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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
The Holy God is triune—three Blessed Persons sharing one Divine substance (or “essence”)—and so, the Holy God reveals Himself as triune. We should not read the Old Testament as if the Son and the Holy Spirit are not there, nor should we read the New Testament as if something radical has happened to the one God faithfully worshipped for millennia (Beckwith, CLD III:132). Our Lord Jesus, to some extent even in today’s Gospel Reading (John 3:1-17), and His apostles, such as St. Peter in today’s Second Reading (Acts 2:14a, 22-36), use Old Testament passages in their New Testament teaching about the Holy Trinity (Pieper, I:394‑395, 397-398 n.28; Beckwith, CLD III:133), with no record of the Jews objecting to the idea of a Triune God (see Lenski on Acts passim). Yet, not a few isolated Old Testament passages, but whole Old Testament narratives reveal a distinct and recognizable God, Who, for example, creates and redeems His people, and Who does so in connection with a distinct yet inseparable Son and Spirit (Beckwith, CLD III:134-141). God our creator and redeemer, Who alone deserves our worship, is, a modern author says, both “indivisibly one and also irreducibly three” (Beckwith, CLD III:160). Passages such as today’s Old Testament Reading with both the seraphim’s antiphonal song “Holy, holy, holy” and the singular Lord’s asking who would go for the plural “us” (confer Genesis 1:26; 3:6; 11:7), are also a part of God’s revealing Himself as Triu‑ne, telling and instructive of God’s Triune identity, and illumining and adorning our confession and worship of the Holy Trinity (Beckwith, CLD III:132; confer Pieper, I:395).
In today’s Old Testament Reading, the Triune God called the prophet Isaiah after giving Isaiah a vision of the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, the train of His robe’s filling the temple, surrounded by the singing seraphim’s shaking the foundations of the thresholds, and smoke’s—likely incense’s—filling the house. Quite the visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory experience (confer Oswalt, ad loc Isaiah 6:4, p.182)! Similar are later visions of the heavenly worship of the Triune God, such as those given to the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:4-28) and to the apostle St. John (Revelation 4:1-5:14), as I am sure that those in our ongoing Midweek Bible Study of Revelation recognize. In Isaiah’s case, the seraphim’s song “Holy, holy, holy” can both reflect the Trinity and emphasize the Lord of Host’s superlative, if not infinite, holiness—His being in some sense separate from, beyond, and above all others in spotless purity and perfection. Holiness is an essential attribute of the Holy Trinity, and something that the Triune God also expects from His people, both who we are and what we do (Leviticus 19:2; confer Matthew 5:48).
The vision given to Isaiah in today’s Old Testament Reading both came at an important time for Isaiah and comes at an important time for us. In the case of Isaiah, God’s holiness and glory were especially notable. King Uzziah had been a generally‑faithful king for years, but then Uzziah unfaithfully entered the temple of the Lord in order to burn incense, and he was immediately struck with leprosy, from which he suffered until he died (2 Kings 15:1-7; 2 Chronicles 26:1-23; confer Roehrs-Franzmann, ad loc Isaiah 6:1, p.449; CSSB, ad loc Isaiah 6:1, p.1027). With Uzziah’s death, the national glory of his kingdom is said to have died out, never to be revived again (Keil-Delitzsch, ad loc Isaiah 6:1, p.189). The people in Isaiah’s day mocked the Holy One of Israel, and Isaiah warned those who, for example, called evil “good” and good “evil” (Isaiah 5:19‑20). Yet, Isaiah lived among those people of unclean lips and, by nature, he himself was a man of unclean lips, as are we people of unclean lips. We live among people who call evil “good” and good “evil”, and too often we think, speak, and act as they do. We are too subject to the un‑holy trinity of the devil, the world, and our sinful nature (Small Catechism, III:11, 18). On our own, we un‑holy people cannot stand in the presence of the Holy God but justly deserve temporal and eternal punishment.
The Lord told Moses that Moses could not see the Lord’s face, because people could not see the Lord and live (Exodus 33:20), and, yet, the Lord was seen by some, like Isaiah in today’s Old Testament Reading (Keil-Delitzsch, ad loc Isaiah 6:1, p.190; confer John 12:41), not to mention Hagar (Genesis 6:13), Jacob (Genesis 32:30), Gideon (Judges 6:22-23), and Samson’s parents (Judges 13:22) before him. So, Bible scholars distinguish an unseen Lord and a visible form of the Lord; the visible form of the Lord in some sense stands apart from the unseen Lord but still belongs to the unique identity of the Lord: distinct but inseparable; two and yet one. (Consider the Spirit of the Lord, and you have three and yet one.) Where the Old Testament variously identifies the visible form of the Lord as the Angel of the Lord, the Name of the Lord, the Glory of the Lord, or the Word of the Lord, the New Testament recognized those appearances as appearances of the pre‑incarnate Christ, the Son of God. Jesus is the Lord’s definitive and final “Angel” (or “Messenger”) (Hebrews 1:1-2), Who comes in the Name of the Lord (John 5:43), a Name the Lord will glorify (John 17:5), the Word of the Lord made flesh (John 1:14). (Beckwith, CLD III:141-142.)
