December 23, 2018 Ry O. Siggelkow The Fourth Sunday of Advent Matthew 1:18-25 God is with us Good morning, beloved friends. I am grateful to be here with you all as we begin our celebration of Christmas. We celebrate this morning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh, the One who was and is and is to come, the One who, as the Christ hymn of Philippians says it, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death. We celebrate this morning the gift of Christmas, the gift of what theologians have called the Incarnation, the enfleshment, the embodiment of God in our world. We celebrate this morning the very center, the core, the beating heart, of the Christian gospel, the event, the good news, the good report, that God is with us, Emmanuel, God is with us and through the love of Jesus Christ, God promises never, ever to abandon us. God is with us, say it with me: God is with us, and God will not abandon us, even to the ends of the earth. What a simple message! It is a simple, yet no less profound message, that we confess together in faith and in hope this morning, a truth, a reality that the God of the universe, the God of all creation, the God that delivered Israel from Egypt, the God of the living and the dead, this God is not content to be God without us, not content to stand apart from us, at a distance from the everyday realities of our world. God is not too good, not too beautiful, not too perfect, not too pure and holy, to be God without us, rather God in God s freedom has chosen to be present to us in love, grace, and mercy. Emmanuel, God is with us and God will not abandon us, this is the content and sum of the gospel. Our reading from the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew appears at beginning of one of the birth narratives of Jesus. Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah to place in this way. Jesus is called the Messiah, which in Hebrew simply means the Anointed One, a title variously applied in the Hebrew scriptures in reference to the anointing of a king, a priest, or a prophet; yet for Matthew this title seems to take on a kind of singular uniqueness when applied to Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew focuses not on Mary but on Joseph, who we are told was a righteous man and not wanting to publicly shame and disgrace Mary for her pregnancy, had intended to dismiss her quietly. And yet Matthew s Gospel reports that just at this moment, when Joseph had resolved to dismiss her, an angel appeared to him imploring him to stay with Mary for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. And angel declared: She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. The Anointed One is the One whose name will be Jesus, a name that means The Lord ( YHWH ) saves. Writing his Gospel to a Jewish audience, Matthew locates the birth of Jesus within the long history of God s relationship with the people of Israel. Matthew has confidence that all of the hopes and expectations of the people of Israel find their culmination in this One through whom YHWH, the Lord, saves his people from their sins by the power of the Holy Spirit. All of this took place, according to Matthew, to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet Isaiah in
chapter 7: Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, God is with us. In citing this passage from Isaiah, Matthew reminds his Jewish readers of a prophecy about a child born hundreds of years earlier whose birth foretold both deliverance and destruction. In Isaiah 7, the kingdom of God was under attack by the northern kingdom of Israel and the allied kingdom of Aram. Isaiah and his oldest son had gone to the king of Judah and told him to request any sign of his choosing that things would work out for the southern kingdom of Judah. But the King refused to choose a sign, so God said that a young woman would conceive and give birth to a child. Before this child was old enough to know the difference between right from wrong, the cities of the northern kingdom, which threatened Judah, would be left in ruins. The woman in Isaiah s prophecy would name the child Immanuel, because he was to be a sign that God is with us, not only when Judah was saved and the kingdoms of Aram and Samaria were laid to waste, but this ongoing presence of God would be no less true when the Assyrians would seige Judah killing and enslaving the people. In its original context, the prophecy seems to indicate that God is with us not only in times of deliverance, but also in times of devastation. Writing to a Jewish audience in the wake of the fall of the Temple in 70 CE, this reference to Isaiah 7 takes on a special meaning and significance. The Temple, the place of God s dwelling, had been destroyed and the city of God s presence, Jerusalem, was under Roman Imperial rule. The early Jewish readers of Matthew gospel would have known oppression, they would have known people, friends and relatives, mothers and fathers and beloved children, who had been killed in the attack on Jerusalem, many thousands gone, many hundreds executed by that brutal instrument of state power: crucifixion. Reference to Isaiah 7 was a reminder that despite the memory of loved ones hanging on Roman crosses, the blood of the martyrs, God is nevertheless with us. And God will not abandon us. We, too, live in a world where imperial violence is manipulated by powers out of our control; three-fourths of humanity still remain captive to the lust of white racist colonial regimes of economic and political power regimes that have rendered the Global South dependent on an exploitative capitalist market economy that continues to suck the earth s resources dry in order to support the dominance and interests of the wealthy few, who control production, health, and the right to political self-determination. While the US is not the only power responsible for the devastation of life on this planet, the length and depth of its violent reach across the globe has been ensured and sustained by a military budget that exceeds the imagination. The President of the US requested over 700 billion dollars for national security in the 2019 fiscal budget, 686 billion of which is projected to go directly to the military with the express purpose of securing US global dominance over competing Russia and China. Nearly 20 billion dollars will go to the building of so-called space-based systems and missile defense. On top of this, the President is demanding 5 billion dollars to build a wall at the southern border, a direct attack on thousands of vulnerable people, families who are coming predominantly from Honduras due to the US supported coup in 2009, which sent their President Zelaya to Costa Rica because he had dared to make education public and expand the rights of ordinary workers and indigenous people after centuries of colonial and neo-colonial rule engineered and sustained by U.S. military force. It is quite simply pathological. We live in a world in which peace and justice are regarded as bad investments, in which human life is reduced to a means to acquire more wealth and power for the few.
