Andy James

Agreeing to Agree

January 26, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
preached on January 26, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As you heard earlier in the announcements, today is the annual meeting of the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone. This annual gathering is a wonderful tradition that gives us space to celebrate the life of the church in this place over the last year and to look ahead into the coming year together. While we do approach some serious business in our congregational meetings, this is largely a ceremonial affair. As much as our Presbyterian polity is built on something of a democratic system that trusts that God speaks through the voices of God’s people as we gather together like we do today, there are only five or six things that we are allowed to do in our meeting today. But even more than that, when the groups that are reporting and bringing items for action have done good work of listening for the movement of the Holy Spirit and have made reasonable decisions and present them in constructive and helpful ways, people will ask good questions and then go on to affirm the work that has been done to get us to today without much dissension.

It is very rare—though not entirely unheard-of—to have dissent and division in the annual meeting—unless you were the church in Corinth. The church in Corinth is remembered even after two millennia for its conflict and trouble, and I can’t even begin to imagine what it would have been like to have been in an annual meeting there! Paul’s two letters to the Corinthians were written to a group of people who seem to have been divided over nearly everything: who baptized them, how to sit together for meals, what sorts of sexual behavior were to be accepted, whether to deal with petty conflicts between church members in the church or civil court, how to deal with people of different backgrounds, what sorts of food was acceptable to eat, whether to cover your head when you pray, whether women should be allowed to speak in worship, even what to do with the weekly offering!

Paul knew that things were bad there, and he right up front in his first letter to them he named the issues:

I have a serious concern to bring up with you, my friends, using the authority of Jesus, our Master.
I’ll put it as urgently as I can:
You must get along with each other.
You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common. (The Message)

In this particular instance, different church members were claiming greater authority, power, and privilege based on who had baptized them. While they had originally come together as one church from their different backgrounds, united by the gift of God in the cross of Jesus Christ, they were now focusing on their differences. While they had once understood their life to be shared in common, connected by a common faith and hope, now they were pointing fingers at each other unnecessarily.

This situation isn’t totally surprising. The early church was itself an offshoot sect of Judaism, with no central authority or even structure to give guidance along the way, so individuals would obviously put greater confidence in those who had been instrumental in guiding them into their understanding of faithfulness. But Paul knew that even if this was an important initial step, it would be disastrous for the long term. If early Christians weren’t careful, they would soon divide up this message of hope and salvation, and in their actions of division they would keep others from wanting to be a part of this new way of life.

So Paul turned the Corinthians’ focus back to Christ, the unifying force in their faith and life. Eugene Peterson translates Paul’s words so clearly here:

God didn’t send me out to collect a following for myself,
but to preach the Message of what he has done, collecting a following for him.
And he didn’t send me to do it with a lot of fancy rhetoric of my own,
lest the powerful action at the center—Christ on the Cross—be trivialized into mere words.

The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hellbent on destruction,
but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense.
This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out.

Ultimately, Paul wanted the Corinthians to understand that the divisions of the world, the human distinctions that emerge in our lives, and even the confusion that emerges in our life together cannot overwhelm the message of the cross.

Now this message of the cross would seem to be the last thing to focus on, really. The standards of the world would never place the cross, a symbol of death, at the center of thinking about new life. The thought that such a powerful God would be so humble as to die a human death was crazy in that day and age. And all the other good messages of that time were presented with flowery words and careful arguments that seemed far greater than the simple proclamation of Jesus through the cross. Yet Paul was convinced that this message was at the center of everything the church ought to stand for. This message was worthy of setting aside all conflict and division—in fact, this message was the only way that the church could come together amidst all divisions.

In our day and age, when so much of our world is more polarized than ever, when even the church keeps fracturing further because of disagreement on things that are pretty small in the big picture, when we need a witness to unity and hope more than ever, Paul’s urgent request echoes across the centuries: “You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common.” This isn’t something we can just will into existence in our midst by pretending like conflict doesn’t exist. If we just set aside our disagreement and paper over our dissent, we don’t actually become “united in the same mind and the same purpose” as Paul so desired.

