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Advent Part 1: Isaiah 7
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
What good is it if Christ came to us once? And life's Christ continues to come to us in our space and our time today. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome to commons. I'm Jeremy, and I'm really glad that you're here with us, particularly as we begin this Advent season together. Because Advent is actually the beginning of the Christian calendar. I know that it sits near the end of our normal calendar, but this is actually week one, day one in the liturgical year.
Speaker 1:And we start our liturgical year by preparing ourselves for the advent of Christ. After all, that is the start of the story, not the end. And so today and for the next four Sundays, you will see us wearing these liturgical stoles when we teach. This is part of how we introduce religious imagery into our worship together, and part of how we remind ourselves that we have entered a season of waiting together. So you're gonna see Christmas decorations around the church, and you'll see some liturgical artwork on the walls, but then you'll also see purple on the stage until Christmas Eve.
Speaker 1:And this stole will turn to white, and that will remind us that our waiting has now reached its culmination in Christ. And we really hope that some of these little touches and these introductions of a larger church church tradition help to invite you into an experience of Advent this Christmas. Now all of that also means that our Advent campaign is in swing. Yelena already gave us a bit of a picture of one of those projects this year. But just quickly, we are providing a new post secondary scholarships for young moms.
Speaker 1:We're investing in partner agencies that we work with year round in Kensington and now in Inglewood this year. We are gathering resources for the coming year of benevolent work that we do in community. And then finally, we are raising another rounds of funds for our refugee resettlement efforts here in the city. Our newest family just arrived about a week ago, so we're excited. And all of the details are available at commons.church/advent.
Speaker 1:And so we thank you for including commons, both this campaign and our regular work in your Christmas giving this year. We really don't take that for granted, so thank you. Now last week, we also just finished up a longer series on the character of Joseph. And I know that series resonated with a lot of people because you reached out and you let us know about that, and thank you for that. It's always encouraging.
Speaker 1:But if you ever want to backtrack and listen again, wanna catch up on something that you missed, you can always head to commons.church, click the watch online button at the top of the page, and that will take you directly to all of the teaching from both of our parishes. And there you'll find video and audio and whatever's easiest for you to track along with. But today is Advent. And it's December and it's Christmas on the way, and that means it's time to revisit old stories. And there's something beautiful in that, isn't there?
Speaker 1:Because this is the time of year where we embrace tradition, and we celebrate old habits, and we long for the ways things were when we were kids. And yet, if we get too caught up in that, it threatens to turn Advent into a very disarmed story. One that's cute and comfortable and potentially nonthreatening, instead of this very remarkable, incredibly political, shockingly subversive tale that we call Christmas. And so this year, we've titled our advent series unexpected precisely because we want to try to uncover a sense of second naivete as we read. And we wanna read as if for the first time, and we want to be surprised by what we uncover as we do.
Speaker 1:And in particular, what we're gonna try to do in this series is take four images from Jesus' life and look at the unexpected ways that his arrival transforms the expectations and the interpretations and sometimes even the meanings that Christians apply to the Hebrew scriptures. And so today, we're looking at birth narratives compared to the text of Isaiah where they draw their inspiration from. Next week, we're looking at Mary's Magnificat set against the words of Hannah from first Samuel. We've got Jesus' flight and his family into Egypt alongside a parallel in Hosea. And then finally, we're gonna look at the way that Jesus uses the scroll of Isaiah to announce his ministry to the world when he goes public in Luke four.
Speaker 1:And in each of these stories, we're going to try to look for something unexpected. Now,
Speaker 2:Facebook has this
Speaker 1:thing these days where it resurfaces posts from this day in a previous year. You've probably seen that. As all of you know, my son is five years old, and we now have enough content to where I am constantly surprised and amused by stories that show up in my feed. Stories that I somehow have already completely forgotten about. And I'll spare you today, but I promise I will have some more Eaton stories before we get to Christmas.
Speaker 1:But this is the thing with Advent. Right? It's the time when we tell old stories all over again, and we expect them to surprise us regardless. And so today is the birth narratives. And in some sense, this is the most Christmas y of Christmas stories.
