Alan Gregory, Principal of St Augustine’s College of Theology, returns with the wisdom and warmth listeners love. This Advent, he draws on the prophet Isaiah to show how God surprises us in life-changing ways.

In episode 2, ‘Isaiah’, you’ll hear how holiness meets human frailty, and why Isaiah’s ‘Woe is me’ still speaks today. You’ll also hear how God helps us face life with courage and love.

Alan also explores the heartbreak in Isaiah’s calling and the quiet hope that leads us to Christ. Through visions of smoke, shaking thresholds, and God’s grief, he invites you to notice Christ’s presence in the unexpected this Advent.

If you’ve ever longed to see God amid noise, fear, or doubt, this episode is for you.

Subscribe now so you never miss an episode.

Learn more about theology study in London and Kent:

http://staugustinescollege.ac.uk

Follow St Augustine’s College of Theology:

Instagram: (http://www.instagram.com/staugustinescollegeoftheology/)

YouTube: (http://www.youtube.com/@staugustinescollegeoftheol9801/)

Isaiah 6.1-9.

In the year that King Isaiah died, I saw the Lord sitting

upon a throne high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.

Above him stood the Serafin.

Each had six wings.

With two, he covered his face and with two, he covered his

feet, and with two he flew.

And one called to another and said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory.

And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called,

and the house was filled with smoke, and I said, woe is me, for I'm lost.

For I'm a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people

of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.

Then flew one of the seraphim to me, having in his hand a burning coal, which

he had taken with tongs from the altar.

And he touched my mouth and said, behold, this has touched your lips.

Your guilt is taken away and your sin forgiven.

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, whom shall I send and who will go for us?

Then I said, here am I. Send me.

And he said, go and say to this people, hear and hear, but do not understand.

See and see, but do not perceive.

In the year that King Isaiah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and

lifted up and his train filled the temple.

God appears in the temple of Jerusalem, and transforms that temple into a

throne room where God is surrounded by glorious attendance, the seraphim,

and sits high upon his throne.

The description gives the reader no encouragement to fill in

this picture, to imagine the face of God or his seated form.

Such detail as is given leads our imaginations away from the throne to the

train of God's robe filling the temple.

If we should grumble or strive for more clarity, we'd only take the way

of idolatry, where we don't want to go.

Then when the foundations shake at the voices of the seraphim, the

vision gets still more obscure, as everything the prophet sees dissolves

in smoke, through which a serafin will later appear with a burning coal.

This passage, then, intimates the unthinkable God above.

The God before all, and beyond all.

The God imagined us beyond any imagining.

God is, but he is with a being beyond any being we know or could conceive.

Yet this is not all.

If the vision gives us no details to satisfy our curious imaginations,

the passage does begin with a startlingly precise and exact detail

in the year that King Isaiah died.

The Lord of an inconceivable majesty who holds time and space in his

hand, whom nothing confines, meets his prophet in time, an exact time.

One you can put in the annals.

Date your lives around.

Remember when Rebecca had the twins and Joshua fell off his camel?

That was the month old as Isaiah popped his clogs.

One word names the living God of Isaiah's vision.

It is the word Holy.

Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts.

Holy is an odd word because only God is holy, which means that

holiness names the godness of God.

What makes God, God?

Sure, we talk about holy places, holy men and women, holy communion and holy water.

But such things are holy only to the extent God makes them so.

Only God is holy.

Only God can make holy.

That doesn't help us much.

We think we know what good means or wise means, though really we flatter ourselves,

but holy brings us to head scratching.

Perhaps we can point in roughly the right direction to claim no more.

We have a clue, in Isaiah's immediate reaction to the vision of God.

He says, woe is me for I'm lost, for I'm a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in

the midst of a people of unclean lips.

Isaiah confesses uncleanness, or impurity.

Before the glory of God,

Isaiah and Israel appear as manifestly impure.

Impurity though is not a term we use very often in talking

about ourselves before God.

Sinful maybe, but impure seems a bit impersonal and has unhelpful

associations with quite un-Christian attitudes to sex, as tainting or dirty.

What's behind the symbol of purity though?

Purity comes close to one sense of the word integrity, or wholeness.

God's purity, his holiness is, we might say, his entire integrity.

No flaw, no failing, no loss of being, no division, no lack, no

double mindedness, no falling away from the singleness of love.

Pure unalloyed.

In contrast, we - and we includes God's prophet - are unsteady,

shifting, ambiguous, divided, distracted, unreliable, scattered.

