First
Presbyterian Church of
Isaiah 6 and Luke 5
“Between a Rock and a Burning Coal”
The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry
I was blessed in my first call to be
part of a monthly ministerial group. The
meetings were always rife with bragging and moaning, but there was also a keen
sense of solidarity and shared purpose.
As a solo pastor in the first years of ministry, this is where I tested
the waters and tried to fill in the blanks of ignorance so often a part of my
day.
The tradition of the group was to
begin our gatherings with a devotional led by the host pastor. The topics of the devotional were intended to
spark a conversation. It was during one
of my turns as host that I posed a question to the group after reading the passage
we have from Isaiah. The question was,
simply put, "Does God still punish people?"
After I posed the question there was
a long pause around the room. It was as if
each of the dozen pastors were trying to measure the question itself. This wasn’t a question like, "Should
pastors empower the laity?" Or "What do you say to couples seeking to
get married?" This one was dicey.
Well, after a rather pregnant pause, they waded right in. And they kept going and going and going. For more than a year, no matter what the
topic or location of meeting, at some point we would jump right back in.
Does God still punish people? I have to say that the question took on a
life of its own. Pastors who gave a
resounding yes, found themselves backtracking when it came to specifics; and
pastors who gave a resounding no, starting to notice how often they spoke in a
prophetic voice on matters of peace and justice and how prone they were to
notions of retribution for those who oppress.
I was reminded of this yearlong debate
not only by the Isaiah passage, his call to be a prophet, but by the passage we
read from Luke. Here Peter is being
called to be a disciple, and ultimately, the apostle upon whom the church would
be built. Peter’s name in Greek, means rock, and later in the Gospel story Jesus will
say pointing to Peter, upon this “rock” I will build my church.
The calling of Peter was important
and perhaps significant for the question of God still bringing prophetic judgment
upon people for the ministerial group.
It was significant because we tend to associate God’s activity with the
church. So if we say God is bringing
judgment upon someone, there was a necessary lingering over the notion of the
church: are we then involved with this?
If God still judges the nations, what role does the church have in this?
Alright, now that the question is
out there, we can back track a little.
One step back would be to recognize that while we might not think of
prophets today, or better said, we think the time of
the prophets is past, we have people trying to be prophetic all around us. In
We don’t often use words like
prophetic to describe scientists, as they tend to be rational and objective and
shun the path of prophets who use a lot of poetry and tend to hear voices. Yet, a prophet bringing judgment, no matter
the means, has a simple formula: a prophet speaks of a national or regional
misdeed, claims there to be consequences for the injustice, and for the most
part, promises redemption if people repent.
Well, this is exactly what the critics wanted in the
We don’t often use the word prophet
or judgment today, but we see it all the time.
Movies today love to be prophetic.
They are our parables gone wild.
Watch a drama today and you are most likely viewing a director’s attempt
to be a prophet. A number of years ago
there was a flap in our denominational magazine regarding the movie American Beauty. The magazine ran a story commending the movie
and people took issue. The movie had
plenty for folks to find offense: nudity, profanity, violence, drug use. Yet, it was also pure prophecy. At the end of watching the movie a viewer
should have a keen awareness of how much of our life we have squandered in
apathy.
Now all this could be fine,
depending upon your levels of ease or unease regarding the morality of movies
today, until we remember the title. The
title was a play on the variety of rose called “American Beauty.” A good portion of the film is infused with
rose petals, a rose garden, and the vanity of physical beauty. Yet, the title is also a kind of judgment
upon American culture, upon us. The film has a prophetic judgment, our culture
is rich and opulent and glorious like a rose, but it is rotting from the core;
it is filled with people who live lives without purpose or passion and its gonna hurt.