Speaker 1:But let's begin by reading from the gospel according to Luke. This is chapter one verses 26 to 38. In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And the angel went to her and said, greetings you who are highly favored.
Speaker 1:The Lord is with you. I really like how one translator puts this, grace to you who is full of grace. God is surely near you. But Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary.
Speaker 1:For you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son and you are to call him Jesus. For he will be great and will be called the son of the most high. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David and he will reign over Jacob's descendants. His kingdom will never end.
Speaker 1:How will this be? Mary asked the angel since I am a virgin. And the angel answered, the holy spirit will come on you and the power of the most high will overshadow you so that the holy one to be born to you will be called the son of God. This is where Matthew adds the direct quote from Isaiah. The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us.
Speaker 1:But Luke continues, even Elizabeth, your relative, is going to have a child in her old age. She who was said to be unable to conceive is now in her sixth month, for no word from God will ever fail. And Mary gets the last word. She says, I am the Lord's servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.
Speaker 1:And the angel left her. So let's pray and we'll dive into this together. Oh God of eternal love and master of glorious simple unexpected gifts. Today marks the beginning of our waiting time. Our anticipation of the great festival in your honor, in your decision to save the world.
Speaker 1:And so we cast aside now our feverish pace. We open our pressured lives to the first sounds of gentle promise. Help us to be quiet enough to hear your voice, and eager enough to catch every word of grace. Where we tread on familiar territory and where we read stories that we have heard a thousand times before. May we, this year, come to Christmas with new imagination, with fresh eyes and open hearts, trusting that you might meet us here again for the very first time this year.
Speaker 1:In the gentle name of the Christ we await, we pray. Amen. Okay. Today on the agenda we have an excursus into source critical theory, war on the horizon, behold this young woman, and old stories made a new all over again. But we also have a story here that is pretty common fodder for this time of year.
Speaker 1:And obviously, we have the surprise birth of a child to a virgin, which to be fair, that is quite unexpected. But in terms of stories that we have heard before and in terms of stories that might seem to surprise us, there's very little new here to mine. And yet, one of the most fascinating parts of both Luke and Matthew when it comes to Christmas is the ways that they take very ancient stories and very familiar stories and stories that perhaps seemed very unlikely to be surprising to their audiences, and they made them new all over again. And so part of what we wanna do today is to go back and spend our time with Isaiah seven, a passage that is often brought out at Christmas and read through the lens of the gospels and a passage that serves as the basis for the birth stories in the gospels, but we wanna try to gather up the original context for this very ancient version of the story. And in doing that, the hope is that we can then see the ways that Matthew and Luke are adding and transforming and leveraging what they find even in their most familiar stories to tell something very new and very surprising about God.
Speaker 1:So we've read the story in Luke. We've heard the quote from Matthew. Let's look at the source material together. And as we do that, we have to remember that Isaiah is likely written in chunks. Scholarship tended to see Isaiah in three parts for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Speaker 1:And that's because the first part of the book spends a lot of time talking about the coming fall of the Hebrew kingdoms. The second part is pretty gloomy, and it talks about being in exile. And the third part looks forward to a hopeful ending and a restoration someday in the future. And so the thinking was, well, obviously, those must be three different people writing. Nobody can be gloomy and hopeful all at the same time, except that people began to challenge that in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1:Postmodernism came along, and all of a sudden, everyone was gloomy and hopeful all at the same time. And it's actually a good example here of how even scholars, sometimes even particularly scholars, tend to read themselves and their perspectives into the text. And what's happened is that modern scholarship still tends to see Isaiah divided into parts, but it does it a different way. That's because what we've realized is that all of us often hold very deep grief and almost ineffable joy in us all at the same time. This is actually incredibly important to remember as we enter into Advent together.
Speaker 1:Because Advent itself is this mixture of hope for the future and longing for today. And part of Advent is, yes, absolutely anticipating Christmas. But part of Advent is also about becoming aware of our need for Christmas. It's about noticing the darkness around us as the days get shorter. It's about paying attention to our longing and waiting.
Speaker 1:It's about internalizing this desperation for Christ to come to us again this year, this Christmas. So Advent itself is about this paradox that's embedded in source critical theories about Isaiah, which is where the gospel writers draw their inspiration from at Christmas, which is a kind of fun if nerdy example of scholastic irony. But we tend to see Isaiah today divided not along thematic lines but along historical lines. And the reason for that is at this point in history, the Hebrew people had been split into two different kingdoms. And Isaiah one to 33 is largely talking about Azaria.
Speaker 1:And Azaria conquered the northern kingdom that kept the name Israel, and they conquered the capital Samaria in July, and they held it for most of the sixth century. The second half of Isaiah, chapters 34 to 66, are mostly talking about life in exile under Babylon. Now Babylon came through and they conquered Assyria in the sixth century, and they took control of the Southern kingdom which was called Judah, and they conquered their capital Jerusalem in May to be precise. So there's more than a hundred year gap between the two halves of the book. And so because of that, there is a shift in tone between the threat of war on the horizon in the first half and the experience of a hundred years of exile now experienced in the second half.
Speaker 1:Now all of that means that when we look at Isaiah seven, which is where Matthew and Luke draw their inspiration from, this is from what sometimes gets called first Isaiah. It's the first half of the story. It's pre being conquered. It's pre going into exile. And the context is this looming threat of battle with Aziria on the horizon.
Speaker 1:And so some seven hundred years later when Matthew writes, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Emmanuel. This is where it comes from. Isaiah said, hear now you house of David. Is it not enough to try the patience of humans? Will you try the patience of my God also?
Speaker 1:Therefore, the Lord God self will give you a sign. The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and will call him Emmanuel. He will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right. For before the boy knows enough to reject wrong and choose right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. So who are these two dreadful kings?
Speaker 1:Well, what's happening here is a little bit Game of Thrones, so bear with me a bit. At this point, a man named Ahaz is the king of the Southern kingdom Judah, and he is watching Israel form an alliance with Aram to fight against Azirium. Now Ahaz doesn't want anything to do with that. He doesn't wanna get involved in the battle. And so Israel and Aram are looking at teaming up to attack Judah first.
Speaker 1:And their plan is to replace Ahaz and the line of David with a king who is more favorable to their objectives, and hopefully that way they'll have Judah on board when they declare war against Azirah. Now Isaiah says they want to place the son of Tobiel on the throne in Jerusalem. And what's interesting about that is we have no idea who the son of Tabeel is. Some scholars have noticed, however, that Tabeel looks a lot like the Aramaic phrase God is good, but it appears to have been corrupted to mean something more like not is good. And so what we have here is probably a pun where God is good has been turned into good for nothing.
Speaker 1:What that likely means is that Isaiah is not actually referring to a specific person with the name Tabeel, but the general idea that all of the enemies of God, those who long for war, they are good for nothing. And I think it's just really fun when the bible is kind of playful that way. But Ahaz is worried. He doesn't think Judah can withstand an attack, especially from two other countries. In verse two, it says that the hearts of Ahaz and his people were shaken even as the trees of the forest are shaken by the wind.
Speaker 1:So Ahaz is getting panicked. He's worried. He's concerned about how much water they have inside the walls of Jerusalem because he's wondering about what happens if they have to close the gates and fortify the city to defend against an attack. And so Isaiah shows up. And he meets the king down by the aqueduct where he's checking on the water supply to the city.
Speaker 1:And he says to him, dude, chill out. Verse four, he says, be careful, be calm, don't be afraid, don't lose heart. Yes. Your enemies want to attack. They wanna place some good for nothing king on your throne, but it will not take place.
Speaker 1:It will not happen. In fact, Israel and Aram, they have no idea what they're playing at here. Because Aziria is far more powerful than they realize. And war will be their undoing if they go that way. But, Ahaz is still terrified.
Speaker 1:And he says, I don't believe you. And Isaiah says, okay. Here's the deal. You see this young woman over here? She'll have a child, and that child will grow up safe and strong here in Jerusalem.
