Episode 12: 12/05/08

Readings:

Psalm 16
Isaiah 3:8-15
1 Thessalonians 4:1-12
Luke 21:5-19

Sermon:

“Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel”
Isaiah 7:14

Grace, mercy and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.

For thousands of years…

Ever since that first fall to sin, that first moment when the serpents tongue pierced the ears of Adam and Eve with his great deception and they were cast from the peace of Eden’s perfection there had been a promise. “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” (Genesis 3:15) The Psalmist would look longingly to that day, that time when that Redeemer would enter into this world, “I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.” (Psalm 2:7). And the Prophet Jeremiah, amidst the darkness of the despair he had felt at the sin and corruption of his people, at the rule at a foreign hand, took his comfort in the fulfillment of that prophesy as old as mankind itself “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely: and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.” (Isaiah 23:5-6)

And there, like so many of his fathers and mothers, so many of his forbearers, the Prophet Isaiah would look to the promise of the Lord, hearing His voice whisper in his ear telling him that there would be one who would enter into this world defying the laws of logic and reason, defying all that was understood about science and biology, being born of a virgin to bring God’s children back to the path of righteousness.

.It was a matter of trust in that basic understanding that told them “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1), believing that God would forever keep his promises. For the faithful it did not matter if God had made the promise two thousand years or two minutes before, in their great grandfathers lifetime or their own, they knew that God was true to His word and that there would come a time when all things would pass into fulfillment according to his divine plan and will. To them, their faith was placed in the advent of a Messiah who would ransom captive Israel and free them from the dark bondage of the chains of sin’s slavery, and there would come a time when, as foretold by the prophets, when he would walk on this earth.

Immanuel… God with us…

Thousands of years later it still seems to defy all that we know about science and logic. Perhaps now we have the technology to artificially reproduce a virgin birth through our own advancements, but two thousand years ago it wasn’t possible. Now, in our age of enlightenment and reason, if it can’t be explained it is dismissed. Some interject that, despite all the historical evidence, that Christ never existed, while others explain away his birth as Mary lying and that there was, in fact, nothing really that truly special about it, that it was a myth made up by a scared girl who did not want to face the consequences for her action.

There, as we find ourselves amidst this Advent season, perhaps we even wonder, if it was God’s intent for people to believe that they might find their salvation through Christ, why this was to be a birth that He knew skeptics and cynics would reject. God, being all powerful, could have made His will be done anyway He had so desired.

But what is often times missed is that God never intended for it to be difficult to believe, even knowing that it was a skeptics world and that the Devil would use his power to deceive. Rather it is something very simple, something very basic, and yet something so beautiful. The idea that there is a loving God, a caring God, who loves us all so much that He would defy all the laws of this world to send a gift into it, His only Son, His beloved Son, that perfect child to not just bring the Lord to us, but to also bring us back to the Lord.

Immanuel… God with us…

Advent is not just a time to prepare for a celebration of the birth of Christ, it is a season of fulfilled promises, a season of hope and joy that tells us no matter how hard the times we are living in are, no matter how difficult our lives may be or how dark our days may be, no matter how impossible things may seem to us, God is there beside us, true and faithful to His word, seeking to draw us closer to Him, seeking to bring us once more to the peace of his wondrous embrace that we may find the comfort and solace that we so desperately seek. There we must remember that its not just in a virgin birth that God defies the logic and the reason of this world, but it’s in each and everyone of our lives that He does as well, bringing us to the joy of our salvation. There God does not need to explain to us for us to find all that we need, nor does He need to follow some special formula or some biological equation, all He needs to do is to love us, to show us that same love He showed when He kept the promises made to Isaiah and the prophets, when he kept His promises to all of us through all time.

We celebrate a time when we remember that there is more to life than just those things that we can understand or that we can comprehend, realizing that just because we may not understand why the sun rises does not make it stop rising, nor does it stop its warming glow from cutting through the dark coldness that surrounds us.

God’s love and Christ’s mystic and miraculous birth may be as a sunrise is to those who do not understand how it comes about and yet it is no less real and no less wondrous than that to us. There, you can place your trust, and faith in the Lord, even if your heart in hardened by the skeptics touch, and know that, as surely as the sun rises each and every day, so to does God’s love transcend and touch us in our daily lives, through this blessed season and through all times.

Now the peace of the Lord that transcends all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus even unto life everlasting. Amen.