So as we approach an annual meeting this afternoon that seems to be pretty routine in a congregation where we usually all get along pretty well, it was interesting for me to spend this past week at a workshop on mediation and conflict transformation. Even if we don’t always express a lot of dissent in our annual meetings, conflict and disagreement is a natural and good part of the life of the church and our world. Believe it or not, we actually communicate better with each other when there is some healthy disagreement—so long as it doesn’t get out of hand and we keep talking to one another! Yet in these days our world suggests that we should have as little as possible to do with those we disagree with, so we in the church can offer a gift to others if we can simply keep talking with one another and loving each other even when we disagree.

I was reminded this week that we are at our best when we are hard on the issues and soft on people, when we take the things we believe and do just as seriously as we take our relationships with one another. I think this is what Paul was really hoping for, too. He was looking for the church at Corinth to recognize that they needed to keep their focus on the most important issue at hand—on the proclamation of the wonderful and strange message about the cross—and so to work through their quarreling and disagreement while living together in faith, hope, and love as best they could.

So what would this look like in our life together? Does this mean that we need to have a big verbal argument at the annual meeting today so that we can be focused on the cross—and kick out anyone in our midst who isn’t as focused as I am? Does this mean that we should just let anyone among us do anything they want, without worry or consequence for its impact on others? Or does this mean that we need to spend a little more time listening to one another as we try to discern how God is leading us in these changing times? I think that third option is the better way, for we are bound together in the cross of Christ and given the hope and possibility of a new and different way, not just in setting aside our differences but in welcoming the opportunity to learn more about the gifts of God in our lives and in discerning how we can be more faithful together in this changing world.

So as we do this important work later today and in the year ahead, may our foundation be Jesus Christ our Lord, may the cross be our hope of the power of God, and may all our conversation—and even any disagreement—reflect the joyous gift of God that brings us new life for all the days ahead. Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Gift and Challenge of Baptism

January 12, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Acts 10:34-43 and Matthew 3:13-17
preached on January 12, 2014 (Baptism of the Lord), at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I think Baptism of the Lord Sunday that we celebrate today is simultaneously one of the most important Sundays of the church year—and one of the most difficult to explain and figure out. All four gospels tell a story about Jesus meeting up with John the Baptist—that’s two more than that talk about his birth!—so this event that we celebrate today had to be pretty important to the early church, but what does it mean for us today anyway?

The story itself is challenging enough, really. First of all, as Matthew tells the story of Jesus, his baptism is a bit jarring. We move directly, without interlude, from Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, his exile in Egypt to escape the evil King Herod, and formative years with his parents in Nazareth to this strange scene with a bizarre messenger named John washing people in a muddy stream. There’s no real transition here—no story of the boy or young man Jesus, no tales of his exploits working in his dad’s carpentry shop in Nazareth, not even the familiar tale from Luke’s gospel where a twelve-year-old Jesus stays behind talking to the scholars at the temple while his parents head back home.

We skip nearly thirty years of Jesus’ life—and then move into a story that just doesn’t always make sense. When Jesus shows up at the Jordan River and asks John the Baptist to baptize him, I find myself asking much the same question that we heard John ask in our reading this morning: Why?? Why does Jesus of all people need to be baptized? To even start thinking about this means that we have to think a bit about what this baptism means. The baptism that John offered in those days had a considerably different meaning and understanding than the baptism we celebrate in the church. For us, baptism is a sign and seal of God’s grace, a mark of how much God loves us and how we are welcomed into the community of faith and a reminder of our cleansing from sin that comes in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For John the Baptist, though, baptism was a ritual washing following on long-standing Jewish tradition that was a public and visible mark of a personal commitment to repentance and a different way of life.

