Immanuel

Sermon for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists
December 15, 2012
Texts: Matthew 1 and 9.

Wednesday morning about 6 a.m. I was walking through the church headed here to the sanctuary. Early morning in a church is a special time. It's quiet. In the heart of winter, at 6 a.m. The sanctuary is dark. With just meager light filtering through the windows from street lights.

There's something special about the sanctuary. We have trained ourselves to expect encounters with God in this space. The room itself speaks of the mystery and wonder of the divine.

I was looking forward to an hour of meditation and prayer sitting here in this sacred room.

But I was interrupted.

As I was walking down the center stairs I heard voices. The lights were on in the Day Care rooms. So as I reached the bottom of the stairs, I glanced that direction expecting to see Pam who is here every morning at 5 a.m. Instead, filling the visual frame created by the doorway, I saw a little girl, I don't know, maybe three years old, sitting on a chair, a circle of curls bobbing as she talked animatedly to Pam who was out of sight around the corner.

The first thought that ran through my head was: Whoa. What kind of life requires parents to drop off their kid at Day Care at 6 in the morning. Are both her parents surgeons scheduled to begin operations at 7? Is her mother, a unit secretary and single? What's it like to be a three year old who has to be dressed, breakfasted, and ready for the day at 6 a.m.?

The second thought that ran through my head was, If I had to drop my little girl off at 6:00 in the morning, I would hope that someone like Pam would be there to welcome her.

The third thought that ran through my head was this week's scripture reading.

This is how Jesus the Messiah was born.

His mother, Mary, was engaged to be married to Joseph. But before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her fiancé, was a good man and did not want to disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly.

As he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. "Joseph, son of David," the angel said, "do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit. And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."

All of this occurred to fulfill the Lord's message through his prophet: "Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means 'God is with us.'"

When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded and took Mary as his wife. But he did not have sexual relations with her until her son was born.

And Joseph named him Jesus.

Matthew's words set us up to expect a very unusual child. The child is fathered by the direct action of God. I don't know exactly what kind of distinctive features I'd expect, but surely since Jesus was a divine-human hybrid, something should be obviously different from pure-bred human kids. To my surprise, the only evidence Matthew presents that baby Jesus has a fifty-percent divine ancestry are the words of an angel spoken in a dream and the words of an ancient prophecy. There is nothing observable about Jesus that is unique. Instead, the specialness of Jesus is utterly hidden. It can be observed only by those with a special ability to see. It does not lie in in the phenomena being observed. Throughout his gospel Matthew works to teach us how to see. He wants us to practice supernatural vision.

Our worship of the Baby Jesus prepares us to see all babies in a golden light. Because Jesus' parents were peasants, we have a special appreciation for the value and dignity of ordinary people. Because of our sense of connection with Joseph and Mary, we have a sense of kinship with people everywhere who lead precarious lives.

At the heart of the Christmas story are the details of an ordinary baby. He sucks and cries. He poops and pees. In Baby Jesus, God and humanity are intimately linked. This link forms a major theme running all through Matthew's gospel. To the untrained eye, there is an ordinary child. But those who have cultivated penetrating vision see the divine.

The stories of Jesus' birth are not merely cute memories, they offer profound wisdom which is reiterated throughout the gospel of Matthew. One of my favorite stories illustrating this wisdom is found in Matthew 9.

The leader of a synagogue came and knelt before Jesus. "My daughter has just died," he said, "but you can bring her back to life again if you just come and lay your hand on her." Matthew 9:18.

If you know anything about Jewish culture, you are immediately riveted. Jews don't kneel. Perhaps you remember the story of Mordecai in the book of Esther. He very nearly got the entire Jewish population annihilated because of his refusal to bow to someone high up in the government. Jews don't kneel for prayer in the synagogue. Now here, this leader in the Jewish community kneels in front of Jesus begging: Please come resurrect my daughter.

Dad's get this. This girl is the light of his life. She is the most beautiful girl in the world. And the sweetest and the smartest and the kindest. The entire world will go dark if she leaves. So dad, who has never before in his entire life, never, ever, not a single time bowed to another human being, is on his knees in front of Jesus begging for the life of his daughter.

In our imaginations we stand with the dads in that crowd. When Jesus begins moving toward the house, we breathe a sigh of relief. If we are at all skeptically inclined, we are anxious. We don't believe Jesus can raise people from the dead. But this time, this once, we hope we are wrong. This dad's desperate affection for his girl has captured our hearts. He must have his daughter again. Surely the universe would not mind bending its rules just this once to allow the return of joy and life.

