God with Us; Can We Live up to That?

4 Advent         December 22, 2013

Isaiah 7:10-17 Psalm  24:1-7        

Romans 1:1-7     Matthew 1:18-25  

Lectionary Link

    

  Emmanuel is the name that was written about in the prophet Isaiah.    It comes from the Hebrew and means “God with us.”

  This name had literal meaning in the life of the prophet Isaiah.   He was referring to the birth of someone who in his day would be a sign of “God with us.”

  And the writers of the New Testament understood the Hebrew Scriptures to be sacred history and so it was a template, a pattern that was set to recur in history.

  Salvation history is like a spiral or a coil.  A spiral is not the same thing as a circle.  In a spiral the circles are open because they are connected to the previous circle but are not the same circle  and they connected to future circles but they are not the same.

One view of history is to note the return to the similar sites in the cycles of human experience.

  People in the time of the prophet Isaiah lived in some terrible times.  The north and south of Israel had been divided.  David’s kingdom and the glory of Israel had been very short lived.  The nation of Israel had divided in two kingdoms with competing kingship lines and the powerful Assyrian armies threatened the northern kingdom.

  Certainly everyone could believe that “God was with them” during the hey-day of King David.  But could people believe that “God was with them” when things were not so good?  Could they believe that God was with them, when the nation was divided and when the Assyrian army was invading?

  So the prophet Isaiah was inspired to preach a message of hope and to assure the people that there would be a sign in the form of a child, that “God is with us.”

  The writers of the New Testament set out to tell the story of Jesus.  The impact of his life was so profound, and yet it all occurred in apparent obscurity in the Roman Empire.  It is amazing that only the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman writer Tacitus and perhaps one other made reference to Jesus of Nazareth.  Only obscure references to Jesus are found in non-Christian sources.

  And yet to the people who knew Jesus and who felt the impact of his presence, even after he was gone, to those people Jesus was again a sign for God’s people, that “God is with us.”

   It is probably true today that the time when we need to know that “God is with us” is when things don’t seem to be going very well in our lives.  That is time when we need the sign that God is with us.

  When things are all rosy and prosperous, we often take good fortune as an obvious sign that God is with us.

  But the sign came when God’s people were not feeling very successful.

  And Jesus came in a very obscure way in an obscure place to very ordinary people.

  Very ordinary people in some very hard time came to know that God was with them in the birth and life of Jesus Christ.

  And now for 2000 years God’s people still feel that Jesus Christ is the sign to us that God is with us.

  You and I need to take hope in that the sign came when time was the worst for God’s people.  That should be an indication to us that apparent success or apparent failure does not add nor diminish the fact of “God being with us.”

  God with us.  This does not mean that we can domesticate God and drop the divine name here and there in a trivial way as though we could control God.  Lots of people get so familiar with how they understand God and so frequent in their God words that one begins to think that they have a special corner on God, as though they somehow could control God’s blessing.

  But let us pray today that there will be signs from God that God is with us, especially to people in war, in distress, in need, in poverty, in sickness, in oppression and those who are victims of prejudice.

  Let us pray that they will know that God is with them; and let us pray that God will use us in an Emmanuel ministry.

  By that, I think we should pray that we could have our lives be used in such a way that people in need see our lives as signs that God has not forgotten them and that God is with them.

   So we pray that as Jesus was able to bear the ancient name Emmanuel, we too might share in the ministry of that name.  We pray, “O God, let our lives be lived so that those in our world will know that God is with them in their time of need and in all of the times of their lives.”

  And as we pray and sing O come Emmanuel, let us be willing to be the one through whom Emmanuel will bless the lives of people in our world.  Amen.