Why would Jesus need to do this? We certainly understand him to be without sin, fully human and fully divine, from the beginning of his life following in God’s way, so there seems to be little point for him to make this statement of his commitment to a new and different way. John was the first to ask this perfectly reasonable question—he knew who Jesus was, and he knew that God had great things in store for this one who would follow him to open the pathway of new life. Yet Jesus approached John and asked him for this moment of blessing, telling him that it needed to happen in order “to fulfill all righteousness” and to make space for the new thing ahead for him.

Once John finally agreed to baptize Jesus, the story actually gets even more strange and wonderful. After Jesus’ baptism, God’s presence was made abundantly clear.

When Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

Ultimately this was a big deal, bigger than even Jesus himself had even thought. While he had gone to John knowing that this baptism was the right thing to do, in this moment he found a much deeper encounter with God than he had ever expected. As the heavens opened, the Spirit flew down like a dove, and a voice thundered from the cloud, Jesus found the confirmation that he needed to step out into something new, the affirmation of his ministry that he had been waiting for before beginning his work in public, the great proclamation of God’s love for him and God’s call upon his life that would define the days ahead in his life and ministry. Now it’s not clear from Matthew’s telling here if anyone else even heard or saw any of this—“the heavens were opened to him” and “he saw the Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him”—but it is clear that in this moment something happened for Jesus that he would never be able to forget.

For us, baptism should be this same sort of of unforgettable moment even though so many of us experience it at a time when we can’t remember anything. Just as Jesus did, in our baptisms we see the depth of God’s love for us combined with the breadth of God’s call upon our lives. In our baptisms, we see a sign and a seal of God’s grace that gives us the strength and the encouragement to walk with Jesus each and every day. In our baptisms, we receive the inspiration we need to not only speak about our strange encounters with God like this one but also to respond with actions that “fulfill all righteousness” in the world as Jesus did. And in our baptisms, we get a little glimpse of the new and different and wonderful world that God offers us, much like what Peter described in our reading from Acts today, where “God shows no partiality,” where all are welcome to the fullness of life made possible in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and where God’s grace is so abundant that “in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to [God].”

The incredible gift of baptism comes not even so much in its initial moment but in the ways in which this sacrament that we can only receive once can renew us and restore us time and time again. It doesn’t make sense, really. A small amount of water applied once in life ought not to make that much difference, right? Even if we participate in the tradition of baptism by immersion, how can a near-drowning change things for us? This is why words are so difficult to find for this story—ultimately baptism (and the Lord’s Supper too, both sacraments) is something that cannot be explained, but it instead must be experienced. The meaning of these things comes not in the theoretical concepts behind them but in the personal and communal encounter with God that come to us in them. When we think and talk about baptism, ultimately words and understanding will escape us, but somehow we know and we trust that God is somehow present in this strange and wonderful moment, transforming us and our world.

But as much as we can’t understand our baptism, we can never forget it, either. It makes us new people by water and the Spirit. It confirms the wondrous grace of God in our lives. And it challenges us to help others make their way to this place so that they can know the grace, mercy, justice, and peace of God and join us in working to make these things more real for all God’s children everywhere. So today, as we reaffirm the promises of our baptism in the past or look ahead to a future encounter with God in these strange and wonderful waters, may we always remember that in these waters we meet Christ himself, we go where he first went, we find the love that he offers us poured out in great and wondrous abundance, and we share that grace and mercy and peace with our world each and every day until he comes again. So remember your baptism, and be thankful, each and every day. Alleluia! Amen.

A Strange Christmas Story

December 29, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 2:13-23
preached on December 29, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

When you think of the Christmas story, what comes to mind?

