Library
Sunday, December 14, 2008
The prophet Isaiah and the work of Christmas
Third Sunday in Advent
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Scripture: Isaiah 9:2 and Isaiah 61:1-2a
2 The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined.
1 The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; 2a to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor
The words we just heard from the Prophet Isaiah are important for several reasons. It is this passage that Jesus quotes in his first ever public statements in the gospel of Luke after he has been baptized by his cousin John and then has gone to the wilderness. He returns to his hometown of Nazareth to worship in his home synagogue.
When he reads the scripture in the worship service he reads these words:
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me for the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted to proclaim liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind.
Do you remember what he says after he reads the words from Isaiah? He tells his hometown audience that the scripture he has read now has come true as they heard it. By the way, when he read that God’s spirit has anointed him, the Hebrew word for “anointed” is the same root word for Messiah.
Jesus is defining his mission and his vision by reading this passage from Isaiah.
The Prophet Isaiah is important for a couple of other reasons: Isaiah is one of the books of the Old Testament that Jesus quotes from the most. Jesus was a very faithful Jew and his Bible was what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. He was steeped in his Bible and in his teachings he quotes from it. The other books in the Hebrew Bible that he cites often are Psalms and Deuteronomy. But I believe it is Isaiah that is most formative. It is in Isaiah that we read about a suffering servant who is willing to be despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, the one willing to be vulnerable and to suffer and through that suffering people are healed.
There is a third reason that we need to pay attention to the Prophet Isaiah this month. It is from Isaiah that we get so many of the words and the images that we use during the Advent and the Christmas celebration.
There are at least two persons who contributed to the Old Testament book of Isaiah. They both lived in difficult times, dark times in Israel’s story. Chapters 1-39 of Isaiah were written as the nation of Israel, the northern kingdom that is, was under threat by the Assyrians in the 8th century. The prophet was doing what all of the prophets in the Bible do, speaking for God to recall God’s people to their covenant and to remind them, sometimes harshly, that God had called them to care for the least and last and the vulnerable. A prophet in the Bible usually comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.
In chapter 40 of the book we probably get a different writer who was living in a later time when the southern kingdom of Judah had been conquered by the Babylonians, the city of Jerusalem had been sacked; the temple had been mostly destroyed. The holiest place for God’s people had been devastated, and the people taken by force to Babylon which is in present day Iraq. It was a time of great darkness and doom. Their spirits were almost broken, and it was during this 60 years of captivity in Babylon that Psalm 137 was written:
By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and there we wept when we remembered (the temple and the hill of) Zion. Our captors asked us to sing them one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
The people who wrote the Bible knew a lot about despair and darkness…and about light.
Isaiah gives us those themes and they can speak to our needs and our darkness because the month of December can be a very difficult time for some. This month is a particularly difficult and dark and uncertain time right now in our country’s history. And this month is of course physically the time of the least sunlight when the days get shorter until the winter solstice on December 21 and then they begin to lengthen again. Perhaps that is part of the reason that around the year 375 AD Pope Julius co opted a pagan winter festival and declared December 25 as the day to celebrate the birth of Christ, the one who is the light of the world, because in December, we begin a return from darkness to light.
Remember we said last week that we do not really know the date when Jesus was born, that it was probably not in December but instead sometime in the spring because that would have been a time when the shepherds could be in their field with the sheep keeping watch over them. The date does not matter. What does matter is that the One who is the light of the world has been sent by God to shine Light into our darkness.
This connects us to another verse from Isaiah one chapter earlier than the one Jesus read in his hometown synagogue: Arise and shine for your light has come.
There are so many other words from this prophet that we rely on and that we will read from in our Christmas Eve worship services.
In the early chapters from this prophet we read some verses that we also know from the magnificent music of Handel’s Messiah:
A child has been born to us, a son is given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Have you heard those words of promise before? Do you need to hear them this month as our nation experiences uncertainty and threats and a recession that has already lasted a year?
Perhaps some other words from Jesus’ favorite prophet can speak to our hearts about the promise of Christ and the promise of Christmas—these words from later on in the book of Isaiah:
Comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and say to her that she has served her term The Lord God is coming with might and his arm rules for him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd. He will gather his lambs in his arms He will carry them and will gently lead the mother sheep.
Sometimes we need to be nurtured and comforted by God in that way when we are in the midst of the darkness. I mentioned that in the sermon of a couple of weeks ago as one of the things I relearned in recuperating from surgery—sometimes we need to receive from God and others; none of us is completely independent and we are foolish when we try. Sometimes we need to learn to be gracious receivers and lean on God for a time and let God and others nurture and care for us. It is a good thing to remember at Christmas when we do both—give and receive.
And then other times we are called to comfort others, to do what poet Howard Thurman talked about as “The Work of Christmas”
When the song of the angels is stilled When the star in the sky is gone When the kings and shepherds are home The work of Christmas begins To find the lost To heal the broken To feed the hungry To release the prisoner To rebuild the nations To bring peace to brothers (and sisters) To make music in the heart.
There are some of the images again from the prophet Isaiah: the work of Christmas, the work and the call of those who want to follow Christ include the call to release the prisoner, to set free those who are held captive.
Perhaps one of the good results of the economic downturn right now is to help set us free from a materialistic Christmas which has now been tragically symbolized by an after Thanksgiving shopping frenzy in which a Wal-Mart worker was killed because of a crowd so obsessed that they ran over him to get to the bargains. Perhaps that gross materialism is one thing we need to be set free from.
We will sing in a little while about the Work of Christmas in one of my favorite new Christmas hymns called “Star Child” which I have trouble singing without getting emotional. I encourage you to pay close attention to the words in the hymn about the child in each of us, the words about the sad child, the lost child as well as the wise child and the faith child.
That wonderful new hymn leads me to the last passage I want to lift up from Isaiah this Christmas. It is the passage about a “peaceable kingdom”. It has been captured in art by several painters and this version is by Edward Hicks.
You will remember the words, the promise of peace and harmony from the eleventh chapter of the book of Isaiah:
A branch shall come from the stump of Jesse (King David’s father) The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding With uprightness he shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. And (in his kingdom), the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord The wolf will live with the lamb, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, They will not hurt or destroy each other And…a little child shall lead them.
It is that last line I ask you to ponder and pray about as we think not only about the light but also the peace of Christmas—a little child shall lead them. How can we learn from a little child? What does a child have to teach us this year about Christmas? What does a child have to teach us about peace?