Podcast: Advent 4 – Lindsay Sytsma

OK. Good morning everyone.

Areas I get settled, put this down there, we don't need it.

Alright, well, another good morning.

We're very happy to have you here this morning.

For those of you who may not know me or I am a new face, my

name is Lindsey. I get to be a slightly more than

occasional teacher here. This is one of the ways that I

serve my husband. Is he still behind me?

There he is that guy. I'm married to him and I am.

I'm always so excited whenever I get the chance and the

opportunity to share as a church community or with you as a

church community. And this morning we are in our

4th week of Advent. So we already mentioned that

that is the candle of love. And we are really getting to

that place where we are preparing to move into Christmas

Eve and Christmas Day. And we've been in Matthews

Gospel for this Advent season. We've been using the writings

from the Gospel of Matthew as we prepare ourselves to move

towards the story and the celebration of Christ's birth.

And as we've gone through this series, we have been looking

about how the Christmas story, essentially how God's story

through Christ intersects with humanity and then with our own

stories. So in the first week, we talked

about this, this idea of God interrupting the story,

particularly the stories of of Joseph and Mary through the

announcement of Jesus. But God is really interrupting

the way things were in the world.

And we asked the question, how might God be interrupting our

stories? How are we opening ourselves up

to the interruption God might be bringing to our life so that we

can move closer to Christ? After that, we looked at this

invitation to trust, to trust in what God is doing, to trust in

the story that he is writing, even when the story he is

writing might go against the plans that we have for

ourselves, the plans that we want, the plans that of the

things that we think we want to see happen.

And we talked about how there is peace found in that place of, of

moving towards trust, of trusting the story.

And then last week by looking at the story of the Magi, we talked

about taking steps of obedience towards Christ, moving towards

Christ in obedience even when there is opposition and the joy

that is found in that place of moving closer to him.

And I want to be completely honest, I cannot promise that

today is going to feel like a completely natural progression

of where we have gone in previous weeks.

Our passage today is very different and very challenging

in some ways, even though it is the very next piece of the

Christmas story as it is shared in Matthew.

So I don't know that everything is going to feel like it is

neatly wrapped up. Excuse the Christmas pun, but my

hope today as we move through this passage is that we leave

this place with confidence that God, the God who loves us, the

God who is love is at work in the story that we're gonna tell

today in in our own stories. So if you have your Bibles with

you, we are in Matthew 2, verses 13 to 23.

Matthew 2:13–23

You're welcome to look that up on a phone.

If you have a physical Bible, great.

There are Bibles are at the back.

If you prefer a physical Bible, please get up and grab one.

Will not bother me. I'd love to see that happen.

I promise it will be on the screens behind me as well.

So last week we left off with the story of the Magi, who are

often referred to as wise men. And these are outsiders who come

from another place. They come from a country with

different gods and different traditions, and they come from

afar to see Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, and they draw near

to honor him. And they know that King Herod,

they're warned in a dream that King Herod was king of Jerusalem

at the time, that he has not good intentions towards Jesus.

So they in a dream are warned not to go back to Herod, not to

say where Jesus is located, and instead go home another way.

And our story picks up literally right after that.

So Matthew 2 verses 13 to 23, when they had gone, when the

Matthew 2:13–23

Magi had gone, an Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a

dream and said, get up, take the child and his mother and escape

to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for

Herod is going to search for the child and kill him.

So he, Joseph, got up, took the child and his mother during the

night, and left for Egypt, where they stayed until the death of

Herod. And so was fulfilled what the

Lord had said through the prophet out of Egypt I called my

son. When Herod realized that he had

been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders

to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who

were two years old and under, in accordance with the time that he

had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the

prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled. A voice is heard in Rama

weeping. And great morning, Rachel,

weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because

they are no more. After Herod died, an Angel of

the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, Get

up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of

Israel. For those who were trying to

take the child's life are dead. So he, Joseph, got up, took the

child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel.

But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in the

place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there.

Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of

Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth.

So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets that He

would be called a Nazarene. So like I said, this passage is

a little bit harder to sit with to see as part of the hope and

the joy and the peace of Christmas.

