December 18, 2016
Sage Story | God's Announcement
- Isaiah 40:1-11
- Rev. Dr. Jerry Deck
Like I’m sure of many of you, Megan and I decided this year to steal our Christmas tree. I mean why pay $60, $70 or more when you can get one for free?! No, I’m mostly kidding. The truth is that we finally found some time this past Tuesday to get a tree and when we got to the lot no one was there. It was just us and a bunch of Christmas trees that looked lonely and like they needed a home. And as I thought about what to do I knew that we had limited time and our girls for weeks have been asking when we were going to get a tree and decorate it and so after looking at their faces and seeing there were no visible cameras, I decided well, let’s take it and we’ll pay them for it later. Which, let me be clear, we did. (What else can you do when the cop comes to your house?!)
Now, if we didn’t have kids we probably would have just left the lot and come back another time or actually we probably wouldn’t have gotten a tree at all. But when you have kids, well, you can’t really help but do Christmasy things and get into the spirit. We drive around town after it’s dark and our 4-year-old sees a house with one string of Christmas lights and she lets out a gasp as if she had just seen the Eiffel Tower shining in the Parisian night. After we decorated our stolen tree our 5-year-old exclaimed, “I love this day!” They love the singing and playing with the nativity scene and eating Christmas treats and their joy and excitement is simply too difficult not to get caught up in. As many have said to me in the past, and as I certainly have experienced over the last several years, children help us embrace the spirit of Christmas with renewed vigor.
As I was thinking about that this week I realized that while many would echo the fact that children help us embrace the spirit of Christmas, that perhaps we don’t see quite as often how exile (what we’ve been talking about this Advent season), how suffering and pain and death and brokenness also help us to embrace the spirit of Christmas. I’ve been somewhat cognizant over these last few weeks that we’ve been talking about less than celebratory things, like exile and brokenness and so perhaps I sound like a real killjoy. “Don’t invite the pastor over for our Christmas party, he’ll start talking about suffering and pain when we just want to drink eggnog and wear ugly sweaters.” I get it, I really do, but one of the things I’m trying to suggest is that it’s only when we get to the heart of some of these more difficult things that we can genuinely celebrate Christmas.
This past week has been a difficult week in the ZPC family. In this sanctuary surrounded by Advent decorations like this candle and tree and these poinsettias and the lights we’ve had two funerals of fathers who were far too young for us to have to say goodbye to. It’s a bit jarring to have funerals in this type of setting. As I shared at one of the funerals, it is moments like these when Isaiah’s blunt line about life is particularly poignant. “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass wither, the flower fades…” (You also don’t want to invite Isaiah to your Christmas party!) But what Isaiah is doing is being remarkably honest about our frailty, our vulnerability, our fragility. I think most probably prefer to ignore those things thinking that if we ignore them enough we’ll never have to face the truth and yet, Isaiah wants to disavail us of that mirage. He understands that actually it is in honestly facing those things that we begin to see just how much we need God, whom as Isaiah says, is eternal.
Walter Brueggemann points out that this passage is the first time we see with intentionality the word “gospel,” meaning good news, in the Bible. The prophet is to tell the people of God good news and what is that news? That “Here is your God!” The good news is not that there are no troubles or that you’re perfect or that you’ll never struggle or that the world is going great. No, the good news is that in the midst of those things, that God is here. That in the midst of our vulnerability and falleness and fragility, we as Christians would say, that Jesus, Immanuel, God with us has been born.
What is so refreshing to me, as I have shared with you all on numerous occasions, is the honesty of our scripture. It’s not “pay no attention to the negative things going on in the world,” but instead says that yes, the world is broken and fragile, that you are oftentimes broken and fragile (as Scott talked about on the first Sunday of Advent), but that God is here to love and save us right in the middle of all of that. As I said at the funeral yesterday, Jesus was not born into the world so that we could get some time off of work or school or sit on the lap of some plump man in a red suit, but he was born into the world because of the fact that he knew we were withering grass and fading flowers. That hope for the world and for us is not found in our figuring it all out, but in our trusting and understanding that we can’t but that God can and will. There is great freedom, it seems to me, in being able to acknowledge that truth.
I think there are two different kinds of Christmas partiers in this world. On the one hand are those who celebrate and give and receive gifts and go from one party to the next as a way of being distracted from the struggles of life, from its’ fragility and brokenness, from the withering grass and fading flowers. Those who would prefer (and quite frankly we all do at points in our lives) to bury our heads in the sand and sing carols that help us to avoid difficult thoughts. And then there are the partiers who celebrate and give and receive gifts and go from one party to the next, not in order to be distracted from the struggles of life, but because those struggles have made it clear to them just how much they need God. That the fragility and brokenness and withering grass and fading flowers that they see around them and within them have helped them to see that there’s no way that they can do this on their own and that the good news, the great news, the gospel news, is that they don’t have to. And while life may still be difficult, the freedom of knowing we don’t have to pretend that everything is great or that we are perfect, but can rest in the arms of our shepherd and savior give us reason to celebrate and party and rejoice.
Christmas partiers, we have one more week until we celebrate the birth of Jesus. What kind of partiers will we be this week? This is not so much a question of which songs you’ll sing or whether you’ll eat Christmas Fudge or Christmas cookies or if you prefer a Santa hat over a reindeer hat. It’s a question of the heart, a question of why it is that you are celebrating? My hope and prayer is that you are celebrating not because you have avoided any troubles or thinking about those troubles, but that you are celebrating because no matter what has come your way or what will come your way you have had the courage to admit that you are withering grass or a fading flower. But you are a withering grass and a fading flower that God, Immanuel loves deeply. So celebrate, brothers and sisters. Whether you get invited to 10 parties or no parties, whether you like Santa Claus dislike Santa Claus or are beginning to look like Santa Claus, whether you start listening to Christmas music in October or can’t wait for December 26th so the music will stop, whether you have a 20 foot sparkling Christmas tree that you paid $200 for or a Charlie Brown one that you stole. Celebrate the good news, that gospel news that God is with us no matter how feeble and fragile we are. We are a celebratory people not because of who we are, but because of who God is. The grass withers and the flower fades, but God is forever. Hallelujah. Amen!