“In the year that King Uzziah died, I also saw the Lord….”
The first time I can remember hearing Isaiah 6:1 was over thirty years ago. (I have written about that experience, and this passage, before). I was a teenager, working at a summer camp that belonged to a prominent evangelical organization. We had Saturday mornings off, and if we were interested, we could attend the lectures at the evangelism “training center” that was next door to the camp. That particular Saturday the lecturer (whose name I can no longer remember) read that line from Isaiah, and it has stuck in my head ever since.
I am not sure why the lecturer added the “also,” which is the only word in the version of the verse that I put at the top of this post that isn’t in the NRSV of the lectionary this week. “Also” doesn’t show up in any of the major translations, though it appears in some of the more obscure ones, so I suppose he must have been using one of those. But I’m sure that he said the line just as I have written it above, with the “also,” because the “also” was foundational to what he had to say about it. This lecturer made a big deal about how Isaiah’s religious experience—which the rest of the passage goes on to describe, with lots of seraphim and strange happenings—was juxtaposed with the experience of worldly politics by the “also” of the passage. Uzziah was a long-serving king of Judah, and the king’s death was probably a political earthquake. In the 21st century, we might approximate the situation if we said something like “on January 6th as the insurrection happened, I also found Jesus,” or “I had my spiritual awakening during Trump’s second inauguration.” It’s a really powerful way to mark time, mixing the religious and the political, the sacred and the profane, and linking them with that “also” that’s doing so much work to bring everything together.
There is a lot of “also” in the world right now, isn’t there? Just yesterday morning I was talking to a friend who I hadn’t seen in a couple of months, and I asked how she was doing. “Well, there’s so much going on these days, and it all just hit me at once last night,” she said. I’ve had a lot of conversations like that lately—conversations about how overwhelming and all-consuming everything is, all the time. I had forgotten just how exhausting it can be, during the last four years of relative normalcy—how debilitating it can be to hear constant breaking news about some new outrage or unprecedented crisis. We are all trying to do our jobs while also trying to grapple with climate crises while also trying to pay our bills while also trying to save democracy while also trying to look after our families while also trying to take care of ourselves while also sneaking glances at an executive power grab that’s unfolding in real time. It doesn’t seem to end, this chain of “also,” and it’s easy to get overwhelmed at the everything’s-on-fire way it feels to be alive right now.
I was reminded the other day of the words of a colleague and parishioner, Larry Kent Graham, who taught pastoral and spiritual care at the Iliff School of Theology for decades and also attended the church where I work. Larry, in his final book, wrote about “pythonic habitats,” which he describes as “an environment that disrupts our well-being by squeezing the life out of us slowly, silently, against our will, or beyond our survival capacities.” I was especially taken with Graham’s observation about how in pythonic habitats, “perpetual vigilance and low-grade threat squeeze our lives into small dollops of triviality.” That sounds like a very good description of the world we live in right now: terror mixed with constant threat mixed with the banal amusements of social media and pop culture. Part of what Larry Graham was arguing is that trauma can be “restrictive rather than explosive,” that trauma can show up in the pressing-down as much as the coming-apart. That feels true to me.
What do we do when the whole world is a pythonic habitat? When we feel squeezed not just sometimes but at every moment, when the air is just pressed out of us by every new crisis, how can we live? We aren’t built for constant stress and trauma, any more than we are built to live without oxygen. How are we supposed to push back against the ways the world feels like it is tightening around us and constricting us slowly but steadily until something breaks?
