Sermon preached by the the Right Reverend Dr David Thomson, Acting Bishop of Hereford, Sunday 9 February 2025
O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,
bow down before him, his glory proclaim;
with gold of obedience and incense of lowliness,
kneel and adore him the Lord is his name.
The strains of that magnificent Epiphany hymn were still echoing through my mind when I turned to the Scriptures set for today, and came face to face with Isaiah as he so dramatically encountered the holiness of God in the Temple. “Holiness”, and that resonant phrase “the beauty of holiness” leapt out at me as they did perhaps for you; and I started to wonder what they might mean for me as a believer and bishop, and for us as a congregation and cathedral nearly 3000 years later. I had my breath taken away for a moment, too, as I thought how amazing it was too that our religious heritage and records of it like this should stretch back so far – going deeper in every sense than even the excavations on most of the annual “Digging for Britain” series on the television that Jean and so enjoy.
Uzziah, who was the King then in the middle of the 8th century BC, was also according to rabbinic tradition Isaiah’s cousin, so the prophet will have been no stranger to either royal splendour or the awesome aura of the Temple. But this time, something was different. It was as if we of this cathedral today had come in as we had done so often before, and sensed the beauty of holiness of the architecture and windows and furnishings, or that of the strains of the choir’s song, but then something quite different had broken in on us, a beauty of holiness of a different dimension, not just echoing that of God but confronting us with it, not just speaking of God but revealing his presence: a real Epiphany.
So Isaiah is brought to his knees in a train crash between God’s holiness and his lowliness, proclaiming, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips;” just as St Peter in our Gospel reading is brought to his knees, despite having gone around with Jesus so many times before, and now demands that Jesus “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”.
What’s going on? Why, awesome though the beauty of holiness of this cathedral and its worship is, is that not normally our experience? And does that matter?
Where to start? The phrase “Holy holy holy” with its triple formula of emphasis stands out. The Hebrew word being used is kodesh which shares its root with the Kiddush meal held as the Sabbath begins and the Kaddish sung at a funeral. All three words patrol a boundary between the secular and sacred, and derive like sacred in Latin and hagiography in Greek from ancient roots that speak of setting things apart and sacrificing them, making them sacred and devoted to a god or gods.
You’ll remember how the Holy of Holies in the Temple was an immensely separated space, with access limited to only chosen priests on special days, and how the Ark of the Covenant had a deadly effect on those around it who were not properly authorised, and how Moses had to cover his face after being in the presence of the Almighty lest its radiance caused harm. We are being taken back to the earliest days of human culture in which the other, the divine was dangerous, and rituals and taboos were put in place to ensure our safety, some of which survive as superstitions to this day.
But by the time of Isaiah, that raw approach to the dangerously divine had gone through a remarkable transformation, beginning the long and fascinating journey of the development of religion that is still going on. Out of elemental spirits had grown a panoply of deities – still far from good or safe – and from them in turn the Israelite understanding of a single Godhead, increasingly seen as the one Maker and Ruler of all, and defined not just in terms of power but righteousness, justice, mercy, compassion: an earth-shaking ethical transformation.
So when God is revealed to Isaiah, the prophet’s reaction is one of suddenly realising the massive quantitative difference in scale and power between him and the Almighty, but also the massive qualitative difference in terms of holiness, an ethical and moral deficit that poses an unbridgeable separation between them, and calls out the well-intentioned but in the end inappropriate way in which Isaiah has entered the house of the Lord. He suddenly realises that he is like the wedding guest without a wedding garment, or in a lighter vein, like a nightmare when we suddenly realise we have come to church in our pyjamas – or worse. (In case anyone’s worried, you all seem to be perfectly properly dressed this morning …)
So the word “sin” creeps into the text: the sin or not-like-God-ness that defines our separation from God, that is both the cause and the result of our inability to be with God and be of use to him in his world. The sin that could be the end of the story, as in a way it was for Adam and Eve: there was no way back, at least as things stood at the time.
