The first song on that record was entitled “Home for the Holidays”. Many of you probably remember the words….
Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays
‘Cause no matter how far away you roam
When you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze
For the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home!
I think those words summarize what many of us want most for Christmas—to be home for the holidays, to have family and friends with us. That’s what gives us a sense of real warmth amidst the chill of winter.
We have already heard a Scripture this morning that contains perhaps the most important, the most cheering word in all the Bible—Immanuel, God with us. Immanuel is the one word that gives us hope, that fills us with love, that provides a sense of warmth amidst an otherwise chilly world.
Allow me to set that word in context by reading to you from the rest of Isaiah 7. Listen for God’s word to you…
In the days of Ahaz son of Jotham son of Uzziah, king of Judah, King Rezin of Aram and King Pekah son of Remaliah of Israel went up to attack Jerusalem but could not mount an attack against it. When the house of David heard that Aram had allied itself with Ephraim, the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.
Then the Lord said to Isaiah, Go out to meet Ahaz, you and your son Shear-jashub, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the Fuller’s Field, and say to him, Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because of these two smoldering stumps of firebrands, because of the fierce anger of Rezin and Aram and the son of Remaliah. Because Aram—with Ephraim and the son of Remaliah—has plotted evil against you, saying, Let us go up against Judah and cut off Jerusalem and conquer it for ourselves and make the son of Tabeel king in it; therefore thus says the Lord God:
It shall not stand,
and it shall not come to pass.
For the head of Aram is Damascus,
and the head of Damascus is Rezin.
(Within sixty-five years Ephraim will be shattered, no longer a people.)
The head of Ephraim is Samaria,
and the head of Samaria is the son of Remaliah.
If you do not stand firm in faith,
you shall not stand at all.
Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test. Then Isaiah said: “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on your ancestral house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria.” (Isaiah 7:1-17)
GOD
I really just have three words for you this morning, but it is going to take more than three words to explain the three words!
The first word is: God. What kind of God do you believe in?
In this story from Isaiah 7 we have Ahaz, King of Judah, shaking in his boots, because the King of Aram and the King of Israel have formed an alliance and are trying to attack Jerusalem. However, the Lord sends the prophet Isaiah to encourage Ahaz not to fear King Rezin and King Pekah because their attempts to destroy Jerusalem will come to nothing.
In a way, this true-life story is all about trust. Who is King Ahaz going to trust?
Perhaps you have heard the story of the guy who was out hiking and fell over a hundred-foot cliff. As he was falling, he reached out and grabbed a root that was protruding from the cliff. He knew he would only be able to hold on just so long, so immediately he started yelling, “Help!”
Along came a Boy Scout who offered to help. The climber thought the Boy Scout was well-intentioned but not strong enough to pull him out of his predicament, so he asked desperately, “Is there anybody else up there?”
Well, along came a Hell’s Angel. The climber took one look up at him and thought, “He’s strong enough, but I am not sure about his good intentions.” So, the climber called out again: “Is there anybody else up there?”
What kind of God do you believe in? What kind of God do you trust? A God who is strong? A God who is loving? Or both?
Ahaz wanted a God who was strong—a God like Tiglath Pileser, the King of Assyria. Ahaz wanted a God replete with military might.
Now Yahweh knew that Ahaz had his doubts about whether Yahweh was the kind of God he could trust. So, the Lord instructed Isaiah to tell Ahaz to ask for a sign—to ask for proof that God would do what he said he was going to do. But Ahaz refused to ask for a sign. So, the Lord gave Ahaz a sign anyway. The sign was that a young woman, possibly Isaiah’s wife, would bear a son who would be called Immanuel, God with us.
Talk about a weak sign! You’ve got to be kidding God! A little baby?
The Lord paid no attention to Ahaz’s mental objections. Rather, he assured Ahaz that before this child was old enough to tell the difference between good and evil, the land of Israel and the land of Aram would be deserted. This prophecy was fulfilled in 732 BC when the boy, Immanuel, was about two years old. And, by the way, one of the key words in Isaiah 7:14, עַלְמָה in Hebrew means “young woman”. When this was translated into Greek, the Greek word used was παρθένος which means “virgin”. More on that in a moment…
WITH
Now what, you may well ask, does all of this have to do with Christmas? Well, we have to turn to the New Testament and its use of Isaiah 7:14 to see how this God, Yahweh, is the with us God.
Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14 in his Gospel, using the Greek παρθένος for virgin, following the Septuagint (Greek) translation of Isaiah. Allow me to read to you from Matthew 1:18-25…
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:Now I know this story raises a lot of questions. One of those questions for me is this: Did Matthew not know that Isaiah 7:14 had been fulfilled hundreds of years before? Presumably he did know that. So, what is going on here? Did Matthew invent the story of the virgin birth “in order to cook up pseudo-events that just happen to ‘fit’ or ‘fulfil’ prophecy?”
“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,”
which means, “God is with us.” When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.
Tom Wright answers that question this way:
Matthew is of course very concerned, not least in these early chapters, with all sorts of prophetic fulfilments; but if that were the origin of the story, how might we explain Luke’s account [of the virgin birth], where Isaiah 7 is not mentioned? Or the sneer about Jesus’ illegitimacy in John 8:41? It looks, rather, as though things worked the other way round: Matthew, faced with a deeply puzzling story about Jesus, found a biblical text that might shed some light upon it.[1]
At any rate, the virgin conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary was just a means to the end of God being with us. The virgin birth is really the smaller of two miracles we remember at Christmas. The larger miracle was that of God becoming human. We call that miracle: the Incarnation. That’s how Yahweh gets to be the with us God. If you can swallow the big miracle, then you won’t have too much trouble digesting the smaller one.
C. S. Lewis describes that Grand Miracle in this way:
In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to colour and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both coloured now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colourless in the dark, he lost his colour too.[2]
That’s how Yahweh becomes the with us God—through this grand descent. And what does all of this have to do with the Advent theme of Love? John’s Gospel makes the connection for us. It is John’s Gospel that is most explicit about the Incarnation:
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)
And John records the words of Jesus explaining that all of this happened because of God the Father’s love for us.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us, the expression of the Father’s love. As we will sing, in just a few moments, in the words of one of the Church’s most ancient hymns: Jesus is “of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be.”
US
So where do we come into the story? What kind of people did Yahweh come to be with? He came to be with people like Ahaz—people who don’t trust him, people who only understand brute power. Yahweh also came to be with people like Mary and Joseph—people who are the weakest of the weak, the lowest of the low—people just looking for a little love in this lovelorn world of ours. And God came to be with everyone in between—he came to be with all of us.
Because of the Incarnation of God, I can assure each one of you this morning: “God loves you, yes you!” No matter your past, no matter your present, no matter your future: God loves you and forgives you of all your sin in Christ. God is with you, God is with me, now and for all eternity.
I love the story of John Newton, the author of the hymn, Amazing Grace. Not only did he preach, not only did he write hymns, but he also wrote his own epitaph that appears to this day on his gravestone:
JOHN NEWTON. Clerk. Once an infidel and libertine a servant of slaves in Africa was by the rich mercy of our LORD and SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST preserved, restored, pardoned and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy.
That’s the kind of people God came to be with—slave traders who he turns into preachers of freedom!
One of the people Newton influenced as a pastor was William Wilberforce, the man who led and won the fight to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. There is this wonderful scene in the movie, Amazing Grace, where Wilberforce goes to see his aging pastor. And Newton says to him, “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner — and that Christ is a great Savior!” That’s not just a great line from a great movie; Newton really said that. Newton also once preached this pithy sermon on 1 Corinthians 15:10…
I am not what I ought to be. Ah! how imperfect and deficient. I am not what I might be, considering my privileges and opportunities. I am not what I wish to be. God, who knows my heart—knows I wish to be like Him. I am not what I hope to be. Before long, I will drop this clay tabernacle, to be like Him and see Him as He is! Yet, I am not what I once was—a child of sin, and slave of the devil! Though not all these—not what I ought to be, not what I might be, not what I wish or hope to be, and not what I once was—I think I can truly say with the apostle, “By the grace of God—I am what I am!”
One more story and I finish… Many years ago, when one of my nieces was small, her family was putting out the Christmas decorations. Amanda was the one who set up the nativity. When her parents came around to look, they were surprised to see that all the figures were turned inward, toward the stable, rather than outward so that the onlooker could see their faces. Amanda’s parents asked her what the figures in the scene were doing and she replied, “They’re all looking at the baby Jesus. Don’t you know? He’s what Christmas is about!”
Right you are Amanda! Jesus is what Christmas is all about. And when we turn toward him, we discover that our God is not some distant deity who does not care. Rather, he is… God… with… us.
[1] Wright, N.T., Twelve Months of Sundays, Reflections on Bible Readings Year A, London: SPCK, 2001, pp. 8-9.
[2] Lewis, C. S., Miracles, New York: Macmillan, 1978, pp. 111-112.
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