As the conversation of the pastors
progressed through the year we became aware of how prophetic judgment is almost
unnoticed today because it is darn near everywhere. We have grown used to the Jehovah’s Witnesses
and their magazines being handed out door to door so we forget they are a group
whose sole purpose is to be prophetic, to say to the world, “the end is
near.” We have grown so used to
prophetic critique that we find humor in Randy Newman whose most recent song
sings about the end of
Yet, simply being aware of prophetic
judgment didn’t answer the two big questions: "Does God still punish
peoples" and then "What does this mean for the church?" The first question truly came down to an
image of God. The pastors didn’t really
like the image of God bringing pain and suffering upon nations. And for all intents and purposes neither do hymn writers. Most
people enjoy singing the hymn “Here I am Lord” which is based upon our reading
from Isaiah. Yet, most people don’t know
what comes after Isaiah says, “here I am.” The hymn is filled with great images of
caring for people and loving the broken and being a voice crying out for the
lost. Yet, in the passage after Isaiah
says, "Here I am," God says, great, now go out tell the people it’s
going to hurt and hurt, and there will only be a few of you in the end. That is not quite conveyed in the hymn.
The judgment Isaiah would bring, and there was
a lot of judgment, is not what we like to associate with God. Warning perhaps (its okay if God warns
people), displeasure (I’ve heard many sermons where I have left believing God
is not pleased), frustration (again, there is a sense in the scriptures that
God is frustrated with creation, with the nations, and if push comes to shove,
with you and me), and there may even be a kind of powerlessness. For many people the idea that God is somehow
powerless is much more palatable than God punishing people. Strange, but true.
Taking up the issue of God and
punishment, prophecy and judgment is for me like being caught between a rock
and a burning coal. Peter as I mentioned
is the rock; he is the image of the church.
And the church for me is God’s attempt to redeem the world. A big reason why we are in
Yet, then there is the burning coal-
Isaiah. God called Isaiah, and here is
the sticky wicket, God still calls Isaiah.
People hear the call to be prophetic all the time; there are words of
prophetic judgment all around us. It is
not by chance that Isaiah is told to speak but have no one listen. I can guarantee that in the next week you
will be in the midst of but not see, have spoken to you but not hear, words of
prophetic judgment, images meant to convict.
The New York Times reported that
Philip Morris, under the new name of Altria, is
selling off Kraft Foods because the cigarette company is doing better than the
food giant. Yet, turn on a television
and you will at some point run into an anti-smoking commercials being paid for
by Phillip Morris. The latest one I have
seen is the dead bodies in the
I believe God is calling people to
speak like Isaiah today, just as I believe God is still very much involved with
judgment, even punishment. Yet, I do not
believe this is what God is doing with the church. This prophetic judgment is real, but that is
not what we are supposed to bring. Peter
embodied this. When he spoke in
Jerusalem at Pentecost, he told the people God was not pleased, there is real
punishment for killing Jesus, but the punishment was not his calling, his
deal. His deal was redemption. The church was there to offer salvation,
baptism, forgiveness of sins.
In Peter it was as if God was
putting another pot on the stove. On one
burner there was Isaiah and his judgment and now there was another burner lit, another pot on the stove, Peter and the church.
It was about the time of this long
conversation with the pastors that I got to know Chris Widner. Chris grew up in the church but had a falling
out with one of the pastors. He was
dabbling with some Baha'i and wanted to say something
at his father’s funeral and the pastor dismissed him out of hand. This kept Chris from the church for many
years.
When I met up with him he was in his
early forties, he was a carpenter, a kind of hippy. He was also a loving father
and gentle man. One Sunday after worship
Chris came through the line and shook my hand.
He said, "When I grew up I always left worship feeling like a jerk,
like a bad person. Now when I leave
there is a sense of joy and I feel that my life is good."
That was all he said. He didn’t mean to do this, but for me that
was my answer to the punishment debate.
Chris had grown up hearing Isaiah without Peter. He had encountered the prophetic voice and
not the Gospel. Now, at this moment in
his life, he was hearing the Gospel and it meant the world to him. A year after I left
A great moment of solace for me in
the grief was knowing that the church had become a
voice of hope for him; it was more Peter than Isaiah.
There
are lots of prophets out there today. It
is not hard to find them. What we lack
are churches committed to being a voice of hope for all. It’s so easy to fall into the voice of
Isaiah, to speak of judgment and proclaim how wrong someone is. Yet, what Chris needed and what our
communities need are churches offering hope, purpose, and a clear picture of
what God is calling us to be as a church.
What
if we get busy being a church? There is
always time, it would seem, to be prophetic.
What if being prophetic is God’s business? What if our calling is to be the voice of
hope not condemnation? Amen.