As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God

by Eugene H. Peterson

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.

The psalm elaborates this blessed way of life by first describing the person “who walks not in the counsel of the wicked.” As we travel this road of faith, this way, we are surrounded by others who counsel, advise, urge us in ways that guarantee our happiness. They support their counsel with statistics and document it by citing the latest sociological and psychological studies. But you and I, hopefully, are learning to not be impressed. We are learning to listen to a different drummer.

But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. (verse 2)

…like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.

The wicked are not so, but are like chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

These men and women woke people up to the sovereign presence of God in their lives. They yelled; they wept; they rebuked; they soothed; they challenged; they comforted. They used words with power and imagination, whether blunt or subtle.

The prophets purge our imaginations of this world’s assumptions on how life is lived and what counts in life. Over and over again, God the Holy Spirit uses these prophets to separate his people from the cultures in which they live and to put them back on the path of simple faith and obedience and worship in defiance of all that the world admires and rewards. Prophets train us in discerning the difference between the ways of the world and the ways of the gospel, keeping us present to the presence of God.

The unrelenting reality is that prophets don’t fit into our way of life. For a people who are accustomed to fitting God into our lives or, as we like to say, “making room for God,” the prophets are hard to take and easy to dismiss. The God of whom the prophets speak is far too large to fit into our lives. If we want anything to do with God, we have to fit into God.

Their words and visions penetrate the illusions with which we cocoon ourselves from reality. We humans have an enormous capacity for denial and self-deceit. We incapacitate ourselves from dealing with the consequences of sin, from facing judgment, from embracing truth. Then the prophets step in and help us first to recognize and then to enter the new life God has for us, the life that opens up hope in God.

The prophets don’t explain God. They shake us out of old conventional habits of small-mindedness and trivializing god-gossip. They set us on our feet in wonder and obedience and worship. If we insist on understanding them before we live into them, we will never get it.

One of the bad habits we pick up early in our lives is separating things and people into secular and sacred. We assume the secular is what we are more or less in charge of: our jobs, our time, our entertainment, our government, our social relations. The sacred is what God is in charge of: worship and the Bible, heaven and hell, church and prayers. We then contrive to set aside a sacred place for God, designed, we say, to honor God but really intended to keep God in his place, leaving us free to have the final say about everything else that goes on. Prophets will have none of this. They contend that everything, absolutely everything, takes place on sacred ground. God has something to say about every aspect of our lives: the way we feel and act in the so-called privacy of our hearts and homes, the way we make our money and the way we spend it, the politics we embrace, the wars we fight, the catastrophes we endure, the people we hurt, and the people we help. Nothing is hidden from the scrutiny of God. Nothing is exempt from the rule of God. Nothing escapes the purposes of God. Holy, holy, holy.

Preaching in the company of Isaiah we develop a comprehensive imagination. A new term, globalization, has been coined to account for the interconnection of everything and everyone. We are now required “to realize that who ‘we’ are is nothing less than everyone.”* I prefer the more explicit term of Jesus—“kingdom of God”—an imagination that includes all under the rule of God, all nations and peoples and times in this together.

Wendell Berry, one of our better contemporary prophets, continues to insist how important it is to have a sense of including and binding together all beings: the living and the nonliving, the plants and animals, the water and air, the stones and humans. All ultimately are of a kind, belonging together, interdependently, in this God-created, God-ruled world. Prophets make it impossible to evade God or make detours around God. Prophets insist on receiving God in every nook and cranny of life. For a prophet, God is more real than the next-door neighbor.

I know most of you pretty well. But there is a lot I don’t know. I am here every week with the conviction that this place of worship is the most important place you can be right now, that the scriptures, hymns, prayers, and sermon can enter into your souls, your lives, bringing you into a deeper participation in eternal life. Not always, maybe even not often, but a lot goes on in this place that is formative even when you are not aware of it.

Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.

The hymn put into words what was experienced: holy, holy, holy. God is other than we are. Holy is a word that sets something apart. That which is holy is not derived from something we are or have. It cannot be related to something we know. It is “other than.” It comes from outside. God is not a projection of our imaginations, not wish fulfillment, not a childish fantasy. God is holy.

At the same time “the whole earth is full of his glory.” If holy describes God as way beyond anything we can imagine or approach, glory describes that which is here, close, evidential. I can see glory, touch it, weigh it. Glory in Hebrew literally means “weighty,” something that has substance to it.

What I want to do right now is identify this place of worship, this sanctuary, this Christ Our King sanctuary, as our equivalent of the Jerusalem temple in which Isaiah was worshiping. This sanctuary is a set-apart place for worship, just as Isaiah’s temple was. When you enter and take your place with other worshipers, you don’t see God, but you see reminders of God, evidence of God—the cross, the pulpit, the communion table, the banners—all signposts to the glory. Each one, with its stories and history, carries with it a sense of the holy, expressive of a presence, God’s presence, the holy God who is other than us and surrounds us with glory, his generous gifting of salvation.

