“The Uncompromising Holiness of God”

Isaiah 6:1-13

Isaiah 6:11: 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.”

John 3:3: Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

[Prayer]

From time to time every Christian and every congregation need to experience an attitude adjustment. We need to be reminded that God is God and we are not. It needs to be brought to our attention that we are less than holy. We are people of unclean lips living in a society – and a church – made up of people of unclean lips.

Coincidentally we need to hear the words of Gerald May in his book Addiction and Grace: “God is not normal.” Unclean lips are normal in a fallen world. So, too, are sin, death, evil, and destruction. It can rightly be said that we live in the midst of a culture that celebrates and rewards unclean lips; a world that considers holiness to be abnormal. One biblical commentator has gone so far as to opine that we live in a culture that is more and more suffering from “a fatal immunity to the truth.”

The truth to which we’re more or less immune is that God demands holiness, righteousness, justice, and peace of his people. We don’t want to hear that truth, speak that truth, or live that truth. Instead of living up to God’s demands we try to bring God down to our level. We want to worship and serve a domesticated God, a God we can control and manipulate. We want to hear and speak a domesticated gospel. What we don’t want to hear or speak is God’s demand that we be holy. Holiness is painful and scary. Holiness demands that we surrender all of our personal, cultural, national, and ecclesiastical idols.

Jesus told Nicodemus that entering into the Kingdom of God requires a spiritual and emotional rebirth, a radically different way of thinking and living – an attitude adjustment, if you will. Confronted by the absolute holiness of God, Isaiah has no choice but to confess his sinfulness and repent of it. God was calling him to a task. He could not carry out that task without a complete overhaul of his soul. God was calling him to be a representative of God’s uncompromising holiness. Isaiah could not accept that call until he was willing to preach, teach, and live out that very same uncompromising holiness. Only then could he say with integrity, “Here I am; send me!”

Three elders and two deacons have just said yes to God’s call to ordained office. A mission team from this church will shortly accept a commission to go out and serve God with their hearts and hands and voices; their skills, talents, time, and energies. Promises are being made today, serious promises. Folks are saying, before God and this congregation, “Here I am; send me!” They are reaffirming their willingness to speak and live out the uncompromising truth of the Lord their God. They are reaffirming their faith in Jesus Christ as their only Lord and Savior. They are making themselves vulnerable to some major attitude adjustments.

They are also, along with every Christian, accepting the possibility of unpopularity. Leaders in Christ’s Church must be ready to speak the sometimes hard, even harsh, words of God. While they will always stand ready to intercede for God’s people, to pray for God’s mercy and compassion, they must never be willing to compromise God’s truth. And while it is part of every Christian’s calling to speak God’s truth to the world, it is sometimes the Christian’s task to speak that truth to the church.

Jesus wasn’t making a statement about being born again to the general population. He was speaking directly to one man who had come seeking the truth of God. He was confronting Nicodemus with the necessity of an attitude adjustment of his soul. Isaiah didn’t answer a call to speak God’s Word of judgment to the world at large, he answered a call to speak that judgment to his very own people: friends, relatives, fellow citizens of Judah. And in the speaking risk their hostility, derision, and ostracism.

And we who follow Jesus in the twenty-first century risk those very same things when we dare tell our fellow Christians that the norms of this culture are not to be their norms. We must remind them that they have answered a call to holiness. We must remind them, and not always gently, that they are to serve as a counter point to the surrounding culture instead of allowing themselves to be corrupted by it.

As your pastor I assume that I can keep you happy as long as I’m speaking out, as I should, against immorality, abortion, and pornography, as long as I’m telling you to not get caught up in the sleaziness of our society. I’m probably safe as long as I stick with generic sermons about the Ten Commandments and such or retelling familiar and comforting Bible stories. I know that I’m okay as long as I’m condemning the sins of those people out there.

But what happens when I preach explicit sermons about something as touchy as the stewardship of money: how we earn it, how we spend it, how much of it we share with others, how much we give to the work of the church? Jim Mead, General Presbyter for Pittsburgh Presbytery, has warned us preacher types, that if we dare to intentionally and assertively address financial stewardship from a truly biblical perspective, we might just find ourselves looking for another call. We Presbyterians will talk about, discuss, debate, and fight about sex and the drop of a hat, but an honest and biblical discussion money is mostly taboo.

That’s because it’s impossible to address the topic of money without also addressing the reality that the church is seriously infected with society’s idolatrous notions about it. We have bought into our culture’s beliefs about the importance of possessions and the need to accumulate wealth. We’ve come to worship the ultimate of all earthly idols, the mistaken assumption that money will make us happy and keep us safe. We’ve accepted the false notion that what we do with our money is nobody’s business, not even God’s.

Isaiah had to say some very hard things about his people’s sexual immorality and their worship of false gods. But he also had some harsh words to say about political and judicial corruption, unfair business practices, and the neglect and even economic exploitation of Judah’s poor, weak, and helpless, the very people whose protection was demanded by God’s law. Related to this were his strong words about the hypocrisy of singing the right hymns, giving the right offerings, and saying the right prayers on the Sabbath only to go back out into the everyday world to not only worship idols and commit adultery, but to lie, cheat, and steal; living as if only the Sabbath belonged to God, while the rest of the week was reserved for the pursuit of personal pleasure and accumulation of wealth.

God’s people have never liked hearing about that: not then, not now. Somehow there has crept into the church’s consciousness the belief that personal piety is somehow divorced from social, political, and economic responsibility. Sins of the flesh seem to be the only sins to condemn and avoid, or at least commit in secret.

But what about the sin of greed that operates under the guise of good business? What about the gross hypocrisy of so-called born again Christian politicians who take bribes or accept favors from lobbyists while decrying our nation’s lack of moral fiber? What about the mostly subtle but still pervasive racism that continues to infect our culture – and our churches? What about overweight, compulsively overeating Christians like me preaching the love of Jesus while looking the other way as children starve to death? What about mostly white and well to do liberal and conservative Presbyterians who are willing to destroy the church over questions of sexuality while millions of people in the world have never heard or experienced the Good News of Jesus Christ?

The uncompromising holiness of God demands a holiness of us that is manifest in every area of our lives. God demands personal piety. God also demands justice and righteousness in our social, economic, and political interactions with others, especially the weak and defenseless. God demands sexual purity and integrity. He also demands honesty, integrity, and fairness in our business dealings. It is God’s law and Jesus’ command that we forgive those who have wronged us, love our neighbors, feed the hungry, and befriend the outcast, even when doing so isn’t popular or profitable. There are biblical mandates for showing hospitality to the aliens in our midst – even if they’re here illegally.

When Jesus says that we must be born again he is saying that every part of who and what we are must be remade in the image of God. When a Christian experiences a Spirit-delivered attitude adjustment, every attitude must be adjusted. When God calls us to turn away from the gods of this world he means all of them. And when God calls us to speak his truth he means all of it not just the parts of it that are popular and easy. And when we say to God, “Here I am; send me!” we’d better be ready for the firestorms that will inevitably follow when we ruffle the feathers, step on the toes, and attack the sacred cows of our fellow believers. Amen.