7/18/54

Scripture: Isaiah 6: 1-8

One of the pleasing amusements, available to children and adults alike when I was a child, was a chance to look at pictures through a stereoscope. Grandparents and neighbors had that device in their parlors. We youngsters might take turns holding the viewer to our eyes. Two tiny, shaded windows, one before each eye, opened on a sliding device by which the picture was moved close to, or farther away from one’s eyes until properly focused. Each picture was doubled on the card as if each eye was to see a separate picture. Then properly focused, the two pictures appeared as one image, with a depth and realism that single photographs, seen without aid to the eyes, never have.

In recent time, motion picture theaters have developed a technique similar in effect to the old stereoscope. The three dimensional pictures are a magnificent and animated version of those older views. Those who see 3-D films experience an added sense of reality in what they are watching.

A racing auto zooms toward the watcher, who involuntarily tenses to jump out of the way. If a rock has been thrown toward the camera those who see the picture may dodge to keep from being hit. Occasionally some viewer, annoyed at being made to flinch by the action designed to startle him, will remove his Polaroid glasses to remove from himself the depth illusion in the pictures he is seeing.

Those whose vision must be with only one eye face certain hazards in perception of depth and of distance and in the ability to estimate the rate of speed of some approaching object. Those with two normal eyes, which focus properly on the image seen, have the sense of depth and distance that enables them better to perceive what is seen.

This is true not alone of physical eyes, but vision with two eyes, or from several points of view, improves perception in spiritual vision as well. There is an urgent need of seeing life not in a single, flat dimension, but with the depth of understanding that results from enough viewpoints from differing angles to involve one personally and directly in divine action.

The faith of Isaiah was broad. It was a “wide-screen” faith, with no blinders, confined to no limited view.

It is comparatively easy to believe in God and to feel religious when everything goes fairly well. It becomes more difficult when tragedy strikes --- and more important as well.

That was the situation before the prophet and his people “in the year that King Uzziah died.” It seems that Uzziah had been a good king, great and competent in the royal role. One would have supposed that he should have had a long and prosperous reign and at length come to a happy and honorable end. But Uzziah contracted that ailment which does such revolting and loathsome damage to the body -- leprosy -- and he died of that disease of the outcasts. Surely it must have been difficult for the Jewish faithful to comprehend and accept so great a tragedy.

Why do the righteous suffer? Must faith encompass the dark as well as the bright facts of living? Countless folk have found that their faith needs to be adequate for times of suffering and tragedy as well as for life’s shining hours. The faith of the prophet, Isaiah, was such. It was broad enough to embrace all the problems of society and comprehend all the concerns of his time.

It has been said that “religion is what one does with his solitariness.” What does a man do when all alone? What is the expression of his true faith? Yes, in one dimension, that of personal sincerity, this is so --- a matter of personal prayer and praise, a few minutes of morning quiet and a Sunday hour in the sanctuary --- a personal transaction between the soul and God.

But it is more than that to one like Isaiah. The fact that his king should suffer and die stirred his soul to its depths. And what about all the people of Judah now, with an incompetent heir on the throne and the mighty armies of Assyria threatening from the north? Not alone his personal relationship to God Almighty, but the well being of all his people stirred the soul of the prophet.

The late Archbishop of York maintained that it is a persistent heresy to believe that “God is interested chiefly in religion.” “He is not,” said William Temple. “He is primarily interested in life.” --- in everything that affects the welfare of his creatures. Do slums increase the tendency to disease and delinquency? Then God, and a vital religion, are concerned about it.

Does alcoholic beverage lead some into temptations they are too weak to resist? Then God is interested in that. A wide-screen faith must concern itself in some effective way with the effect of political decisions on the life and welfare of the people. And certainly any situation that tends to destroy good human values comes within the purview of vital faith.

A “3-dimensional” faith may be compounded of the Bible and the daily newspaper. If God spoke to the situation of men in days of yore, He yet speaks to the situation of people now, and we need to know what the situation is.

One of the black marks against our character is that we have so little sense of the situation, the experience, the viewpoint and feeling of other folk. General Dean writes now, after months of experience in the Republic of Korea, and more months of military imprisonment in the north of Korea, that he would be now inclined to make it an offense subject to military punishment, to call any Korean “gook.” That thoughtless Yankee nickname has done a vast amount of mischief and harm among folk who had no background or temper for that kind of kidding.

