I wonder what you expect will happen when you come to church? You probably look forward to meeting friends and (in normal times) singing hymns; you will of course listen attentively to the sermon and join in with the prayers. By the end of the service you will hope to have been encouraged and enthused, ready to serve God for another week. But I doubt if you expect anything dramatic to happen, except perhaps someone being taken ill (which, sadly, does happen), the Minister knocking over the flowers or the video projector catching fire!

I don’t think that Isaiah ben Amoz was expecting anything unusual to happen when he went up to the Temple that day in about 740 BC. Although he wasn’t a priest, he was a frequent visitor to the holy building, familiar with the religious ceremonies and rituals of ancient Israel. His worship was regular and ordered, the basic rhythm of his daily life. But on this occasion, Isaiah was changed for ever. For he went into the Temple as a member of the royal family – a first cousin of the former king, no less! – a respected aristocrat within Jewish society. But he came out as a prophet, humbled and convinced that God had called him. Isaiah’s worship had transformed him: for in the Temple he had encountered the grandeur and power of the living God.

These were troubled times for Israel. It was under constant threat from its powerful neighbours; indeed, much of its territory had already been overrun with only the small kingdom of Judah staying in Jewish hands. For half a century this had been reigned over by one of its greatest kings, Uzziah or Azariah, who had fortified Jerusalem, reorganised the army and conquered both the Philistines and the Arabians. However, his reign had ended tragically when he was stricken with leprosy: according to the book of Chronicles this was because he over-reached himself and forced his way into the temple to burn incense, which only the priests were allowed to do. It was while Uzziah was there that leprosy appeared on his forehead – I suspect it may have actually been some kind of stress-related eczema. He was driven from the Temple and forced to live in virtual isolation for the rest of his life. The government was turned over to his son Jotham who became king in his own right shortly before Isaiah’s own Temple visit.

All this means that the reference to “the year that king Uzziah died”; does more than give us a date for Isaiah’s experience. For it puts him in a similar situation to a British man going to church on September 10^th 1939, a week after the Second World War was declared; or to an American at worship on September 16^th 2001, the first Sunday after the devastating attack on the Twin Towers; or to us nervously meeting on March 15^th last year, as Covid began to grip the land and lockdown loomed. Everyone in Judah would have been living with uncertainty and be full of questions. But things went further for Isaiah, as a first cousin of the late king, possibly brought up in the royal palace and living at the heart of Hebrew politics. For he was both anxious and bereaved; to him, the situation was personal. While I’m not in any way suggesting that his vision was the result of his anxieties and fears, I’m not surprised that this was moment when God met him.

So what happened that day? Well, it was certainly wasn’t “worship as usual”! For “I saw the Lord”, says Isaiah, “sitting on a throne, high and raised up, with his divine robes filling the temple” – an immense and awesome vision of a divine ruler. And that’s not all that he sees: there are also heavenly beings that he calls “seraphs” attending this Lord. These creatures are frankly terrifying: they each have six wings: two hiding their faces, two hiding their feet, and two for flight. It seems that the name “seraph” comes from a root which means “fiery” or “burning”, and Isaiah’s creatures fit into a long middle-eastern tradition of great flaming monsters who lived in heaven and were poised to come in terrible destructive wrath – a truly frightening prospect. But things are different here, for these seraphim serve the one Lord, flying around and above him on missions of service and praise. And perhaps they hide their faces as a gesture of mercy to Isaiah, for a human would never be able to survive even a glimpse of their grotesque countenances. It’s no wonder that Isaiah recoils and cries, “I am doomed! I am a man of sin, and I have seen God himself!”

One commentator on this passage has said that we can’t possibly understand it in any literal way; that we must regard it as poetry or a dream sequence. You may be thinking the same; and, of course, it’s impossible to gauge precisely what’s happening when someone has a vision. Nevertheless, this same sceptical writer continues: “Isaiah was aware of a Power greater than that of his earthly king; and this experience was Awe-filling”. For his whole religion and life were being shaken to their foundations. All his privileges meant nothing, his best speeches were going up in smoke. He was experiencing himself as lost, a man whose lips were dirty with false talk and who was living among a people with equally lying lips. For now he had seen the King of Truth, the Master of all messengers of truth; that was devastating. We must ask whether our own worship has lost this sense of awe and astonishment before the Almighty, the “mysterium tremendum”, and replaced it by a something far more casual and mundane. I suspect that it has – in which case we’re surely failing to do him justice!