And I just want to state that at the beginning when I was praying

about this passage, when I was discerning where I should go,

when I was trying to find the ways that God was speaking me

through this so that I would know a direction of where to to

share with you. This morning I had to stop

several times and just sit with the writing.

I am a problem solver, solver by nature.

I immediately go to how do I analyze?

How do I make this easy? How do I make this clean and

simple? And how do I share this?

And I had to resist that urge inside of me to try to figure

out a way through this. I felt a sense that I had to sit

with the difficulty and the uncomfortableness of this

passage. And it is good when Scripture

does that to us. It's certainly good when it does

it to me. We start off with this passage,

seeing the Angel bring another message in a dream.

It's another moment of interruption.

And generally when an Angel brings a message in a dream or a

brain Angel brings a message, it means something is about to

shift in the story. And that's what we see here.

This is a story, a passage that is full of dualities.

On the one hand, you see the tangible action and the

protection of God. We see him intervene to ensure

that His plan and his purposes cannot be thwarted.

We see the obedience of Joseph, of Mary.

They're continuing to come into alignment with God's will, not

being afraid to just get up and go into a new country.

They take this immediate action to save their family and to

become an even greater part of the work that God is doing.

It's amazing in so many ways. And yet we also see this

opposition. We talked about Herod last week

as an oppositional force, but it's more than that this week,

right? Like, this is pure evil.

This is a king that is so paranoid and so desperate that

he would do such an unspeakable thing.

He would kill innocent children, all to protect position and

authority. That was always going to be

temporary because Herod is human and he is going to die.

And at this point in our story, he's actually fairly advanced in

years already. It's an evilness that's really,

really hard to read about and and to juxtapose to all the good

that we see. It's hard to think of this as

part of the Christmas story. Stanley Howard Ross In his

writing on this passage, he talks about how nothing

challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas more in

the Gospels than this interjection right here.

It is a stark reminder that Jesus is born into a world in

which children are killed and continue to be killed to protect

the power of tyrants. That is a heavy statement, and

yet maybe the awful truth of this piece of Scripture.

It's a profound reminder of just how deeply we need Jesus.

Maybe this painful and challenging passage in this

bigger story shows us how desperately the world needs and

continues to need Jesus, a different king and a different

Kingdom, and how immense the love of God is in sending Jesus

to a world that could look like this, a world that's so

desperately needs him. And that's really where I want

to start this morning. And I'm gonna be clear this,

this sermon has two main points. That's it.

And I'm not even gonna make you wait.

I'm gonna show you what they are right now.

So if you leave with nothing else, I hope that this resonates

deeply inside of you. The 1st is that God is present.

That is the first truth. The second is that God is at

work. Those are where I want to ground

ourselves this morning. God is present and God is at

work. One of the things that strikes

me about this passage is that God does not wait for the danger

to pass before sending his son into this world.

He doesn't move his birth to a different place.

He isn't afraid to use the signs and wonders like stars that the

magic I would follow. God places Jesus in the shadow

of Jerusalem. The literal shadow.

There's only about 5 miles between them.

He places Jesus in the shadow of Jerusalem, where a cruel king

sits on a throne whose power is preserved through violence.

The Christmas story does not avoid suffering.

It names it. It contains it.

It is not separate from the weeping in the morning that this

world goes through. Brokenness is part of the world,

and brokenness is part of our Christmas story.

This passage shows the full range of human experience.

Fear and hope and grief and obedience and violence and trust

in all of these things are woven into the birth of our Savior.

And it is precisely this time and this place when God chooses

to come near. This is the moment where God is

not just close to His people as a feeling or as unknowing.

He takes on human flesh. He steps down onto this earth.

God is not just watching over the earth.

God is on the earth. Throughout the scriptures there

are moments where heaven and earth, where the divine and the

earth intersect. Burning bushes, pillars of

clouds and fire, dreams, visions, prophetic words, places

where the divine and the human meat.

But Jesus is something more than another intersection, point,

event. He is the intersection.

He is the embodiment, literally, of the human and the divine

meeting. God does not remain apart from

the world. He becomes part of it through

Jesus. When we speak the name Emmanuel,

it's introduced to us in Matthew 1, God with us.

It is not a comforting slogan. It is not meant to be a

sentimental phrase. It is meant to be a radical

claim we are naming a reality that reshapes how we understand

God's presence. God chose to live as a human

within human vulnerability, to live within a place that is

dangerous, to live with suffering, to live with fear and

fragility, to live a life where there is some level of

uncertainty. RT France writes about God's

saving work, that it unfolds within history's beauty and

violence, that God does not remove himself from the

brokenness of the world in order to redeem it.

Christmas does not announce that everything is fine.

It announces that Jesus, the Christ God Incarnate, He has

come anyways, that he is here, that he has entered this world.

We do not worship a God that we cannot see or who rescues us

from a distance. We worship a God who draws close

enough to be affected, to be wounded, and ultimately to save.

And the power of the incarnation does not end when Jesus leaves

the the earth. The incarnation changes

everything about how we understand God's relates to the

world. God continues to meet with us in

the realities of our everyday lives, our fear, our

uncertainty, our joy, our suffering, our hope.

The incarnation tells us that God's presence meets us exactly

where we are at. That God is still moving towards

his people. He's not moving away.

God is not intimidated by our circumstances.

He is not unsettled by what is going on in the world.

The same God who took flesh. And Jesus is the God who is

still present with us now through his Spirit.

He's faithful, moving, compassionate and loving.

God is present then and now Emmanuel.

I love how that Advent devotional, if you're doing the

the Daryl Johnson one that we've been doing as a church, he talks

about how the word Emmanuel, which we often say is God with

us, is more literally translated as the with us God.

The God that is not only here in the soft picture perfect

Christmas card moments. He is here with us through every

moment God is present. God is also at work now.

God is always been an active God.

He is always creating and speaking and guiding and

intervening this. The scriptures are full of

stories that that do this or that show this.

And yet we see God's divine plan in new ways.

When we look at the Christmas story.

If we return to the text and pay attention to how the story

unfolds, we notice something really important.

Joseph is warned in a dream of what here it is going to do

before that threat is actually ever realized.

Hair doesn't even know where Jesus is at this point, and

Joseph is warned before Herod can even think to act.

God has already acted first. God provides a way to protect

Mary and Joseph in Jesus before the threat is ever realized.

God warns. He guides forward.

He shows the next step in the journey this little family has

to make. He protects not by removing the

danger, but by providing a way through it.

At the very place where human power seeks to destroy, God was

already working to save. The NIV translation we read

earlier, it says in verse verse 13 that Herod wants to kill

Jesus. But the word here is actually

better translated as the word destroy.

Yes, the word can mean kill, but it carries with it more weight

than that. It points to the total ruin, to

the complete loss of life and purpose.

Herod doesn't just want Jesus gone, he wants what Jesus

represents gone. He wants what Jesus represents A

raced from the world when the Magi, when the Magi come to see

a Messiah, A savior. Herod wants that very idea, the

idea of deliverance or saving to be not even a possibility of

what could happen. And his opposition leads is

violent and it's furious and it's loud and you can almost

feel the tantrum like force of hair.

It's paranoia spilling over into complete cruelty.

And yet in these moments, God is already at work, and God is at

work in really cool ways. I think sometimes we forget when

we read the Bible how often God is relying on us to do things,

to be part of this work. He puts his trust in Joseph.

For Joseph to be obedient. God could have waved his hand

and made the danger disappear. He doesn't.

The evil remains real. The threat remains real.

And yet God speaks and Joseph listens.

And once again, Mary and Joseph are called into this act of

obedience. They are asked to leave their

homeland, to become refugees in a foreign place, to live among

strangers. They are removed from the

familiarity of extended family and from stability.

And they are called to a life. I mean his.

Their life right now very much is a life on the move, and they

just go again. We see the same pattern running

through the Christmas story that we've seen in other weeks.

The leap of faith, the willingness to trust the

opening, to put their lives in God's hands and to be part of

this strange and costly work that is unfolding around them.

And yet God's blessing goes with them as they do this.

I think so often I will only speak for me, but I'm gonna say

it's probably pretty true of everyone.

We so often imagine that God's protection looks like safety and

comfort and certainty and ease. The Christmas story tells us

otherwise. Jesus is saved through flight,

through displacement, through obscurity.

The very things the world often despises, God uses for his

purposes. And there's even this kind of

quiet reversal happening in this story.

We talked last week about how the Magi, these outsiders, they

moved towards Jesus. And now we see Jesus is moving

outward. He's moving more into the

margins. He is moving into exile.

From the very beginning, God's saving work is not confined to

what is easy or what is familiar or what is comfortable or what

is even expected. And I want us to ask ourselves

this question this morning. Where are we being invited to

partner with the work that God is already doing?

Where are we invited into being or into having lives that are on

the move? Lives don't that don't cling too

closely to certainty and familiarity, but lives that are

willing to go into new places and new spaces.

I'm talking about brand new countries though.

Maybe for some that is your calling, but where?

Is there a new place or a space that you could move into to be

part of the work that God is doing?

Where is God calling us into obedience that feels

inconvenient and unsettling, and yet might be the exact place

that we need to be. The Christmas story reminds us

that God is still at work, often quietly, often unexpectedly,

often happening in ways that we will not see and do not

understand. And it is inviting ordinary

people to to take a step forward into obedience, to be part of

something bigger than we could have ever imagined.

God is present and God is at work.

There's one more way in this passage.

I wanna show how these two ideas come together.

And I really think that Matthew wants us to see it, which is why

I couldn't let it remain unsaid. From the very beginning of his

gospel, starting in verses or starting, starting in chapters

both 1 and 2, Matthew is trying to tell us that Jesus is not

just another figure in Israel's story.

He has the he is the one that God's people have been waiting

for. And you see this in the use of

scriptures. Now this might be a podcast

topic or for a later date, but I will admit.

Matthew loses uses his scriptures a little fast and

loose. He does that.

But he is doing this to tell a bigger story.

He is showing that God has always been at work in history

and that he has brought his people to this very moment where

Jesus has intersected with this world.

More specifically, in the passage that we're reading,

Matthew is shaping this story so that his audience, both ancient

and present, will see that Jesus acts as a new and a greater

Moses, one who is chosen to save his people and deliver them.

The parallels are intentional. Pharaoh orders the death of the

Hebrew children and Moses is spared.

Herod orders the death of the children in Bethlehem, and Jesus

is spared. Israel goes to Egypt for refuge

and then comes out of Egypt for deliverance.

Jesus goes into Egypt and is going to come out of Egypt.

Matthew is narrating a new exodus.

He is showing us that God has been bringing His people to this

moment, a new and ultimate deliverance.

Just as God once delivered his people through a from oppression

through Moses, God is now bringing a deeper and greater

deliverance through the person of Jesus Christ.

And this is not simply the rescue from one tyrant or one

empire that that God's Kingdom is being made real in this world

through Jesus Christ. He is the deliverer, the

ultimate Messiah. He is the one who will save.

God's salvific work takes flesh. God.

God's promises to his people are fulfilled in the birth of a

child, God's Son, God Incarnate. What was once hoped for and

anticipated and longed for is now embodied in Jesus.

God is not inventing a new story out of thin air.

He is bringing this story to fulfillment right here, right

now, in the midst of the world as it is.

At the end of this passage, we are told that Herod dies.

Very simply, history will say that Herod died a very painful

death of a mystery illness. They don't really know what it

was at the time. And Joseph and Mary are told

once again by an Angel to move, to return home.

And we could linger here once again on, oh, there's an Angel

and there's an interruption. And Mary and Joseph are obedient

and they go home. And it's, it's lovely.

But I think that we've nailed this point home in the last few

weeks. So I want us to draw our

attention to another thing, and I want us to notice the

complete, nonchalant way that Herod's story simply just ends

here. Herod.

Despite all his paranoia and his wealth and his cruelty and his

security, he doesn't last. He does not endure.

He, like every mortal and finite thing, he dies.

And for all the awful things that Herod was, Herod, through

history, is remembered as a great builder, an innovator of

his time. He built cities, he engineered

mountains where none existed. He used waterways and systems

and pipes to move water between places that it had never

reached. He surrounded himself with

education and beauty and power and excess, and yet his Kingdom

did not last. And many people don't know

Herod's legacy outside of his just complete and utter cruelty.

This is a quiet reminder at the end of our story that the

kingdoms of this world, no matter how impressive, no matter

how powerful, no matter how they try to cling to power, they will

not endure. Matthew's gospel from the very

beginning places 2 kingdoms and he puts them side by side.

One is the Kingdom of a very rich and powerful man, one of

empire, one that is clothed in splendor and security, and the

other one. The other Kingdom is ruled by

the king of Kings, who was born poor to a family that no one

would make room for in a tiny town.

He was born in a place that's meant for animals.

His arrival is attended and announced by shepherds, and the

opposition to His Kingdom and His kingship start right from

the beginning. As we saw today, He comes into

the world's in danger, and when that immediate danger is passed,

He is raised in a small rural community, Nazareth.

We see this at the end of our text.

It is a tale of two kingdoms. One Kingdom is built on power

and control and fear, and it is the Kingdom of this world, and

the other is the Kingdom of God. It is marked by Shalom, by

wholeness, by peace and hope and love, and it is built on and

realized in the person of Jesus Christ.

We have spent this whole year looking at the Gospel of

Matthew. Sorry for those who thought you

were gonna get a Luke reference. Sorry, Not Matthew.

We've look at Luke. I said the wrong word, book.

We've been looking at Luke. Sorry for anyone who thought we

were gonna break from Luke. You're not.

Here it is. We have spent our whole church

year looking at the Gospel of Luke, and we have been looking

at what the Kingdom of God looks like.

It does not avoid the messiness. It moves into it.

It meets people where they're at.

It rejects the values of this world and shows us a new way to

live. It is a Kingdom that invades and

persists. It welcomes and it loves, but

more than anything it endures, and not because it is protected

by force, but because it is rooted in God's love and is

enduring faithfulness. Heritage Kingdom ends with

death, but the Kingdom of God does not.

In fact, death cannot stop it. Death could not hold Christ.

His death does not end this Kingdom, it unleashes it.

The Kingdom of God endures, it does not rise and fall with the

tides of this world. Two kingdoms.

The story of two kingdoms, but only one, is marked by the

presence and the work of God. The words that we use during

Advent Love, joy, hope, peace. They aren't abstract concepts or

seasonal decorations. They are embodied in the person

of Jesus Christ who entered a messy, messy world and continues

to enter the messy world and our messy stories.

He continues to work and be present in those circumstances.

So wherever you are coming from today, whether this year held

the highest of highs for you or the lowest of lows or something

in between, whether or not you are joyful and full of peace and

gratitude, or whether you're just not and this season looks a

little bit different for you, I pray that you hold on to this

truth. God is present and God is at

work. We rejoice in the love and the

peace and the hope of God, not because all is well.

We rejoice because we know that God is here and we know that He

is doing something even when we cannot see the outcome.

God's love born in Jesus Christ is still alive and well, and it

goes with us and calls us into live call, sorry, calls us into

living as God's people. And my prayer for you, for me,

for my family, for your family, for the greater world out there,

is that this presence and this love will be our confidence and

our comfort and our hope this season.

Will you bow your heads in prayer with me?

God, we thank you that you are not, you are not a distant God,

that you are a God that is working and active and has come

close. And let us see you through the

person of Jesus. God, we live in a world that

often feels very heavy and very uncertain.

And will you remind us this morning, deep in our souls, that

you are here with us, that you are working and moving even when

it doesn't make sense, even when we can't see it or understand

God? Would you meet us in the middle

of our very real lives, in the middle of our our questions and

our worries and our joys and our grief?

Would you help us give us the courage to trust that you are at

work? And as we leave this place and

we go into this week, as we celebrate Christmas, in just a

few short days, God, would you shape us into people who reflect

your love, who can live lives of peace and hope and joy in the

places that you put us and where we need to step into new places?

God, that you would give us the calling and the courage to do

that. We pray all these things in your

Son's name, Amen.