There are of course the great biblical stories of Matthew and Luke that tell about the birth of Jesus, and the beautiful opening words of the gospel of John that put a more theological spin on the beginning of Jesus’ life. Then there are the more contemporary stories that define Christmas for many of us, ranging from simple tales that give wonderful portraits of a spirit of giving to the crazy family stories that get most of their meaning from the characters involved in them. And then there’s A Christmas Story, a movie from 1983 that has built such a broad following over the last few years that one cable channel shows it on continuous repeat for twenty-four hours on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day every year! Personally, I have yet to sort out exactly why this movie has so many fans—its storyline focuses on an elementary school-aged boy who desperately desires an air rifle for Christmas, even as everyone around him repeatedly warns him, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”

Yet even this strange movie about a boy and a BB gun seems more connected to our Christmas stories than our reading this morning from Matthew. This terrifying story is a strange postscript to the stories that have defined this last week or month or more for us. It features no shepherds and no angels, and the wise men have already gone home. There are no heavenly songs offered here, no manger welcoming shepherds and sheep, no Mary pondering these things in her heart. Instead, this Christmas story brings us a murderous and jealous king-in-name-only, Herod, installed by Rome to make the Jews feel like they had some control over their own destiny, who responds to a perceived threat to his power with infant genocide.

After Herod learned of Jesus’ birth through the visit of astrologers who had come to pay homage to the child born King of the Jews, he sent them on their way to Bethlehem with instructions to return and report to him about this child. When they went home by another road, Herod was so angry and frustrated that he ordered the death of all the children two years and younger in Bethlehem so as to make sure that this threat to his power would not survive. But Herod’s seeming cunning did not match up to God’s providence for Jesus and his parents. After the departure of the wise men, an angel appeared to Joseph and warned him of Herod’s impending search for Jesus. Armed with this news, Joseph took Mary and Jesus and fled to Egypt, where they stayed until Herod died and an angel delivered word to Joseph that it would be safe for them to return home to Israel. However, when Joseph learned that Herod’s son Archelaus was in power, he feared that this son would share a little too much in common with his murderous father and so resettled not in his hometown of Bethlehem but in Nazareth, where Jesus grew up.

This is a strange Christmas story, to say the least. Not only does it leave out the shepherds and the angels and others that have become an integral part of our idea of the Christmas story, this word from Matthew shifts our focus from birth to death, from celebration to mourning, from joyous new life to horrible untimely death, from hope to uncertainty and fear. This story of the massacre of innocent children just seems so very much out of place in our Christmas celebrations—yet the carol we just sang that lifts it up has been around for hundreds of years, and many medieval celebrations of Christmas included this story as an integral part of their tellings of the birth of Jesus.

Today, though we may try to push it out of our minds, this story serves as a reminder that Christmas just isn’t beautiful and simple and joyful for everyone. For some people, this story of what happened after Christmas is perhaps closer to the reality of their lives at this time of year. When everyone seems to be celebrating, some of us face tremendous challenges in our lives. When many of us are celebrating with our families, some of us are remembering the pain and struggle and sorrow in our family experiences—past abuse, neglect, or alcoholism; present depression, fighting, separation and divorce, or distance; the struggles of difficult relationships, political or religious differences, or expectations not met; chronic or sudden illness; recent or impending death; or some mix of any or all of these. When many of us are sharing gifts with great abandon, some of us are struggling to explain why there are fewer or no gifts this year—or even worse, trying to keep up appearances to hide more difficult realities below the surface. When many of us are rejoicing because God has come to dwell with us, some of us are crying out wondering where God is in the midst of our pain, sorrow, and doubt.

While these experiences and feelings are present all year long, this season magnifies them all the more as so many messages in our culture say that Christmas should be perfect and beautiful. We hear that there’s “no place like home for the holidays” even if that home is emotionally unhealthy or physically unsafe for us to go there. We hear that “Santa Claus is coming to town” even if there is no money for gifts this year. We sing that “everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe / help to make the season bright” when there is no turkey or mistletoe to be found or when darkness of any sort casts its shadow over this season.