But things did not stay as they stood at that time. As understanding of God and his nature grew, especially during the time of the prophets, so also did the realisation that his justice was always tempered with mercy; that God’s relationship with humanity could be described as one of love, and on his part a faithfulness that transcended our unfaithfulness and could offer restoration and redemption. So out of the blue, as it seems to me, Isaiah is granted a vision of a massive liturgical innovation, that even the inventiveness of our own day would balk at: one of the hot stones from the altar on which incense was being burnt is used by a seraph, no less, to touch Isaiah’s lips, forgive his sin and make him clean. Needless to say, there is no evidence that I know of for this liturgical practice in ordinary reality: we are in the visionary world, but for Isaiah this was totally real, and set him free to be able to accept his new commission from God: “Here am I; send me.”
Only with the coming of Christ, though, would it start to become clear that redemption and restoration were not the perquisite of prophets or kings, but were an essential part of God’s purpose, intended for all, and so essential that the cost of them would be born by God himself; and in the Gospel for today we see that realisation starting to dawn on the first disciples, though they still had a lot to learn, as do we.
That brings me back to our own situation, and what if anything the record of these exceptional occasions has to say to us now, as we in our turn come into the Temple, and seek to be with and follow Christ.
Let’s go back to that phrase “the beauty of holiness”, which seems to me to very much resonate with the cathedral here, whether I am thinking of the wonders of the Norman architecture, or the introductions of recent years. It’s a very special space to come into – and there is much that if our eyes are open should stop us in our tracks and make us wonder. The well-known stonemason Andrew Ziminksi tells us in has latest book that he was once in Sherborne Abbey being blown over by the superbly fan vaulting that is perhaps their greatest treasure, and asking some visitors whether they were moved by it. When the answer came in the negative, he rather less than politely suggested that they should see a doctor.
Those of you who are cathedral guides will, I hope, not have had any encounters as awkward as that one, but you will have faced the challenge of introducing our visitors to the building and while recounting its history also perhaps wondered how you can help them see through the windows, as it were, and glimpse the spiritual realities that underlie everything we see around us, and even perhaps sense the spiritual presence that is at the heart of what we are doing here this morning, which is, one has to say, the point of it all.
That challenge in fact, and to state the obvious, in fact begins with us ourselves, not those we welcome. Moments of epiphany are considerably more widespread than we might imagine in our secular society. One of the privileges of a pastoral ministry is that we sometimes hear about them, often prefaced with a phrase like “I’m not religious but…”. Our job is then often to dispel the shadows of fear that come with such an experience and let the light within it shine and bring comfort and inspiration. But moments they are, and though a few people seem be to called by God to live with the curtains drawn back, as we might say, and, we sense them to be a mystic or prophet amongst us, most of our own religious experience is quite mundane by contrast.
So the challenge, I think, looks like this. First, like Isaiah, we must try not to let the ordinary lack of such experience, and our sheer familiarity with the trappings of the temple close our hearts and minds to the possibility, I think I want to say probability, that there will be moments when we do feel the awesome presence of God or his angels, and the air thickens, and silence deepens, and time itself stands still. To stand behind the altar and celebrate the presence of Christ in the eucharist is to invite such a moment when the veil is drawn back between heaven and earth; one I am privileged to feel nearly every time I celebrate and which can transform routine into rapture. And to kneel before the altar and receive Christ into your hands and heart is another, as barely noticeably to those around us we may feel with John Wesley that our heart is strangely warmed, or with Mother Julian that all shall be well, and that we and the whole world are cradled in the hands of Christ.
Secondly, we are asked to hold and treasure the privilege of such a gift, knowing it to be out of all proportion to our deserts, and to pray that God through his gift will cleanse our sin with the fire of his love and make us worthy of our calling. There is no gig economy in the Kingdom of God: a bit of work and a bit of money to be done, taken and then off we go, with no further obligations. We are re-called into membership of a family business, and – bearing the family likeness – are to carry that likeness wherever we go.
So thirdly, like Isaiah again, we are emboldened to say yes, to say “Here am I: send me”, and take up the business of the family, which is no more and no less to help it all happen again, to do what we can to help another person whose light has not yet shone out or gone dim with time glimpse again the glory of God, know that they are loved, and know that they have work to do.
And here in this place, or wherever the Spirit takes us, that may well mean helping the beauty of its holiness speak into hearts that are full of the burden of carefulness, comforting their sorrows and answering their prayerfulness as, perhaps for the first time for a long time, they allow the beauty of truth and the tenderness of love to touch them, and see evenings of tearfulness give way to mornings of joy.