Even when we're at our best, our best keeps slipping away from us.

When Isaiah laments his uncleanness, his lack of holiness, a seraphim flies

through the smoke with a burning coal.

The Seraphim touches Isaiah's mouth and says.

Behold, this has touched your lips.

Your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven.

Uncleanness is now specified more narrowly as sin and guilt.

We shouldn't ignore the suggestion of pain in the business of kissing a burning rock.

This cleansing is not like washing off mud because it's not an external

cleansing, but a transformation.

God fits Isaiah for his call.

A hard, single-minded, uncompromising call.

The Holy God draws wayward, uncertain humanity to speak

a true word.

To obey God's will, wholeheartedly.

The prophet gets to speak straight in a crooked world, which puts him

uncomfortably at odds with his neighbours.

Notice something else though.

By rights, surely a flaming coal from the heart of a brasier in the throne room of

the Almighty should have left Isaiah as little more than a smudge on the floor.

It should have consumed him, but it doesn't.

Remember Moses, out under a blaring sun, watching a thorn bush crackling

with fire, but not burning away.

We have the unthinkable, Holy God, his glory falling in light around

him also drawing intimately near to one of us, at a precise and

dateable moment in the turning world.

The busy, distracted, wayward and sinful world.

God's glory burns, but it does not consume.

It transforms.

In Isaiah's case, though the transformation may shock

our notions of God's glory.

God has transformed the temple into a throne room, and asks his

heavenly attendents, those privy to the inner circle of his council,

whom shall I send and who will go for us?

This is ancient and probably not so ancient royal theater.

The king would address his audience indirectly by speaking

to his closest courtiers.

God speaks perhaps to the Serafin, but he's addressing Isaiah.

God expects Isaiah to overhear the question and volunteer from

the heart of a calling, not forced upon him, but freely grasped and

brimming out from his very soul.

Here am I. Isaiah says, send me.

Then comes a shock.

God commissions Isaiah to fail.

To become a prophet whose audience only shrug and leave.

Isaiah will cry out and call in the city, and after a moment's distraction,

everyone will put back their earphones, turn up the volume and tune him out.

Go and say to this people hear and hear, but do not understand.

See and see, but do not perceive.

After that awe inspiring vision of the Holy God, and after Isaiah's

painful cleansing, which opens the path of transmission from God's

holiness to Isaiah's human voice, after all, that must, we now accept

that this is all for nothing.

Not if we understand what it means to become a prophet.

A prophet speaks in God's name, as we might say, the prophet is the word of

God in person, here at this place in this time, which is the year that Isaiah died.

God though is not heard.

God speaks, but his people go their way, heedless, unimpressed, distracted.

This is the woe of God, to give life and receive no thanks, to love and

get mistaken for more manageable Gods.

To speak,

and have no listeners.

A prophet is a sign of God in the world, and most of the time

getting misheard, misunderstood, ignored, and refused a welcome is

what happens to God in the world.

Hidden in that very sadness, though, we find God's glory.

God takes Isaiah to his heart, makes this parcel of human flesh and blood

God's own likeness in the world.

Calling as God calls, grieving as God grieves.

How else would Isaiah be God's prophet?

No worldly defiance or rejection, no worldly tragedy prevents this glory.

Send me, says Isaiah, then heaven comes upon the earth, and desire goes his way.

The image of God in the world.

We've now got to Advent, the season when we prepare to

celebrate the birth of Jesus.

I'm suggesting that we read Isaiah, shivering to his toes before

God's holiness, purified by fire and going public to laughs and

to sneer, not hear thank you.

I suggest we read him as prophesying Christ.

Pull aside the tinsel, and we celebrate a Messiah given no place,

not even a room for his birth.

The holy God comes to us uninvited, without force, settling in the

world with the integrity of love.

Thus, he will spend himself for us, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and

as one from whom men hide their faces.

Christ gets pushed out of the world, out of Jerusalem, onto the cross.

For our sake, he shoulders the woeful truth about ourselves, so

that love might have the last word.

God speaks to us from the side on which we are hard of hearing, from where

we don't hear him or don't want to.

In those, for instance, whom we should forgive, in the enemies we should love,

and in those whose sufferings would break our hearts if we heeded them.

God reveals himself where we have left him comfortless.

I pray that this Advent we shall hear Jesus, and even more so that we shall hear

his voice through the jangle of Christmas.

When we do, he'll come as something of a surprise, since whenever we

hear him truly, jesus has healed a little more of our deafness.