Religion is concerned with the hopes and fears of people -- with their multifarious experience, their needs and accomplishments, their sins and depravities, their sufferings and hopes, in Wisconsin Rapids and in Paris and in Johannesburg and in Hanoi and Manila.

It was in the year that King Uzziah died that Isaiah “got religion” --- or that God got hold of him. From that time on, he preached not just the homilies of the priest on the life of the home and the individual and the temple, but the perceptions of the prophet on judges taking bribes, landowners foreclosing mortgages without regard for people, kings making foolish alliances with foreign powers. Everything that affected people was grist for his mill. It all came within his sense of religious urgency. There was no artificial distinction between the so-called secular and sacred.

We need the same kind of faith today -- faith vitally related to all the significant events and trends of the time -- to all that threatens human welfare or offers promise of better human life on this planet.

Of course a vital faith needs be more than a philosophy. Isaiah was more than a philosopher, thinking deeply on the problems of life. He was more than a reformer concerned with the social ills of his day and their correction. He was a prophet of the living God!

Recounting the vision of his call, he starts out: “In the year that King Uzziah died” --- and he goes on to tell of his vision of “the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up.”

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;

the whole earth is full of his glory.

This passage gives us one of the most moving pictures in the Scripture of the sense of the holiness of God.

Too many of us for too much of the time, “believe in God in a commonplace sort of way.” We lack the awed and glorious sense of the high and holy God which the prophets and the saints of history have had. Lacking this vital dimension, life is as flat as the hot plains of Kansas, without knowledge of the lift of Colorado’s mountains. It takes the dimension of great spiritual height to bring our vision of life into focus. Without that dimension, life’s panorama of personal and social problems is depressing and overwhelming. Salvation in the midst of human perversity and adversity and tragedy lies in knowing the loving God above it.

It is the glory of Old Testament religion that the prophets, though they were utterly realistic about evil and its awful consequences, and the terrible necessity of taking life as it comes, could always see God above it all. And, to them, God is deeply interested; God has a plan of righteousness for this world, and waits only for mankind to join hands with Him in working out that plan.

This is also the glory of the New Testament with its doctrines of God who so loved the world that He gave his Son to live in flesh among men, and by his cross to redeem mankind. This element of spiritual height and hope is what enables us to raise our eyes, after reading the morning paper, to Him whose will it is to transform the earth from its ills and evils into His own realm or kingdom.

A mechanic working under a car in a New England garage, said: “I know the perfect solution to the world’s problems.” “What is that?” someone asked, and he continued, “Man ought to abdicate and let God take over.”

That, in a sense, is what Isaiah was urging --- not for man to wash his hands of the mess and “go fishing,” but to go ahead at his best under the reign and guidance of God, with full trust in His sovereignty.

We are realizing, more vividly than for a long time, the importance of our faith in God. We of this nation underline our trust in God with an urge to recognize the deity in our pledge of allegiance to the flag of our country; by increased church attendance and activity. We have a feeling that, apart from God, our world is sunk!

But we can too easily leave it there in the realm of abstract conviction (like a little child with a broken toy leaving it on Dad’s work bench with the blithe confidence that Father will fix it while he plays with something else.) We can not be that childish with God. Isaiah saw the Lord, high and lifted up. And he said, “Woe is me! for I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips ...”

It is easy to recognize the inadequacies of others and to stand in the temple like the Pharisee thanking God that he is not like the other sinners. It is hard to say “we;” it is easy to say “they” have unhealthy prejudices; “they” neglect their duties to their church; “you” have made a faulty decision; “the Russians” threaten the peace of the world; the movies or the comics or television corrupts the morals of youth ... all of which may be and probably is true. But it is not easy to recognize our own involvement in the evils of our time, in the spirit of the Negro Spiritual that sings: “Not my brother, not my sister, but it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.”

And Isaiah had a vital and personal sense of forgiving grace. “Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand which he had taken with the tongs from the altar; and he laid it upon my mouth and said, ‘Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.’”

Some such experience of God’s forgiveness and personal cleansing ought to be ours. We ought to look for it, and expect it each time we come to the communion table; and each time we lift our souls to the omniscient gaze of God.

And we ought to stay involved in the needs and possibilities of the world, working there by God’s grace, and depending on His power.

The climax of Isaiah’s experience came when he “heard the voice of the Lord as if saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ then said the prophet, ‘Here am I! Send me!’”

And we won’t take off our Polaroid glasses, but will get into the picture, taking our responsible place in bringing it to focus, and to right issue.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, July 18, 1954 (Union service)