Welcome for those still travelling (Advent 4A)

Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; Matthew 1:18-25

 

Christianity (as a religion) owes a lot to Judaism (as a religion). That idea could be unpacked for centuries and still be a job unfinished. Similarly there is a lot that Christians as a group of religious people owe to Jews as a group religious people, I am talking about the two great congregations away from their books. This is also something that would take many books and conversations to examine. But one thing in particular that I have found as a Christian who reads beyond his own religion, but something that I have rarely heard about in sermons, is the idea that the Jewish scriptures is a story of homecoming.

 

If we think of Judaism as a single Bible story it begins with God in Genesis 1:1, which my copy of Tanakh (JPS: 1985) reads as When God began to create heaven and earth; and it ends with “Any one of you of all His people, the LORD his God be with him and let him go up” which is 2 Chronicles 36:23c. The Bible for Jews begins with God creating Creation and ends with many Jews leaving their place of exile in Persia (via Babylon) and being encouraged to head for Jerusalem with the blessing of the colonising king. “Go home, you are free, return to the place that the LORD [your] God first created for you.” What a great image that is; and thank you very much to Judaism because you won’t find that storyline in the “Old Testament” of Christianity. The first thing God ever did in the universe was make you a home, and the final thing God will do in the universe is welcome you home when you come back, so says the Jewish religion’s Bible. In a way the Christian Bible says that too, but you need to read through until Revelation to get the whole story.

 

The great message of Christianity, and of Judaism, is that God made you because God loves you, and God wants you to live in love and relationship with God and Creation. At Christmas, we Christians remember that Jesus was born into a family with named parents and at least one cousin. Later we discover that Jesus had brothers and sisters, at least six siblings who survived their childhood into Jesus’ adulthood. Relationships matter to God and homelife matters to God. God in the Jewish Bible and in the good news of Christianity is centred on welcoming and homecoming. This is so much so for Christians that the story we tell about God is one of God’s coming to earth in human form, to a family, to make that welcome clear to all of humankind. Christianity’s story makes it clearer than Judaism’s that God’s welcome is not just for the physical descendants of Jacob’s sons via Isaac and Abraham; but also for Dinah’s descendants, and Esau’s descendants, and Ishmael’s descendants, and all descendants of all parents, even those not originally from the lands of Sumer or Canaan. Judaism does actually tell that story, but Christianity (IMHO) tells it more clearly.

 

Christmas is not only a story of relationships, it’s also a story of homecoming. This makes a lot of sense because Christmas is the story of a Jewish family acting on the advice of the Jewish God and the commands of the foreign army (gah! who is it this time?) occupying Judah/Judea. In the Luke 2 version of Christmas Joseph has to take his fiancée home to Bethlehem, from Nazareth. In Matthew 1:18-25 (and Matthew 2:1a) Jesus is probably born at home in Bethlehem but as a not-quite-a-toddler he and they are soon on the road, from whence they return to create a new home in Nazareth. Christmas is all about family and Christmas is about travelling home to be with family: who knew? Well, the writers of the Bible knew.

 

But have you noticed, and don’t worry if you haven’t because I literally just have, that Jesus in Matthew’s story is not a baby for long? The focus of Matthew 1-2 is not on the birth stories but upon God acting to send a sin-saviour and grace-mediator, a great voice to call all people home. The Father of Creation sent someone to tell the Jews to tell the world that all is in readiness and that there are many rooms (John 14:1-3) prepared for them. The one who comes from God, via a brief period of prophetically loaded infancy, is sent from The Spirit (Matthew 1:18) with the ministry of rescue (Matthew 1:21. The fact that he was born and had to spend some years completing childhood and adolescence is just the facts of the way in which he came, not the important part of the story itself. “Don’t focus on the baby,” seems to be Matthew’s story, “pay attention to what he grew up to be, but with the knowledge that this was always the case from the start”. The take-away message of this part of Matthew is that the saviour was born, not recruited. In Greek, the story is that Jesus the Messiah has his origins and his genesis in the Spirit; that’s who this man is, this man who was once a newborn Bethlehemite boy of Davidic ancestry.

 

When we look at Psalm 80 we find the need for the saviour, and for the summons to home. Psalm 80 is classified by scholars as a lament following national calamity, but even without a scholar’s understanding literary terms we know what that means: Israel is crying out to its God for rescue, specifically because something tragic has happened and there is a disaster in the present. This is not a “God we always need you” general prayer, or a “please stay close by” thing while someone lays in bed with a headache; this is a complete “the sheep has hit the fan and here we are stood drenched in blood and mutton offal” event. God, God! The whole country needs you and we need everything of you that there is to have. This is the sort of prayer that God answered with Jesus; God comes into the mess while it is still messy and God invites us to leave the messy and come home, washing us down as we travel out. In Psalm 80 we don’t get the story of rescue, we get the story of needing the rescue: Psalm 80 is the Triple-0 call, Bethlehem is the lights and sirens.

 

God is constantly calling the world home to Godself, this is why Jesus came. It is also why so many psalms and other passages of Tanakh and The Bible record the pleading of God’s people in many generations for God to act, we have always known that God is always faithful. Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! The words of Psalm 80:1 are not the words of the doubtful, even if they are the words of the hurting. Restore us O God; let your face shine that we may be saved, again in Psalm 80:3 we read from people who know their history with God, remembering Aaron and the blessing he gave to Israel alongside Moses and the story of Israel being miraculously saved by this God. In Egypt God did the impossible and saved an entire nation of Hebrews, and so in Samaria the Israelites call out to the same God to do the same thing in their generation. Such confidence, even with offal on their faces and blood on their hands; it is an amazing story and an incredible testimony to who the Israelites thought God is, and who the Jews still think God is.

