Preached at All Saints’, All Cannings (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)
Isaiah 6.1–8; John 16.5–15
“Woe is me! … because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!”
Starting in 1972, the animal psychologist Francine Patterson began to teach an infant gorilla named Koko a modified form of American Sign Language. Patterson claimed Koko could sign a thousand words and understand twice that number in English. I remember seeing Koko speaking on children’s programmes when I was a kid, where we were told that this was absolutely the case (and some people still claim that is so).
Other researchers, however, found that while Koko could indeed use signs to request food, play, or affection, her handlers were, to a large extent, seeing what they wanted to see and ignoring the many times that Koko signed arrant nonsense in search of a reward. Koko could only use signs in a simple, isolated way, with no evidence of the complex, rule-based sentences that even young human children use.
Koko’s life was not in vain, however. She transformed public attitudes to gorillas, previously seen only as dangerous and brutish, just as their habitats were coming under terrible pressure and needed protection. She died eight years ago at the ripe old age – for a gorilla – of forty-six.
Those with longer memories recalled a horse in early 20th Century Germany nicknamed Clever Hans, whose owner, Wilhelm von Osten, claimed that he could not only spell words by pointing his hoof at a blackboard, but could also tell the time and even do arithmetic well enough to work with fractions. Unfortunately, when von Osten died, nobody else could get Hans to multiply fractions, and the poor creature had a miserable end, drafted into the First World War as a warhorse, where he was either killed in action or, perhaps, consumed by hungry soldiers.
Clever Hans’ owner claimed he could spell, tell the time, and even work with fractions.
Words are the fundamental thing that separates us from animals. Even animals who have an impressive range of calls use closed systems of communication – we see no open-ended creativity among them, or combining of existing elements to make new concepts. Humans can use the power of language to touch the hem of God Himself. We can use our God-given power over language to speak truth, or we can use it to facilitate deceit. This is not always a case of maliciously and wilfully telling lies. As the stories of Koko and Clever Hans show, people often hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.
Tonight’s second reading comes from John’s Gospel, which famously starts by telling us that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ, yet was still the divine Word who was already with the divine Creator before time began. The Father spoke that eternal and divine Word. In our power over words, we show that we are made in the image and likeness of God.
Like any other God-given gift, words can be abused. We’re told that we live in a ‘post-truth’ era, where we can all choose our own facts from a limitless supply of online news sources. There’s no question that technology, which always amplifies our power to do good and evil alike, is helping us run away from hard truths so we can pad our lives with comforting lies.
But this is a very old problem. In our first reading, Isaiah says that he is a person of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips. Isaiah wrote in the middle of an acute spiritual and political crisis for the Jewish people. They were facing new political threats, like the Assyrian Empire, which was known to treat conquered peoples brutally. They had also seriously declined from their golden age under Solomon and David. They were now a badly divided people who had drifted from the God-fearing vision that had once animated them, towards cynicism under self-serving leaders.
From this dark moment in its history, Jerusalem would have a period of spiritual renewal and cultural flowering. Isaiah, the wise counsellor to a succession of kings over more than half a century, would be a key part of that renewal.
But when he first heard God calling him to be a prophet, Isaiah didn’t rush to stick up his hand. He said “Woe is me!” Not only because of the way in which the lives of prophets often ended, but also because he saw himself as a deceitful man living among a deceitful people.
God knows that’s the material He has to work with. In Isaiah’s vision, a seraph takes a hot coal from God’s altar and touches it to his lips to purge him, so he can speak God’s truth.
The central truth that Christians are called to proclaim is that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are many other truths for us to proclaim and good works to be performed, but many of those tasks can be shared with others. Only Christians can proclaim Jesus Christ is the eternal Word who was in the beginning with the Father, who promised us the Spirit of truth. The Holy Spirit is love as a person, and love as God, a love that is aflame for the truth, a love fierce enough to burn away our lies. A love that drives us onwards where, in our own strength, we would fail.
We, too, need a spiritual renewal at a point when Church and state alike lack vision and are lurching from one crisis to the next. But renewal never begins with a committee or a strategy document. It begins when someone, confronted with the living God, cries “Woe is me!” and then, once their lips have been touched with fire, answers, “Here am I; send me.” Who will be that person for us?
Probably it isn’t you. But will you pray that God will raise up prophets among us – men and women with lips made clean – who will call this people of unclean lips to follow their Lord and Saviour? And if someone among us is brave enough to say, “Here I am, Lord, send me,” will you stand with them, support them, and refuse to silence them when the message becomes uncomfortable?
Because the same Spirit who moved Isaiah, the same Spirit promised by Jesus in tonight’s Gospel, is still at work. He is the Spirit of truth who will not let us do what Koko’s handlers and Clever Hans’s owner did – seeing only what we wish to see and disregarding the rest. He is the fire that burns away our lies and our self-deceptions, and He is looking for lips that are willing to be cleansed.
And now to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
