The Christmas Present

“The Christmas Present”

Isaiah 7:10-16

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/22/13

          Poor old King Ahaz, he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place, while sitting on the fence and wishing he could change horses in the middle of the stream.  But before he can grab that bull by the horns, he wants to get all his ducks in a row, because when it comes time to fish or cut bait, he doesn’t want to shoot himself in the foot by throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

          Ahaz is no chump.  He knows that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  But he also knows to watch out, because that first step is a doozy!

          I think Isaiah hears something like this when Ahaz refuses to ask Yahweh for a sign.  Even though the prophet gives the king permission to demand a sign, even an overwhelming one, Ahaz sidesteps the issue by quoting the ancient wisdom from Deuteronomy: “Do not to put the Lord your God to the test.” (Deut. 6:16)

          Isaiah’s response to Ahaz says, in effect, ‘Oh, give me a break!’

          In The Message, Eugene Peterson paraphrases Isaiah’s words this way:  “[Ahaz, it’s] bad enough that you make people tired with your pious, timid hypocrisies, but now you make God tired.”

          When offered the chance to experience something disturbingly new about God, Ahaz balks.  And his excuse is nothing but a veneer of cliché, particleboard piety.  Get just a little sweat and just a few tears beneath the surface, and that thin façade buckles and separates as the particleboard swells, dries and crumbles into a pile of sawdust.

          Genuine faith, on the other hand, builds a solid structure, because, honest-to-God faithfulness leads us through breath-taking risk.  And the principal guarantee of risk is, by definition, uncertainty.  As much as some of us would like it to be otherwise, uncertainty and ambiguity are as native to faith as wet is to water.  Faith is not about knowing.  Faith is about trusting.  Ahaz doesn’t have the patience for faith.  He wants to know.  And so, instead of enduring the hazards of living by faith, he hazards a pious dodge to Isaiah’s discomforting invitation to trust.

          I take no pride in this, but I fully recognize and claim the tiresome, cliché Ahaz within me.  Is there a little bit of him in you, as well?

          Things have just begun to get difficult for Ahaz.  After Isaiah chews him out for hiding behind false piety, the prophet says, “Okay, Your Majesty, King of Indecision, here’s a sign for you: ‘There’s a young woman who’s already pregnant.  She’s going to have a son.  And she’s going to name him Immanuel – God with us.  Now, by the time that child finds himself eats eating solid food, and by the time he figures out the difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ your troubles will be over.’

          That is to say, of course, that Ahaz and Jerusalem will have to wait for a while.  And in the meantime, things will get worse before they get better.  Still, Jerusalem’s days of suffering are numbered.

          That’s the extent of the comfort Isaiah offers the king – the unprovable assurance that his people’s struggle will not last forever.  So the prophecy is a call, a dare really, for Ahaz to place his hope, and his earthly kingdom itself, in a God-promised future rather than in some temporary truce wrought by the destructive violence of war or by political sausage-grinding.

          Deliverance is on its way, says Isaiah.  Eventually.  So, be patient.  Wait and trust.  And most of all, prepare.  Let this period of suspended hope become for you a time to rediscover the art and the discipline of expectation.  Let it become for you a season of Advent.

          We observe Advent only four Sundays in the Christian year, but if there is a season that best describes how Christians are called to live our day-to-day lives, I think that would have to be Advent.  We are called to live expectantly; and as every truly grateful mother knows, to live expectantly means not only to prepare for, but also to live in active and intentional engagement with the fulfillment of the fearlessly loving and vigorously hopeful promise of new life.

          Now, yes, we often begin our journeys in the safety of shallow lagoons, swampy, nurturing places where the language and images we use are simplistic and easy.  This is true, I think, because it must be.  We need small and clearly boundaried places as beginnings in the very same way that a human life must begin in the enclosed and protected space of a mother’s womb.  And all that waiting and preparation prove crucial, because once a human being is born, once the mother is no longer “expecting,” unexpected challenges begin.

          Birth means the beginning of an entirely new relationship, a new journey.  Life as everyone knew it is over, and a brand new life begins – a life defined by overwhelming love, love that will give rise to both empowering and disabling experiences and emotions – joy and sorrow, sickness and health, anger and ecstasy.  It’s as if we enter a whole new pregnancy, a whole new process of waiting, preparing, and trusting – with much broader and nerve-wracking boundaries.

          The future changes forever with even the knowledge of the potential for helping to create and bring a new life into the world.  And surrender to that future can take one of two forms: helpless surrender, or hopeful surrender.

          If we, in faithless dread, resign ourselves to helpless surrender, we will expect and demand provable explanations and concrete answers.  We will chose to fear the unknown, to win at all costs, and to accept violence toward other human beings and toward the environment not just a given, but as God's will for winners – God’s will for God’s sheep, wheat, and chosen ones.

          It’s no surprise then, that the religious culture of helpless surrender becomes one of rigid doctrine, exclusionary judgment, and of those saccharine clichés such as Ahaz utters, clichés that almost always prove to be pious equivocations, shallow lagoons of contrived safety on which enduring and redeeming hope cannot float.

          There lies a more gracious path – but it is much more demanding.  If, in hopeful surrender, we accept the holy dare of Advent, we take child in hand and push our boats out onto the deep and unpredictable waters of faith.  And there we discover the dangerous joy of embracing Isaiah’s promise.

          At this point, the Child, that is to say, God’s New Thing Among Us, belongs to a much bigger picture.  It belongs to a future over which we have no control.  All we can really do is, through trial-and-error and love, to learn and to teach some ways to embrace the inevitable joys and cope with the inevitable challenges of life.  And in so doing we walk in the organic presence of that Child, that New Thing.  We walk in its ever-changing and ever-transforming presence.

          I don’t believe that Isaiah just haphazardly picks the image of mother and child and Immanuel out of thin air.  With thoughtful intention, he offers to Ahaz, and to us, an image laden with the winged burden of grace, the burden of bold faith and unconditional love.  And he offers it in the very face of whatever angry, “smoldering stumps” seem to have stolen the future, stolen the future by seizing the present.

          One trouble with living according to the demands of this faith, hope and love Child is that there is really no place or time in which comfortable platitudes will hold us – at least not for long.

          One trouble with scripture is that we often reduce little snippets of it into platitudes.  When Ahaz says that he “will not put the Lord to the test,” he does indeed quote scripture.  But he misses the point.

          He uses as a dodge a teaching meant to challenge God's people to live the active, selfless and hopeful surrender of faith.

          Remember if you will, much later someone else will use the same line very differently: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you...'”

          And Immanuel himself answers the tempter, saying, “It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'”

          Ahaz uses scripture to avoid faithfulness.  Jesus uses the same scripture to commit himself to God's daring, risk-laden calling.

          Whenever we use scripture to say “No” to the radical call of unconditional love, we are channeling our inner Ahaz.

          Hearing and uttering a holy “Yes” to scripture by saying “Yes” to one another, now that is a gift of unfettering grace, a gift given to us by the Christ within.

          I love Christmas morning almost as much as anyone else.  I love all the surprises, the delight, the gratitude.

          I especially love getting up on that morning that really is remarkably, even kind of eerily still.  It’s kind of like that moment when some fantastic new work of art is unveiled, or a baby is born – that quick, breathless, timeless moment when all those Can it be true? and What does it mean? questions race through every circuit of our brains.  We get no real answers, though, because fine art and new life offer relationships, not proof.

          I do love all of that, but what if, during Advent, we did ask God for a sign?  And what if that sign was to experience the joy, and the excitement, and the wonder of Christmas without all the distracting and often spirit-numbing excess of decorations, and presents, and weight gain?  It would take some serious preparation for that kind of Christmas morning to become a happy memory, wouldn’t it?  But genuine enjoyment of such a Christmas morning would be an enduring testimony to new birth.  It would be a bold statement of faith – faith that wholeness, purpose, and the future itself belong to the invasive grace of God, not to our own already-failed desire to buy or earn acceptance, worth, and happiness.

          To live toward that new future is to live the new birth of Bethlehem, the new birth of Sunday’s lively cemetery, and the new birth of the Jordan River all at once.

          We live into the new future prophesied by Isaiah by living gratefully, generously, and hopefully in God’s here-and-now gift of Today.  Advent is all about learning to live in the Christmas present.  A present we receive, unwrap, enjoy, and re-gift to one another every single brand new day.