In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne, the edges of his robe filling the temple. Winged creatures were stationed around him. Each had six wings: with two they veiled their faces, with two their feet, and with two they flew about. They shouted to each other, saying:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of heavenly forces!

All the earth is filled with God’s glory!”

The doorframe shook at the sound of their shouting, and the house was filled with smoke.

I said, “Mourn for me; I’m ruined! I’m a man with unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean lips. Yet I’ve seen the king, the Lord of heavenly forces!”

Then one of the winged creatures flew to me, holding a glowing coal that he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips. Your guilt has departed, and your sin is removed.”

Then I heard the Lord’s voice saying, “Whom should I send, and who will go for us?”

I said, “I’m here; send me.”

On Memorial Day weekends I will sometimes to go to the computer, and do something macabre, or at least macabre to some, though I think of it as my attempt to remember the ravages of war, to remember that so many young men and women in the armed forces of every country were cut off and cut down in the very prime of their lives, times when they should have had no more worries than who they were going to the dance with on Saturday night. We just forget that most of these young men were not career soldiers, men in their late twenties or thirties but boys ages 18, 19, 20. I look at their faces, handsome and dressed in their dress blues, or even sprawled dead in some foreign country they had only just recently learned the name of, and you can see the summer in their faces, the summer in their bodies, as the writer Andrew Holleran says of the young, life still in its potential, youth at its most glorious. And yet it is a summer, a summer that becomes suddenly stilled, a horrifying moment, when they were just gone, gone from their mothers and father’s arms forever. And I don’t just do this macabre search with only the American men we Americans have lost to war, but I search out the faces of Korean, German, Vietnamese faces, so that I can remember the other mothers and fathers who never saw their children again. Whatever lofty principles we fought for, that we were willing do die for, many of them worth dying for, perhaps, the other side of those principles is all these lives cut short, all those summers cut short, and it’s simply a damned shame and damned waste of life, no matter how good the principle, no matter how just the cause – and damned, not of God, is the right word in this case. The faces of people I will never know remind of that truth, that there is no real glory in war – but just pain and grief and love cut down too early and too cruelly.

But, in truth, human faces have always fascinated me, to the point that I even find myself preferring art with human faces – paintings of pastoral settings with no human faces, or beautiful photographs such as the ones done by Ansel Adams simply do not interest me, or at least don’t interest me enough that I would put them up on my walls at home. I was waiting in the hallways of the hospital this week, and they had some beautiful reproductions of nature paintings – but it was the old Norman Rockwell paintings that caught my attention, and his wonderful ability to capture the folly and beauty of human life, and human faces. To quote a cliché, they say that faces are a mirror to the soul, though others have said they it was only the eyes, but nonetheless that cliche points us to the fact we glean so much of what people are going through in their lives, their joys or pains, their crucifixions or resurrections, all of particular selves just shows up in their faces, even if we don’t express these hurts explicitly. A pain, a hurt, shut away behind a stoic face eventually shows up in the face nonetheless – the masks we wear to hide eventually subsume the mask, and it ends up showing up, we eventually reveal our joy, our pain, our despair, our hope, despite our best efforts not to do so. Faces are a revelation, their beauty, their ugliness, their youth, their wrinkles, all of it, and they divulge us to others, and our reactions to other faces reveals who we are, showing us our prejudices, our desires, our hopes, our compassion, our cruelty – but, at their best, of course, they also reveal the marks of their Maker, the very face of the living God.

