12-22-19 Readings & Sermons

A reading from Isaiah.

Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign of the Lord your God, let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.

But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.

Then Isaiah said, Hear then, O house of David, is it too little for you to weary mortals that you weary my God also?

Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign.

Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.

He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.

For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.

The word of the Lord.

The gospel according to his son, who was descended from David according to the flesh, and was declared or declared to be the Son of God with a power according to the Spirit of Holiness by resurrection from the dead.

Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship, to bring about the obedience of faith through all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves, who were called to belong to Jesus Christ, to all gods beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints, give grace to you, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The word of the Lord.

When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with a child from the Holy Spirit.

Her husband, Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.

But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

All this took place to fulfill what he had spoken by the Lord through the prophet.

Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means God is with us.

When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.

He took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son, and he named him Jesus.

The gospel of the Lord.

Throughout Advent, I have been reflecting on Isaiah as a prophetic dweller of the threshold.

How he continually draws his listeners' attention to the fact that we are dwellers of the threshold, as we dwell in this in-between space, planted in the realities of the world of the present, but reaching up to a God who is reaching down to us, a God who makes this so-called other world present in our reality.

The first week of Advent, I recited a poem, The Dweller, by Joel McCarrow, and I'd like to repeat just a few lines again today.

For we are artists and we are pilgrims of the threshold, with one foot in the clay, one hand chained earthbound, and the other stretches high to the sky.

We find the tares in the curtain where the divine reaches through his hand to offer her water to the lips of thirsty beggars and kings alike.

This is the true pilgrim, he who stands upon the threshold with one hand to the heavens and the other to the earth, to not run from the world to the heavens, but to hold the two together.

Today, in our reading from Isaiah, King Ahaz is invited by Isaiah to stand at the threshold, to reach up to God in the midst of the harsh realities of his present.

First, I would like to put today's reading in context.

The northern kingdom of Israel has formed an alliance with King Aram of Syria to bring protection against Assyria.

They invite King Ahaz to bring Judah into this alliance, but King Ahaz refuses.

This in turn leads the kings of this northern alliance to bring an attack upon Judea.

King Ahaz then turns to the Assyrian king Tiglath Pilesar for protection.

This request for protection likely occurs before this meeting between Isaiah and Ahaz that we hear of today.

And then jumping forward past today's meeting, Ahaz will be so pleased with these initial results of this alliance that he forms and all that he sees in Tiglath Pelasar that he will begin to dismiss some of God's instructions on how to worship and replace them with what he sees from the Assyrians.

He will redecorate the temple with replicas from the worship centers of Damascus.

Not only will his political alliances switch, but also so will his spiritual practices.

Ahaz is actively turning his back on God.

At the point of today's reading, Ahaz has found himself in a dark, challenging, dangerous place.

Some by his own poor choices and others simply result of broken humanity.

He is in a world that elicits fear, insecurity, doubt, and anxiety.

Isaiah is present here before King Ahaz, offering a gift so that Ahaz can find the strength to even in these dark times and places to reach up and experiencing God reaching down.

Isaiah invites Ahaz to stand at the threshold, to experience the intrusive, merciful nature of God.

But King Ahaz denies this gift.

Does he deny the extremely rare opportunity to ask for a sign because, well, he is pious, believing humans were not supposed to put God to the test?

Or was he wanting to avoid God?

He had already most likely made this alliance with Tiglath Palesar.

Or is it simply that he was hedging his bets?

He knows of the military strength of Assyria.

That military strength of the king of God, though, is a strength that he's not sure of and doesn't trust will be greater.

Ahaz is invited to ask for just about anything in this sign, anything to prove that God has Judah's back, that they will make it through these dark, challenging times.

Yet Ahaz refuses this generous gift, instead, relying on his own abilities.

Mercifully, though, the God of love does not deny us just because we deny God.

God still offers a sign through the words of Isaiah, the words of a promise of a child named Emmanuel.

And within the time of the child's early years, those threats from those northern kings will go away.

There's a lot to unpack in this sign, and I'm not going to go through all of them today, but I'd like to focus in on two parts.

First, that a son will be born, and second, that the son's name will be Emmanuel.

When Isaiah is speaking these words, he's likely not talking about some child to be born in Bethlehem some 600 years later.