Stories like this one from Matthew serve to remind all of us that there is more to Christmas than these visions of seeming perfection—and that God is the midst of all of our Christmases, that the incarnation of God in Jesus is for our perfect Christmases as well as our broken ones, that God’s presence is with us whether our Christmas is wonderful or awful or somewhere in between. At Christmas, God took on our flesh and bone and blood in Jesus Christ, not to make us immediately perfect but to know the fullness of our human life, not to paper over our pain and hurt but to understand them and experience them, not to fix us overnight but to fix us for good, not to transform us in spite of what we want but to push us and drag us and guide us into something new, maybe slowly, maybe quickly, but always certainly and hopefully and joyfully. And even when the powers of this world threaten to destroy this new light in Jesus, this story reminds us that God’s power is stronger than any of them, that God’s work of bringing justice and peace cannot be overcome by evil in the world, that even in his infancy Jesus would face great challenge and yet emerge victorious.

So as this Christmas continues, may God’s presence be in the midst of it all, in the midst of our joy and our mourning, in the face of despair and hope, in the glimpses of perfection that fit our best images of Christmas and in the times when we can only hope and pray that God’s grace and mercy will take hold soon, for God’s new life came into our world in Jesus Christ, to begin making all things new and make space for all of us to join in, here and now and always, until Jesus comes again.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

December 24, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on John 1:1-14
preached on Christmas Eve 2013 at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

When I was growing up, it would be about right now on Christmas Eve that we would be opening presents. In my mom’s family, we open most of our gifts on Christmas Eve, then Santa Claus brings us a few more on Christmas morning, though we’ve had to negotiate a new arrival time with Santa in the years since I’ve been working on Christmas Eve and can’t join them until Christmas Day! Every year, I remember some conversation about the schedule—when I was younger, it was usually me trying to get to the gifts earlier!—but it almost always worked out the same way: we would go across the street to my grandparents’ church for a 5:00 service, come home, finish preparations, and eat dinner about 7:00 or 7:30, then move into opening presents around 8:30 or 9:00. In the end, whatever the scheduled worked out to be, the gifts were really the focus of the evening. That’s what it’s all about, right? Why would we think of doing anything else on this holy night other than opening presents??!!

More and more, this whole Christmas season becomes about the gifts—about the things that we exchange with our family and friends, about making sure that the value of the gift we give matches that of the gift that we receive, about finding the perfect gift for the right price with the least amount of effort. In the end, there is something about all these gifts and presents that matters, but only as much as they point to the real gift of Christmas: the gift of God coming to us in Jesus.

Our reading from John tonight takes us right there. It may not be the familiar story of angels and shepherds in a manger, but ultimately it tells us everything we need to know:

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.

All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being in him was life,
and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overcome it….

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.

This is the real gift of Christmas, the gift that really matters, the gift that keeps on giving: the presence of God who comes into our world, who walks and talks with us, who eats and drinks with us, who laughs and cries with us, who puts up with us, who loves us and cares for us beyond our wildest dreams.

This is the best gift we could ever imagine: the presence of God among us, the vision of Immanuel, God-with-us, the reality of God visible and available and living right here, on earth, beside us, among us.

The greatest gift ever is that God comes to us, living a human life, struggling human struggles, walking the same ground and breathing the same air and drinking the same water.

God set aside God’s power, glory, and honor so that we could come close to that power, glory, and honor in Jesus, so that we could not just glimpse God from afar but encounter God up close, in person, face to face. As Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood is said to have said, “The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.” (quoted by Rachel Held Evans) When we encounter Jesus, the ultimate gift, we encounter God.

So on this Christmas Eve, when it is so easy to look to our gifts to give our lives meaning and hope, we can turn our eyes instead to this ultimate gift that changes everything about our giving—not simply because we’ll never measure up to it but because this gift is truly unlike any other before or since. When we welcome this gift at its fullest, we can do nothing but set aside the presents that so easily define this season and instead embrace the presence of God in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, dwelling among us, the presence that really matters. We will find this presence of God around us and among us—maybe in the time we spend with family and friends over the coming days, maybe in the people who care for us and help meet our needs, maybe in the people who inspire us and challenge us and even frustrate us, and maybe even at this table, in this simple meal, where we trust that God will host us and meet us.