Speaker 1:You might as well name that child God with us. Because before that child is old enough to know right from wrong, the kings you are so terrified of, their lands will be laid waste. Now, as I paraphrase Isaiah, you may have noticed a couple things here. First of all, I started see this young woman here. That's because in Hebrew, there's an interjection.
Speaker 1:It's the word hine. You might remember that from our last series. We talked about this word a couple times in Joseph, and usually we translate it behold. But here, the consensus is that this means Isaiah is telling Ahaz to behold a particular young woman who's in his presence. Essentially, Isaiah confronts the king down at the aqueduct out in public in front of everyone, and he tells the king to be calm.
Speaker 1:But Ahaz is still worried, and so right there in front of everyone, Isaiah picks some random woman standing nearby and says, look, this woman is gonna have a son, and you might as well name that kid God with us because that kid will be eating solid food before all of this is over, so stop worrying. Now, I have no idea what this woman thought about all this. She's probably thinking, look, I didn't just came down for a glass of water. Don't drag me into this. But the second thing is obviously here, this young woman bit.
Speaker 1:You see, when Matthew quotes Isaiah, he uses the Greek term Parthenos. And that's the term that's used in the Septuagint Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, so it's not surprising that he does. But while Parthenos almost exclusively is used for virgin, not always, and that's why Matthew and Luke go out of their way to explain that, yes, they do actually mean virgin. The Hebrew ulma that Isaiah uses really just means a young woman or a woman of marriageable age. Now because she seems to be chosen at random and we don't know anything about her, we don't know if she was married, we don't know anything about what happened to her or her son, in the context of Isaiah, that doesn't really matter though.
Speaker 1:Because the emphasis there isn't the spectacularness of the birth, the emphasis is the witness of God in the moment, Emmanuel. Now that's very different for Matthew and Luke, we'll get to them in a minute. But first, we should see how this plays out in Isaiah. Because if we keep following and we flip forward a few verses, we're gonna find Isaiah using this language again. But this time, he's diverting his attention from Judah to Israel.
Speaker 1:And where he had courage and comfort and support to bring to Judah he has some very harsh words for Israel. Says in chapter eight, raise the war cry and be shattered. Listen all you distant lands. Prepare for battle and be shattered. Strap on your armor and be crushed.
Speaker 1:Devise your strategies but it will come to nothing. Speak a word, it will not stand for. God is with us. And what's really interesting here is that the last time Isaiah used this phrase, we translated that into a proper name, Emmanuel. And yet here, the writers or translators have decided to switch it up, and they go with a declaration, God is with us.
Speaker 1:That's a problem for me. Because I think that when we start arbitrarily deciding when the story is about God, Emmanuel, and when the story is about us, God is with us, we risk reading the story the way that we want to. And so I really like the way that Eugene Peterson has handled this passage because he ends it on the final note with the words, when all is said and done the last word is Emmanuel. Which leaves us with something more like this. All you oppressors who prepare for war.
Speaker 1:Listen all of you far and near. Plot all you want. Nothing will come of it. All your angry words are empty. Because when all is said and done, the last word is Emmanuel, God with us.
Speaker 1:And see, what happens now is that the us of God with us becomes not just us, like not just Judah, not just America or Canada or the West or the wealthy. The Us is the Us of humanity that God is with. It's all of us who are trampled underfoot. It's all of us who suffer under oppression because for Isaiah, God is not for one side and against the other side. God is with all of us who suffer.
Speaker 1:Even if those who suffer suffer because of God's people. You see, this is Isaiah's full imagination of God. It's why Isaiah has hope in exile, and it's why deep grief and profound joy can coexist within the frame for Isaiah. Because God is with us particularly when we wait, especially when we suffer, particularly when we work and live for peace and justice. Now, with all of that in mind, not just the image of a virgin, but this full imagination of Emmanuel and everything it means for Isaiah.
