Sermon 4 Advent A - December 23, 2007

4Advent A – 23 December 2007
Isaiah 7:10-17; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25
James V. Stockton

Hope, and Peace, and Joy, and Love. And as has been said, ‘the greatest of these is love.’ Love is the gift that, like the light of this small flame shines brightly enough to bring to people sitting in even a massive darkness genuine hope and true comfort. It is the gift of God that, more than all the others, I think, changes everything.

Through the season of Advent we Episcopalians and many other Christians as well make a journey of our own to that stable and its lowly manger to the child born there whose birth we celebrate beginning tomorrow evening. It’s a journey that begins in a darkness of sorts, recalling how very unfamiliar a thing it was: this coming of God’s chosen One. Our journey’s progress thus is marked by the lighting of the candles of the Advent wreath as we have done these past weeks. And one thing we learn along this journey out of darkness into light is that the deeper the darkness, the easier it is for people to notice the light. One does not pray for greater darkness, of course. But one may rightly pray that, by virtue of the light, people may notice and be bothered all the more by the darkness in which they find themselves.

We who see with their eyes know this symbolism well enough, perhaps. But I wonder if it isn’t those whose literal sense of sight is impaired who understand better than the rest that the light of Christ is an inward light and the Love of Christ for all is the real and actual gift to which the light merely alludes. Sighted or not, many people within and outside the fellowship of the Church understand that there is indeed a darkness and many of these are hoping and longing for the miracle that contradicts it. There is a darkness that is a baseness of spirit, that is a surrender to the survival instinct which puts one’s personal interests ahead of those of everyone else. There is a darkness of the soul that is a surrender to the fear that somehow people in the past have misunderstood those long-lived promises of better days to come, that someone has misinterpreted those ancient and eternal prophecies of mercy, justice, and victory. It is a cold darkness within and the Light of Christ, the Love of God in Christ for all, enters into that interior vacancy to illuminate it, to warm it, to burn away from it all the hidden fears and desperations that have accumulated in the farthest corners and crevices.

The ancient Israelite king, King Ahaz is one of those afraid and desperate. The nation of which he is king is shrinking in influence and prestige among the surrounding lands. Ahaz is trying to hang on to what is left. His people are turning with false hope to false gods, and, like their king, they are surrendering to a fatalism that gives them excuse, if not reason, to be utterly self-interested and to assume that everyone else is the same. To believe in all gods is to trust no god, and so, ultimately, the people trust only themselves. But knowing also that their resources, material and spiritual, are extremely limited, they know that even the next day, all may change, and so change to them means the end. And so rather than caring themselves, the indulge themselves as best they are able. They live just for today and do not allow themselves even to ponder what may come tomorrow. So afraid and so desperate are they that they fear even the changes that God’s Love might make. Little is left of love for God, love for neighbor, even of love for self. The inward light, has faded.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God reaches out to the people: “Let me remind you of my promise,” God says. “Let me give you a sign of my faithfulness to you. Ask of me in order that I may respond in a way that will brighten your hearts with my Love.” Who wouldn’t jump at the chance? Who wouldn’t welcome the opportunity to ask a sign of God with the assurance that God will do it? Ahaz says, ‘No.’ Holding to his fear more firmly than to the hand of God, he is afraid to ask.

Trusting more in the inevitable cruelties of fate than in the faithfulness and Love of God, Ahaz turns away from the promise of God. Covering over the a substance of a selfish desperation with a veneer of devotion, Ahaz declines. “I wouldn’t want to test God.” What is it like to offer a gift to someone and have that person refuse it? What is it like for God to offer to the people rescue from their fear, and have them turn away from an admittedly unfamiliar grace to the darkness and desperation that they know so well? What is it like to be as deeply afraid as are they? And what is it like to be as deeply rejected as is God?

God responds as only God can. Where God might turn from the people as decisively as the people turn from God; where God might exercise divine judgment and their story would end here and now, God responds instead as only God is able. Though no sign is asked, yet a sign is given. ‘God with us’ shall be born. Contrary to their fears, God will preserve the people against the hostilities of their enemies. Contrary to their desperation, God will bring the people will again to live in that legendary land of milk of honey. Contrary to their being accustomed to the gloom, the very presence of God is coming here to be among them.

Even the mere promise of the sign is signal to those in search of reason to hope that things are changing, that Love is breaking in to the world. Maybe you and I and our fellow Episcopalians and fellow Christians and even the wider fellowship of all seekers after God can take it as a hopeful sign in itself, that after all this time, people still are watching for a sign.

Even hundreds of years later, long after God had spoken to the king through the prophet Isaiah, people held onto the promise of God’s sign to them. Until on a quiet night, a typical working man, Joseph the carpenter, has a dream. Perhaps like Joseph the son of Jacob this Joseph also is a dreamer. Maybe he, like many around him, has dreams of the sign to come of the presence of God among the people. If so, his dreams are, as the Christmas hymn puts it, met tonight, as soon again they will be met in that little town of Bethlehem.

Finding his fiancé to be pregnant with a child not his own, yet, Joseph is a kind an decent person. He might have disgraced her as he surely as she seems to have disgraced him, but he responds as only a kind and decent man could do. the engagement will end discreetly, and the two will part company. But as only God is able to do, God enters in and everything changes. Tonight Joseph learns that his dreams are God’s dreams, as well. Just when his journey with Mary has seemed to come to its end, he finds that his journey has only just begun.

And we also, we here at the end of our Advent journey, find ourselves concluding a journey back to the beginning, back to the stable, to the infant Christ-child, to the Light of God is born within us. Driving out dark fear, Hope enters in and springs to life in the people of God. Relieving gloom and desperation, Peace wells up to calm and comfort the people of God. Shining brightly upon us, God’s own Joy lifts us up the people of God, and makes it home in your heart and mine.

And at last, the greatest of these is Love. It comes when we ask and when we do not. Quietly but insistently, God’s Love comes in and changes everything. And it offers itself always until, comforted by it, calmed by it, inspired by it, we take it and it becomes us. So that wherever you are there shines the Light of God; so that wherever I am, there the warm glow of the promise of heaven gives its comfort. God’s Love come among us: yes, long ago in away in a manger; and also here at the end of our journey, it is come into our world again in you and me. Wherever we are, today, tomorrow, on Christmas Day, on any day thereafter, because we are there, there is the Love of God come near; and here and now or there and then, as only it is able, God’s Love changes everything.

And now may Almighty God, who gives us grace to reflect in this world the eternal promise of God, grant that we may share always in that Love that filled to overflowing the heart of our Lord Jesus Christ, that it may overflow ours to God’s praise and glory; through the same Christ our Savior, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, One God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

© 2007, James V. Stockton