Do Your Job

Biblical Text: Isaiah 6:1-8

Recording note: I usually include the reading of the biblical text, but the microphone wasn’t on at the beginning, so the recording is just the sermon this week.

On the secular calendar it is Memorial Day weekend, but on the Church Calendar is was Trinity Sunday. As I think has become a mantra this year “this is the worst calendar.” Christmas on a Monday, Early Easter, Pentecost and Trinity around graduations and secular holidays. I’m a “called servant of the word” so in church I try to give pride of place to the church’s calendar and the reading. Memorial Day was recognized in announcements and prayers. But My 2nd son graduated this past week, so my mind was in that space, and the text is the call of Isaiah. It is perfectly designed to contemplate vocation. And the modern window into that contemplation is a mantra of Coach Bill Belichick, “Do Your Job.” Call it a law and gospel reading of Doing Your Job. Only one of them though can join with Isaiah – “Here I am, send me.”

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The Year Uzziah Died…

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Biblical Text: Isaiah 6:1-8, John 3:1-17

The Sunday is Trinity Sunday, which is the final “Festival” in the Festival half of the church year. It is set aside to meditate on the Truth that captured the imagination of the first six centuries of the church – The Trinity. Part of that in the Lutheran church is the confession of the Athanasian Creed. (In the recording responsively.) But the texts for the day are rich is so many ways. This sermon does something I don’t do that often, it layers the Old Testament lesson in with the Gospel. And I did this because the story of Uzziah, mentioned in Isaiah’s call, and the story of Nicodemus layer so beautifully. They are stories of incense and pride. They are stories of desiring to see God in His essence, and missing God in what He has done. The year Uzziah dies, is the year we can see God. This sermon helps us see that.

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Pride and Promise

Biblical Text: Isaiah 6:1-8
Full Sermon Draft

This is Trinity Sunday on the Christian calendar. That means a couple of things. The first is that we typically roll out the long creed – the Athanasian Creed. We break it into two logical portions in the service and I’ve tried to capture that here. The second thing that Trinity Sunday invites is a more theological approach. What I mean by that is that the day concerns the nature of God which is something that we can never fully comprehend. If we could, they we aren’t pondering God. This sermon is an attempt to mark out some of the boundaries of pondering God. Not boundaries on God himself, but things that should bind us. And it does this through a contrast between King Uzziah, whom the text starts off telling us died in the year of Isaiah vision, and Isaiah’s vision and call. The contrast I’d boil down to the path of pride and the path of promise. One is the path of life and the other of death. I hope you enjoy this.

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