Emmanuel

This is the sermon I gave on December 23, 2012.  It's short, and I think it says something important.

Who Are We Waiting For?  Part 4

Emmanuel, God With Us

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 23, 2012

Scripture:  Matthew 1:18-24

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

It has been a dark week.  Christmas is only two days away, but it has been a dark week.  Just over one week ago a disturbed young man first killed his mother, then drove to a school where he killed twenty children and six adults; then, apparently, he killed himself.  Twenty-eight deaths, all but one of them innocent.  Some of them heroic.  Twenty children and six adults at a public school.  As of yesterday, since the tragedy in Connecticut, there had been more than 100 deaths from guns in our country and no doubt others from other kinds of violence.  It’s beyond comprehension.  I can’t speak for you, but as for me my mind can acknowledge that it happened but my soul can’t comprehend it.  My heart can’t get around it.  I can’t understand it.  I can only weep and mourn and ache for hurting humanity, ache for all of us mere humans among whom something like this can happen.  Is the human psyche really so fragile that it can snap and cause someone to do such an unspeakable thing as shoot another human being?  Apparently so.  Apparently so.  It has been a dark week indeed.

Yet somehow, some way, life goes on.  Tomorrow evening we will gather here for our annual Christmas Eve service.  Then the next day is Christmas, the celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ.  Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy; and for many people it will be.  It will be a time of family and gift giving, of children and parents and grandparents gathered together in love and joy.  I pray that it will be all that for you.  On Wednesday morning it will be all that for Jane and me as we gather with my son and daughter, their spouses, and our grandchildren.

It will be good,  It will be very good, yet how can we forget the events of December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut?  How can we forget all the other violence in our country and in our world?  We can’t.  We won’t, and because we can’t forget and because we won’t forget, we must ask ourselves:  In the face of such tragedy does Christmas make any sense at all?  Is it possible to celebrate at all in the face of such horror?  Can we make any sense out of it?  Or are we left only with family traditions that have had all of their religious foundation blown out from under them by countless gunshots that took twenty-seven innocent lives just a few days ago?  It would be easy to say no, Christmas makes no sense.  To say no, we cannot celebrate.  To say that there is nothing to celebrate.  To say yes, the religious foundation of our traditions has been blown away by this senseless act of violence.  By all of the senseless acts of violence that so mark human existence of which Newtown is only a recent, shocking example.

It would be easy to say all that, but here’s the thing.  Those negative things about Christmas that it is so easy for us to feel whether we say them or not aren’t true.  They just simply aren’t.  The truth is different.  The truth is different, but it isn’t easy.  The truth brings comfort, but it isn’t an easy comfort.  The truth connects us with God, but it isn’t an easy connection or an easy God.  The truth isn’t easy, but it is still true; and we see that truth in Matthew’s story of the Annunciation to Joseph of the Good News of the coming of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew that we just heard.

In that reading an angel appears to Joseph in a dream.  The angel tells Joseph that his betrothed one, Mary, will have a child by the Holy Spirit though Joseph and Mary are not yet married.  God tells Joseph that this child will save the people from their sins.  Matthew then comments that this took place to fulfill a passage from Hebrew scripture, from the book of the prophet Isaiah actually, where it says that a child will be born, “and they shall name him Emmanuel.”  Now of course they didn’t name Jesus Emmanuel.  They named him Jesus, which the angel tells Joseph to do a few lines before the Emmanuel quote, but never mind.  Matthew still tells us that this child, this Jesus who is coming, will be Emmanuel.  And that, my friends, is very Good News indeed.  It is very Good News even, or rather especially, in dark times like the ones we have lived this last week, like the ones we live every week.  It is very Good News indeed because of what Emmanuel means.  It’s a Hebrew name, and it has a precise meaning.  It means “God is with us.”  Matthew tells us as much, and he’s right.  This child, this Jesus who is coming, is Emmanuel.  He is God with us.

This is the central confession of the Christian faith, that on that first Christmas day God came to be with us as one of us in the person of the baby boy Jesus of Nazareth.  In Jesus God is with us, and God has a very specific reason for being with us in Jesus.  In Jesus God is with us to show us God’s love, God’s grace, God’s compassion for us and for all of humanity.  In Jesus as Emmanuel God is with us to bring us consolation, to bring us hope, to bring us peace.  All of those blessings we have in Jesus Christ when we see him as Emmanuel, as God with us.  In Jesus as Emmanuel, as God with us, we see God holding all of humanity in endless arms of love; and we see God doing that come what may.  We see God holding us in love in good times, yes.,  In good times too.  But much more importantly in Jesus as Emmanuel, as God with us, we see God doing that, holding us in God’s everlasting arms, in the bad times.  In Jesus as Emmanuel we see that God doesn’t flee from us when things are bad.  In Jesus we see God entering into the bad times, into the worst that humans can do to other humans.  In Jesus we see God suffer with us.  In Jesus we see God even die with us.  Then we see God bring new life out of the suffering and out of the death.  In Jesus as Emmanuel we see God enter into human suffering and into human death, bear them with us, then triumph over them.

The power of that most basic Christian story, the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, comes precisely from the truth that Jesus Christ isn’t just another human being like us.  He is like us, but he is more than us.  He is Emmanuel, God with us.  And as God with us he experiences all of human life, the bad—indeed the very bad—as well as the good.

And so it is no surprise that Christmas comes at this time that feels so dark to us.  In Jesus God comes to us, God is with us, not because of some need God has but because of the need we have.  Friends, we all know, even if we don’t want to admit it, that human life is often a very dark place.  It is a place of fear as well as of joy.  It is a place of despair as well as of hope.  It is a place of death, including violent, unjust death, as well as of life.  God is with is in joy and in life.  More importantly, God is with us in fear, despair, and death too.  God comes to be with us in all of life, in the bad as well as in the good.