The presence of God in Jesus, embodied in these and countless other ways, gives us confidence and hope of God’s presence each and every day, not just to make us feel better or to get through the difficult moments of our lives but most of all so that we can be the presence of God for others. Ultimately the gift of God in Jesus Christ keeps on giving to us and to all people as we give it to others, because we take the light of Christ that we have received and reflect it out to others, because we embody the love of God in our daily lives, because we are not afraid to share this wonderful gift of glory, grace, truth, and love with everyone we meet.

So as we go forth to celebrate this Christmas, exchanging gifts with our family and friends and celebrating a bit of time away from the everyday routine, may the gift of God’s presence in Jesus Christ be the only present that we need, and may we share the wonder of God’s love with everyone we meet, in word and in deed, this Christmas and always, until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to all, forever and ever! Amen and amen.

Signs and Wonders

December 22, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 7:10-16 and Matthew 1:18-25 for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
preached on December 22, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Poor forgotten, ignored Matthew. In our world, it’s easy to forget that someone other than Luke tells us the story of the birth of Jesus. Matthew’s telling that we heard this morning is so different from the other, more familiar version that it’s maybe even fair to wonder if we’re talking about the same story at all! In Luke, we have a bunch of angels—several special messengers sent to speak to Elizabeth, Zechariah, and Mary, not to mention the “multitude of the heavenly host” who announce the birth of Jesus to the “shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night”—but in Matthew, Joseph is the only one to receive heavenly guidance from these angelic messengers amidst the strange situations surrounding Jesus’ birth. In Luke, the birth story starts out with a long journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, but in Matthew, Joseph and Mary already live in Bethlehem and travel only after Jesus is born as they flee to Egypt to avoid Herod’s murderous intentions and eventually move to Nazareth. In Luke, the family of the newborn is visited right away by shepherds from the nearby countryside, but in Matthew, it takes a while for the wise men from the east to make their way to Bethlehem.

Our cultural visions of the Christmas story and even many of our Christmas carols try very hard to blend the two different gospel stories together, to merge all their different details and paper over all their differences, but today for once I want to give Matthew his due. Luke will get equal time in just a couple days, but today we set aside the familiar shepherds and angels and listen instead for this incredible sign and wonder in a slightly different way.

Matthew has to set a bit of context for the birth story, but he tells us a lot less than Luke, too. The only thing that precedes this story in Matthew’s gospel is an account of Jesus’ ancestry, tracing his roots back to the most historic Jewish fathers Abraham, Isaac, and David. But then it seems that the fatherly connections don’t really matter at all! All those ancestral connections seem to be only for appearance’s sake, as we quickly learn that Jesus’ earthly father Joseph—the one with all those connections to Abraham, Isaac, and David—wasn’t really his father at all! In fact, Joseph nearly abandoned Jesus and his mother Mary when he found her pregnant before they lived together. Once he got word of her pre-marriage pregnancy, clearly because of another man, he was prepared to leave them behind entirely because he was “a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace.” In our day and age at least, those sound like code words: Joseph didn’t want to be responsible for another man’s child, nor did he want to be married to a woman who would not be married to her child’s father.

Thankfully God stepped in and sent an angel in a dream—the first of the three heavenly messengers who speak to Joseph in Matthew—to clarify things a bit. There was no need for him to desert Mary, “for the child conceived in her [was] from the Holy Spirt.” The angel went on to tell Joseph that this child would be a son and that he should name him Jesus. Joseph did as the angel instructed, marrying Mary right away, walking with her through her pregnancy and childbirth, taking her son as his own and naming him Jesus, just as the angel had instructed.

