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For Us and For Our Salvation
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 11, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 44:1-8 Matthew 1:18-25
That the child in Elizabeth's womb leapt for joy while Mary rejoiced in God her Saviour…that the angel announced good tidings of great joy as shepherds made haste to see this thing which had come to pass…that the wise men rejoiced with exceeding great joy when they saw the star…all these reports lead me to ask after the joy you and I would miss had Christ not, for us and for our salvation, come down from heaven: not only the joy we would miss had He never been born, but the joy we do miss as, day by day, season after season, we spend the hours we are given unmindful of the God who has come to us in Him. I think it not by chance that the joy of our Christmas celebrations is a very elusive and illusory sort of joy. The happiness we attempt to conjure for ourselves around Christ's birth seems to be, more often than not, a happiness which quickly fades as we return to "darning and the Eight-Fifteen." "It was bitter, that Christmas day," wrote D. H. Lawrence, "as it drew on to evening, and night became a sort of bank holiday, flat and stale. The morning was so wonderful, but in the afternoon and evening the ecstasy perished like a nipped thing, like a bud in a false spring. Alas, that Christmas was only a domestic feast, a feast of sweetmeats and toys!" Our holidays, our feasts, our "festivals," notes Karl Barth, "are foreseen joys and…assuming that joy is really foreseen, why should they not be planned, prepared and arranged? But why," he asks, "are they so far from festive…? Why do we have to persuade ourselves and others that they are? Why are we so often glad when everything has passed off without too many damaging and annoying incidents and we can resume our customary way of life….Obviously," he concludes, "because joy cannot be induced by any labor however skilful or assiduous, or any organization however careful or elaborate." The first thing to notice with Mary and Elizabeth, with the shepherds and even the wise men, is that the joy which moved Elizabeth's child to leap in the womb and called forth Mary's Magnificat, the joy which sent shepherds running with haste toward Bethlehem and led wise men to the place where the star came and stood, was a joy not induced by any labor however skilful or assiduous, or any organization however careful or elaborate. This was a joy clean outside human arrangements. This was a joy which literally broke into the human condition and turned these characters Godward. Their joy had nothing to do with how they were feeling or with what they were doing or even, at that moment, with their beliefs concerning the child. Rather gladness and rejoicing was to be found in the startling, frightening, redeeming movement of God toward humankind in the fullness of time itself. The God for whom creation had been groaning was about to enter in not as guest to humanly orchestrated feasts but as host of an eschatological banquet promised by the prophet Isaiah. He would make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined. With his own self he would do this because the God for whom mortals had waited had come to swallow up death forever, to wipe away tears from all faces, to remove the disgrace of God’s people as though it were his own. This is the God for whom we have waited too, my friends, whose saving grace has broken into our arranged feasts and abides. In the second place, the joy we would miss without him is the joy which arrests our movement in time--"the movement of our continual striving and desire for small or great ends,” says Barth, “for new or distant goals, of ideas, wishes, obligations, hopes." In him eternal life enters time and, for a moment, we are given a glimpse of our salvation, which is to say a glimpse of our human life at one with the God for whom we were made. God who has promised not to be God without us is about to be born. The birth narratives portray such an arrest of human activity as the child leaps in Elizabeth's womb and as Mary ponders these things in her heart, as the shepherds go with haste but then halt before the manger and as wise men, led by a star which stopped and stayed, also knelt and worshipped. In each case, they beheld in Mary’s son the promise complete, unambiguous, potent: promise of God's mercy shown from generation to generation, of the proud scattered in the imagination of their hearts, of the mighty put down from their thrones and those of low degree exalted, of the hungry filled with good things and the rich sent empty away. Now there was no place they had to go because the manger was where they had been destined to arrive; now there was nothing more to attempt because all had been accomplished in Christ's coming; now their endless beseeching could be collapsed into thanksgiving because the One for whom they had waited was about, in the fullness of time, to appear. Still in time we find ourselves consumed by a longing that is sharpened and deepened at his manger. I think this is because “‘The promise is fulfilled’ does not mean that the promise has ceased, and that which is promised takes its place. It means that the promise is now complete, unambiguous and thus potent." [Barth] In other words, in Him the content of our hope is revealed, though still it remains hope: that the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers awake cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them. We may quit our search in every other place for our human lives even as we may quit our waiting for God because in him we have glimpsed both God and the good thing God began in us all and will bring to completion in the day of Jesus Christ. Or as Simeon will sing a few days after the fact, we are stopped in our tracks because our “eyes have seen our salvation”, have seen our life with God in him! The moment at the manger, of course, is but a moment. For in the third place, the joy we would not know without him is a joy given us not for ourselves, but for the sake of the whole world. The joy that is truly joy and not a brief lifting of our individual hearts is never a private affair but inevitably sends us out into the winter darkness as bearers of the light that is Light. Therefore, once he had leapt in his mother Elizabeth's womb, John was born to lose his head over the witness he would bear to the One the world was unprepared to greet. Once the shepherds had seen Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger, they made known what had been told them about this child such that all who heard it were amazed. Once the wise men saw the child with Mary his mother and opened their treasures, they departed for their own country by another road lest the news they had to tell be silenced as it still is silenced at the hands of Herod's murderous decrees. The joy we would not know without Him is a joy which remains joy only as it is communicated to a world more in need of God’s Word made flesh than we can imagine or the world can believe. Yet there is the rub. For when we step out of ourselves and into the world, what we find is a world that is taken with its own activity and not readily stopped in its tracks…a world content in the words it speaks to itself and not particularly interested in an address from outside itself spoken to turn the human heart and mind Godward…but also we are confronted by a world grown weary of the church’s words upon words upon words, a world waiting, in truth, for a God with the power to save. "…it is not enough simply to give them a share in what gives joy to us," say Barth. "Nor is it really enough merely to think and do something which we know might be an occasion of joy to some….What is really demanded is that I ask myself from the standpoint of the other what will give [the other] joy." What is really demanded of us, in other words, is an act of self-emptying, an entering of another’s flesh, an incarnation of sorts, an embodiment of the love with which we have been loved wherein another’s hunger, another’s homelessness, another’s fear, another’s loneliness, another’s imprisonment, another’s powerlessness poses for us not a question to debate but the manger…and in the manger the child who summons us to His side anew with exceeding great joy. Then finally I think it not a minor detail of Luke’s nativity that the means by which Mary communicates to the world the glad tidings of the savior waiting in her womb to be born is a song. So I think also in this season of the artist by whose brush stroke the eye is arrested to see anew; I think of the poet whose words put flesh on the ancient story, causing us to remember as if for the first time "the stable where for once in our lives/Everything became a you and nothing was an It"; I think of the dancer in whose company the abandon that is praise breaks forth to cast even and especially the lame in the Nutcracker Suite; I think of the musician whose too many notes seem almost to mediate the heavenly host; and then I think of choir and congregation joined in carols that are, in the words of my friend and Old Testament scholar Pat Miller, "but anticipations of the eschatological choir, the voices of God's people who sing the praises of the Lord in, through and beyond the judgment of the universe." The joy we could not know without Him is the joy given us only as we tune our words to another's need, as we dip our brush in paint to declare all things new, as we join our voice with a chorus already begun, as we dare our one precious note in concert with creation's cry: it is a joy which will not be complete until all have reason to glorify and praise God forever. "I tell you," says the Mozart of Amadeus, "I want to write a finale lasting half an hour! A quartet becoming a quintet becoming a sextet! On and on, wider and wider--all sounds multiplying and rising together--and then together making a sound entirely new!…I bet that is how God hears the world. Million of sounds ascending at once and mixing in His ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us" but seemingly not to Mary: My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, she sings and in so singing, invites us to practice our own scales of rejoicing as well at the birth of him who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven. “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” Thanks be to God! |