The Comfort of the Familiar
I don’t know about you, but I like the comfort of familiar rituals. I like knowing that every day will begin with a freshly ground dark-roast coffee and a warm bowl of oatmeal garnished with fresh fruit. I like knowing that every evening will end with getting under the flannel sheets and opening a book. I like knowing that every Friday I will go to the park with my nephews.
I don’t know about you, but for me church can be a comforting ritual too. There I am greeted by familiar faces and casual conversation about shared interests. I find my favorite seat and get comfortable in it the way I might burrow into the couch before my favorite TV show. There’s quiet, calming music in the background. Perhaps it is meant to invite me into an empty space where I might encounter something or someone other than myself—but usually I listen to it more like I listen to lounge music in a hotel lobby, as a pleasant backdrop to my own thoughts. As the chatter dies away and I focus my attention on the front, as though it were a stage and I were its audience, there is before me the most comforting element of the whole ritual. The idea of God. The idea that I am not alone, that the creator of the universe is sympathetic to me, to my struggles and to my desires. Oh, it is a comforting idea indeed. I wouldn’t admit it to anybody, but truth is, this imagined God looks quite a bit like me. Votes like me, thinks like me, condemns the same people that I do.
In short, this church experience is a comfort because it conforms to me and my interests. There are no surprises, and I am always reassured.
A Shock to the Self
Isaiah, however, had a very different experience of worship. In today’s first scripture, he imagines himself in the temple—and it is anything but comfortable. I imagine Isaiah was like you and me, someone who went to worship regularly, prayed regularly, tried to do the right thing in life. I imagine he had his own idea of God that regularly brought him comfort. But in this vision of the temple, God shatters through all the familiarity. God shatters through his very idea of God. At the end, he does not cheerfully remark, “What a lovely service,” before wandering off to a full meal and an afternoon nap. Quite the opposite: “Woe is me! I am lost, for…my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts” (Isa 6:5). Peter says almost the same thing by the sea of Galilee, when his net suddenly becomes full of fish, and he suddenly realizes that he is standing in the presence of God. “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8).
Isaiah and Peter both exclaim their brokenness. “Woe is me! I am lost,” says one; “I am a sinful man,” says the other. It is as though when they see God, who is love unfailing, they also see themselves in a mirror for who they really are. They see the feebleness and fragility of their lives, their failures in the way of love. They feel it viscerally in their body, this distance between themselves and God.
It’s a feeling that we’ve all had before. God is not a privileged experience. Some of us have encountered God looking into a child’s eyes and feeling the infinite, unbearable weight of responsibility and the certainty of our failure. Some of us have encountered God waking up in a sweat in the middle of the night, suddenly aware that our days are numbered and we will not live forever and we’ve already wasted so much time. Some of us have encountered God in the haunting suspicion that we have not been true to ourselves, that in the pursuit of some goal we have lost ourselves and begun living a lie. Some of us have encountered God at rock bottom, when our eyes are opened to the reality that we cannot manage our own lives. However we have encountered God—that infinite distance between unfailing love and our mortal and misguided expressions of it—the experience is the same as Isaiah and Peter’s. We see clearly and suddenly that we are not, nor is the world, as we thought.
Avoiding God Until We Can’t Help but Cry
The only difference between Isaiah and Peter and us is that, oftentimes, we do not recognize God in these uncomfortable moments. At least, I do not. I usually run away from these moments. I try to find ways to cover them up. I think most of us do. We have phones in our hands to fill up every empty moment and to keep us from ever having to feel deeply or think about what really matters. We live for cheap thrills that keep us distracted, like the weekend or the next television series or the newest household comfort or convenience. Even church can become an escape from God. Methodist theologian Will Willimon quips, “No wonder we tiptoe around this Presence, turn our churches into carpeted bedrooms, fearful that we might awaken this One. Note how we often chatter, nervously, before the music begins, the way people chatter when they’re scared of what might come next. We transform our worship into the backslapping conviviality of a Kiwanis Club meeting; everybody smiling, reassuring one another that this is only church, only Sunday, only God, nothing over which to be alarmed.”[1]
Yet try as we may to avoid God, God breaks through. Maybe not at church. Instead, it is usually in our weakest moments when we cannot help but cry. There is, in fact, a rich tradition in the history of our faith that identifies divine encounter with the experience of tears.[2] When we weep, our eyes are opened to the uncomfortable truth of our mortality and our mistakes, our weakness and our need for help. Tears clear our vision. We see the reality of who we are. With Isaiah and Peter, we finally cry out the truth we have been trying to avoid, “Woe is me! I am lost….” “I am a sinful person.”
An Even Greater Shock
But this painful truth of our stumbling, sinful selves that we spend so much of our lives avoiding, is not the whole truth. These tears that we desperately try to suppress are not the end of the story. They may be a necessary beginning, but they are not the fullness or finale of our faith.
If at first God is a shock to Isaiah and Peter, to their self-centered, shortsighted way of life, then they are in store for an even greater shock when God responds to them. Peter cries, “Go away from me.” But Jesus draws nearer. Isaiah cries, “I am lost,” but God is looking for him to help in the world. “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah isn’t lost, he’s found.
There are two shocking truths in the story, then, a small
truth and a big truth. And to get to the
big truth, we must go through the small truth.
The small truth is that we are indeed imperfect and broken. Or in church lingo, “sinful.” We judge, we condemn, we exclude, we fight
for control, we put up walls, we put ourselves in front of others. We bear a flawed image of our loving creator. In the clarity of our tears, however, we see the
big truth that Isaiah and Peter see.
Despite our protests of unworthiness, despite our cries to be left
alone, God draws even nearer. Why? Because that is the way of love. Does a mother leave her child for falling
down? Does a lover renounce his love when
his beloved is at fault?
This big truth of God’s love, the shockwaves of which could turn our world upside down, transforms us whenever we accept it. No longer bound by striving to be this or that and inevitably failing, no longer bound by pride and shame, we are free to be ourselves, which is the greatest gift we can give others. And so it is that Isaiah cries out, “Here I am; send me!” (Isa 6:8). And Peter and the others, we are told, “left everything and followed him” (Luke 5:11).
Prayer
Who is always drawing near to us—
Help us not to run away
From our tears
And the shock of our brokenness.
…
For it is here, shockingly,
That we are nearest to you
And your love,
Which leads us into life.
Through Christ: Amen.
[1] William
Willimon, “Depart from Me,” Sermon for Duke University Chapel on February 9,
1986, accessed on January 31, 2022, https://repository.duke.edu/dc/dukechapel/dcrst003219.
[2] Alan
Jones, Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality (New York: Harper
& Row, 1985), 82-106. Simeon of
Byzantine in the tenth century referred to tears as “the second baptism” and an
essential stage of a person’s spiritual growth.
Ephrem of Syrian in the third century said that our tears are actually
God’s tears for us, shed that such a lovely image of goodness should be lost.
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