And so today we have a moment where the Divine Face is shown to brother Isaiah centuries ago, though it must be noted that Isaiah, or the writer of this portion of Isaiah, speaks in the first person and yet he never tells us what the face of God actually looks like. What’s odd is that he gives us a description of everything else going around God in this throne room setting – but never, ever does he say that God looks like this or that, exploding, in a way, the patriarchal and racist image of God as a white bearded male figure we’ve been fed by in our culture. In the Bible, we are often told that no one has seen the face of God, including even Moses, who only saw God’s backside, because the glory of God’s face was believed to be too much, too much for humans to handle, and would likely kill those saw it. And yet, here is Isaiah, seeing the face of the Divine, and living to tell the tale, though with no details – mystery is mystery and remains so, even in this moment of revelation. Really, this whole text is a call story, of Isaiah’s call to speak God’s words after a time of political upheaval in Israel, but I don’t want to focus so much on that part of the story as I do the images found in this divine throne room itself. The whole thing is startling, in many ways, and when you look deeper into the Hebrew, it even gets weirder because, in describing the creatures found there, the word for “feet” is usually euphemism for male genitalia in the Bible, and the word “hem” here is sometimes used in other parts of the Bible as euphemism for “uncovered genitalia.” See, I told you it got a bit weird – but that is probably the patriarchy showing up, an expression of the writer’s early belief that males rule, thus God must be male or male like, though again, Isaiah doesn’t describe a male face. But what’s not surprising really is that when we encounter God face to face, everything is truly uncovered, including ourselves, and that is what Isaiah is experiencing in this text. To be in the presence of the fully revealed God caused a revelation in Isaiah himself – and that revelation, that uncovering, so to speak, was that, having seen God’s face, he found himself so unworthy of being God’s voice to the people. This encounter with God’s face unmasks Isaiah, strips him naked and he seems himself fully and he does not like what he sees – “he is a man with unclean lips, he is ruined,” he cries out, simply for having seen the unseen God, a showing and a seeing that has unmasked Isaiah’s image of himself. Ever graceful, God purifies his lips with that symbolic red hot coal, cleaning his lips, sterilizing them, really, so that he can indeed be God’s voice to Israel.

The face of God reveals nothing and everything to Isaiah, to us, and perhaps the same can be said of our faces with each other, though I agree with Emmanuel Levinas, the Jewish philosopher and theologian, who has said that the human face is the borrowed presence of God – and that the human face is where traces of divinity, of God, are ultimately to be found. You’ve heard me speak of Levinas in past sermons, he who was trained as a philosopher, but when World War II began, he joined the French army, eventually being captured at the beginning of the war. Though he was a Jew, he wasn’t sent to the concentration camps, but was instead was treated as a prisoner of war. Still he saw, he saw the brutality of the Nazi treatment of his fellow Jews in another camp, a concentration camp that was nearby his own POW camp. After the war, he sought some way to find a universal ethic – and he found it in the human face. Levinas argued that it wasn’t the sameness of human faces that should drive our ethics, that is, we shouldn’t do the right thing by others because we are all the same, that our commonality shouldn’t be the foundation of ethics, that human sameness shouldn’t be what compels us to be ethical and humane with each other. Instead, Levinas argues that it is the differences in those faces that should invite us to do the right thing – and that the foundation of ethics is resisting the temptation to kill, destroy, eliminate those who are not the same as us - we ought to resist that temptation to kill what is different from us, to resist giving priority to only our experience, only our understandings, and only the “faces” that look like our face, so to speak. Each human face is the borrowed presence of God, and thus, indeed, “Thou shall not kill the other, kill that which is not me, those who are not us, because to do so is to wreck violence on the borrowed face of God. Resist the temptation to erase that which is not me, not us, because in trying to eliminate those who are not me, the other, like the Nazis tried to do with the Jews of Europe, we are actually trying to erase the presence of God in this world, found in the human face, the God who passes by us in that human face, the borrowed presence of God found in every human face. God is not found in the sameness of things, of people, but God is found in their differences – divinity is found in diversity, not uniformity. The root of bigotry, prejudice, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism, war even, is a desire for sameness, a desire to dictate uniformity in the world, to make all things, all people the same, and to erase all differences. We must resist that demonic pull to erase difference because the many different kinds of human faces, in all their diversity, are the borrowed presence of a God who seems to be deeply interested and frankly, invested in variety and not similarity – one need only look at the diverse world God created to see that truth on full display. And the witness of Jewish and Christian Scriptures is to the continual unfolding, revealing of God, in new and different ways, from a veiled face, to an unveiled face, to a covenant reserved for the few, to a covenant given to all of humankind, from one to many, from Moses to Isaiah to Jesus, from uniformity to diversity. God seems to love different faces, different ways of being, different ways of loving, and if so, perhaps we should love that diversity as well.

