Hatter & Hobbit

A ruler of the Jews comes to Jesus after dark with a careful speech prepared, and never gets past the opening line — because the answer he gets is not an argument but a diagnosis. You cannot be born a second time, which is true, and which is exactly the point: you had nothing to do with the first one either.

A woman walks into a dinner party, snaps the neck off a sealed jar worth a year's wages, and empties it over a man who will be dead inside the week. The room does arithmetic. He tells them to leave her alone — and then attaches a promise to her: wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, this will be told about her.

A man sits down in a silent room, cannot bear it, and asks God to let him die. What he gets instead is quiet — and in the quiet, a line he learned as a child comes back whole. It was never lost. He had simply been too loud to hear it.
 

A man on the wide road counts heads, decides that many people cannot all be wrong, and is told there are a hundred doors and he may pick the one that fits him. Then he finds a small gate with somebody standing in it, and discovers that nothing he brought will go through. The gate is one man wide, and the country on the other side is wider than the road he left.

Isaiah was sent to preach to people who would hear and never understand, see and never perceive. Built on Isaiah 6, Psalm 115, and the man born blind in John 9, this is a warning from a singer who was born in the same dark, until the God who said "Let there be light" shined in his heart.

In the year King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, and fell apart: "Woe is me, for I am undone." A king who reached for holy fire was struck with leprosy; a prophet who could not reach was touched by a burning coal from the altar. A hushed, smoky meditation on Isaiah 6:1–8, where cleansing comes first and calling comes after.