Who's Calling?

Isaiah 6:1-8
Trinity Sunday
May 31, 2026
William G. Carter

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said, "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.

 

And I said, "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!" Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said, "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out." Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send me!"

Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night. We sang those words last week at the end of our confirmation service. It’s a favorite hymn, to be sure. Whenever we sing it, it is certain to get a positive response. The tune is singable; the words are heart-felt. If you look around, somebody is probably wiping away a tear or two. Here I am, Lord.

When you heard the scripture text, you probably noticed the words of that song are lifted right out of our Bible. Isaiah of Jerusalem remembers the voice of God calling him to his life’s work. God is looking for the right person to speak up, the right person to speak out, the right person to address the people of Judah in troubling times. Who will it be? Who will speak up for God? And Isaiah declares, “Here I am, Lord.”  

That’s about all most of us know about the prophet Isaiah: he responds affirmatively to God’s Voice. That, of course, is the punchline of the story. It’s right up there with God speaking to Moses out of a burning bush, “Go to Pharoah, tell him to let my people go.” Or Jesus, walking along the shore of the sea of Galilee and calling out to some fishermen, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

The plot of each story goes the same way. God says, “I need to get something done.” The heroic Bible character says, “OK, I will do it.” The rest of us cheer, breathe a sigh of relief, and figure “mission accomplished.” Somebody out there is doing what God needs to get done. In other words, it’s not a story for the rest of us; it’s about some specialist who said “yes” to the Lord a long, long time ago.

Yet if you were listening to this story, you heard a lot more going on in this story. In the end, the ancient prophet says, “OK, God, sign me up.” But that’s merely the conclusion, and a provisional conclusion at that. The story becomes a lot more interesting the deeper we dig in.

So here are three details to notice: the seraphs, the unclean lips, the burning coal.

First, the seraph. One morning, one of our office volunteers was proofreading the worship bulletin before it was printed. I walked through to grab a donut, she looked up, and said, “What’s a seraph?” What? “A seraph – the Bible passage says there were seraphs. What are they?” I said, “I don’t know; I don’t think I’ve ever met one, but they are kind of a super angel.” She looked at me with a most curious gaze.

And then I said, “The bigger question is, what are they doing in the Temple?” And she looked really confused.

The seraphs, or as they are sometimes called “seraphim,” are only mentioned here as angelic beings. They have three pairs of wings: to fly, to cover themselves in modesty, and to cover their faces in reverence. There are texts outside the Bible that speak about different orders of angels, although the Bible itself doesn’t spend a lot of energy getting distracted by angels. Suffice it to say, the seraphim are the ones closest to God.

This satisfied our Thursday volunteer, but I pressed the other question: what are they doing in the Temple? And that’s a trick question. It has to do with King Uzziah, who is mentioned rather quickly and dismissed.

Here is the backstory. King Uzziah began as a wonderful king. Given the sorry list of Israel’s terrible kings, he showed a lot of promise. Uzziah ruled for 52 years. He chased out the Philistines, defended the borders, and built up the economy. In the words of the Bible’s greatest compliment, “he learned the fear of the Lord.”[1]

That is, until he got a little big for his britches. Uzziah believed that, since he was the king, and things were going well, that he would also act as if he was a priest. He grabbed the incense pot, started smoking up a little frankincense, and made his way to the high altar. It was a desecration, an abomination, a really bad move. Uzziah was stopped in his tracks by the real high priest and eighty other priests, all described as “men of valor.”

An argument broke out. Uzziah figured he was the king, and kings can do whatever they want. The priests said, “Oh no, no, no.” And just when Uzziah started getting huffy, leprosy broke out all over his face. They hustled him out of the temple, now doubly desecrated. He had to live alone in seclusion. He could still call himself the king, but nobody was going to go near him or pay any further attention to him. He had leprosy until the day he died, and all the moralists said, “That’s what you get when you get too big for your britches. Especially in the temple.”

Meanwhile, the Temple was still desecrated – and in the year Uzziah died, God showed up. It was big. Really big. Even the seraphim were there. Nobody had ever seen one, I figure, but Isaiah knew what a seraph was when he saw one. Their voices were thunderous: HOLY, HOLY, HOLY. The foundations are shaking; the house is filled with smoke.

And what are the seraphim doing there, in a desecrated Temple? They are announcing the holiness of God, even there, especially there. There is no distinction between sacred and secular because God is there – so it’s sacred.

Just let that sink in. Wherever God is present, it is HOLY, HOLY, HOLY. Whenever, wherever. The implications are staggering. Someone puts it this way.

One of the bad habits we pick up early in our lives is separating things and people into secular and sacred. We assume the secular is what we are more or less in charge of: our jobs, our entertainment, our government, our social relations. The sacred is what God is charge of: worship and the Bible, heaven and hell, church and prayers. We then contrive to set aside a sacred place of God, designed, we say, to honor God but really intended to keep God in his place, leaving us free to have the final say about everything else that goes on.

