Fourth Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 7:10-14 | Romans 1:1-7 | Matthew 1:18-24

Pour forth, we beseech you, oh Lord, your grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ your son was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This is our fourth chapter, so to speak, of preparing for the great Feast of the Incarnation.  I really believe, with all my heart, until we understand the fullness of the incarnation, we really can’t begin to enter into the fullness of what religion is promising us, what our hearts are longing for, what God has planned for all those that he loves.  It’s really summed up with the gospel of this particular Sunday, because we’re talking all along about something that’s coming, something new, something different, something that’s been spoken of so often in the Old Testament, but somehow it got hidden and distorted in a system of justice and rules and regulations.  But the mystery is found in the name that has been given to this Jesus.  The name Jesus means God saves, but he’s also called, in this particular passage of this particular Sunday — he’s called Emanuel — Emanuel.  And what does it mean?  God is with us, within us.  In a way that I have to admit I have never fully understood in the many, many years of my priesthood, when I was being so effective, I thought, and I think perhaps I was effective in a certain sense, and I did good work, I feel, and did the best I could, but I never really experienced what I’ve experienced since I retired and began meditating and reflecting.  That’s been ten years ago, and I’m overwhelmed by the simplicity of this message of just believe that this whole New Testament, this whole new life that we’re being promised is based on a new understanding of the way in which God works.  

He had to work the way he worked in the Old Testament.  I’ve said that to you so often.  Now that I preach from the New [sic] Testament, I’m more and more aware of the struggle God had to get the attention of people, and he had to start with where they were, what they knew, and they knew gods.  His main thrust of the Old Testament was to convince them that there was only one God, one really effective God.  The other gods are ways of imagining this awesome power that goes so far beyond our arguing power, something we need, something we long for, but never in the pagan gods did people get the feeling of what God, the God, the God who’s revealed himself through this incredible Judeo/Christian religion, who he really is.  No one could expect a God to be the lover, the friend, the partner.  The intimacy with which this God describes his desire to be with us is pure blasphemy to anybody that understood gods.  Gods were so powerful, so frightening and so overwhelming that even to get close to one you would disintegrate.  That’s why God had to be so careful to begin to work just with a few, a few of the patriarchs, particularly with Abraham, and he began to speak to Abraham and then Moses.  And even when he would speak to these people, they were so transfixed and transformed by it.  I know Moses had the experience of, when he’d go and speak with God directly, his face would be so bright, so illuminated that he had to cover his face, because people couldn’t stand to look at him.  It was so bright.  What is that saying?  That this God is so distant from us.  He can choose someone to talk to but not to all of us.  We are human.  We are imperfect.  We are underdeveloped.  We are not fully who we should be, and this God has always been thought to have been a God that dwelt only in perfection, only with perfection.  And to change that image of a God who is only there because he’s found someone who’s so far above everybody else he feels he can contact them now, what we’re seeing in the New Testament, is that no, he’s here for everyone — everyone. 

It’s the whole notion of, when Jesus saved the world, when Jesus came to announce that God is with us, there was no way they could say Jew or Gentile.  They had to say God is with everyone, and that was so shocking.  It’s like the Catholic Church recently, in the Vatican Council, has said every human being that seeks the truth is going to find the truth in God, whether they choose a religion or not, whether they’re Christian or not.  Those are almost impossible words to fathom that the council made so clear, that God’s gift of self to us is universal.  It’s not owned by any religion.  

So we’re still struggling with the same issue of how to understand a God who is so loving and so ready to enter into us.  How do we figure this out?  Well, let’s look at the four Sundays, because each one of them has something unique.  I apologize if I get them out of order, but I remember what each was.  The first one was this whole idea of this image of wake up, and it starts with the image of Noah.  Noah was the man who walked around and knew something was coming.  Something was going to overwhelm people, a flood.  It’s an image of, I’d say, some kind of contagious unconsciousness, that everybody’s out of touch with reality, and he’s being lifted up into a higher realm of understanding, and he’s telling everybody they’d better prepare for this.  And they just went on and did everything they were doing, completely unconscious, and so the whole theme of the first Sunday is, “Wake up.  Pay attention.  There’s something here that’s never been here before, a new birth, a new way of seeing, a new understanding, and everyone is capable of it if you’ll just open your eyes and see.”  

And then there’s the image in the other reading about the Pharisees, and they’re coming to be baptized by John.  And the Pharisees are totally out of touch with reality.  They are caught in the thing that everyone who gets caught into a position of authority and power falls into.  They begin to see themselves as way above everyone else, and they have a very hard time surrendering to anything other than their own egos and their own needs.  It’s such a shame that this power thing is so seductive.  It’s hard on children who have parents that way.  It’s hard on people that work for a hierarchy of organized leaders or managers.  It’s hard on the simple people in religion when a religion becomes so disciplined and so harsh on imperfection.  It’s the enemy.  It’s a form of resistance to the surrender that we’re supposed to have to everything that God is offering us, giving it to us without cost.  So the Pharisees are the symbol of what God is trying to get us to see past.  So when John is raging at them, saying, “Why are you here?  You’re not going to change,” and then he makes this statement, “This coming of the new truth, the understanding of who we really are, this truth sifts you, and it means everything that’s in you that’s true and whole and real stays on the top, and the chaff falls at the bottom.”  Sometimes you read that image, and what you come up with is something like this: at one time, Jesus is going to come into the world, and everybody that’s got the truth is going to be saved, and everyone who’s caught in an illusion is going to be burned in hell.  Well, it’s not exactly that.  I think it’s much more about what he’s come to do is to work with each individual so that we can grow in our understanding of what is real and true and what is fake and false, and everything we’ve tried to use to get to something that we hope will be better for us, and we find it doesn’t create anything any good, that’s the chaff.  And he wants to burn it out of us.  He doesn’t want to divide the world into good and bad and crush the bad.  He wants to take you and me and divide our two sides of us and show us the need for repentance, and that’s what John the Baptist is telling these people.  Repent, what does repent mean?  It means face the truth of what you’ve done.  Look at the dissatisfaction of what it’s produced, and you’ll have a regret.  That’s why living for a long time is such a good deal.  You look back, and I think, “The things I did, the things that were important to me 50, 60 years ago, they’re embarrassing.”  That’s called repentance.  

So he calls them to repentance, and then this other notion of what Jesus has come to show everybody — so on the third Sunday, it’s like John the Baptist is there, and he’s a figure in the gospel, and he’s sending his disciples to see what this new kingdom is about.  And then you hear this thing that God is opening our hearts to.  He said, “Look at the kingdom.  The blind see.  The deaf hear.  The lame leap and dance.  Those that are imprisoned are freed.  Those that are dead are coming back to life.”  That’s what the inheritance of this God in us is promising, and Jesus is showing people how it works.  He’s saying, “Look at it.  See it?  It’s amazing.”  And what I find so fascinating about that image is how the leaders of the church would not see it.  They would not look at it.  They would say, “No, this man who was born blind and even now he can see, and we know he has witnesses that tell us that he was blind at birth, and now he can see.  It didn’t happen.”  It was amazing how they could just reject the truth.  Here’s the proof.  Here’s the situation, and they would say, “No, that’s not proof.”  Resistance, resistance.  Why were the Pharisees so resistant?  Because, and this is a frightening thought, maybe they understood who this Jesus really is and what he’s come to do for people, to take what they had in the temple, locked in a room that was only available to them.  This presence of God was going to leave their control and enter into people freely, and they were terrified.  I would hate to think that they had some sense of that.  I would like to think that they really thought Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, but it’s more, perhaps, real to say they probably did know who he was and what he would do to them and how they would lose their authority and how they would be reduced to something not nearly as important and how they wouldn’t have any value in their own mind.  It’s frightening, terrifying that we as human beings have the power to resist something that wonderful, something that powerful, something that good.

So the gospel at this Sunday just summarized it all.  It said, “Look, a sign.  You want a sign?  Well, it’s here.  It’s in this person Jesus.”  And when you really look at it and examine it, it’s impossible to ignore.  How can you ignore someone who comes and names the sin that is so overwhelmingly clearly present in the religion at the time and then show people what religion can be, what it can do?  It’s a power that enters into a human being, and they become the minister.  They’re ministered to as they minister.  They’re given truths so that they can give it to someone else, and when they believe it and they are affected by it, they change, how can you fight that?  How can you deny a life of someone who, in the world filled with stress and pain and suffering, somehow is freed of all the negative elements of it and finds a way to surrender to the reality of life, believing that it’s somehow for the good, that everything in this world is for the good, that we’re all moving in a direction that’s bringing us life?  How do you compare a person who can find peace in the midst of all this insanity and not say, “I want that,” and not say, “That makes sense”?  And when we cling to, “I’d rather be in charge.  I’d rather be the best.  I’d rather be the one that understands, and nobody else really does, and I go off in my own corner and say, ‘Thank God I’m not like the rest of those people,” how can that be a substitute for what is promised in this incredible story of a God entering into us, welcoming him into us and then delighting in the effectiveness of that?  

The image that I think is so interesting is that, when the whole thing was presented to Joseph in the gospel today and he just said, “I’m going to follow my heart.  I’m going to follow an angel that spoke to me.  I’m going to follow somebody that I can’t explain to anybody, but I’m going to break a rule, taking a woman who’s been unfaithful into my house.”  And he knew that somehow she wasn’t under the law, and that’s the most beautiful thing about this life that God is promising us.  We’re freed from that kind of bondage of the law.  Not that the law isn’t there to give us direction, but it doesn’t rule over the way God acts and works and lives within us.  He broke the rule, because the rule didn’t apply.  That was the point.  She wasn’t unfaithful, yet she wasn’t a virgin.  Well, how do you figure that?  The law can’t handle that.  It’s the same way with our logical brain.  Logic doesn’t work for this incredible promise of God dwelling in us, but just as Joseph took Mary into her [sic] home, and Mary had Jesus inside of her, so Jesus tells us, “Let me come into you.  The Father’s in me.  If I come into you, the Father’s in you.”  God is with us.

Father, your presence still causes my mind to just wonder and wander in this whole mysterious thing we call my Christian life, your Christian life, our Christian life.  It’s beautiful.  It’s beyond my imagining.  It’s something I’m longing to delight in and feel and share and teach.  So bless our work, the work of the church.  We are the church.  Believers are the church.  Our leaders are there to serve us.  Without them, we’d be lost, but with them, if we’re not careful, we can be limited.  So it’s about everything working together to bring about this beautiful gift of peace and wonder and joy.  That’s the kingdom.  No matter how it’s working, no matter how crazy it is, that’s the kingdom that’s available to anyone in the midst of more confusing, stressful situations.  We can have it.  It’s our inheritance.  It’s our gift.  It’s our Christmas gift, and we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.