Last Sunday I preached to our little congregation in our little chapel. A small group to be sure, but a discriminating bunch. They received my sermon well and I appreciate them for that. I talked about the different “calls” that Isaiah, Paul, and Simon Peter received and accepted from God and how they were alike and how they were different. I also talked about our own calls from God and how we mostly don’t think they are of the same order as the three just mentioned. But, it ain’t necessarily so–I think all calls to us human beings are of the same order but maybe not of the same magnitude.
But it would be a pretty tall order to get a call like Isaiah’s. All the stops were out on that one. The throne, the robe, the live coals, the smoke, and the Seraphs. I got hung up for quite awhile thinking about the Seraphs. I learned from the footnotes in The Inclusive Bible that Seraphs literally means “burning ones”. Because I have a mental image of the great flaring forth of the Universe in the first instant being a flash of heat and light, I thought “well, there are the Seraphs”.
When the first-born of all creation is the Word, then the second-born, the next generation, are those burning ones. The burning power of their heat and light is still with us as one event of creation gives way to the next in the never-ending, seamless flow of being. Their power to proclaim the glory of God does not diminish and they are forever praising God with a “Holy, Holy, Holy” that shouts the universal, eternal victory of heat and light. The Burning Ones… still burning after all these years.