So neither the tragedy of nine days ago in Connecticut nor any of the other human tragedies that we hear of or that are part of our own lives should keep us from celebrating Christmas.  Why?  Well, just who are we waiting for at Christmas?  Who is it that comes to us at Christmas?  Jesus Christ of course, the one Matthew names Emmanuel, God with us.  In Jesus God comes to us as one of us, and in dark days like these we need God to come to us so badly.  We need to see God come to us as a human being like us.  And as more than that.  As God come to us.  As God with us.  We need to see the one named “God is with us” bring us God’s love, God’s hope, God’s peace.  And come he will.  The day after tomorrow he will come again to bring us that love, that hope, and peace.

So this year let us truly celebrate Christmas.  The good feelings of family and friends, yes; but more than that.  Let us not forget, but let us celebrate.  Let us celebrate Emmanuel, God with us, God coming to us to meet our need, to give us the gift that God wants all of us to have, in the good times but especially in the bad times, the gift that is no less than God, that is no less than Emmanuel, that is no less than God with us.  That is the truth of Christmas.  God is with us once again.  God brings light in the darkness once again.  And that more than anything else in all creation and even in times much darker than these is worth celebrating.  Christ is coming!  Let all the world rejoice!  Let us and all the world celebrate.  Amen.

Reflections on Newtown

Reflections on Newtown

It’s such a heart-wrenching tragedy.  We can’t get our heads around it.  Our hearts just break.  Twenty children murdered.  Seven adults murdered.  A disturbed gunman killed.  It’s all too much.  We reel.  We cry.  We grieve.  We explode in anger that such a thing could happen.  We can’t understand, we can only mourn the unjust death and scream our rage at the senseless, brutal, murderous thing that has happened among us.  It’s happened before, and it (or something far too much like it) will certainly happen again.  But that doesn’t help.  It doesn’t make it OK.  It doesn’t take away the tragedy of it.  It doesn’t take away our grief.  It doesn’t take away our anger.  It’s such a heart-wrenching tragedy.  We can’t get our heads around it.  Our hearts just break.

And there has been so much utter nonsense written about it.  It happened because we don’t force children in school to pray, we’re told.  It happened because we have made abortion and gay marriage legal, we’re told.  It happened because God is punishing us for not being socially reactionary enough, we’re told; and we know that that’s all totally and completely absurd.  It’s nothing but irresponsible sputtering uttered as though it came from God.  It didn’t happen because we don’t force children to pray in school.  It didn’t happen because we have made abortion and gay marriage legal, to the limited extent that we have.  God isn’t punishing us.  God doesn’t punish, God loves.  It’s a total perversion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to lay the Newtown unjust and premature deaths at God’s feet and say you did it.  God didn’t do it, a young man did it.  We don’t know why, but we know who; and it wasn’t God.  Yes, our society contributed to what happened.  It contributed by making guns and ammunition way too easily available to way too many people.  It contributed by making mental health services too scarce and too expensive, but our society didn’t kill those people.  God didn’t kill those people.  One young man killed those people, and he did it for reasons we probably will never know.

Which of course leaves us with one huge, burning, nearly overwhelming question:  Where was God?  Where was God when that young man shot his way into that school with murderous intent?  Where was God as that young man mowed down those innocent people, both children and adults?  Was God absent?  Had God fled from that school, or just left so that young man could do this terrible thing?  Or had God never been there in the first place?  It’s easy enough to answer all or at least some of those questions yes.  It’s easy, but it’s wrong.  It’s wrong, and the foundational story of our Christian faith tells us that it’s wrong.  What is that foundational story that tells us those things are wrong?  It is that God came to us in human form in Jesus of Nazareth, suffered unjustly, died unjustly, then rose again.  He was murdered by the imperial power of his day, Rome.  God didn't stop it.  God didn't prevent it.  God didn't intervene to save even God’s Son Jesus from unjust suffering and death.  Rather, in Jesus God entered into unjust human suffering and death, bore it, grieved it, and brought new life out of it.  Where was God when Jesus was tortured and murdered?  In Jesus.  With Jesus. Bearing it all with Jesus.  Where was God when that disturbed young man blasted his way into those classrooms and started killing children?  With the children.,  In the children.  Bearing it all with them and with us.  That’s where God was.  That’s where the story of Jesus Christ tells us God was.  That’s the only place we can really imagine God being.  It’s the only possible answer.  Where was God?  With the victims.  God is always with the victims.

God is always with the victims, and God has a way of bringing new life out of even senseless tragedy.  We don’t yet know what that new life will be that is to come out of the tragedy of Newtown.  Perhaps gun control.  We can pray for gun control.  Perhaps better public mental health services.  We can pray for better public mental health services.  We don’t know.  Perhaps the new life to come out of Newtown won’t come quickly.  Perhaps it won’t come for a very long time.  Perhaps it will not be all that we pray for, but in Christ Jesus we have at least the hope that new life will come.  Not for those killed of course, not in this life at least.  Yet it may still come for us.  It may still come for God’s world.  That today is our prayer.  That today is our hope.

So let’s be done with the utter nonsense.  Let’s stop blaming God for what God didn’t do.  Let’s stop blaming our society for refusing to adopt even more ignorant and discriminatory social policies than most of it already has.  Those things have nothing to do with what happened.  A human being snapped.  That’s what happened.  Pure and simple.  A human being snapped.  Where was God?  With the victims of course.  Our task isn’t to use the tragedy of Newtown for narrow political purposes that have nothing to do with what happened.  Our task is to look for new life beyond Newtown and to work for a new life beyond Newtown.  If we can do that we will be living the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a Gospel that never makes God violent or vindictive but that makes God, and we pray us, peaceful, loving citizens of God’s world.