The Audacious Love Of Emmanuel

Opening Prayer

Gracious and loving God, we come before you in this season of waiting and wonder. Open our hearts to receive your Word today. Quiet the noise around us and within us. Let your Holy Spirit move among us now, that we might hear not just with our ears, but with our souls. Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening. In Jesus' name, Amen.

The Sermon

There's a story I heard about a young couple in Birmingham, Alabama, back in 1963. The husband's name was James, and his wife was eight months pregnant with their first child. They lived just blocks from the 16th Street Baptist Church.

On that September morning, James kissed his wife goodbye and headed to work at the steel mill. But something told him to turn around. He couldn't shake it—just this feeling deep in his chest that said, "Go home." His foreman wouldn't understand. He'd probably lose half a day's pay. But he turned around anyway.

When he got home, his wife was confused. "Baby, what are you doing here?" He didn't have an answer that made sense. "I just... I needed to be here."

Twenty minutes later, the bomb went off. Their windows shattered. Their walls shook. Four little girls died that morning—Addie Mae, Cynthia, Carole, and Carol Denise. But James was home. And when the chaos erupted, when fear could have won, he held his wife and that unborn baby and he whispered, "God is with us. Even here. Even now. God is with us."

That baby was born six weeks later into a world that seemed bent on destroying her before she could even take her first breath. But she lived. She grew. She became a teacher who taught two generations of children that love is stronger than hate.

That's Emmanuel. God with us—not in the easy times, but in the impossible ones.

Church, we're in the season of Advent, and this week we're talking about love. But we're not talking about the kind of love that shows up when it's convenient. We're not talking about the love that sends a greeting card or leaves a casserole on the porch.

We're talking about the kind of love that Isaiah prophesied about seven hundred years before it happened. The kind of love that looked at a teenage girl named Mary and said, "I choose you." The kind of love that took on flesh and moved into the neighborhood—our neighborhood—knowing full well what it would cost.

Let's go back to Isaiah 7. King Ahaz is terrified. Two armies are coming to destroy Jerusalem. God sends Isaiah with a message: "Ask for a sign. Ask for anything—as high as heaven or as deep as the grave."

But Ahaz, in his false piety, says, "I will not test the Lord."

So God says, "Fine. I'll give you a sign anyway. A virgin will conceive and bear a son, and will call him Immanuel—God with us."

Now here's what we miss: This wasn't just a nice prophecy about Christmas. This was God saying, "Ahaz, you're scared because you can't see Me in this moment. But I'm coming. I'm not sending another prophet. I'm not sending another king. I'm coming Myself. And when I come, you'll know that I have never left you, not even when you couldn't feel Me."

Fast forward seven centuries. Mary—young, poor, Black or brown-skinned girl from Nazareth—gets a visit from an angel. And the angel essentially says, "God is about to do something through you that will cost you everything. Your reputation. Your safety. Maybe your life. But God will be with you."

And Mary says yes.

Joseph could have walked away. The law gave him that right. But Matthew tells us that Joseph was "a righteous man." And here's what righteousness looked like: When the angel came to him in a dream and said, "Don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife," Joseph didn't argue. He didn't negotiate. He didn't ask for a committee meeting.

He woke up and he did what the Lord commanded.

That's the love of Advent, church. It's the love that shows up when everyone else would be justified in walking away.

You know what gets me about this story? God didn't choose a palace. He didn't choose Rome or Athens or Jerusalem with its marble temple. He chose a teenage girl's womb. He chose the scandal. He chose the whispers and the shame and the danger.

Because Emmanuel—God with us—means God with us in the mess. God with us in the pain. God with us when the bills are due and the diagnosis is bad and the world feels like it's falling apart.

I think about our ancestors who sang, "I want Jesus to walk with me... in my trials, walk with me." They understood Emmanuel. They understood that love isn't just the feeling you get on Christmas morning. Love is God saying, "I will not watch your suffering from a distance. I'm coming down there. I'm going to feel what you feel. I'm going to know what you know. And when it's all over, you're going to know that you were never, ever alone."