Encountering God

Passage for reflection: Isaiah 6: 1 - 8

Last Monday, 24 May, was the day the Church remembers the conversion of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. Remember in the evening of 24 May 1738, John Wesley went unwillingly to a meeting in Aldersgate Street in London where he heard Martin Luther’s preface to Paul’s letter to the Romans being read and we know at about a quarter to nine while the reading was shared - words about how God can work in us - he felt his heart strangely warmed. He had an encounter in that meeting with God and it changed him forever. 

Methodism was raised up as a heart religion. It was born out of a meeting with God. Its members were on fire because God was real. Wesley said later about the movement he began:  “ My fear is not that our great movement, known as the Methodists will eventually cease to exist or one day die from the earth. My fear is that our people will become content to live without the fire, the power, the excitement, the supernatural element that makes us great.”

Where’s the fire in our belly today? Do people see any excitement in us? Do we encounter the power of God in our worship? Will we feel it this Sunday as we gather for worship? When we go to church, and we have our service we need to expect that like Wesley we will be changed by an encounter with the divine, his mystery, his holiness, his glory, his overwhelming love for us. We’ve become very fussy about our worship, which hymns we like, how hard the pew is, where we sit and the quality of the preacher! I used to ring my Mum on a Sunday afternoon and ask her how the service had been that morning. They had an 11am service. She’d say “it was good” sometimes. “What was good?” I’d ask. “He finished at ten to.” Under the hour was good. I’m not sure there was much encounter with God going on. 

If we are to be credible, our primary reason for being here is to meet God and to expect to be changed. And God should be met by anyone coming into our churches. We enter into the mystery, we come in awe, we glimpse some of God’s character, we lose ourselves in wonder, love and praise. Our churches are not social clubs, they are places where God and his people meet. When Lis and I got together she took me to her home church — Peterborough Cathedral. It was a Sunday afternoon Evensong in June 2016. I remember sitting in the choir stalls and saying out loud “WOW!” An appropriate response really! We got married in that cathedral less than a year later. I’m still blown away every time we go in it. 

This week’s Old Testament reading is one of my favourites. It’s a vision of God. Isaiah – already a prophet – is in the temple and suddenly sees something beyond what’s physically there. God. God in glory, God in mystery, God who is beyond what Isaiah’s eyes can see or comprehend – but God who is certainly not abstract. The God whom Isaiah sees is certainly incomprehensible – in the old sense that he cannot be contained, cannot be compassed by Isaiah’s vision. There is mystery, but there is also glory. There is the unseen but also the seen. The house was filled with smoke, but also, Isaiah saw the Lord.

And that seeing was a commissioning. When Isaiah saw the Lord, that vision of mystery and glory wasn’t for himself alone. Nor was it a single occasion with no impact on the rest of his life. Seeing the Lord – in mystery and glory, in Threeness and oneness – was a call. When he saw the Lord, Isaiah realised his own sin and the sin of the society he lived in – I am a man of unclean lips, I live among a people of unclean lips. He realised he needed to repent and be forgiven. And he realised that God had a task for him.

It is seeing God – God in glory and mystery – which makes Isaiah realise who he is – a sinful man, in a sinful society - and what he is called to do – shout God’s glory, God’s mystery, God’s justice into that society, proclaim God’s condemnation on acts of pride and arrogance, oppression and violence, on greed that ignores and disregards those it tramples underfoot. 

Isaiah’s vision teaches us that the better we know God, the more we see of God, the more clearly we will see ourselves and our world and the better we can respond to God’s call. That’s certainly what Wesley experienced. That meeting with God on a May evening in a meeting he didn’t really want to go to changed not only his perception of God but the direction of his ministry. We sing of it: “ See how great a flame aspires, kindled by a spark of grace.” So, where’s our spark today? Here’s another Wesley quote: “Light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn.” 

The good news is this. When we meet God in his vastness and find ourselves before him our priorities change and we find a new purpose. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord”, says Isaiah.  King Uzziah died in 740BC. He reigned for fifty-two years and his reign was blessed with material prosperity but he became arrogant and proud and tried to manipulate religion away from the worship of God to worship of him. It’s almost that in the Temple here God reasserts his authority. It is in the Temple that, for Isaiah, heaven and earth meet and as they do, the prophet gains a fresh understanding of God’s awesomeness. In the light of what his eyes behold, he becomes acutely aware of the breadth and depth of his own shortcomings and insignificance.

The effect is cataclysmic.

His whole world is shaken to its very core but the gap between the individual and his God is bridged dramatically (and painfully!) by a burning coal. In this moment, Isaiah also discovers that the God he has glimpsed in such an overwhelming way is a God who wants to reach out to his people – and it is that realisation that moves Isaiah to do something quite radical. While other prophets are called by God, often by name, to speak and act on God’s behalf, here Isaiah volunteers. The young prophet hears God’s question, ‘Whom shall I  send, and who will go for us’? Perhaps Isaiah hears too, the longing in God’s voice and he sticks his hand up in the air, asking God to choose him.

This holy, holy, holy God is asking who, in an often broken and unjust world,

who will speak... and listen... and ‘be’, for God?

I had lunch with one of our Supernumerary ministers this week and we both recalled our ministerial training. I shared with him my memory of my college principal at Hartley Victoria College, one Rev Graham Slater. Graham loved philosophy of religion and told us we would understand it by Easter. He didn’t say which Easter. So it got to exam time. The passmark was 40 per cent. I got 41. He said to me “there young man, I knew you understood it!” I didn’t understand it, I did enough to pass the exam. There was much I didn’t get. But maybe with God that’s okay. Maybe we aren’t meant to know everything. Maybe God is not to be explained but encountered. There are those who’ve domesticated God to fit their own script. There are churches who’ve made their church the god while the living God has left the building and is at work down the road...

For John Wesley, the encounter with God led to a radical movement being born which shared Jesus with ordinary people. People and society were changed. 

For Isaiah, the encounter with God led to a sense of his inadequacy but a compulsion to serve.

And what of us? If we’ve met the living God what’s our response? Worrying about the church or placing ourselves in his hands?