Sermon on Sunday, February 7
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...
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!”
I want to share three phrases with you today. Just three phrases. The first is, “In the year that King Uzziah died.”
Nobody names their kid “Uzziah” anymore. I don’t know that I’ve ever met an “Uzziah.” But the name, “Uzziah” means, “The LORD is my strength.” And our story from the book of Isaiah begins, “In the year that King Uzziah died…”
If you look elsewhere in the Old Testament, you can find bits and pieces about Uzziah’s reign as king. He took the throne when he was just sixteen years old and ruled until he was in his late sixties. For fifty-some years, Uzziah—“The LORD is my strength”—ruled over Judah. In the books of Kings and Chronicles, it is said of Uzziah that he was faithful to God, bringing prosperity to the land.
Uzziah was a famous king. Throughout the region, to the border of Egypt, his name was known and revered. In Jerusalem, Uzziah built fortified towers and raised a massive, powerful army. According to the book of Second Chronicles, “the whole number of the heads of ancestral houses of mighty warriors was two thousand six hundred. Under their command was an army of three hundred and seven thousand five hundred, who could make war with mighty power, to help the king against the enemy. Uzziah provided for all the army the shields, spears, helmets, coats of mail, bows, and stones for slinging.”
Uzziah was powerful and organized. He ruled Judah with vision and with authority. For most of Uzziah’s reign as king, his name was synonymous with prosperity and prestige. But then, as the story unfolds, Uzziah’s reign did not end well. In his strength he became prideful, says the writer of Chronicles, and his pride became his downfall. His crime? He attempted to elevate his status to that of high priest. Apparently, the power of kingship wasn’t enough for Uzziah, and so he barged into the temple and assumed the role both king and priest. As the story goes, he was immediately struck with leprosy for defying God’s will in this way.
For his last ten years as king, Uzziah was shut away in a separate house, shunned from any real power. His son, Jotham, ran the kingdom in his place. Finally, Uzziah withered away and died, and because of his leprosy, was buried alone—not with the former kings of Judah. It was sort of a pathetic end to a once mighty and prosperous kingship.
Our story today begins, “In the year that King Uzziah died…” But I’d like to rephrase that. “In the year that King Uzziah died” means, “In the year that ‘The LORD is my strength’ died…”
The year King Uzziah died: the year we questioned the LORD’s strength...
The year we wondered if our best days were long gone,
The year we wondered if we’d been blessed or just lucky,
The year King Uzziah’s earthly power and fame finally shriveled to nothing,
The year we had to accept that even the best of us could fall so low…
History has a way of forcing moments like these upon us—moments when we question God’s presence, when we question all that we thought we knew about our strength and sense of security. Isaiah chapter six begins with the people of God wondering, “What now, God? What next?” And perhaps it should evoke in us all those times and places when we simply could not see a way forward.
The year King Uzziah died: the year we questioned the LORD’s strength...
The year the economy dropped out from under us,
The year he lost the job,
The year we lost the house,
The year she got sick,
The year the marriage finally fell apart…
The year we questioned the LORD’s strength...
The year the earth shook,
The year a hurricane took our city away,
The year the towers fell,
The year we lost faith,
The year we questioned everything…
It’s not so often that I spend so much time on just seven words, but the phrase, “In the year that King Uzziah died” is loaded. More than a simple historical marker, it says something of the human condition—that from time to time we find ourselves questioning God, questioning ourselves, questioning our future… and that so often life itself gets carried away to the point where we’re not sure who’s in control anymore, if anyone.
In the book of Isaiah, it is in the midst of this anxiety and uncertainty that a new prophet is born. It is in the context of turmoil and fear and doubt that God’s voice is heard again and in a new way. This brings us to our second phrase: “The hem of God’s robe filled the temple.”
In our story, Isaiah is not a prophet yet. But he’s in the temple and he sees God “sitting on the throne, high and lofty.” It’s a pretty fantastic scene, with six-winged seraphs flying around and singing and smoke rising up everywhere. It’s a vision of God on a massive scale—so massive, in fact, that just the hem of God’s robe fills the temple.
Some interesting things about this description of God. If you wanted to read it all literally, you might say, “Well, that settles it—God must wear a robe—a really, really big robe! With a big, big hem.”
Or we might say instead that nothing in this world can contain God. God is always bigger than the temple, bigger than the church, bigger than our understanding. Our words can’t contain God, our beliefs can’t contain God… even our religion can’t contain God—nothing can! God cannot be contained! God is God, and perhaps the visions we have of God are but fragments of a much, much larger whole.
“In the year that King Uzziah died,” Isaiah saw the Lord sitting on the throne, high and lofty, and “the hem of his robe filled the temple.” In other words: In the year everything fell apart and we began to question everything, we saw God and God was bigger than all we could see.
The third phrase is a question: “Whom shall I send?” In light of the first two phrases, I marvel at these four words: “Whom shall I send?” The world is falling apart—Uzziah, “The Lord is my Strength,” has died. But still, God is still God—a God so big, even the hem of God’s robe fills the room. And yet, God’s question for humanity is not what we would expect it to be. God does not say, “How can I help now that your king is dead?” or “What can I do to restore your faith?” Instead, God’s question is, “Whom shall I send?”
We’d often love to have a Superman God—a God who swoops in when the going get rough—a God who makes everything ok. So often we’d love to have a God who makes it easy to believe, easy to trust, easy to not worry about the things that fall apart in this world. But God doesn’t ask, “How can I make everything ok?” Instead God asks, “Whom shall I send? Whom shall I send?”
This is the nature of God. God—bigger than our understanding, always bigger than our imagining. But not a “Superman God”—rather, a God who is always asking, “Who will go for me? Who will speak for me? Who will move with my Spirit and love with my love?” Even when the world seems to be falling apart, crumbling in the midst of war and poverty and brokenness, God is whispering into the ears of would-be prophets like you and me: “Whom shall I send? Whom shall I send? Whom shall I send?”
The faithful response, then, is not to understand it all, or even to know the way forward. The faithful response is to daily summon the will to say, “Here am I. Send me.”
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