You all know what happens next in Isaiah’s dramatic vision: how he sees one of the seraphim using a pair of tongs to grab a live coal from the altar fires. He must have wondered what was going on and become even more terror-stricken as the seraph approaches him with the hot coal: what is going to happen? The answer is soon given: the seraph touches Isaiah’s lip lightly with the coal (Did it hurt? We’re not told; but a heifer feels pain when a branding-iron is used on its skin, and our lips are far more delicate). The seraph then announces, “Listen! With this God purges your sin and covers your guilt: you are free!” Isaiah can hardly believe his ears.

So what’s going on here? Again, we know already: Isaiah is about to be called by God to be a prophet. He hears the God’s voice saying, “Who will we send, who will go for us?” Like Saul of Tarsus, spread-eagled on the Damascus Road by an overwhelming vision of Jesus, there is no way he is going to say “not me”. For Isaiah has been made clean by God, purified by fire, and so is able to hear him. But there is more: his commission is to take that divine voice into the world. It is highly symbolic that the burning coal appeared to touch Isaiah’s lips; for it is clearly these, rather than his hands or feet, which will be the principal tool of his trade. His ecstatic vision hasn’t been an end in itself; rather it has prepared him to hear God’s words and to proclaim them to the people. As God goes on to say in the later verses of this chapter, that task will not be an easy one.

The reason, of course, that we’re looking at this passage today, Trinity Sunday, is because of that thrice repeated word, “Holy” chanted by the seraphim. That phrase, called the “kedushah” has been a central part of Jewish liturgy for many centuries. It was certainly being used in Jesus’ time and 500 years earlier during the Babylonian captivity; it is still used today and, indeed, its words are regarded as so sacred that the congregation must stand to say them. It’s even possible that Isaiah himself was familiar with this ascription of praise as part of regular worship in the Temple. The same words – known in Greek as the “trisagion” – also come in John’s vision of heavenly worship in the book of Revelation. And later they became an established form of Christian liturgy, usually translated into Latin: “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth; pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua”.

As you probably know, the word “holy” means “to separate” or “to set something apart”; when applied to God it makes us realise that God is totally “other” to us in his greatness and that he is completely cut off or separate from everything that is sinful and evil; in fact, to say that God is holy means there is no trace of evil in his character and that he relentlessly seeks or even demands virtue in those who follow and worship him. In the Old Testament – and in the New Testament in both the book of Revelation and the story of Jesus’ transfiguration – divine holiness results in awe and fear; as the terror-stricken villagers of Beth-Shemesh say in 1 Samuel 6:20: “Who is able to stand before the Lord, the Holy God?” It is therefore no surprise to read that Isaiah falls to the ground when he hears this cry of “Holy, holy, holy”, each repetition underlining and emphasising what has gone before. In this encounter with God’s absolute holiness, the prophet can do no other.

But is there more? Is there any hint here of the Trinity that Christians talk about and try to understand, of one God in the three persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit? It would be nice to think that there is, both in that threefold cry of “Holy” and in that intriguing final question, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”. Personally I think we must be careful not to read too much into those phrases, which can be read in several ways. For although we do meet an overwhelmingly mighty and awesome God, we get little sense of his compassion and love, just a little of his salvation, and none at all of his active Spirit. There is no story here of a Suffering Servant being sent to redeem the world, no promise of God pouring out his Spirit on people of every nation. Those themes do appear later in the book of Isaiah, in sections which some say were written by other authors and which have a very different “feel” to them. But if we’re hunting for Old Testament evidence of the Trinity, I don’t think that this is the place we’ll find it.

But this story does give us an amazing vision of God, one which most of us will never experience but which we can certainly imagine as we reflect on the passage. And what comes through very clearly is this: that true worship is an encounter with God which should propel us out into the world to serve him. I believe that it actually has little to do with us going home feeling happier or more fulfilled than when we came. But it has a great deal to do with hearing God’s voice of call or commission: at the end of every service we do not merely ‘return’ into the world, we are sent out into it by our Lord.

If Isaiah had known what was going to happen that day, he might never have gone to the Temple and his life would have kept following its normal, predictable course. But he did go, and he met with God in a majestic, traumatic, life-changing way. His story shows us that worship must never be an end in itself, and that even the greatest of religious experiences merely prepares us for the costly and even discouraging service of God in the “real world”. “Holy, holy, holy”, cried the seraphim. We cry, “Worship, mission and service” as well.