 

Prophets will have none of this. They contend that everything, absolutely everything, takes place on sacred ground. God has something to say about every aspect of our lives: the way we feel and act in the so-called privacy of our homes, the way we make our money and the way we spend it, the politics we embrace, the ways we fight, the catastrophes we endure, the people we hurt, and the people we help. Nothing is hidden from the scrutiny of God. Nothing is exempt from the rule of God. Nothing escapes the purposes of God. Holy, holy, holy.[2]

So, Isaiah says, “Woe is me! I have unclean lips. I live among people of unclean lips.” In the presence of a Holy God, the only God there is, we are toast. (That’s my translation.) What the prophet is missing is the same thing he sees - the seraphs are in the same room with him, the same filthy room. God is there, too, a pure Holy God in the midst of a desecrated Temple. His first, only, response is, “There isn’t room here for the likes of me, and the likes of us.” We are people of “unclean lips.”

Again, that’s an interesting Bible phrase. Even though it’s an ancient phrase, you can probably surmise what it means. It has something to do with lips, but it reveals something else.

Some years back, a retired high school English teacher wrote a letter to one of our presidents about gun violence in the schools. She received a form letter back from the White House. The grammar was atrocious. There were redundancies, incorrect capitalizations, and lack of clarity in the reasoning. So, she corrected the letter in purple ink and sent it back to Washington.

USA Today reported the story on a slow news day.[3] You might not think that a retired teacher correcting a letter written at a fourth-grade level would be a big deal, but you should have seen the online comments and the criticisms of what she did: they were a mile long. Critics pounced on her in print. They denounced her as  “stupid.” When battle lines formed, still in print, each side started calling the other “stupid” as well. Alas, we live among a people of “unclean lips.”

You see, “unclean lips” reveal a filthy heart. That’s the sense of the Biblical phrase. In one of the Psalms, there is a complaint lodged against a person with dirty heart and lips: “Your tongue is like a sharp razor, you worker of treachery. You love evil more than good and lying more than speaking the truth. You love all words that devour, O deceitful tongue!”[4]

Isaiah discovers he stands in the presence of a Holy God. What does this reveal? That he is surrounded by people of impure speech, destructive insults, lying impulses, and forked tongues. And he confesses that he is one of them, too. Unclean lips, indeed.

That brings us to the great “nevertheless,” something the Bible continues to off. God is announced in the Temple by the seraphim. Isaiah knows he and the people are broken and unworthy. So God bridges the gap. In a highly symbolic act, one of the seraphs flies to the altar of the Temple, picks up a burning coal with a pair of tongs, and touches the prophet’s unclean lips.

Then the pronouncement is given. Your guilt is chased away. Your sin is over and done. The God who is already present in the desecrated temple is able to reach all the desecrated people. There are mercy and forgiveness for all who can accept it. And for all who can accept it, there is work to do.

It’s a terrific text, a huge story. Ultimately it is a story that models how God calls each of us to participate in his purposes for the world. We discover God is here: maybe it’s a holy moment, a story, a sermon, or even somebody’s Voice calling us in the night.

Then, we realize we are not worthy. The task is too big. We don’t know enough. We don’t have the skills. And we are not pure enough, much less qualified. It’s going to take more than we have to offer.

Then, somehow God gets through. Or continues to stay after us. Or might even do something dramatic to get our attention – and we discover this is why we are here. This is our purpose. This is what we need to do.

Like that moment when a twenty-something child called her father one afternoon. The phone call was awkward, seemingly aimless. Then she blurted it out, “Dad, what’s a calling?” Not your everyday question! Somehow, he had the presence of mind to respond, “Honey, it’s when we discover why we are here, right now, in this moment, in this place. And the calling can come at every season of our lives.” Because we live out our lives on Holy Ground. There is good work for each of us to do.

The Bible says it this way: “Where can I flee your presence, O Lord?”[5] Wherever I go, you are already there. The conclusion is that all ground is Holy Ground. And God gives us something to do, because holiness is not something to be bottled like perfume so we can spritz a little bit of it here and there. Holiness is something to be lived – out in the world as well as in the Temple. Holiness is the clear and abiding sense that God is here, with us and among us, and that the daily work we do is part of God’s purposes for the world.

So, enjoy this moment in this small-town temple. Consider what God invites you to do, and who God invites you to be. Life is a precious gift. The glory of the seraphim is all around us. And whether the Voice comes in thunderous noise or deep silence, God is calling you.

What do you think he wants you to do?

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] 2 Chronicles 26:5.

[2] Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 2017) p. 117

[3] USA Today, “Teacher corrects White House letter with ‘many silly mistakes,’ 26 May 2018 (online at https://usat.ly/2sakbA3)

[4] Psalm 52:2-4.

[5] Psalm 139:7-12.