The distinction between the three Blessed Persons of the one Holy Trinity matters for us and for our salvation (Pieper, I:398), as the Father’s Son alone was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary. As Jesus said in the Gospel Reading, God the Father loved the world by giving His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. Jesus lived the holy life that we fail to live, and Jesus died for our failure to live that life. We receive Christ’s righteousness; we are holy in Him. As St. Peter preached in the Second Reading, Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God; He was crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men; but God raised Him up. Jesus died on the cross for the sins of the world, including your sins and my sins. He died in our place, the death that we deserved. As with Isaiah in today’s Old Testament Reading, so with us: when the Holy Spirit leads us to confess and believe in Christ, then our guilt is taken away, and our sin is atoned for.
Isaiah’s guilt was taken away and his sin atoned for when one of the seraphim took something from the altar and touched Isaiah’s mouth. The seraph is usually thought to have taken a burning coal from the incense altar, which burning coal itself would be associated with atonement, since burning coals and incense were used on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:11-19). But, instead, at least one commentator thinks the seraph took a piece of baked bread (Oswalt, ad loc Isaiah 6:6, p.171), and there usually was bread present in at least the Old Testament tabernacle or Temple (for example, Exodus 25:23-30). Regardless of what the seraph took that touched Isaiah’s mouth, Isaiah’s vision shows God’s forgiving sins through a means of grace. Commentators often refer to Isaiah’s confession and God’s absolution (Keil-Delitzsch, ad loc Isaiah 6:6-7, p.196; Leupold, ad loc Isaiah 6:6-7, p.134), and we certainly might think that Isaiah was also forgiven by virtue of his being brought into the people of God by circumcision.
However, for you and me, Holy Baptism, Holy Absolution, and the Holy Supper are God’s Means of Grace for forgiving us. In Holy Baptism, we are born from above, as Jesus described in the Gospel Reading, by water and the Spirit as we are baptized in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In Holy Absolution, our pastor with his hand on our head forgives us in that same one Name of our three‑person God. And, in the Holy Supper, Christ’s true Body and Blood are, in bread and wine, present on the altar, distributed by the pastor, and received by us who repent and believe for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation (for example, Augsburg Confession X:1). Isaiah’s burning coal of the Old Testament Reading, understood as a combination of wood and fire, may even point forward to the bread and wine that are also the Body and Blood of Christ, Who Himself is human and Divine. Regardless, God is not confined here, nor is His glory restricted here, or anywhere else, but the Holy Trinity chooses and promises to meet us here in these concrete ways, working through those whom He sends on His behalf, who, like Isaiah, preach law and Gospel, and who make disciples of all nations by baptizing them and by teaching them to observe all that Christ commanded His apostles (Matthew 18:19‑20), including Holy Absolution and the Holy Supper.
Ben and Melody have been baptized, taught, and absolved, and this morning they will be confirmed and for the first time receive the Holy Supper. Like Isaiah in today’s Old Testament Reading, they have offered themselves to service in the congregation: Ben already has been working on Pilgrim’s website and its audio and video recordings, and Melody is willing to fill the vacant position of Outreach Coordinator. We are thankful for them and for all who serve the congregation, officially and unofficially, in various ways. Such service is among the good works that give evidence of our faith and by which we are judged when Christ comes. Of course, more important than our serving the congregation in such ways is our fulfilling our vocational duties (like those in the Table of Duties, that we began again in our time of catechesis this morning), and most important is our worshiping God by continuing to seek and receive His forgiveness in the ways that He promises to forgive us, and so to give us peace and joy. As Isaiah saw in today’s Old Testament Reading, the Holy Trinity already is enthroned and ruling forever over all for the sake of His Church. And, as with Isaiah when King Uzziah died, no matter what might happen in our world, the Holy Trinity has set us apart as holy for service to Him.
On the basis of all of Holy Scripture, Old Testament and New Testament, their narratives and their supporting passages, such as the seraphim’s song of “Holy, holy, holy”, the Scriptures’ creedal statements and their liturgical formulas (Beckwith, CLD III:132)—on the basis of all of this, we believe, teach, and confess the catholic faith—that is, the faith that the true Church of all times and all places has confessed—which faith is that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance. In part, we worship as in today’s Old Testament Reading, with antiphonal Psalms and with liturgy and hymn versions of the seraphim’s song “Holy, holy, holy” (for example, Lutheran Service Book 178 and 507). “Blessed be the Holy Trinity and the undivided Unity. Let us give glory to Him because He has shown His mercy to us.” (Liturgical Text.)
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +