to burn”. There is some evidence that the seraphim were flying serpents. Of the burning kind. That’s what made me think of dragons. 

You probably have seen the scene in the movie “Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark”, where the bad guys open the holy ark, and just before their faces start to melt, out come these colorful lights flying around. That was their interpretation of the seraphim.

By the way, in Hebrew a burning serpent means a poisonous one. So it may be that the part about burning is about poison, instead of flames. Does this make you happier?

I think the Indiana Jones movie got the mood right. It must have been terrifying for Isaiah. Face-meltingly terrifying.

It doesn’t make it better that one of the creatures then grabs a live coal from the altar, and, without asking for permission, touches it to Isaiah’s lips. Does it?

But let’s back out for a minute, and take a quick look at the context.

By the time this story happened, about three thousand years ago, the empire that had been created by David and Solomon didn’t exist anymore. The country had split in two, with the northern part being called Israel and the southern, Judah. Jerusalem, Isaiah, and the Temple, were located in Judah.

Israel and Judah had good, bad and terrible kings, but generally speaking, it was downhill most of the time, and the good ones were few and far between.

Uzziah (os Uzziahu, as he’s called in Hebrew), was one of the good kings, but with a twist.

His life reads like a made-for-television story.

He became king when he was sixteen years old, because his father was murdered by a political conspiracy of people who were unhappy with the way he had been governing. In fact, Uzziah’s dad had made some very unwise decisions that led to his downfall.

In contrast to his dad, Uzziah was brilliant. He was beloved by the people, and faithful to God. He was very successful militarily and otherwise. He improved agriculture and the cities, led successful architectural projects, and even invented new kinds of weapons. Some kind of giant tower that shot arrows! His reign was the height of the power and influence of the kingdom of Judah.

And then, as they often say on television, his success led to his downfall. He became so full of himself, that he decided to go offer incense in the temple — something that only the priests were allowed to do. And then God smited him. He contracted a highly infectious disease and from then on, he was king in name only, because he had to live in isolation.

It’s interesting to note that Uzziah is one of the ancestors of Jesus listed in the genealogy in the gospel of Matthew.

Isaiah (or Isaiahu as he is called in Hebrew) is one of the major prophets in the Bible, and was the leader of a religious movement.

By the way, what is it with the names ending in iahu? I don’t know, but there are a lot of them. I have always assumed that it came from a character in a popular soap opera of ancient times. The Real Housewives of Babylon? The Bold and the Babylonian? Babylon 90210?

Isaiah was active for about fifty years, during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. Ancient tradition says that Uzziah was his uncle. 

The book of Isaiah has always been a hard one for me to read, because it doesn’t seem to have a plot. It just jumps all over the place in a disconnected way. Now I understand it to be more like a book of poetry than a book of stories. It collects poems by Isaiah and his followers, covering a period of a couple of centuries.

Alright, back to our normal program.

Before our historical interruption, our hero was having a terrifying time in the Temple. Isaiah is terrified that he has witnessed this manifestation of God. It is interesting that in our culture, we have a mostly benign view of God. The old guy on the ceiling of Colbert’s studio. He looks a little bit like Santa Claus, and is our friend. But in the Bible there is always this aspect of the Divine which is terrifying, awesome in the sense of awe inspiring, overpowering. There was this idea that if you got to see God, you could die! The whole system of worship in the Bible was a way to allow imperfect human beings to share space with God and survive.

When Isaiah said that he was a man of unclean lips, this word impure was taken directly from this worship system. They considered that there were things you were allowed to bring to God: these things were called clean. There were other things that you shouldn’t dare bring to God, if you wanted to survive the encounter: those things were called unclean. People could also be clean or unclean, depending on many factors. If you were unclean, there were things you could do to fix that and become clean again.

Like I said, when you read Isaiah, you are reading poetry. What could “unclean lips” mean, poetically speaking? Our lips, our speech, reveal what is really inside us, what we are made of. Isaiah has just been confronted with the absolute holiness of God, and that makes him see his failures and the failures of the people very clearly. But uncleanliness is not a permanent situation. There are ways to deal with it in our tradition, just as there are ways to deal with it in our tradition. Here, God cuts to the chase, and deals with the problem: “Now that this coal has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.”

