This sermon was written for an ecumenical service at a Retirement Community for Seniors. It is a revision of another of my advent sermons titled "Love in Advent".
Sermon for Suites by the Lake – Advent – “A Child is Born” - November 24, 2007
Isaiah 9:6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 7 Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.
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An unusual survey was done a few years ago, Participants in the survey were asked this question.......what 3 word sentence would you most wish to hear or have said to you ? The top three answers were 1. I love you.....2. I forgive you.......3. Supper is ready. How does that relate to Advent? Listen and I’ll tell you.
Today we celebrate Advent or the four weeks before Christmas. Advent in the Christian year is a time of anticipation, a time of yearning. There are at least two parallel traditions in the church.
One of those traditions focuses on these four themes on each of the four Sundays leading up to Christmas: hope, joy, peace and love. Another tradition focuses on these four themes: waiting, accepting, journeying and birthing.
Today we’re going to sort of blend the themes together since Advent is just beginning in the next few weeks and this is our one Advent service for the season. I want to think about hope. What it is, what it means and how hope involves waiting, accepting, journeying and birthing.
Read Isaiah 9:6-7
What do you wish for? When you stop to think about it…what are you hoping for? Hope is a powerful thing. It is a transforming thing. Without hope, life is indeed pale and it’s sufferings really do seem pointless and arbitrary.
Our Scripture today needs to be understood first of all in the light of the way the first hearers of this prophesy would have heard it.
Very briefly, like a great many ancient peoples who were not in a place of power, the Jews to whom this passage was written were accustomed to loss, to grief, to frustration, to domination by foreign powers…But also they were accustomed to trying and yet failing to align themselves, to befriend themselves to God.
They had a clear notion of God who had revealed Himself through Moses as the One who ever lives, who Is…The great I Am. As a nation they had learned the character of God as kind and patient, loving and generous, and also that He was a jealous God.
They also knew that His jealously was rooted in His love, the same way a husband or wife’s jealousy is rooted in the profound commitment they have made to each other.
But in their humanity and in their choice to repeatedly, as a nation, turn from God, they found themselves feeling very, very far away from God. I think we perhaps all know what that feels like.
We sometimes choose to indulge ourselves in hurtful activities to fill what feels like a great emptiness or a great boredom in our souls. And in that choice we find in ourselves a distancing from God. An absenting of ourselves from the peace we know, the love we feel, the embrace of God that we cherish.
So it is to an oppressed people that these words were written. To a frustrated lot who were tempted at times to throw in the towel…to give up the notion of waiting and yearning and instead to settle into a sad and desolate depression.
Pause.
So what was the message of Isaiah to the people. It sure wasn’t “Don’t worry, be happy!” Do any of you find that type of saying pretty vacant? I sure do. It wasn’t: “Just keep doing what your doing and maybe things will work out for ya”.
Actually, the message of Isaiah was pretty much right out of left field. You see Isaiah knew from personal experience that Israel needed to be delivered from their oppression.
He also knew that for generations the Jews were waiting… waiting for a deliverer…hoping that there would be a Messiah sent from God and specifically believing that the Messiah would be, for Israel, the One who would come as God’s mighty delivering hand against the historic enemies of Israel – Egypt, The Assyrians.
Violently overthrowing violent oppressors, bringing death to those who had brought death to the Jews, vanquishing the enemies, the oppressors of God’s people…in other words they awaited a sovereign, righteous deliverer.
A powerful, military-type deliverer.
And so, knowing all of this, Isaiah prophesied none other than that…a baby would arrive. A helpless, dependant bundle of need...would arrive. On our doorstep. On humanity’s front porch.
Isiaah 9:6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
This was, to say the least, unexpected. A child was to be born on whose shoulders power would rest. He would be for people a wonderful counsellor…
One to Whom we could speak our deepest thoughts and fears and who would walk with us to sort out the jumble of pain that seems to knit our lives together.
He would be for people the Mighty God. Israel knew before most others that God was not many but One. And this child to be born, this Son to be given would be known as THE Mighty God. The one in whom all the fullness of the godhead bodily dwells.
This son was to be called Everlasting Father. The Son and the Father perfectly united in One holy union. This Son was to be the unending assurance and presence of God Himself.
And the child in question would be – not a warrior, not a man of wrath, not a man of war, but rather this child would be a prince…THE prince of peace.
Isaiah’s prophetic answer to the problem of external oppressing forces was to offer, in his divinely-inspired words, a solution that addressed the deepest needs of the inner man and inner woman…a solution that would enable people to live with hope and meaning and purpose and joy regardless of the external realities around them.
The Son would come. And so God, revealing Himself perfectly for the first time, came to us in the person of the Christ child.
That is what the Christian faith offers to you and to me. God…very, very near to us. Immanuel. God with us. God…speaking to us and counselling us at a very deep location in our souls. God…being for us mighty and everlasting, God and Father.
The One who brings us His peace with all the urgency and guarantee of a divine promise.
And perhaps only thinly veiled in this promise is the reality of God’s profound compassion for us…He knows the sadness of our hearts, He knows our pain and the brokenness that colours our experience of life…and He cares.
He cares more deeply than anyone else could, and, unlike others who care for us, He has the power to change us on the inside. He can give us a deep joy that will calm the sorrow that sometimes rages inside us. [Pause]
Our passage today says something also about the character of the Christ child whose birth we anticipate in the coming time of Advent.
“He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.
The character of the promised holy child is one of righteousness. That’s just a fancy word for rightness. Doing things for the right reason, spurred on by the right motives.
What are those motives? To love us. To draw us near. To become for us the warmest and most tangible of expressions of the character of God. Actually, God Himself among us. [Pause]
Today we are reflecting on the promise of God expressed through the prophet Isaiah. “Unto us a child is born, to us a son is given”. But of course we know that the Christ child grows up to be the man Jesus.
The fully human, fully God person who would reveal to us the thoughts of God, the heart of God.
All the fullness of God is now in the man Jesus who walks the streets of Jerusalem, who talks with the people and walks with the people and heals the people.
Who is tried before Pilate and unjustly condemned. The Christ child grows up to be the one who now suffers for our sakes on the cross; motivated and spurred on and incarnating the mighty love of God, Jesus dies on the cross.
And He defeats death and triumphs over the grave. And all our hope and purpose and love are somehow bound up in His whole magnificent life. Born in abject poverty, in a vile, stinking stable. Humble. Weak. Yet so incredibly powerful and world-changing in his passionate love for humankind, for you, for me.
David Yeago, a respected New Testament theologian, says this: “Jesus was God’s own Son whose surrender for our sakes is decisive evidence of God’s all-conquering love for us. Jesus did come to conquer.
He came to conquer our hearts...to win us over.” “The fruit of Christ’s work is the lifting up of human beings into the life of God”, Yeago says.
J.I Packer, in his book, Knowing God, said this: “There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me.
“There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that He sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow-men do not see (and I am glad!), and that He sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is enough).
“There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose”.
I started off this morning by telling you about this unusual survey from a few years ago. Can you recall the top three answers to this question...What 3 word sentence would you most like to hear or have said to you ?
The answers were 1. I love you.....2. I forgive you.......3. Supper is ready.
Well, today, God has three, three word sentences to say to you. There are 1. I love you. 2. I forgive you and 3. Supper is ready. [Point to Eucharist]
Won’t you come and join me in the Lord’s Supper.