These are not just problems for the so-called Third World or the displaced within our own cities and towns; these are universal problems that have the potential bring about the total annihilation of the earth; indeed, it is within earshot, day by day, even if we manage to find a thousand different ways to justify it or, what s even worse, to ignore it. The Brazilian theologian, Rubem Alves spoke of the absurdity of our modern capitalist society as akin to the rationalization, or the logic, of the dinosaur, whose arrogance of power led not to their survival but to their extinction; the dinosaur did not survive, Alves says only skeletons remain; the logic for power for power s sake is at odds with the 1 logic of life. Love of power has become our obsession, Alves says, and power itself our sole god. The earth is, indeed, the stage of human action; but it is also the stage of God s action. God is with us proclaims Isaiah and the Gospel of Matthew. What does it mean to confess that God is with us? Can we have confidence of the ongoing truth of this reality that we celebrate at Christmas? Does it make any difference in our individual lives? In our churches? In our world? In history? Does it make any difference whatsoever? Even if a mother forgets her child, the prophet Isaiah say, God will not leave us alone. God will not leave us alone. God will never forget about us. Is this not the central message of both the Old and New Testaments? And is this not the central message of Christmas? Even in the midst of disaster, God is with us. God will not abandon us. To have confidence in the God of creation, the God of the exodus, the God of Jesus Christ the Liberator, is to trust in the God who will not abandon us, ever; and to trust in this God is to take an active part in the birth of a new world. The message of Christmas is not merely that God showed up on the earth as a human being for a time, as if Jesus were a mere epiphany, a moment in human history in which God touched down briefly and 2 then left us, abandoned us. The message of Christmas is rather that God is with us and will never abandon us ; nothing can separate us from the presence and loving activity of God enfleshed in the person of Jesus. The truthfulness of this statement is, of course, a matter of faith, but not in an intellectual sense. We often think of truth as something to contemplate or to achieve, but in the Bible truth is an activity, a power that possesses us and sets us free for love. It is not something that we reach for in order to possess and manipulate it, so much as it is something that is to be done. We do the truth; truth is a doing; a divine and human activity; a divine and human power. When Jesus says I am the way, the truth and the life, in the Gospel of John he is speaking of truth as an existential reality, truth as a form of life, a way of living in community, with others and for others because we live in Christ and for Christ; the truth sets us free on a road of love (Paul Riceour). Truth is a Spirit that touches us as it converts our pride into humble praise and gratitude for a gift, given not achieved (Beatriz Melano Couch). The message of Christmas, of God's promise to always be with us is an invitation to a new path of doing the truth within the painful realities of the world in which we live; it is a matter of opening oneself, or rather being broken open by the love, and mercy, and grace of the person of Jesus, the foolish and weak One through whom God chose, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, to shame the wise and 1 Rubem Alves, Tomorrow s Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth of Culture (Harper & Row, 1971) 2. 2 See Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Blackwell): The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are not an epiphany, a simple showing of God, a moment in which the world s history is touched and changed. There is a specific shape to the story: it is part of a history marked by a strong dimension of conflict. The gospels make it harshly clear that belonging with Jesus upsets other kinds of belonging of family, of status, even of membership of the children of Abraham. Jesus on the cross is consciously portrayed as isolated, condemned by the political and religious communities to which, in one sense, he belonged. 229.