Speaker 1:Do you see how much more profound it is when you go back to the gospels and you see Matthew and Luke who are steeped in all of this imagery pulling from this moment here in Isaiah? Because they're not just looking for a proof text to prove the virgin birth, they're looking at the virgin birth and realizing that Jesus speaks to something much much bigger about the divine. The reminder that God has always been with us. That God has always been near to the oppressed, but now God is literally with us. And it's as if Matthew and Luke, they look at Jesus and they go, oh, wait a minute.
Speaker 1:We know this story. Like, this is our story. We've heard this story. This is a story we've believed for years, but now now it's like that story has been put on steroids, and it's bigger, and it's better, and it's even more beautiful than we remembered it. And sure, it's the supernaturalness of Jesus' birth that grabs their attention, but it's the withness of Jesus' birth that really opens their eyes here.
Speaker 1:That God is with us now in a way that we never expected. And maybe you never saw Jesus coming. Maybe you never expected to be here in church again. You thought that that was an old story that was dead and buried for you with nothing left to teach you. And then all of a sudden, you found yourself surprised by Jesus.
Speaker 1:Maybe you encountered grace somewhere in the world, in a gift, in a child, in a kind word from out of nowhere.
Speaker 2:And all of sudden, said
Speaker 1:to yourself, wait. I know that story. I remember that story. I forgot that story, but now I know it all over again. You have to remember that when Jesus arrives, the Jewish people have been subject to Assyria, and then Babylon, and Persia and then Greece and now Rome.
Speaker 1:And for hundreds of years, the Jewish people have been desperately trying to hold on to this idea that God really is with those who suffer. But after that long, it's hard. Now God is with them. And everything is even more beautiful than the prophet imagined it would be. Because you see the waiting and the grieving and the holding and the expecting and the forgetting and the remembering, all of that is just as important as the arrival and the celebration and the excitement and the joy.
Speaker 1:It's why we sing, oh come, oh come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here until the son of God appear. Rejoice, rejoice Emmanuel shall come to thee, oh Israel. Because if we don't learn how to hold deep grief and ineffable joy together in the same moment, We miss the moment because the moment was meant to move us forward into something new. Every year at Advent, I come back to one of my favorite quotes from Meister Eckhart, who wrote in the thirteenth century, and he said, what good is it if Christ came to us once? And life's Christ continues to come to us in our space and our time today.
Speaker 1:And that right there, that is exactly what Matthew and Luke grab a hold of here in Isaiah. And they say to themselves, what good is it if God was with us? We need God with us now. And then they see Jesus, and they recognize the story, and they remember the story, and their minds are blown, and they immediately they jump at the chance to tell an old story which becomes a very new story. And old words take on new meanings, and ancient images dance to new life, And Isaiah's experience of God becomes alive and fresh and full of Christmas morning in its retelling.
Speaker 1:Maybe what you need is to find a way to retell this story again this year. To read it and sit with it, to meditate on it and allow it to speak to you in new ways. To notice the ways that you are waiting for something really important right now, to recognize the spaces where you are grieving over something very painful right now, To be aware of the spaces where you need God to be with you right now. But then as Christ comes and inevitably, invariably shows up in the spaces where you least expect. Spaces like old sheds out back and stories that we've read and long forgotten.
Speaker 1:Spaces like churches where maybe we thought God had forgotten about too. Christmas might remind us about the need to look again and to discover the divine that was always with us, especially in those moments when we lost sight of it. May Christmas be unexpected for you this year. May you learn to look for God in surprising places. May the divine appear not where you want, but exactly where you need this Christmas.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God, as we rehearse old stories, and we recapture old memories, and we dust off old narratives that perhaps we have set aside for too long. Would you be present by your spirit? Helping us just like Matthew and Mark did to read with new eyes and recognize that in old tales, you are still there. Speaking and breathing new life into us, kindling new excitement and embers of passion inside of us that if we can carry them well, can find a new life in this world that we inhabit.
Speaker 1:God, may all the ways that old stories become new for us bring us grace and peace, and might we then be able to share that with those around us. May we represent spaces of joy, spaces of grace, spaces of peace that come from out of nowhere for those who need them. And in that, might your presence be made known here in the world this Christmas. In the strong name of the one we wait for. We pray.
Speaker 1:Amen.