The Day the Doorposts Shook

(Isaiah 6:1-8)

Do you know what it feels like to come inside with muddy hands and muddy knees, and someone you love is wearing something white and clean? You hold your hands behind your back. You stand very small. You think: I shouldn't be here. Not like this.

That is a little bit how Isaiah felt. But oh, so much bigger.

By now God's people had split into two kingdoms, and both were sick with idols. So God began sending prophets, people who carried his words to his people. Isaiah was one of them, down in the southern kingdom. And in the year the old king died, God let Isaiah see something. The doors of heaven opened, just a crack, and Isaiah looked in.

There was the Lord. High up. Lifted up. Sitting on a throne so tall that just the hem of his robe filled the whole room, the way the sea fills up a shore.

And all around him were angels, bright burning ones, flying. They had wings to fly, and wings to cover their faces, because even the angels could not look straight at all that shining. And they sang to each other, back and forth, the way the waves keep coming and coming:

Holy. Holy. Holy.
The whole earth is full of his glory.

Their singing was so strong that the doorposts shook. And the room filled up with smoke, soft and warm, like the nearness of God himself.

Isaiah did not sing. He was afraid. He felt every wrong word he had ever said. He felt small, and dirty, and not-clean, standing in front of someone so big and so good. "It's over for me," he cried. "My lips are unclean. And my eyes have seen the King."

He thought being close to God would crush him. He thought: someone like me cannot be wanted here.

Then God did something for the man who felt too dirty to stay.

One of the burning angels flew down. In its hand was a coal, a little piece of fire from God's own altar, still glowing hot. The angel came close, right up to Isaiah's trembling mouth, and touched the fire gently to his lips.

Long before, Moses had stood in front of a bush that blazed without burning up. This was that same kind of fire, God's kind, and instead of burning Isaiah, it made him clean.

"There," said the angel. "The fire has touched you. Your wrong is carried away. You are clean now."

The big clean God did not back away from the small dirty man. He came close. He reached for the very part Isaiah was most ashamed of, and he called it clean.

And then God spoke, soft, like someone looking for a friend. "Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?"

And Isaiah, clean now, unafraid now, said the bravest little words: "Here I am. Send me."

That burning coal was pointing ahead to Someone. One day God would not send an angel with a piece of fire. He would send his own Son, with his own hands, to touch the ones everybody else called dirty, and to say the gentlest word in the world: clean.

He had always longed to come close. The coal was only the beginning of how close he would come.