the strong (1 Cor 1:27). To be broken open by the person of Jesus is to undergo a certain kind of pathos, it is to go through with, to concretely accompany those who suffer because of the exploitation of the powerful of our society. Faith in the truthfulness of the message of Christmas is not so much a matter of intellectual assent to a set of beliefs or affirmation of a creed or doctrine or confession of faith as much as it is about a kind of work, a doing of the truth, an invitation to immerse oneself fully in the pain, the joy, the grace, struggle and the conflicts, the trauma, the complex realities of the people of God who suffer at the hands of the powerful. It is an invitation not to a peaceful pious life away from the realities of the world, but an invitation to immerse oneself fully into the conflict and 3 into the struggle for a new world, because God is there. The promise of God s presence with us is firm, which is why Jesus says, I will never leave you, he says; I am always with you... to the end. The pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent Christmas at Tegel prison in 1943 after having been arrested and detained for his alleged involvement in plot to kill Hitler. On December 17, 1943 he wrote a letter to his parents from his prison cell, reflecting on Christmas: Viewed from a Christian perspective, Christmas in a prison cell can, of course, hardly be considered particularly problematic. Most likely many of those here in this building will celebrate a more meaningful and authentic Christmas than in places where it is celebrated in name only. That misery, sorrow, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt mean something quite different in the eyes of God than according to human judgment; that God turns toward the very places from which humans turn away; that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn a prisoner grasps this better than others, and for him this is truly good news. And to the extent he believes it... the prison walls lose their 4 significance. And that s truth, an incarnated truth; it is the truth that the prison cell does not have the final word, the gas chambers do not have the final word, the crosses of the martyrs of human history do not have the final word. Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can the SS? Can ICE? Can the Border Patrol? Can the Oil Companies? Can the President of the United States? Can bombs and missiles? The message of Christmas is the abiding truth that these realities of our world that seek to separate us from one another have no final power, no power before the One who in love and in truth makes all things new. The message of Christmas, the abiding truth to which it points, is an invitation to us become agents of changing this world that God so loves; not out of our own authority with some messianic complex; but by entering into the work and action of God who invites us into a life of faith with confidence, a God who desires deeply to give abundant life to the whole of humanity, to the whole of creation; it is to enter into the work of the kingdom of God, the reality of Christ amid the realities of our world. The earth is the place where God dwells, indeed, together with God s creatures, it is the home of abundant life, of freedom, of the Spirit, of creativity, of the new, of surprise, of hope in the liberation of all peoples by the grace of God. God will never abandon us; God is here; God is with us. I want to close with a prayer by Rubem Alves, the Brazilian theologian I referenced earlier. It is a prayer called Our Father... Our Mother : Father Mother of tender eyes, I know that you are invisible in all things. 3 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Fortress Press): It is a denial of God s revelation in Jesus Christ to wish to be Christian without being worldly (58). 4 December 17, 1943 to Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer in Letters and Papers from Prison (Fortress Press) 225-26.
May your name be sweet to me, the joy of my world. Bring us the good things that give you pleasure: a garden, fountains, children, bread and wine, tender gestures, hands without weapons, bodies hugging each other I know you want to meet my deepest wish, the one whose name I forgot but you never forget. Bring about your wish that I may laugh. May your wish be enacted in our world, as it throbs inside you. Grant us contentment in today s joys: bread, water, sleep May we be free from anxiety. May our eyes be as tender to others as yours to us. Because, if we are vicious, we will not receive your kindness. And help us that we may not be deceived by evil wishes. And deliver us From the ones who carry death inside their eyes. 5 Amen. May the God of love, mercy, peace, and justice be with us all, now and forever. Amen. 5 Alves, Our Father Our Mother, in Transparencies of Eternity (Miami, Convivium Press, 2010) 11.