In technical terms, Isaiah chapter 6 is the narrative of Isaiah’s “call”. In the Bible, there are several characters who have this experience of being literally “called” by God to do something. And in fact, here it comes:

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying,
‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’
‘And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’

“Hineni”, “Here I am” is the classic Biblical answer to a divine call. It’s what you are supposed to say when God calls you.

We still talk, literally and figuratively, in church and outside church, of being called, or finding our call. Someone has said that your call is the place where your passion intersects with the needs of the world.

Something very interesting happens with the language of Isaiah chapter 6. We can see it even in translation. In the first verse, Isaiah says that in the year when King Uzziah died, he saw The Lord. Then a little later he says: “my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.” Do you see the change? When God becomes clear to us, we also understand that there can be no other lord, no other king.

People who are called by God, have discovered a different frame of mind. They don’t fear the powers that be, anymore. In the Bible, they are often called prophets. 

The main kinds of religious leaders in the Bible are the priests and the prophets. The priest is a professional. He does his thing well, and even gets paid for it. The priest gets to offer the incense. Nothing wrong with it. Priesthood tends to run in families. I myself, am the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers.

On the other hand, the prophet is an amateur. The prophet does what she does because she can’t otherwise. She feels, like Jesus, that if she shuts up, even the rocks will begin to cry.

Often, it ends up badly for the prophet. And she doesn’t mind. Think of Martin Luther King. Bishop Romero. Dorothy May. Mother Jones. Rosa Parks. Malala Yousafzai. Jesus. Paul. Peter.

Tuosheng Nee said that God takes the best apostles and puts them in jail. The traditional story about Isaiah is that King Manasseh (one of the bad ones) had Isaiah cut in half. Like the book of Hebrews says, people “of whom the world wasn’t worthy”.

Once you see the dragons, you know where things really stand.

Once you see the dragons, you Know.

Do you know people who Know? I had a musician friend who said God told her jokes. She said God has a really weird sense of humor. There are always some people who seem to Know, with a capital K. I envy them, sometimes.

But the fact is, there are also dangers in Knowing. People who Know can become too proud. Like King Uzziah offering incense in the Temple. He thought he knew.

In fact, the more you know, the more you don’t know, because if God is really God, you will never know the size of his left shoe, or his favorite color. There is a long tradition of Christian mysticism based on the unknowability of God. Someone even came with the very cool term: the cloud of unknowing. Quoting old Donald Rumsfeld, there are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, and with God, the unknown unknowns are infinitely numerous.

Old-school map makers had a tradition of marking unknown areas of the word with the expression: Hic Sunt Dracones: Here, there are dragons. What that means is: dear traveler, if you go there, you are on your own. We don’t know what you will find there.

Jesus said: blessed are the ones who didn’t see, but still trusted.

I hate “call sermons”. You know what I mean: “who will save the lost souls in Patagonia?” I hate hearing them and I hate giving them too. I would hate asking you to do something I’m not doing. So, I won’t.

I will instead talk to you about Martin Luther and his idea of the priesthood of all believers. Martin Luther redefined the idea of calling, or “vocation”, which is just a fancy word for calling. He removed the distinction between secular and sacred work. Every vocation, every work you do, is a way to serve God, and it is also the way God is manifested in your community. Your work in the house, or at school, or in the office, or in the home office, your work has profound dignity in the eyes of God. We are called to embody our principles and our spirituality in every seemingly mundane thing we do. Everything we do has enormous value.

Which brings us to the part you were waiting anxiously for: the conclusion of this sermon.

Have you ever had an experience of the Sacred? Have you stood in awe as the Divine intruded into your world? If you have, you know what I’m talking about. If not, don’t worry. Maybe it will happen to you. But if it doesn’t, please understand: you are the miracle. You are the divine presence in this world.

I don’t know if you will see the dragons. But there are plenty of wonders all around you, if you learn to look.

And, more to the point, as Mary Oliver wrote, “what are you gonna do with your one wild and precious life?

Amen

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I’m planning to end with this song by Carrie Newcomer, from her album The Gathering of Spirits. I thought: after a sermon about dragons, let’s have a song about laundry. :-)