Alongside this narrative, Matthew adds in a bit of commentary and explanation. From the very beginning, Matthew’s version of the gospel story seems to place great emphasis on Jesus’ connections to the people of Israel. Matthew’s record of Jesus’ ancestral line goes through David, the great and legendary king of Israel, and ends with Abraham, the beloved father of this great nation. And Matthew often links his stories to those of the prophets so that Jesus is more directly connected to their cries for redemption and new life. Here, in telling about the birth of Jesus, Matthew connects this story to the words we heard from the prophet Isaiah this morning. These words had originally been offered to King Ahaz of Judah while the nation was under siege by Israel. Israel had hoped to replace King Ahaz with someone more favorable to them who would make an alliance against the outside power Assyria, the nation that would ultimately destroy Israel and scatter its people all across the Mediterranean region. Isaiah’s words of comfort to Judah during this siege were certainly not originally focused exclusively on a child who would come centuries later, for the people and the king were looking for a sign of God’s intervention in the short term, someone who would give them hope that they would emerge safely from the siege, someone who would make it clear that God was with them—Emmanuel—in the midst of a very difficult time. Exactly who this child was in Isaiah’s own time remains the subject of much debate among scholars, but Isaiah clearly had someone else more contemporary and immediate in mind in addition to any thought of Jesus.

While some might argue that reading the prophet in this way and listening for his original intent beyond his appropriation by Matthew takes away from the prophetic connection to Jesus, I think this reading ultimately gives us space to think about these things for ourselves. It reminds us that Isaiah’s words might having meaning and importance for us in our own time, that we too are looking for a sign of God’s presence, that we also long for Emmanuel, God-with-us, that Jesus comes to us in this season, too. Just as Isaiah prophesied that a young woman would bear a son who would be a sign of God’s presence, just as Matthew suggested that Jesus was the embodiment of this promise in his own time, these stories of God’s presence from Matthew and Isaiah remind us that there are signs of God’s presence among us in these days.

These signs may not be as earth-shattering as the birth of a Messiah. They may not be as controversial as the birth of a son out of wedlock. They may not fit into our assumptions of how God is at work or what God’s work should look like. These signs of God’s presence may be as small as a simple smile from an unexpected passer-by on a busy holiday street or as substantial as a major act by a prominent and powerful person to indicate God’s care and concern for the poor. These signs of God’s new life in our world may be as unnoticed as a small gift of a few dollars given to those in need or as impossible to miss as a world-changing gift that impacts the lives of millions of people around the world. And these signs of God’s Emmanuel may come to us in dramatic angel messages that are impossible to miss or in still, quiet voices that we might not hear if we are distracted by the busyness of these holidays.

Whatever they are, wherever we hear them, these signs are always too real to ignore and too important not to share, for they point beyond themselves to a sign and wonder beyond our wildest dreams. The ultimate sign, the ultimate gift, the ultimate mark of these days is the coming of God to dwell with us, not just in a little child born in the midst of troubled times in Israel 2700 years ago, not just in a little baby born out of wedlock in a small village in Palestine 2000 years ago, not just in a burst of light amidst these darkest days of winter, but each and every day when God’s presence and light shines on us anew to show us the depth and breadth of God’s amazing love, to show us the lengths to which God will step in and intervene in our world, and to show us that God is not finished with us yet, that there is something greater and newer ahead for us and all creation, that God can and will transform all things and send great light into our world.

So as we finish our Advent preparations and begin our Christmas celebrations, may God’s light break forth upon us to show us the signs of God’s presence in our lives, may we see the wonder of God’s amazing love breaking into our world, and may God give us voices to join with angels of all sorts to proclaim these things to others as we continue waiting and watching and hoping and praying and working for God’s light in Jesus Christ to shine in us and upon us and through us each and every day until he comes again. Lord, come quickly! Amen.