And that brings us to the diversity of faces we find in that troublesome, beguiling, doctrine we Christians call the Trinity. As I’ve stated in the past, I believe what the Trinity says, that God manifests, God reveals God’s own self in the Father, the Mother, the Creator, and God reveals God’s own self in the Christ, the man from Nazareth, and that God reveals God’s own self in the Spirit, the God within us, the Divinity we bear within us. But I personally think it is a doctrine of the church, not of the Christians scriptures, though I don’t think it ultimately conflicts with those same Scriptures. Even our text today, which is used every three years for Trinity Sunday, is an effort by some to argue for the Trinity’s Scriptural basis, but, frankly, I’m not buying what they are selling. Some point to the Holy, Holy, Holy in the text, a refrain often called the Sanctus, for proof of the Trinity’s presence even in the staunchly monotheistic Old Testament, but, again, that seems to stretch the text a bit. And others will point to the plural found in the words “Whom should I send, and who will go for us?” but that is more likely God using the plural in the context of the heavenly court, the kingly throne room scenes like this one, the king speaking for the people, so to speak. Feel free to disagree with me about its Scriptural bases, but that does not mean I don’t believe the Trinity as a doctrine points to something profoundly true. In fact, I think the early Christians who came up with this way of speaking of God were simply trying to explain the ways that God actually shows up in our lives, the many diverse faces that God wears when She encounters us in the real world. The Trinity as an idea, as a doctrine, is simply trying to name what we know is true – God shows up in such surprising moments and in such surprising ways, and in such surprising faces. And it’s interesting that Isaiah’s experience of the Divine in this scene, this experience of seeing God’s face and then suddenly him realizing the truth of who he really is, a man unworthy of even the calling he has been tasked with, I think we can have that experience with others, we can see the face of God in others and find ourselves suddenly realizing something about ourselves that we had never quite seen before. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve witnessed the face of God in you, in others, and simply been humbled by your goodness, your generosity, your patience, all of it. The primary way we encounter the Divine is through each other, and that is why Christian community exists, why the Church exists, to tell the Good News of God’s encounter with the world through the Christ, and God’s encounter with us, we who have chosen to walk together in the community of the church, the one place in most of our lives where we are told over and over to look for the face of God in the face of your sister brother and sister, the one sitting right next to you, and in strangers and friends and enemies outside these walls.

So, my invitation to you during my absence this summer is to look for God for everywhere, just seek God’s face, and do it through the faces of human others, your encounter with human other. I think I’ve shared this with you in the past, but one of my great teachers was also probably the most difficult church member I’ve ever pastored. It’s a long story, but Jackie and I were like oil and water, and that is unusual for me – I think one of my gifts is that I can get along with about anyone – but that wasn’t the case with her. Jackie was a constant thorn in my side, complaining constantly about me, about what I did or didn’t do to her or for her, and though we eventually sadly learned much later that some of her behavior was likely due an undetected hormone base cancer, something we and I didn’t know it at that time. I have to tell you, though, that no one has ever, ever taught me more about himself than sister Jackie did – she was my great teacher, and I think God used her as a way of teaching me about all the shadow and anger I can sometimes manifest, the ugly parts of myself I don’t want to look at within myself – she uncovered me to myself, and that was a great gift. And I think I did the same for her in our encounters with each other – she too was unmasked to herself. Jackie is now in God’s arms now, having passed away over some 15 years ago, but she was the face of God to me, in whose presence I was unraveled and unmasked and revealed to be sometimes unkind and impatient – but that is what you get when you see God face to face. When the pupil is ready, the master will appear, as the Buddhist saying goes. I invite you to do the same this summer – prepare your eyes so that when the Master appears, you will recognize her, you will recognize him, one of the many faces of God that may unravel, may unmask you to yourself. But the unraveling that happens when we see God face to face, when we stand before the borrowed presence of God in each other, well, there is just a good gift in that moment, and that is we get to see what God sees, and to know this most important of truths, to know it in our bones: God loves, still loves us, unconditionally, after having been unmasked by God. Nothing will change our lives more than knowing that deep truth in our own bones. Amen.