The place of worship is a channel, a channel in which God comes to us and we come to God. The place of worship provides a protected space for transactions to take place, our presence in God’s presence. Holy and glory are two words that name what is going on: holy for the unseen, glory for the seen.

In comparison with that person you don’t look too bad. But if you are playing that kind of game, stay out of church, stay away from the sanctuary that is full of reminders of the being of God. Consciousness of sin, of inadequacy, of unworthiness is a regular part of worship. We aren’t what we should be. We fail miserably. In the words of one of the old confessions of the church, “We are miserable offenders.”*

Consciousness of sin is a regular part of worship; despair isn’t. Isaiah’s anticipation was thwarted immediately.

In this place of worship, sin is matched and then wiped out by forgiveness, the assurance of pardon. We don’t confess our sins so we can wallow in despair but so we can hear the joyful words of forgiveness: “Friends, hear the good news of the gospel. In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.”

Worship now opens a new dimension: listening to the word of God. God speaks to us. “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ ” (verse 8). God speaks to us. The word of God is at the center of our worship. God speaks to us in Scripture, in sermon, and in sacrament. It is the same word each time. The summary message is always, whether explicitly or implicitly, a question: Will we be God’s people and do his bidding? Will we embrace his gifts and participate in his saving work? “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

Scripture and Sermon and Sacrament combine to develop a relationship between God’s voice and our ears. We believe that God has something important to say to us, not just to inform us about the nature of the world, but to elicit our response. Questions and blessings and commands are the characteristic modes of address that get a response from us. God has plans that include us. Our lives are whole only when they are lived in dialogue with our Lord. The sermon is a weekly witness to that necessity to be open to the word of God and to be responsive to it.

God has the last word: “Go, and say” (verse 9). God says, in effect, “Isaiah, you have been in this place of worship long enough. Now walk out those doors and live for others what you have experienced here. Give voice to my voice among the people in Jerusalem, your neighbors and the strangers on your streets.”

What we are regularly aware of is the shaping influence that worship has for life lived beyond the sanctuary, in our homes and places of work, among our neighbors—the reality of God as holy and this earth as a place of glory, the awareness of our failures and of God’s reconciliation, the command that when obeyed enlists us as participants in God’s holiness and the glories in which we are immersed daily.

There is a sense in which the hour of worship never ends. It is merely adjourned until the next appointed time for meeting. We are sent out with our hearts made right and our minds informed with God’s plans for the world and our wills charged with response.

Worship is the action that centers our lives in the holy life of God and sets us firmly in the glories of creation and salvation. Faithful and intelligent and reverent worship keeps us in touch with what is real.

The three insteads I just quoted to you were first preached by a prophet in Israel to a congregation that was very unhappy. The Jews had been in exile in Babylon for seventy years. And then the exile ended. While in exile, they lived for little else but restoration to their homeland. They had prayed. They had waited. They had remembered. The life of an exile is mostly a matter of fantasies and longings, and the Jews were exiles. They remembered the green fields, the fertile vineyards, the magnificent temple and city they had left. They remembered their homes and villages and the beauties of their festivals. But the first reports from their homeland were not encouraging. The holy city, Jerusalem, was rubble. The Solomon temple was a pile of rocks. The fields were overrun with brambles and weeds. Wild animals foraged in the vineyards. Nothing was like what they remembered. What was the glory in coming back from exile when it was to this they had to come? The entire nation experienced “ashes…mourning…a faint spirit.” And then this great prophet began to preach: The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor… to comfort all who mourn… to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise ins...

The words and acts of Jesus became a trading post for exchanges. Look at some of them. A Samaritan woman spoke with Jesus at a well. She was a five-time failure at marriage. She was a member of a religious group that had failed. Her life was one failure after another, among a people who had a racial sense of inferiority. A life of ashes. Jesus spoke to her gently, firmly, and lovingly. He offered her the water of life. He gave himself to her as the Savior. Her life blossomed. She found joy as Jesus placed a garland on her head (John 4:1–42).

The promise is clear: God invites us to make exchanges. The documentation is persuasive. Exchanges took place repeatedly with Israel and with Jesus. The expectation is reinforced in the final book of Scripture, Revelation, which entered the Christian church during a time of great suffering, with Isaian phrases that have kept the comfort current: “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat….And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes….Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more” (Revelation 7:16–17; 21:4).

The possibilities for these transactions are embedded deep in the nature of the life that God creates in Jesus Christ: the ashes of disappointment traded in for the garland of hope, the mourning over sin traded in for the oil of a glad salvation, the faint spirit of depression traded in for the praise mantle of the God who makes all things new.

But I have a pastoral admonition to offer you when death or accident or betrayal occurs in your family or among your friends: don’t use clichés; don’t gloss over suffering with greeting-card sentiments. Be with the one who suffers, the one who grieves, the one rejected. Say little but be there as a silent, patient witness to God’s insteads.

