Advent 4: God With Us

Advent 4: God With Us

          Advent is a strange season, we start at the end (Matthew 24), and then eventually end at the start (chapter 1), clinging barely over the edge into Christmas… (I can see it from here, can’t you?)

          Here, peering from the precipice of Advent onto Christmas—we, get to, again, consider the History, Mystery, and Majesty—the Past, Personal, and Promise—fill out one more time the Advent Sermon Bingo Card, noting the History, Heart, and Hope of God With Us.

Prayer

          I’m going to help you fill your final bingo card out here—God, With, Us.

History

          “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel” which means “God with us.”

          Originally these were words of comfort from Isaiah to the inhabitants of Jerusalem under siege by their Northern cousins the Israelites and their Eastern neighbors, the Syrians… telling them that this child was a sign of hope for them, that by the time he’s weaned the siege will be lifted and their enemies will be defeated—for God dwelled with them, there in Jerusalem.

          We would miss, if we ignored this history and made a B-line to Jesus, the solemn reality that the inhabitants of Jerusalem were in dire straits,
in need of rescue,
in need of a sign for them…

          This need points us to the Baby Jesus we find in Matthew’s Gospel—look! He will save his people, he will be God with us…
in his life all the saving acts of God recorded in Hebrew Scripture find sacred echoes
—he teaches us a righteous way of humility,
in him, when he is among us, the Kingdom of Heaven comes near.

          These are solemn, necessary, dire needs…

Just as a besieged city needs hope and assurance that all enemies shall be cleared away, so too we have an ongoing need of salvation from sin
—an ongoing need of God being with us.
 With that piece of history, our need of him, our need of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, is heightened.

Heart

          God with us… With!

          Not God for us… but God with us. Not for, but with…

          We would, of course, like God to be on our side—it might feel good when your opponent is clearly in the wrong, clearly irredeemable and hopelessly damned—because that says something about you too—you are redeemable and right, you are angelic and above it all… but we know that is rarely, if ever, true
—We humans are ambiguous creatures, happy to create gods out of whatever our latest opinion and inclination happen to be.

          I was reading through Exodus recently and came to the Golden Calf incident—Moses goes up the mountain, everyone quakes and shakes and are scared, because God is revealing God’s self on the mountain… and then, next thing you know, they’re making a golden idol for God to reside on or in… even as God thunders behind them on the mountain…

          We have such a propensity to produce idols… to assume Jesus is my Jesus, and no one else’s.

          Yet, we must heed Abraham Lincoln’s words during the Lincoln Douglas debates, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.“

          Because God is with us, not for us…

          But what does that mean, with us?
          It means that God seeks to be in solidarity with us, not siding with us for the sake of our ego. As that famed description of God’s love, John 3:16 puts it, “God so loved the world.” Not the world that agrees with me. Not the world in so far as it is brought to heel.
          God loves the world and resides with the world in Jesus.
Jesus with our fears, with our joys, with our sorrows! Jesus more than that—Jesus our courage in the midst of fear, our delight in moments of joy, Jesus passionately moved, mourning with us in our sorrows.

Hope

          And that is the Hope of God with us, the hope of the season to come—God is with us… not with me, not with you, with us.

          Just as we have a tendency to create idols, we also have a tendency to retreat into ourselves, to seek individual gain, to eschew what we have in common for what we can lay claim to as “mine!” To succumb to the sin of selfishness, self-centeredness, and self-importance. As Luther would describe it, curved in upon ourselves, gazing at our belly buttons.

          When God shows up, God calls us into community. To quote biblical scholar Carolyn Lewis, “Jesus reminds us of who we are meant to be and supposed to be—people in community with God and with one another. People oriented toward the other because of God. People who truly believe God is present when even just two of us are gathered.”

          Our faith calls us out into the hurting world to love and serve our neighbor, to be little Christs to the world, and ALSO calls us to share our own pains, to be open and trust that God’s hands and feet will come to us unaware. In God created community we both kindle Christ’s hope in others and ourselves are warmed by that same hope held forth for us!

          We can hope, and know, God is there among us. God is not simply for ME, but with US, and that is what we prepare for these four Sundays of Advent. We prepare for Christmas.

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