A Man of Unclean Lips

Smoke is filling the temple, and the doorposts are shaking in their places. Isaiah is standing there "in the year that king Uzziah died."

The doorposts move at the sound of a voice: "And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory." Isaiah is already a prophet when this happens. The five chapters before this one hold his messages, and they are full of woes spoken over other people.

Then he speaks a woe over himself, and it lands in a very exact place: "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips." The Hebrew word behind "undone" can carry the sense of being silenced or cut off. His whole calling is to speak, and it is his mouth that fails him. It fails in a room where other mouths are praising God perfectly, and even they cover their faces to do it.

None of this was news. His lips had been the same lips the week before. What changed is in the last part of the verse: "for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts." Job comes to the same place at the end of his book, after all his arguing: "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee."

So try a small version of this before your day gets going. Take the thing you say most often about other people, the remark you would defend as simply true. Say it in that room, with the seraphim covering their faces, and do not tidy it up first. Then wait. Isaiah did not go and fetch the coal. One of the seraphim took it from the altar, carried it to him and laid it on his mouth, saying, "thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged." The cleansing came to him from God's own altar.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 42 is Call and Answer (Psalm 91:15).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two