Sermon

Sanctus

by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston, Scholar-in-Residence

“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts,
 heaven and earth are full of thy glory.
Glory be to thee, O Lord most High.”

Those are, of course, very familiar words, the three short lines of the Sanctus of the Mass, sung or said every time we celebrate the Eucharist.  We’re more used to “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of Power and Might.”  But whether Rite I or Rite II, the Sanctus comes straight out of today’s piece of Isaiah.

For centuries, these eight verses occupied the Old Testament spot in the readings for Trinity Sunday.  And for reasons that are not altogether clear to me, the Revised Common Lectionary has bumped the text to the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany.  In either location, however, it seems to me that Isaiah 6:1-8 begs a little reflection on the nature of God.  So what does the prophet mean by “holy?”  And who is the God that is the Lord of Hosts?  First a note on translation.

Tracing backwards from the Latin sanctus through the Greek hagios gives us the Hebrew word kaddosh, which means “otherness,” a radical separation.  So the seraphs in Isaiah’s vision are actually crying-out, “Yahweh is Kaddosh! Kaddosh! Kaddosh!”  “Yahweh is Other! Other! Other!”  This is a deity, awesome, numinous and presidential, who occupies a reality vastly different from our own.  He is attended by a pair of angelic beings who cover their faces lest they look upon his.  At the sound of their voices, the whole temple shifts on its foundations.  And Yahweh is engulfed -- like the God of Mount Sinai, who hides his face from Moses -- in a cloud of smoke.  As the hymn puts it, this is “light inaccessible hid from our eyes.”

But this deity is very different from the one we find later in Isaiah--some sixty chapters after his lips have cooled from the burning coals.  In this latter case, God says of himself:

Behold, I will extend prosperity like a river,
       and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream;
and you shall suckle; you shall be carried upon her hip,
       and dandled upon her knees.
As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you;
       and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

The God of this text is neither too great nor too marvelous:  this is a divine presence very close at hand.  And the face of this God is likened to that of an ordinary nursing mother.  You don’t have to raise your eyes too high to see Her face because you’re nestled in her bosom.  And the feminine pronoun is the right one here.  This God is not He, but She!  Luke 13:34 calls this God a hen gathering her chicks under her wings.

Now ratchet back to Genesis, Chapter 2, and the second creation story.  If Isaiah’s Lord of Hosts is at some remove, shrouded in mystery, the Yahweh of creation gets down and dirty.  He makes a little mud by spitting on some dust and molds in his hands what is called h’adama in the Hebrew, which literally means “earth-thing.”  And into this bit of clay, he breathes the spirit of life.  Then he does a little surgery on h’adama and creates sexuality, making Adam and Eve.  This is a much more intimate, more tactile Deity -- something like Isaiah’s midwife.

This God is, however, rather more parsimonious with his bounty.  The earth-thing is given only a piece of a garden, and not everything in it is freely available:  there is, for example, the fruit of that special tree they are not meant to eat.  And when they do, he throws a veritable temper tantrum in roughly twenty-six lines of Hebrew poetry:

“Cursed are you above all cattle;” he says to the snake,
       “upon your belly you shall go;
       and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.”
In pain you shall bring forth children,” he says to the woman,
       “yet your desire shall be for your husband
       and he shall rule over you.”
“In toil you shall eat of the ground,” he says to the man,
       “but it will bring forth thorns and thistles;
       you shall eat bread only by the sweat of your brow.”

Creation cursed, fertility restricted, and bounty denied.  This Lord is unpredictably volatile and prone to dark moods.  Not two full chapters into the biography of God, and it looks as if the main character in the drama –- borrowing the phrase of the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, and to put it mildly (!) –- the main character has a rich and complicated interiority.  A rich and complicated interiority.

Now, I don’t think for a minute that any of this stuff is mutually contradictory.  What I think is that no single metaphor, nor any complex of metaphors, serves fully to define the ineffable character of God.
No single revelation is exhaustive of that which is revealed.

So if we begin with the God of the Hebrew Bible we have a God first as creator; then as regulator of fertility; then author of a legal system to regulate fertile humanity; then a warrior to secure their land.  Then he’s a counselor and dispenser of wisdom; and finally a friend and lover, father and mother, wife and husband. And along the way, he’s also something of a destroyer who regrets his destruction.  This is no thinly-drawn role in a soap-opera!

And that, it occurs to me, is what the Doctrine of the Trinity is trying to say.  [I promise I’ll try not to get us stuck in the mud of doctrine, but it behooves a Christian community reflecting on God to reflect likewise on God’s triune being.]

Of course, the Doctrine of the Trinity came out of the experience of the community that centered its reality on the life of Jesus.  And they discovered that this odd man from Nazareth was a God-experience.  So clearly a God-experience that certain women gave reverence to it by washing its feet with their tears.  So clearly a God-experience that they were able to speak of him after his death only in terms of his on-going presence.

And then along came the Spirit, and that too was a God-experience.  Not perhaps so surprising as the first one, because the First Epiphany had promised them the Second.  But still, so profound an experience that they felt powerfully sustained and fundamentally renewed.

Initially, of course they didn’t have the language for any of this; they didn’t have the ideas; they had to discover everything.  They had only a set of experiences that said, It had happened.  The Messiah had come, died, and was raised; they had been “in trespass and sin,” and now they were not.  They were regenerate.  So might everyone be.  “Repent and be baptized in the name of Christ Jesus, and you will receive the Holy Ghost.”

That was the summary of the experience, and it took right on four hundred years to work out the ideas.  After much wrestling over how to interpret the experience, and how to talk about it--unhappily, many would say--in the language and stilted logic of Hellenistic Greek.  But the Doctrine of the Trinity is nothing more complicated than the admission that all our options for the experience of God are open.

Trinitarian Christians have never had trouble with the obvious vagaries of God unfolding –- as they do in the Hebrew Bible –- in endless variety.  We’ve always known that behind the two dimensional icon of God is a whole set of third--and fourth and fifth—dimensions that we haven’t even begun to see.  And when we move through life with only one set of rigidly determined images, we close ourselves off from much that is blessed.

But the really good news in discovering that the God of the Bible has a rich, complicated interiority is that you don’t have to deny your own.  The Good News is that you don’t have to go through the texts of your life editing out verses 7, 15 and 22b.  It turns out you’re much, much more in the image of your Creator than you ever thought.

“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts.”  It’s a song, really; not a statement.  In the Greek, hilarion -- literally, an ode of hilarity, an ode to joy, a song of laughter.  It was sung first ecstatically by a prophet who got high on God in a Temple full of incense. But it is our song too -- the promise that all our experiences of God are possible.  We should sing it lustily and with joyful voices.

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral