Advent
4A 2013
Father Adam Trambley
December 22, 2013,St. John’s Sharon
When children wait for Christmas, their intensity grows over
time. You know this because you have all
been children once, and some of you maybe still are. The waiting starts shortly after the last
gift is unwrapped when somebody sees something they want and says, “I’m asking
Santa for that next year.” For a few
months Christmas is left on the shelf, like a forgotten elf, unless a
particular goodie catches the eye, or Mom needs to make a quick “naughty of
nice” check. By the time school starts,
the awareness of Christmas vacation starts to dawn on the horizon. By November lists are being made. After Thanksgiving expectations ramp up daily
with decorations, baking, parties, Kettle Korn, wrapped gifts showing up under
the tree and the end of classes. Occasionally
snowmen even make an appearance. By
December 23, children of an easily excitable nature are pinballing around the
house on a hot cocoa high, teetering on the edge of spontaneously exploding
with anticipation. Welcome to Advent
waiting.
God’s people experience the same growing intensity over time
as they wait for the coming of Emmanuel who is the incarnation of
God-with-us. The difference between
God’s people and our children is that while we sometimes wish our youngsters
would give their Christmas expectations a rest, God is always trying to
heighten our longing for his coming.
We start in the first reading from Isaiah this morning. Ahaz is not a good king. He does not do what God wants him to do. He is facing war with two neighboring powers,
and Isaiah is directed by God to go and tell him not to worry about them,
because God is going to take care of things.
But Ahaz doesn’t want to wait for God to act. He doesn’t have faith. So Isaiah says that God wants to give him a
sign so that he can trust God, so that he can expect God, so that he can know
that God is going to show up and do what God is promising. But Ahaz won’t do it. He says he doesn’t want to put God to the
test. He won’t test God because he
doesn’t think God can pass the tests he would devise. He doesn’t think God is as powerful or as
smart or as competent as he is and he judges the commander of the heavenly
hosts of flying seraphim and cherubim with flaming swords an ineffective
military leader.
Sometimes we are like King Ahaz. We don’t want to put God to the test in the
midst of whatever difficulties we face.
We’d rather suffer in fear and anxiety and despair than cry out to God
for help. We don’t believe, in our
hearts, that God is actually able to handle the situations we have gotten
ourselves into, or maybe we don’t believe that he cares, or maybe we just don’t
want to do what it would take to resolve our problems. We refuse to hand over the test of our lives
to God because for some reason -- and it is never a very good reason – but for
some reason we don’t let God answer the test questions because then we would
have to read his answers. God’s answers
usually demand us to grow and change and love and give and let go of our resentments
and fears, and generally become a key component of God’s long-term solution --
and ain’t nobody wantin’ that!
King Ahaz definitely does not want that kind of sign from
God showing him clearly what to do. So
Isaiah gives one of my five favorite responses in all of scripture: “Hear then,
O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my
God also?” I love that line. Isaiah then gives God’s sign for King Ahaz,
which is, by the way, a sign that he is going to have to wait for.
Isaiah says that the young women is with child and will bear
a son and shall name him Immanuel, which means God with us, and that before the
child is old enough to know right from wrong he will be eating curds and honey
because the two kings threatening Judah will be gone. Now this sign from God is a prophecy that
looks ahead to two different events on two different levels. Both are true. The first component of the sign tells King
Ahaz that a young women he knows, possibly even one of his new concubines,
either is or will shortly become pregnant and bear a son. Before that boy gets to be a couple of years
old, the king’s enemies will be destroyed by God. Isaiah is guaranteeing that God is going to
pass the test that King Ahaz wouldn’t give.
Many Jewish scholars, as well as Christian scholars, see this first
level as pointing to King Hezekiah, Ahaz’s son and one of the few good kings of
Judah.
Then, of course, we know the second layer of this prophecy that
points to Jesus’ birth. To get from
Isaiah to Jesus, one important transition had to be made. Isaiah’s words got narrowed from meaning any
“young woman” to a “virgin.”
In the century or so before Jesus’ birth, a group of Rabbis
in Alexandria, Egypt, translated the Hebrew Bible That Greek Bible was called the Septuagint,
because the tradition said that seventy rabbis went into their own rooms,
translated the scriptures, and when they came out they all had identical
translations, thus proving the translation’s divine inspiration. While such stories may have been slightly
exaggerated to boost sales on Amazon.com, the edition was highly scholarly, and
became the standard Jewish Scriptures for both educated Jewish people in the
ancient near east and, later, for the early Christian Church. The translators changed the Hebrew word
meaning “young women” into a Greek word meaning “virgin.” They could have used a comparable Greek word,
but they didn’t. Now instead of some
particular young women being with child through the normal course of events, we
have a prophecy in the most widely-used and inspired scripture at the time about
a virginal conception.
 |
| Beginning of the Book of Isaiah (Septuagint) |
Now some people might call this a mistake. Actually, the early Jewish scholars who
argued with Christian leaders pointed to this translation issue to say that
Isaiah’s prophecy couldn’t be about Jesus’ birth the way Christians used
it. The Christian understanding,
however, is that God continued to be at work, inspiring and shaping the scriptures
all the way through their creation, even through the translation and editing
process. The Greek Septuagint was the
early church’s Bible, as well as the Bible for most Jews at the time. We can consider that version as inspired as
any other, especially since Jesus probably read it, and much of the New
Testament is based upon it. In fact,
some of the books in the Greek Septuagint that New Testament authors draw upon
are not found in the Hebrew Scriptures.
For these and similar reasons, the Episcopal Church claims the Holy
Scriptures of Old and New Testament to be the Word of God, but does not make
specific claims, as some churches do, about the inerrancy of the Bible in the
original Hebrew or Greek. We know that
God has inspired the very complex and very human way that the scriptures come to
us so that they can be God’s Word to us today. And, as God’s word, the Bible is
rich enough to say what it needs to say to many different people in many
different times in many different ways.
God’s word can mean something powerfully important to King Ahaz, and
then point ahead to something even more important about the birth of the
Messiah.
 |
| Window in St. Joseph's Church, Nazareth |
Moving a couple hundred years ahead from King Ahaz to
Joseph, we see someone else wrestling with what to do in a very difficult
situation. Joseph, however, is waiting
for God to do something. He probably
doesn’t expect God to do what God is going to do, but he is aware of the need
for God. He is in the middle of the
two-part Israelite marriage process.
After the first part, which we sometimes call an engagement in English,
the parties are legally married but they are still separate. Then at some later time they start living
together. Now Joseph’s legal wife Mary
has become pregnant before they lived together.
Joseph was troubled. He was an
upright adherent to the Jewish law that said you have to divorce people in this
situation. But he also cared enough
about Mary that he didn’t want to cause a scandal for her. He planned to dismiss her quietly, but he
hadn’t yet. Why not? Maybe because he was still waiting for an
option that seemed to be God’s true preference, and not just what others
expected him to do, or what the hurt he might have felt told him to do, or what
his rose-colored glasses told him to do.
He needed to find what God wanted him to do. He waited on God, and the angel of the Lord
showed up in a dream and told him what to do.
The angel quoted Isaiah to show him how God had planned this virgin
birth. He told them to name the boy
Jesus, and that he would be God-with-us.
Joseph, we know, did what the angel told him.
Was following God easy for Joseph? Not really.
People were already talking. He
didn’t even know yet that he was going to go to Egypt and back, then head back
north to Nazareth. We know that God had
a plan, and that plan was carried out, but Joseph probably had some anxious
times while waiting for God to do his part to make everything work out. Joseph listened and invited God into the
situation, but then he had to follow God’s lead while still waiting for
everything to finally resolve itself.
We are like Joseph when we do invite God to come into the
midst of our lives, when we really want to experience God-with-us. When God shows up and we pay enough attention
to do what God directs us to, God’s instructions often turn our lives upside
down. We are instructed to pay attention to new priorities, develop new
relationships, and learn to lean on God instead of whatever crutches we are
prone to putting in his place. We are
shown the way to make the paths of our lives straight for Jesus to enter
in. But when we do so, we still have to
wait for him.
When our lives are turned all inside-out and upside-down,
and we have been struggling to do what God We wait for Jesus like
young parents closing in on the birth of a baby. We wait like the first Christians who really
expected Jesus to turn up on any given day.
We wait like a thirsty deer in the desert desperate for streams of
water. We wait like the agitated addict
trembling for the next fix. We wait like
children the night before Christmas who can’t sleep, can’t be quiet, can’t stop
looking for excuses to get up glance out the window lest they get the glimpse
of flying reindeer in the distance. We
wait because Immanuel is coming, God-with-us, and we really need him with
us. We need him in so many parts of our
lives, especially in those places where we don’t know yet how to let him. God is willing to give each and of us the
signs we need during this season so that we know he is coming. Then he will help us prepare the way so that
he can. In the meantime, with full faith
in his coming at his right time, we wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment