THE OPEN DOOR
SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION
The Rev. Michael Vinson+ Rector
The Collect. Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity; We beseech thee that thou wouldest keep us stedfast in this faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities, who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.
“After this I looked, and behold, a door was opened in heaven.”
John There is no gradual ascent, no slow approach through the anteroom and corridor. There is no gradual ascent, no slow approach through the anteroom and corridor. There is only the open door — thrown open — inviting you to come up and walk through
And a voice like a trumpet: Come up hither. And immediately, immediately, John is caught up in the Spirit into the throne room of the Almighty.
What does he see? A throne. One seated upon it, radiant beyond all description — like jasper, like sardius, encircled by an emerald rainbow. Lightning and thunder pouring forth. Seven lamps burning before it. And around it, four living creatures, full of eyes, wings beating, never resting, ceaselessly crying:
Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.
Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power:
for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.
But John is not the first to have seen this. Seven centuries before the Isle of Patmos, a young priest named Isaiah went up to the Temple in Jerusalem in a year of national mourning — the year that King Uzziah died — and the veil between heaven and earth grew thin, and Isaiah saw:
The Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.
Above the throne stood the seraphim — burning ones — each with six wings, crying one to another in that same unceasing antiphon:
Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.
And the posts of the door moved at the voice of the one who cried, and the house was filled with smoke.
The same throne. The same cry. The same overwhelming, unapproachable glory — glimpsed by a Hebrew prophet in the Temple, and again by an aged apostle on a prison island, separated by seven hundred years and yet beholding the same eternal reality. This throne is not a vision of something past or future. It is the deepest, most permanent reality there is. Before the world was made, it existed. After every earthly thing has passed away, it will remain. And what fills that throne room — what defines it, what never ceases within it — is the worship of the Triune God.
This is where Trinity Sunday begins. Not with a doctrine. Not with a definition. With a throne, and an open door, and a voice saying Come.
But Isaiah’s vision does not leave us gazing upward in peaceful admiration. The moment the glory breaks upon him, something else breaks too.
Woe is me, for I am undone. I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips — for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.
This is the first honest response to the holiness of God. Not wonder only, but undoing. Not admiration, but the sudden, devastating clarity of what we are in the light of what He is. Isaiah does not climb toward the throne. He collapses beneath it. The distance between the Holy One and sinful man is not a gap that human effort can bridge. The door stands open — and we are undone before it.
A man came to Jesus with something of the same question, though he was too careful and too learned to let it show quite so plainly. He came by night — this ruler of Israel, this serious Pharisee named Nicodemus — and he opened with a compliment: Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. A careful opening. A diplomatic opening.
But Jesus answered the question beneath the question. Verily, verily, I say unto thee — except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
Nicodemus is undone, as Isaiah was undone, though in a different way. How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb? It sounds almost comic, but there is nothing comic in it — beneath the confusion is a genuine and desperate longing. He senses that what Jesus is describing is real, and utterly beyond his reach.
How can these things be?
And here our Lord makes the most astonishing claim of all: No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.
The door stands open. But no one climbs to it. No learning reaches that high. No religion bridges that distance. No moral effort crosses that gulf. Isaiah knew it when he fell undone before the throne. Nicodemus feels it in the dark, groping toward a question he cannot quite form. And we know it too, if we are honest — that the throne room of the Holy One is not a place we find our way to. It is a place we must be brought.
And so the Son came down. He descended from that throne room of glory, through the open door, and was born of a woman in the darkness of a stable. He lived our life and bore our uncleanness. And at last he was lifted up — not on a throne, but on a cross — lifted up in darkness and abandonment, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
The Cross is the door. He descended into our death so that we might ascend into his life. He came down so that we might go up. The gulf is crossed — not from our side, but from his. And the means by which we are drawn up into the One who came down, the new birth he promises Nicodemus in the darkness, is the gift of Holy Baptism.
Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
Return for a moment to Isaiah, still collapsed before the throne, undone and unclean. He does not climb back to his feet through resolution or religious effort. What happens next is entirely from above:
Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar. And he laid it upon my mouth, and said — Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.
