Luke 5:1-11
Isaiah 6:1-13
SERMON “Still Not Feet”
Though cats domesticated humans, the process usually works the other way around. Homo sapiens established sometimes symbiotic, sometimes exploitative relationships with countless other species of plants and animals, often modifying them through unnatural selection. It is fair to say we would not be the species we are without the enhanced nutrition made possible by settled agriculture.
We also attempt, unsuccessfully, to domesticate the holy. We project our own image on to a placeholder we call God, stuffing God into a box and making the unknowable all too much like us, assigning to the divine our worst traits, jealousy and fury.
We’ve done the same thing to angels. They were a fairly late development in pre-Rabbinic Judaism, members of the divine council that got a demotion as the tradition moved from a form of polytheism to ethical monotheism.
You might occasionally see the Archangel Michael with a sword, but generally angels are depicted as pretty, feminine in appearance, human, of course, and white in the Western European tradition. They can sometimes be found loitering at the top of Christmas trees, lurkers long before that stupid elf.
We’ve invented for angels a sort of caste system, including cherubs who are bizarrely depicted as flying infants, confused with the Cupid of Greek mythology. Seriously, if you start to think about it, it is all just a little bit weird.
Today’s text, Isaiah’s call narrative, implies angels with basically human physiology, since the angel uses tongs to carry a coal from the altar, though the two wings with which we are most familiar are replaced with six wings here, two covering their faces, two used to fly, and two covering their feet.
And as we discussed when reading from the Book of Ruth recently, these are still not feet. The ancient authors used feet as a euphemism for genitals.
Honestly though, we should just run with Isaiah’s six-winged crotch-covered angels. The prophet Ezekiel, writing from Babylon over a century later, sees cherubim that are definitely not flying infants. They are metallic and have four wings, calf’s hooves, and four faces: human, lion, ox, and eagle.
Neither the Tanakh nor the Christian Testament employs angels to keep you from stubbing your toes, or to help your team win the big game. Their role is that of divine messengers. They bring their terrifying six-winged or four-faced word to the prophets, and the prophets brief the rest of us.
And that word, the Word of God, is generally not “Swell job guys! Keep up the good work.”
Sometimes it is “Ya’ll need to shape up!” and sometimes it is “God loves you! Now shape up.” But it always requires change. “Same old, same old” is just not how God works. We know this because “same old, same old” is just not how creation works. The holy is constant creativity and change and unfolding, and we can reasonably expect that the traits we see in the created reflect the traits of the Creator.
Even if we were fully and consistently aligned with the holy, and we seldom are, there are always new challenges, new messengers showing up with a new word, though hopefully not of either cherubic variety, the terrifying quad-faced angels of Ezekiel or the flying babies, which just seems messy.
God calls, always challenging, always pushing, and some are called to speak those words of fire into the world, the coal on the lips of Isaiah, the words that become fire in the mouth of Jeremiah, the tongues of flame on the heads of the Spirit-touched.
Prophets in the Tanakh are sometimes seers, often revival preachers, occasionally miracle workers, always constructive theologians, but as Jesus reminded us last week, they are seldom loved or successful in their own context.
Elijah had to flee from the wrath of Queen Jezebel. Amos was ordered out of Israel. Jeremiah got thrown down a well.
The one truly successful prophet in the Tanakh, Jonah, doesn’t want the job, is sent to a foreign city (not even to Jews!), and when they actually accept his judgment and repent, averting catastrophe, he has a tantrum.
Angels play a role in the births of John the Baptizer and Jesus, and both Islam and Mormonism claim angelic origins, but these days angels are mostly relegated to folk religion. If you claim to have a direct message from God, announce that you see angels, you either get medicated or get your own show on the Christian Broadcast Network.
The thing is, God did not die with John of Patmos, and God is not an absentee landlord. God is still speaking, and never stopped, the song that becomes light that becomes matter, the pull of spinning galaxies, and the wiring that moves us to compassion and caring.
God’s word may not come from angels, from cherubim or seraphim, but it is still absolutely real, found in the text below the text, not the historically and culturally specific works we call scripture, but the story that unfolds within scripture of a people moving from fear to love, from tribalism to universalism, from scapegoating to agape, which is to say selfless love for their neighbors.
God is still speaking in prophets and martyrs and artists in every age. Week after week I share the inspiration I draw from my own heroes, poets and activists and preachers, from Bonhoeffer and King, Milk and Romero, Lorde and Whitman, Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh. Prophets still preach words infused with holy fire, and often pay a price for their faith and their courage.
White Nationalists have tried to co-opt the Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as they always try to co-opt victim narratives, but he is ours and always has been, directly connected to our German Reform tradition, a committed anti-racist and anti-fascist, Antifa like the Allied heroes who stormed the beach at Normandy. It was Bonhoeffer who wrote in 1933 that is was the job of the church to admonish the state, to help the victim of the state, regardless of religious affiliation, and equally important, to jam the spokes in the wheel of the state. This idea of direct action to obstruct evil would show up again in Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” inspiring generations of environmental activists to sabotage the machinery used to destroy the environment. Bonhoeffer would be murdered during the final days of the Second World War for his small role in one attempt to stop the evils of the Third Reich.
Long before United Church of Christ member Barack Obama brought his message of hope to the campaign trail, a secular Jewish transplanted from New York City to San Francisco understood his prophetic witness for justice for the queer community as a source of hope. Facing death threats, Harvey Milk sat down in his apartment in the Castro in 1977 and recorded a message to the future, which included these words:
“I ask for the movement to continue, for the movement to grow, because last week I got a phone call from Altoona, Pennsylvania, and my election gave somebody else, one more person, hope. And after all, that’s what this is all about. It’s not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power — it’s about giving those young people out there in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias, hope. You gotta give them hope.”
A little over fifteen years ago, I was ordained to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in this amazing tradition having been called as Pastor and Teacher to a local church months earlier. Not all Pastors and Teachers are called to be Preachers, but that has been part of my call all these years, trying to carry the Word across two millennia into our current context. I thought preaching the Christmas Eve service after children were slaughtered at Sandy Hook was the hardest thing I’d have to do. About that…
I cannot spend the next four years up here railing against the bold evil that has seized our nation, admonishing the state week after week. I am going to have to offer words of comfort too, just like the prophets we read in the Tanakh, words of comfort for the victims, words of comfort for the compassionate who feel overwhelmed and powerless, Samaritans who don’t even know where to start, with which victims in which ditches. I am going to have to convince you that you are not powerless, and help you find the tools and the hope to jam the spokes and monkey wrench the machinery of death. Which means I’m going to have to move past being overwhelmed myself, be moved to hope and action. We’re in this together, and we must be strategic.
For make no mistake, cutting off humanitarian aid and defunding medical research is murder. Filing a case to strip Native Americans of their voting rights is racist. I could go on, but we do not have that much time.
We are in an evil time, and if we, safe in our privilege, are going on with our lives as if nothing has happened, we too are sinners and complicit in the evil. We must, as much as we are able, disentangle ourselves from the murderous machinery of the sociopathic oligarchs.
In a terrible time, the Holy asks once again, “Who shall I send?”
Look around. It’s just us.
Amen.