I wonder whether that’s what Isaiah was talking about in 6:1 with the “also.” “The year that King Uzziah died” was probably a pretty rough year. After 52 years of governance, suddenly everything was up in the air. (Uzziah’s reign was not without drama—including the drama of an executive power grab—but that’s a story for another time). For someone like Isaiah, the death of a long-serving ruler like Uzziah would have represented a big upheaval. At a time when most people lived shorter lifespans than today, a king reigning for over fifty years meant that many people would have been born and died while only knowing Uzziah as king. Isaiah himself probably began his public career in the last years of Uzziah’s life, meaning that he had lived his whole life to that point only knowing a world where Uzziah was on the throne (although Uzziah shared power with his father and his son at the beginning and ending of his career, respectively). The death of the king was noteworthy enough that Isaiah used it as a time stamp for his religious experience—that he used it to pin down a vision of God’s throne room. “In the year that King Uzziah died” was well-known enough that it could be used to remember important events. It was a marker of a certain kind of trauma and uncertainty, maybe the way “2020” works for us, as a shorthand for recalling a lot of chaos and weirdness (and pythonic stricture). Say “2020” in a conversation these days, and you’ll get a lot of knowing looks and deep sighs, because that year was hard on everyone in ways we still probably don’t really understand.
2025 might turn out that way; it’s too soon to tell. 2025 might turn out to be a year like 2020 or “the year that King Uzziah died,” when everything went off the rails enough that the mention of the year itself is enough to evoke all kinds of other experiences and memories. 2025 might end up being a sharp inflection point in a decades-long crisis. Or 2025 might simply turn out to be another in a long string of pythonic habitats, squeezing us slowly and making us feel like we have nowhere to move and no way to escape. Either way, the “also”-ness will pile up, with both mundane and extraordinary experiences crowding in around us. Either way, this year is going to take its toll.
I’m not here to find the silver lining in the way everything is falling apart, and I’m not really one of those “crisis is opportunity in hiding” kinds of people. Sometimes things fall apart, and sometimes a crisis is a crisis. But the “also” gives me pause. For Isaiah, the great crisis of his day was the death of a long-serving king, which probably felt like the ground shifting under everyone’s feet. But he also saw the Lord that year, he tells us—he also had a vision of God enthroned. And the vision was about more than; the vision was about the way God called Isaiah out of and into that moment in history for a purpose. “I am a man of unclean lips,” Isaiah protested to God, “and I live among a people of unclean lips,” as if to announce his unworthiness to be a mouthpiece for the divine. But one of the seraphim took a hot coal and touched it to Isaiah’s mouth, and declared that the prophet’s uncleanness had been cleansed. And then the Lord’s voice asked a question.
“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
It’s a good question.
For Isaiah, the heaviness of his moment found escape in his discovery of a calling. Isaiah, in the year that King Uzziah died, had an experience of the divine in which he felt himself being tapped on the shoulder and summoned for the task of prophetic speaking. The “also” of Isaiah 6:1 holds the political and the religious together with the personal, the “also” shows us a map from chaos to purpose. “Whom shall I send,” God asked, and Isaiah found himself saying, “Here I am; send me!”
Moments of crisis do have a way of spurring people to action. We’ve all read stories of people who found themselves in a chaotic or unjust situation, and looked around to see who was going to help, only to realize that they would be the ones to help. This is often the backstory for people deciding to run for office, change careers, start nonprofits, train for the ministry, or begin an advocacy campaign. People see God asking, or see the world asking, “whom shall I send,” and before they know it, their hand is shooting up. Isaiah wasn’t the first person to find purpose in the “also,” between the heaviness of the world and an emerging sense of calling, and he wasn’t the last either. Whether you think the world is going downhill fast or you think everything is going great, there seems to be a widespread agreement that we are living in a moment of crisis, a pythonic habitat that is exerting pressure on all of us, all the time. Whether you support the things going on in the current political moment or not, you probably see it as a pivotal time. We probably all feel the weight of it, and the combined force of all the “also” that is piling up. The question, if we take Isaiah as our guide, is whether this moment also holds the beginnings of some new purpose or the first glimpse of some new clarity. In this year, at this time, in this specific moment, what are we feeling a call to do? Where are we hearing a call to speak? In what injustices are we being called to intervene?
“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
It’s a good question.