Turn and be healed
by Kimberley Pfeiffer
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Behold this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for (Isaiah 6:7).
Isaiah is freaking out! He knows no-one can see the face of the Lord and live (Exodus 33:20), and he just had a vision and saw God! He said, ‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am 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!’ Many people think it would be cool to have a ‘spiritual experience’ like the shepherds in the field or Peter in the boat with Jesus, but the most common reaction in the Bible to a divine appearance is to be struck with fear.
Surprisingly, Isaiah was not harmed but healed by touching his lips with hot coal carried by a seraph, who said, ‘Behold this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for’. He was cleansed by God’s mercy so that he could be commissioned to do God’s work. Isaiah was then sent back to God’s people to show them their sins and urge them to return to God and be healed.
The words God gives to Isaiah to speak to his people in these verses point out that they have no way of truly knowing their need, let alone God’s wisdom, without God’s help. Isaiah tells them their eyes will continue to be blind, their hearts dull, and their hearing will have no understanding unless they return to God. When Isaiah asked God, ‘How long will it take for this healing to occur?’, God told him it would not happen until things were completely desperate and their hope looked like a dead stump in the ground.
But those in faith know that in the Bible, the stump is not just the place of something that was and is no longer, but that in God, it is a place where God creates new life out of what is seemingly nothing. Jesus is the shoot from the stump of Jesse. Through Jesus, God recreates his vision of new life in the world. Jesus is the only way for us to find God’s peace.
When God’s people learned this, some 700 years before Christ’s birth, though their hope may have seemed foolish to the world, it sustained them because it centred on Christ. Like the faithful who have gone before us, our eyes, ears and hearts can become dulled unless our spirit is constantly renewed by God’s healing gift of faith given to us through God’s word and sacrament.
Merciful Father, thank you for showing your mercy to your people of old and giving them hope in Christ long before he was born. Help us not to grow dull of hearing your life-giving word. Let it create and nourish our faith in you. Thank you for revealing yourself to us through your word and sacrament. By your mercy, renew our hope through Jesus Christ and grant us the peace that surpasses all human understanding. Amen.
Kimberley Pfeiffer is married to Pastor Joshua, and they have four children. Kimberley served in various capacities in the LCA Churchwide Office before moving to the USA at the beginning of 2022 for Joshua to complete his PhD studies. In God’s provision, Kimberley has been given the opportunity to study a Master of Arts (Theology) degree at Concordia Theological Seminary, St Louis, which she says she is enjoying very much.
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