Reading: Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:24-37, Isaiah 64:1-9
Preached at Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, NY on December 3, 2023
Why? Why did God choose to do such a crazy thing as coming to the world as a baby in a manger? Of all the options that God – being God – could have chosen in order to reveal love and righteousness and truth and light to the world, what’s with this “Jesus /Christmas/ Incarnation” thing?
I could stand up in the pulpit for a long, long, time and never even scratch the surface of the “Why” question. ‘Why’ is a tiny little word, but a great big, huge question. ‘Why, Daddy, why?’ ‘Why does this do that?’ ‘Why won’t this work?’ ‘Why do I have to go to church?’ ‘Why can’t I be an astronaut?’ ‘Why does the mailman wear blue?’ ‘Why do fools fall in love?’ ‘Why did God send Jesus?’.
I think that Isaiah 64:1-9, our lectionary passage for this morning, gives us a little insight into the “Why did God send Jesus?” question. You see in that passage Isaiah is going through, what can only be described as… A MAJOR CRISIS!
Isaiah was of course, (by virtue of being an old Testament prophet) writing a long time before Jesus was ever born on earth. What’s more, Isaiah, who as we’ve said was an Old Testament prophet, was an extreme sort of guy, not afraid to speak his mind when he felt called to do so.
And Isaiah, in our reading is hurting. He’s not just having a bad day – he’s having a terrible, horrible, obnoxiously awful time of things. He’s tied up in knots, frustrated and starting to get a little crazy. And most of it is to do with the fact that he is a prophet.
On the one hand, his problem is with God. God seems to be on the run… in hiding... gone missing, gone walkabout, absent without leave. It wasn’t that God had stopped listening... God wasn’t even... as Bette Midler put it, “Watching from a Distance”…God just wasn’t there. Think about it. If you were a prophet declaring the word of God – the absence of God was a major problem. Isaiah had a problem with God.
He also had a problem with God’s people. Actually, not with God’s people specifically, but just ‘people that God had made’ in general. Isaiah looked around him and looked at the way people were living and the things they were doing and then looks up to heaven and complains to God; (verse 7) “There is nobody who calls on Your name, or attempts to take hold of You.”
Maybe that was exaggerating things a bit, but even those that did bother trying to connect with God, were in an equally bad position, because those who were doing the right things were doing them for the wrong reasons, and even if they did get it right, compared to the righteousness of God, their righteousness was just like dirty old rags or filthy dish-washing cloths. Welcome to the jungle! Every person for themselves and God didn’t even come into the picture.
Isaiah’s Crisis;
1) God wasn’t showing up.
2) Nobody was looking for God.
That’s a problem for a prophet!
It’s a problem for any person of faith. As society becomes increasing secular and God is increasingly portrayed as ‘one of those philosophical conundrums that one can choose either to dismiss or accept only with some caution’, then the only way people can live is by working out what’s right and wrong for themselves.
You can no longer settle an argument by saying, ‘Well, it says in the Bible’. Because somebody is going to turn around and say, ‘I don’t give a fig what it says in the Bible, because it’s an outdated old book that belonged to an ancient time when people still held onto some romantic notion of their actually being a God. There is no God... so why do I have to listen to your idiotic ramblings.’
Taking it one step further, the question, as to if there is or is not a God, is a complete irrelevance to some people, because God or no-God, they are not about to waste any of their valuable time looking for Him, Her or it, because frankly they feel they have better things to do with their lives. Why look for God when you are getting by quite well, thank you very much, without needing any sense of the Divine?
This is where, I believe, the ‘WHY?” of Christmas comes into play. Why did God choose the revelation of a Christmas Jesus to share and show divine love to the world?
Precisely because, as Isaiah discovered, and as people in our world are still telling us, not only did God seem absent, but also, nobody was looking for God. Such is the crisis of belief that Isaiah faced. Such is the crisis of belief that the church today has to speak to.
And the Advent message speaks right into that situation.
1. It tells us that God is not on holiday, on study leave, missing without a weekend pass, or absent in any way whatsoever, but God in Christ comes to the center of human reality, as a baby, in a manger, subject to all the uncertainty that being human being exposes us to. God – in Christ – shouts out to us with the piercing wail of a baby’s cry – I’m real, I’m really here – right now – and I’m here to be found and known by you.
2. The Advent message is that not only is God real and really here, but God is out looking for us. If a person is lost without knowing it, the only way they ever become found is if somebody goes out looking for them, finds them where they are, taps them on the shoulder, and says, “Hey, I was looking for you!”
The God of Christmas, God in Christ, is the God whose real presence comes looking for us, the God who in Jesus, gets on our case and under our skin with words that call us to follow and actions that call us to change, whose healing touch becomes the remedy for our sickness and whose salvation gets a hold of us, at times when we don’t even realize we are lost.
This is a God whose Spirit works on our insides and says crazy things to us like, “Hey, listen, I need you. I need you to walk with me. I need you on my side. I need you on my side because you need Me more than I need you.” Did you catch that last bit? “I need you on my side because you need Me more than I need you”
This is God. It would be arrogance indeed to suggest that the God of the universe, the God who flung stars into space and carved atoms out of nothingness, actually can’t get by without us. Yet God chooses for us to know God’s love, not because God can’t live without it, but because God knows our lives are so different when we make room for the love of Jesus Christ in our heart of hearts.
There’s a crisis in our world. Now that’s an understatement. Our world is crisis after crisis after crisis. Seems like there’s always something going wrong, some revelation of something rotten, some bad thing going on here, tragedy there, disaster taking place in this place or that.
Maybe there’s a crisis that you are personally traveling through. Maybe it’s something you’ve got yourself into. Maybe it’s something bad that has come your way, out of nowhere. Maybe it’s just life, getting you down, tugging at you in ways you don’t like or can’t handle. Maybe you’re just not sure anymore. One says this. One says that, I don’t know whom to believe!
So here it is in a nutshell. The Advent message. God is here. Always was here. Always will be here. Christmas tells us that God will go to the limits of human experience to prove God’s love is here for us. Maybe we haven’t been looking? No problem. God’s looking for us!
So, on this first Sunday Advent, I invite you to let yourself be found. Believe the Good News. Christ was born in Bethlehem. May Christ be born in our hearts anew as we travel through this Christmas season! AMEN.
The Reverend Adrian J. Pratt B.D
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