No, Isaiah is most likely speaking of a woman of Ahaz's house present during the time of this address.

A child to be born as a descendant of Ahaz.

The family line will continue to the next generation.

The empire that Ahaz is trying to keep alive may break down, but there will be remnants to carry on into the future.

This is a promise, a promise made for so many of the Hebrew ancestors also.

Remember the promise made to Abraham when God said, I will make your descendants, descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed.

This promise will carry on into the future long after Ahaz is gone.

Secondly, the name Emmanuel, meaning with us is God, this too is a promise from our loving God.

No matter how much Ahaz is acting unwisely, no matter how many poor decisions he makes in his future, God is with him.

No matter how many poor choices Ahaz will make, God is remaining present.

This is a promise that was given to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and David.

Each one of them in their stories is given the promise that God is with them, that God is present among them all along.

Through all of this, God is saying, My love for you and for these people is much bigger than all of your poor choices.

I, God, invite you to meet me at the threshold, but even if you don't, my promises will carry on, and I will make my merciful intrusions into this dark space.

In our reading today, Ahaz isn't the only one invited to meet God on the threshold.

Joseph is also invited.

Joseph learns that his betrothed is with child and not his child.

And he considers how he can run from the situation in a manner that will do the least amount of damage to all who are involved.

This news must initially have felt like darkness moving in towards Joseph.

All that he is hoping for, all that he is planning on, all that is arranged between his family and Mary's, all of it changing suddenly.

I don't think anyone can blame him for considering how to discreetly dissolve this proposed marriage.

And yet, in comes a messenger of God, and the message offers words, an invitation for Joseph to be a dweller of the threshold, to join Mary in this journey to be part of the earthly family of this child, this Savior, a child that will be God with us.

Unlike Ahaz, Joseph receives this invitation and accepts it.

He steps onto the threshold, reaching up to God as God is reaching down to him, allowing the light and love of God to break forth into this dark and scary time.

Not only does he accept this invitation, but in the end he accepts his role as the earthly father, even being the one to name this child.

As we wait for Christmas and remember God's merciful intrusion into the world through Jesus Christ, and anticipate his second coming, we are invited to stand at the threshold, to reach up to God as God is reaching down to us.

We can't run away from the darkness, nor are we called to run into it, turning away from the light and love of God.

We are called to be dwellers of the threshold.

Do we accept this invitation?

To be aware of the world of the present, where brokenness, darkness, and pain are all too real, but to also continually reach up and hold on to the never-ending promise that God is with us and that we will carry on.

Do we seek signs of where God's light and love are intruding into the present?

For this is the truth, my brothers and sisters.

God so loves the world that he sends his only son so that all might have life.

I didn't skip it because it's extremely crucial for what's getting ready to happen this week.

Reminder that we've known that Christmas is coming.

This is not necessarily something older generations enjoyed, but we knew.

And out of that knowledge, we've been asked to cultivate in ourselves the virtues of hope and peace and joy, and today love.

So when the Christ child comes, he'll find a ready welcome in our lives.

And quite honestly, we'll be ready for him to show up in new ways in our lives.

So we talked the first week about hope, and I'm going to quote Rabbi Jonathan Sachs here.

Optimism is the belief that good things are going to happen.

Hope is the belief that we can make them happen.

So hope isn't about wishing, it's about goal setting.

We talked about peace.

We talked about how sometimes we confuse peace with quiet.

When instead peace is about building something new.

It's the opposite of war.

Peace is about creation, not about destruction.

Peace is about building bridges that have been burned.

Last week we got to hear about the rose-colored virtue of joy.

Jenny said it better than I did, but you here's here's our brief summary.

Joy is about connection.

It's about being connected with somebody else, with the world, no matter how hard that is.

And it occurred to me this week talking to our day schoolers.

I never looked forward to changing my daughter's diaper, but I absolutely enjoyed it.

Because the connection it made, caring for her needs, time and time again was second to none.

I never was happy apologizing after I did something wrong.

But I sure did enjoy making right what I did wrong.

Joy can abide sorrow and happiness can't.

And we are asked to cultivate joy, and today we're asked to put room for love.

And I hope it's okay to say, you know, in general, if we limit love to a feeling, it's gonna be really hard because I've never been able to make myself feel a certain way, no matter how hard I tried.

And I say this at every marriage that I celebrate.

If it's all about feeling in love, I'm gonna give you back two years.

Good thing my wife's an attorney.

We can uh we can help you out here.

Um, of course, what we understand is love is a level of commitment regardless of how we feel, and love can take us to some really dark places.

We go there because the depth of our commitment brings us there.

And I want to suggest to you that our readings today are really about that.

So let's start out, if it's okay, with this Isaiah reading, that honestly, the way I was given this reading is that it's all about predicting Jesus.

The prophet is talking about Jesus, not somebody in his own day.

Most of you are sophisticated enough to realize Isaiah is talking about a child that's getting ready to be born in his own lifetime, possibly his own son.

A little bit of context here is that Jerusalem is under siege.

They're not a military might, to be honest.

Sometimes we think the Israeli army is the finest military fighting force in the world per capita.

No, no, you need to think about the Haitian military.

That's what they were like at the day.

This is the military of Haiti being surrounded under a siege.

And the prophet says to the king, listen, there's hope for you, and here's the sign, there's gonna be a new baby.

Now, you have to spend a second on this, because when you're under siege, there's no food or water coming into the city.

Jerusalem actually had some water, but they didn't have any food.

The last thing you want in a siege is a baby.

Because it's another mouth to feed, it's another life to take care of.

It involves crying, which wakes up people who are compressed into a city that is too small to hold them.

The prophet says, here's a sign, there'll be a new baby.

We often, again, think, yay, new babies, but again, under siege, this is dangerous.

And the prophet says, you'll call that baby Emmanuel, which means God with us.

Hey, that doesn't mean God's on our team.

Like we just won the Fantasy Football League and we drafted God as our quarterback.

Emmanuel really means God is among us.

Like God is in this with us.

Like God is gonna enter, besieged Jerusalem, and be with you.

Now, Joseph isn't under a siege.

He's not.

But he's living in perilous political times, to be honest.

And he gets this mixed sign.

Hey, there's gonna be a baby called Emmanuel, and the lady you're betrothed to is gonna have it, and don't worry that it's not your baby.

This is a good thing.

Would that work with you?

I mean, would you wake up from a dream in which the angel of the Lord appeared and said, hey, that lady you're supposed to get married to, don't worry about her pregnancy.

It's from God.

Would you wake up and say, Hallelujah?

I mean, this is an ambiguous thing happening in Jesus' life.

In fact, it's a really challenging thing.

And this is something we don't do anymore, the system of betrothal.

So the way it works is like this.

Keep in mind that marriages were made by parents, not by kids.

Now we have a tradition that comes not from the Bible that said Joseph was really old and Mary was like really young.

But that's not in the Bible.

The way it usually works culturally is Joseph would have been like 13, 15, something like that.

Mary would have been like 13, 15, something like that, and their parents said, hey, this is a good match.

And because women belong to their dads, like chattels, Joseph's folks would have made a down payment on the goods.

That's when you're betrothed, when you put money down on the bride to be.

Now that's a contract.

That means unless something crazy happens, this is gonna be the match.

Something crazy happens.

Now, you need to know that these people are peasants.

They're not rolling in dowries.

So to think through this, and Matthew's the one who talks about Joseph.

Luke talks about Mary, but Matthew talks about Joseph.

Matthew's family has made this damn payment, and if Joseph walks away, he may have no hope of getting married.

The rest of his life because this was his one chance they could afford.

Again, we don't do it like this, but this is how they did it.

A dowry was compensating a father for having raised a child who could not inherit property or earn income.

You were paying the family for having raised a daughter.

So they're paying 13 to 15 years worth of living expenses.

That's a big sum of money when you are a subsistence worker.

If Joseph's older, this would be his life savings to marry this woman.

And he's about to walk away from it because he's going to divorce her quietly.

Joseph could have said, Your daughter broke the contract.

He would have got his money back, and Mary would have either been stoned or burned alive.

Joseph, this is an interesting thing, isn't it?

You hear the scripture.

Joseph is a righteous man.

Righteous.

Which means, well, it can mean a lot of things, but I suppose it means Joseph loves Mary enough to not take her life, even if it means he'll be single for the rest of his own.

Isn't that interesting?

Joseph is willing to sacrifice the future he'd always dreamed of for the challenge and the life right in front of him.