The cleansing comes from the altar. It comes down to him. It touches him where he is most acutely aware of his unworthiness — a man of unclean lips — and it does what he could never do for himself. It purges. It makes clean. And only then — only after the cleansing — does the voice of the Lord say: Whom shall I send? And who will go for us? And Isaiah, who moments before was undone and silent, now answers from the depths of a cleansed and burning heart: Here am I. Send me.
This is the pattern of the whole Christian life. And it is the pattern of Holy Baptism.
The catechism gives us the classical definition: a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, given unto us, ordained by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof. In Holy Baptism the outward and visible sign is water, wherein the person is baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. And the inward and spiritual grace? A death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness — for being by nature born in sin and children of wrath, we are hereby made children of grace.
Baptism is not a work we do for Christ. It is the merciful work Christ does in us. Like the coal from the altar carried down to Isaiah’s lips, the cleansing comes from above. He is the one baptizing. He is the one uniting us to himself. He is the one sending his Holy Spirit into us. We bring nothing but our uncleanness — and he takes even that.
Hear how the Apostle Paul unfolds this mystery. As many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may walk in newness of life. The old nature goes down into the water and does not come back up. What rises is new — clothed, as Paul says elsewhere, in Christ himself: as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. He takes our filthy garments and we are clothed in his righteousness. We are no longer what we were. We are made children of Abraham, heirs according to promise, adopted into the family of God.
And hear the Apostle again, writing to Titus: Christ saved us — not by the righteous deeds we had done, but according to his mercy — through the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. Mercy. Not merit. The washing is his. The new birth is his. The renewal is his.
And the Prophet Ezekiel, standing in the ruins of exile, saw this mercy coming from afar and cried it out across the centuries:
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean.
I will cleanse you from all your impurities.
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you.
I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
And I will put my Spirit within you — and cause you to walk in my statutes.
Five times in three verses: I will. I will. I will. I will. I will.
It is all him. The coal from the altar. The water of new birth. The Spirit within. The heart made flesh from stone. All of it descending. All of it grace. All of it the mercy of the Triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — who desired from before the foundation of the world to bring fallen humanity up into the Divine Life. This is the new birth Jesus promised Nicodemus in the darkness. This is how we enter the kingdom. This is how we are drawn up into the One who came down. Not by our ascending — but by his descending into us, washing us, filling us, making us new. The throne room of John’s vision, the holy ground of Isaiah’s undoing, the dark night of Nicodemus’s longing — they all converge here, in the waters of Baptism, in the Name of the Trinity, where heaven and earth meet and a soul is born again.
And so Isaiah, cleansed and commissioned, goes. Here am I. Send me. That sending — that response from a purged and burning heart — is the shape of the whole Christian life. Not striving toward a holiness we do not yet possess, but walking in the holiness already given. Living from within the reality of what has been done to us, for us, and in us. This is what it means to walk in our baptism.
The collect for this day puts it with quiet, honest precision:
Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity; We beseech thee that thou wouldest keep us stedfast in this faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities.
Notice what the Church asks. Not for a new vision. Not for a higher experience. But to be kept stedfast. To be defended from adversities. The collect is a prayer of people who know that they live between the vision and the consummation — who have seen the open door, have been born through it by grace, and now must walk faithfully in a world that presses hard against that faith.
To be stedfast is not to strain. It is to return — again and again — to the mercy already given. To the Name already sealed upon us. To the Spirit already dwelling within. St. Paul says it plainly: walk worthy of the calling to which you have been called — with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
This is the baptized life. We need patience in temptation, humility in all things, wisdom to pursue peace, courage to seek justice, grace toward all — and none of this is ours by nature. It is ours because we have been brought into the life of the One who is himself all of these things. The Triune God — who has always existed in a perfect, eternal community of love, deference, and giving — has made us partakers of that life. And to persevere is simply to keep living from within it.
The throne room is not a spectacle for distant admirers. The door is not merely open to be looked through. The coal from the altar has touched our lips. The water has washed us. The Spirit dwells within. And the voice that once said to Isaiah — whom shall I send? — says now to us, the baptized, the born-again, the children of the Trinity:
Here is my life. Go and live it.
Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty,
which was, and is, and is to come.
Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power.
Amen.