Jesus and his entourage head off with the father. Along the way, Jesus stops. (Like any good movie, Matthew's movie has twists of plot.) He turns and interacts with a pathetic woman in the crowd. A woman who has been bleeding for 12 years. The bleeding mentioned here meant that for 12 years she was forbidden by the command of Scripture from having any intimate contact with her husband. She was to have no social contact with anyone. Strictly interpreted, the law would have separated her from her children, her sisters. Certainly from participating in worship.

Her life has been living death. But, of course, she deserved it. Or at least, she was the kind of person these kinds of things happen to. People close to her were stirred with revulsion. Bleeding was yucky. Disgusting. So, she was revolting, disgusting, repulsive.

And she had the effrontery to touch Jesus.

He stopped and turned. He had read her touch. Instead of scolding, rebuking, mocking, instead of asking her what was she thinking, imagining she could get away with violating every social and religious taboo and reach out and touch him, a rabbi, no less. Instead of saying or doing any of that Jesus enveloped her in a transforming light.

There in front of that crowd Jesus suddenly revealed her divinity.

“My daughter” he said.

When Kate Middleton gives birth, her child will be royalty. Why? Because Prince William and Kate are royalty. When Jesus, the divine king announced this woman was his daughter, he announced her own glorious status, a glory utterly invisible anyone uninstructed in the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Matthew softened our hearts with his portrayal of the Jewish synagogue dad bowing in front of Jesus pleading for the life of his daughter. Then having charmed us with the warmth of desire and admiration in that dad's heart, Matthew plays a trick on us. While we are all emotional, sucked in by the drama of this dad's love and loss, he pivots the camera and catches this woman who repulses us, then has us hear Jesus say to her, “My daughter.” Then Jesus seals her status by healing her.

The story ends with Jesus resurrecting the daughter of the synagogue ruler, but by this point in the story the resurrection is anticlimactic. We were all in love with the synagogue ruler's daughter from the beginning of the story. We know it's going to turn out okay for her. The surprise glory of the story is transfiguration of an undesirable, pitiful woman into a glorious queen of heaven, daughter of Jesus the Messiah.

Matthew presents us with the most exalted wisdom in the history of humanity—the vision of beings as the bearers of the divine presence.

See that baby born to Mary, that infant sucking and crying and sniffing and making happy baby noises. Look again, that child is the Son of David, the Son of Abraham, the Messiah of the Jews, the Son of God. Then throughout his gospel, Matthew shows us multiple examples of this same principle. God and God's beloved are hidden in plain sight all through society. Kids and women and men. Lepers, Romans and ruffians. Synagogue rulers and Pharisees. Once we have been learned from Jesus, we see the glory of God glowing in them all.

When we have deeply imbibed the wisdom of Jesus contained in the gospel of Matthew it might transform the story I told at the beginning of my sermon.

On Wednesday at about 6 a.m. I was walking through the church building, anticipating a quiet hour with God here in the quiet emptiness of this sanctuary. I was going to practice contemplation of the infinite.

But I was interrupted. I was prompted to look back over my shoulder toward the Day Care room where I saw, framed by the doorway, a vision of a little child talking with an attentive adult.

In light of the Christmas story, especially the way Matthew tells it, my hours of meditation on the grand mystery of God are not superior to the minutes Pam spends every morning paying close attention to three-year-olds whose parents are off to work.

As a congregation, we at Green Lake Church, rightly give serious attention to shaping our worship services to lift our hearts to God. We spend money and time to make sure this space lifts our spirits and facilitates our engagement with God.

You are to be commended for this.

As a congregation, Green Lake Church also opens its doors at six in the morning, Monday through Friday, to care for children who are in every observable way indistinguishable from Baby Jesus. (Okay Jesus wasn't blond.)

This is certainly no less significant, no less holy, no less admirable.

While I am sitting here in the darkness attending to the mystery of God, Pam is sitting in the light attending to the prattle of three year olds. According to Matthew, Pam's attention to a three year old is not less glorious my prayer and meditation.

And the entire enterprise of caring for children, which occupies so much of our building for much of the week is no less gloriously spiritual, is no less an engagement with God, than is our worship here at 11:00

As a Christian congregation, a community of people owned by the Christmas story, we are called to the highest vision, the glory of God hidden in every child of God, every son and daughter of human kind.