 

When Jesus came, Emmanuel, God with us, this is the God who came. This God, the one the Jews have worshipped and trusted for four thousand years, this God came. And the God who came, came to remind us of home and to point to home from the dust of the earth; came to call us home, and came to bring us home. Home, the place of family and safety.

 

It’s Christmas, come home, the welcome is there and it always has been. 

 

Amen.

Adventure in Lostness (WWHS)

This is the text of he message I brought to Kaniva Active Retired Group for their December 2022 Christmas Service (Break-up). It comes in place of the annual Blue Christmas service, since many who would have attended that evening service are now too frail to come out.

John 1:1-5, 10-14

There are some years when I want Christmas to come without the pageantry, and this year is a year like that. With two years of lockdowns and border closures behind us as we entered 2022 we had such hopes for this new year that finally we could get on with a new normal. Things would never be the same again, but in a farming community maybe the land would do what the land always does, and as long as Dan and Steven (and now Peter) kept their hands away from the invisible line at Serviceton we’d be able to get back to where we were, and maybe even some way to where we might have been. But then there was Covid-19 itself, and many of us got sick; perhaps only a week off here or there, and maybe it happened twice, but we felt crook and we stayed home and we wondered what all the fuss had been about. And there was the usual stuff of a year where some friends died and other friends moved away; but the land did what the land does and the crops and the stock grew tall. And then it rained; and it’s still raining, and even though the Wimmera River didn’t do what the Murray and the Campaspe did we still got bogged and our crops and our stock got wet. After two years of rolling bouts of home detention right now I just want to hide under my doona. Yes, my doona, even on 14^th December because it is doona weather this week.

This year Christmas Day falls on  a Sunday, so for those of us who are people of faith it is not just another day of the week or a random 25^th of the month. But with wet conditions for  harvest, and a delayed harvest, even Christmas Day is a day we might not have wanted this year. It’s a day better spent on a header than on a dining chair, a day better spent hiding under the doona than looking out the window at unfinished jobs.

Christmas Day is always a loud and bright day in Australia, and I’m sure it will be no different this year. But will we just be putting on a happy face, or will we have found joy even in this year?

In the opening verses of John’s gospel we have Christmas without the paraphernalia. There are neither magi nor shepherds; no animals, no angels, not even a baby let alone manger. There is no bright and shining star, but there is light and there is a word; a word which is a who (and not a what), a word who is glorious and alive, a word who is light who banishes the darkness. I have often wondered during Advent what a Christmas pageant would look like if we based it on John’s account rather than Matthew’s or Luke’s. It would be less boisterous without the bunch of kids dressed as a flock of lambs; rather one solitary boy dressed as everlasting light. I never got to be Joseph when I was a child, although I did play him in a monologue when I was 42. At eleven I was one of the angels, (complete with magic wand); I wonder what it would have meant to be chosen to play the real light – the light that comes into the world and shines on all mankind.

In John 1:12 we read to those who did accept him he gave the power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name. You know that the name of the Word who came as light is Jesus, whose name means “God Saves”.  The phrase in his name might means to accept Jesus for all that he is and all that he stands for: the whole being of Jesus and his story. If you acknowledge and receive Jesus, the one who exists and proclaims the salvation of God, then you will become a son or daughter of God.  Many did not accept Jesus when he came, and many since then and until today have not accepted him, either they have heard the story and rejected it, or they haven’t heard the story properly told. We read where John 1:12 specifically says to those who did accept him, because in John 1:11 we’ve just been told that many didn’t.

And that’s where we might find ourselves this Christmas because the story is unacceptable. Here’s a story about eternal light entering the world, a story about the Word of God which is God’s authority entering the world. Here’s a story about a man who embodies all of the above and his name is literally “God’s Salvation” as if the man is himself the saviour, and not just a living prophecy whose name is a message, he himself with the name is also the means of salvation.  And yet here I am, on a Wednesday in the side-room of a hospital, and here I am questioning because God did very much NOT save. If God saves then why in 2022 have some been widowed, others orphaned, others divorced, others bankrupted, others made psychotic, or quadriplegic, or simply left bedridden by a virus? Why does all of this light that the Bible speaks of just make the darkness even more obvious to those struggling with the realities of the 2020s, including “post-lockdown 2022”? When we say “God saves” we must acknowledge that others find that very hard to accept, let alone believe, especially at Christmas.

As a local pastor I heed that call to hear the hurt; as Christians at Christmas we all must. My story of salvation is not complete, I have not felt safe at times this year, and even today I am operating from my last reserves. This month I have been so busy working as a minister in December that I have not found space to be a Christian in Advent, and I am really missing Jesus. I wonder whether some farmers and shopkeepers in December might be feeling the same. So, when someone outside Christianity  tells me that God’s salvation is very hard to accept, let alone believe, I believe them, and I accept that story as accurate and true.

But John’s story is also accurate and true, and I know this because it is also my story.  That I am here this year, after fifty years of years like 2022, (and 2021, 2020, and a few nasty ones in the nineties and noughties), and still able to tell my story and connect it to John’s gospel, is all down to the fact that God does save, did save, will save, and that Jesus is the means by which that is accomplished. I am a Christian, a recipient of salvation. God saved me I did not save myself and even in my weakness and irritability this week I know that only Christ came come through for me, because he always has, because I have never been able to do so. That message was easily lost in this busy and rainy December, but I am hopeful it might be found once more. Amen.