Isaiah's vocation is our vocation

Isaiah 6 is a pretty famous chapter – Isaiah’s commissioning. First, Isaiah is taken in a dream to “go meet his maker” so to speak. When confronted with God, he is overwhelmed by not His greatness or Isaiah’s own wickedness, but by the difference between the two. Having witnessed the holiness of the one he was to converse with, he describes his own situation, probably out of pure shock. Hearing this proclamation of wretchedness, and angel is sent to burn his lips with a fresh coal, searing the sin out of him. And then the most well known of the verses in the periscope: “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!’”

Now – and I don’t know about you – but if I was mystically taken to see a purely Holy being, had my wretchedness not only acknowledged but then proclaimed (by my own lips, nonetheless), had an angel sear my lips with a flaming coal fresh from an alter to the Holy thing, and then hear the Holy beast demand a servant, I know I would be in a stupor rattling enough that I too would say “Uh, me?”

And I think the maker of humans knows this about them: that if they’re rattled by the presence of that which they are reverent towards, they will do whatever their object of worship desires. So, as if to test him and see if he’ll actually follow through, he demands a proclamation from this newfound servant to all of his friends and family. Let us review what God wants of Isaiah, shall we?

“Go and tell this to the people: ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’”

Ok, pause, let us recap: Crazy, God-meeting, life-altering experience; followed by a vocation to proclaim something like this: “You don’t understand me, and you never will, so tell them to stop trying so darn hard. You will never completely have me figured out, or an orthodoxy so perfectly crafted by you all that I will be completely contained within it. This guy won’t be around for a couple of millennia, but don’t Heisenberg the situation to fit what you’ve conceived of as “me” in it. Why don’t you just let the actual Me handle it? You’re in good hands!”

Now, granted, God didn’t literally say everything I just put in His mouth, so don’t take it as doctrine either. I think that God was simply telling Israel something that is completely pertinent today: “If I’m small enough to fit in your flawed heads; I’m not going to be big enough to ravage your hearts.”

Which is why God didn’t send a book or words; he sent the Word. He sent a person so that we would finally see that he was a little more complicated than already confusing and complicated stories and prophecies.

And at the same time as all of this, however, let’s examine what Buechner has to say about life:

“Life can be thought of as an alphabet by which God graciously makes known his presence and purpose and power among us. Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left up to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure, but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves.”

And hence my interpretation of Isaiah’s vocation. It means what it means to me through my life which is why you have every right – nay, privilege – to disagree and refute it because what God says to me may be different from that which He needs from and for you. Reading the Bible has less to do with adultly reading a tome, than it does with – like a child – having it read to you by the Spirit that works in us all, placing vowels as it sees fit. His proclamation that he wants Isaiah to make says the same thing as Buechner: “Be ever hearing, but never understanding.” Always seek to be attentive to the alphabet; God will help you fill in the vowels.

And in the same fashion, when Taoist author Deng Ming Dao talks of devotion he says that “our determination will build momentum.” If our devotion is to love God, or more to it, to let Him love us then our determination will fill in the vowels for us. And if we’re not careful enough to slow life down and take a look, we will completely bypass the vowels from our sheer momentum. Deng also says that “if our paths and our personalities are completely unified, then there is no distinction between the outer world, and the inner one. Nothing is faraway anymore, nothing is not open to us. That is why the world is like a single point; so strong is devotion that there is nothing that is not part of it.”

Deng’s words remind me of L’Engle’s on ontological living, or Tournier’s on the authenticity of personages. If we accept ourselves in our ontological state (like Isaiah before the Lord) then we can begin to simply live rather than try to be this thing we are not, causing ourselves to try to understand the un-understandable. When we accept our states: our persons: our ontology then we can begin to freely live in the alphabet of grace, proclaiming the vowels that are revealed to us rather than first seeking the vowels, and then trying to build a false life (alphabet) around them.