Boy, I don't like to hear love in those terms, but I think those are the terms of love today.

To sacrifice the future we've always dreamed of for the sake of life that's right in front of us.

That's tough.

And the prophet Isaiah is brought into this to hear, aha, this is going to fulfill, like this story is resonating with the chord that happened in Isaiah's lifetime a long time ago.

It wasn't about some prediction to happen yet in the future, it's about resonating with these very sometimes confusing ways that God chooses to interact with us.

I mean, listen, if you were under siege in Jerusalem, the sign you would want is for Brock Lesnar to come into the city and beat the junk out of your opponent.

If you don't know who that is, he has really big hands.

He does.

They're like twice the size of the normal hand.

That's what you would want.

Or you would want the desert fox to come and guide your armies.

Or you would want, I don't know, USAID to send you some F-14s, and then you could get your way out.

That's what you would want.

You don't want a baby.

And that's what you get.

A baby.

That's what you get.

Someone else you gotta take care of.

Vexing how God chooses to work sometimes.

And this is what Joseph gets to hear.

Hey, listen, in the middle of all of your concern, I mean again, if we're just talking about feelings, I don't think it's a stretch to say Joseph is going to feel confused about this baby the rest of his life.

I don't think it's a stretch.

What he chooses to do, though, is not live into his feelings.

He chooses to live into something deeper, a mixed sign about where God might be, especially when it's inconvenient to him.

And in so doing, he resonates with what God has already done.

Listen, the resonance is really clear in Paul.

We get to hear that Jesus is descended from the line of David, right?

Who came from David?

Joseph, not Mary.

And Joseph's not his dad.

It's not even true.

But it resonates, don't you hear?

That's why it's included.

I know you're thinking Judaism is matrilineal.

Oh, only since 1000 of our common era.

That's like AD.

It was patrilineal, which is why when you read the genealogy, it's all about Joseph.

Joseph's related to David, but Joseph is not Jesus' dad.

The scriptures are not being limited to factuality.

They're trying to say, here's the resonance of what God is doing.

Here's the truth.

And if you get bogged down on the details, you miss the whole point.

The point is that Joseph's life resonates with what David's going to do, which is to bring God's people together.

That's the opportunity.

Which means, if at the end of the Christmas story we dislike somebody more than we already did, we read it wrong.

Which means at the end of the Christmas story, if we live into our feelings about love, instead of practicing it, especially when it's hard, we did it wrong.

Now look, I am not naive, and I don't think practicing love means always saying yes and being trampled over.

No, no.

There are people in every congregation, I've come to learn this as a priest, whose spiritual gift, spiritual gift is the ability to say no.

That might be the only one they have.

I want your nose.

But they have it.

And there are times when we practice love by saying no.

There are times.

I just think sometimes we choose to say no without ever thinking about whether it's loving of us or not.

Sometimes we just make no the default when really we might ought to stretch to see whether we can say why not first.

And that I think is what's really tough.

And let's not let the Holy Family off the hook here.

Again, put yourself in this situation where you've been preparing for this life of your dreams.

And then your child comes home and says, I don't want to go to college.

Your child comes home and says, Mom, I'm gay.

Your child comes home and says, Mom, I know I have your son, but I identify as a woman.

Put yourself in those situations and you're right there with Mary and Joseph.

And the question is, are we going to practice love or are we going to practice living into just our feelings?

The whole point of these Advent virtues I put to you is that we don't always feel like being hopeful.

Boy, if you give me the choice, I'd much rather be an optimist than have hope.

I would much rather have what I wish than have to work something that's greater than what I wish for.

I would much rather have quiet most of the time than peace.

You know?

I really would.

I might even rather have happiness and comfort than joy most days.

And I might rather like somebody than have to do the hard work of loving them.

But just like with a new baby, you see, if you don't do any preparations for them coming, you just won't be ready.

You won't be ready, and you won't be showing them love and joy and peace and hope.

And that's what we're asked to do.

No, baby Jesus won't be born in a manger again this year.

But I guarantee you, he's crying in the life of somebody that you know, waiting for somebody to care for him.

And that's our opportunity.

And look, you've got two days to practice that kind of love.

Don't worry, we're gonna have some nutrition in just a few minutes that's gonna give you that energy.

But use that energy well.

Love somebody today.