Outsiders to the gospel (and some insiders) stumble over what is sometimes named the problem of evil: How can an all-powerful God permit bad things to happen to good people? But I can’t think of a better place than a congregation, this congregation, to live out circumstances of pain or difficulty. Jesus has the last word on what Isaiah first preached, in his second beatitude: Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. (Matthew 5:4) Amen.

But if you are interested in seeing what God is doing right now in our culture and contemporary history, a prophet is just the person to have at your side. In Isaiah, chapter 11, we have a vision of something that is going on right now, as up to date as this evening’s news. There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots…. In that day the root of Jesse shall stand as an ensign to the peoples; him shall the nations seek, and his dwellings shall be glorious. (verses 1, 10)

It would grow, blossom, and develop because “the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him” (Isaiah 11:2). Notice that the stump is now a person: from the stump of Jesse, Jesus. The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. (verse 2)

I am contemporizing it yet again, for you: first a sprig from a stump, then a righteous king ruling a peaceable kingdom, and finally the whole picture as it develops out of the life of God incarnate in Jesus: In that day the root of Jesse shall stand as an ensign to the peoples; him shall the nations seek, and his dwellings shall be glorious. (Isaiah 11:10) Eternity is revealed in time, meaning becomes explicit, and hope is fulfilled. Everyone sees it. Everyone responds to it. “Him shall the nations seek.”

the Jews, those people who are so strangely and insistently connected with the idea of God, were slaughtered on the most civilized continent in the world, the orders for their execution given by persons who listened to Mozart in the evening, who had been educated in the great philosophical traditions of Immanuel Kant, and who sang Luther’s hymns in church on Sundays. Each novel has a similar conclusion: “My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes.”*2

The opposite of seek is dawdle. To live aimlessly and listlessly. We either dawdle, or we live furiously, redoubling our energy when we lose our direction.

“To seek God means, in every part of Scripture, to cast all our hopes upon him.”*3

God starts out where we start out: a child is born. He submerges himself in our biology, our psychology, our history. He becomes one of us so we can become what he is. He doesn’t terrorize us with doomsday signs. He doesn’t crush us with superior knowledge. He doesn’t tease us with mysterious clues. He is here with us, in Jesus. God’s way of revealing himself to us and giving himself to us is Jesus.

We ask, “Really? Can that make any difference? What can a child do?” Isaiah, we must remember, preached in desperate times. He was involved in an international crisis. He walked the streets of Jerusalem with persons stretched to the breaking point with anxiety, with pain, with fear, their hearts heavy with the burdens of sin, their arms aching from carrying the baggage of guilt. They were people like us—they needed help, they needed deliverance, they needed relief, and they needed hope. They needed all the things that persons who have been faithless and have lost their sense of integrity need, persons who have rebelled and lost a sense of security, persons who have trivialized the sacred and found themselves separated from meaning and reduced to boredom and banality. They needed a gospel adequate for their needs, and their needs were extreme and desperate. To such people Isaiah said, “To us a child is born, to us a son is given.”

If the way God reveals himself to us is to become one of us, the way he completes his work in us is to raise us to where he is: the government is on his shoulders—he takes responsibility for us. He bears the burden of us. His rule is not imposed so we are oppressed. It is a means of supporting and assisting and freeing us.

C. S. Lewis has a marvelous elaboration of this detail in Isaiah’s vision. In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. One has a picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders.

Wonderful Counselor. He is not a dictator but a counselor. He listens more than he talks. He comprehends our needs and helps us find ways to meet them. He pays attention to us. When we are in his presence, we know we are significant, important, unique. And the result is that we find a will and the means to live with zest.

Mighty God. He is able to do what he sets out to do. And what he sets out to do is conquer sin, defeat the evil that would maim and cripple our aspirations to goodness. There is nothing passive about our Savior. He incarnates an aggressive assault on what is wrong with the world that will finally result in a new heaven and a new earth.

Everlasting Father. God is the origin of our existence and continues into eternity. He is no absent Father. There is continuity in God, and as we live in him, our lives have continuity. We escape the jumble of impressions and the chaos of experience. We don’t have to start each day looking for something new to keep us going, to be happy or entertained. We have histories t...

Prince of Peace. As the prince rules, peace develops. He is thorough and complete in what he does. Peace is the harmony that comes from putting everything together so it fits. I try to get peace by getting rid of what irritates me; God gets peace by restoring everything to health. I try to get peace by getting rid of what I don’t like; God gets peace by loving the unruly and unlovely into a life-changing salvation. I try to get peace by saying, “Shut up. I don’t want to hear it anymore”; God gets peace by saying, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

Twice in the course of Isaiah’s vision in chapter 9, the word increase is used. Near the beginning we read, “Thou hast increased its joy; they rejoice before thee as with joy at the harvest” (verse 3). And near the end of the vision there is this: “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end” (verse 7). There is plenty given. It is given in a way you can receive it. What is given will do what needs to be done in you. It doesn’t run out. It is inexhaustible. What is given increases week by week, year by year. What you got last week or last month is not subtracted from what you still have coming to you. “Of the increase…there will be no end.”