NRS
Isaiah 9:6 For a child has been born
for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 7
His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the
throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice
and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore. The zeal of the
LORD of hosts will do this.
Advent
is the season of anticipation. It is what it is named for. Wikipedia says this
about Advent. Advent
is a season of the liturgical year observed in many Christian churches as a
time of expectant waiting and preparation for both the celebration of the
Nativity of Jesus at Christmas and the return of Jesus at the Second Coming.
Advent is the beginning of the Western liturgical year. Therefore, as Eric
did to you several weeks ago on the first weekend of Advent, Happy New Year. We
celebrate the Christian year at Advent because it makes sense to start the year
with the anticipation of the celebration of the birth of Christ. Some people go
over the top and refuse to put baby Jesus in the manager and the Magi in the
Christmas scene until we celebrate those specific events. I am not one of those
people by the way.
What did the Hebrew
people anticipate and in some ways, why did they not get the connection between
the prophetic message that we just heard and the birth of Jesus? First and
foremost, I think they were looking for a royal birth from a royal family. They
were looking for King David to be born again if you will. Someone who would
rise up the people against Rome and make Israel a great nation again. All of
these things are part of the Messianic prophecies that the Hebrew people are
still looking to be fulfilled today. Imagine for a moment that you are living
under intense conditions not unlike those of our ancestors who lived in Egypt.
Conditions that make day-to-day living difficult and oppressive. Those are the
times of the life of Jesus and the Hebrew people of that day. Their lives in
some ways have not dramatically changed in the last two thousand plus years as
evidenced by the tragedy in New Jersey this week. But if you imagine that then you
can make the connection to how they were looking for one thing while God was
doing something new. Yes, we have much to anticipate in this celebration of
birth.
Jesus came into the
world in such a humble way that many missed it. Herod certainly understood what
was happening and within the next two years would have all the male children of
Bethlehem put to death under the age of two in order that he could stop this
rise to royalty. Even in that is a great hypocrisy is it not. If God was doing,
an incredible thing and fulfilling Hebrew prophecy why then would a Hebrew King
try to stop it. That has always been one of my questions and it leads to how
then could the Hebrew people have missed it. Jesus’s birth fulfills 41 of the
prophetic messages of God; some of them in Psalms and Isaiah were given as much
as 700 years before His birth. He would go on to fulfill over 351 prophecies in
His lifetime. Jesus was proclaimed by God to be born of a virgin young girl,
born in Bethlehem, David’s birthplace and then spirited to Egypt where He would
then come to fulfill His ministry. Jesus birth, life, death and resurrection
did cause Israel to rise as a great nation in the form of Christianity, which
now permeates all the known world. Yes, we have much to anticipate in this
celebration of birth.
So
let us explore this a little today.
· We know that He is from
the line of Jacob, Abraham’s grandson. Numbers 24:17: “I see him, but not now;
I behold him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise
out of Israel.”
· From Isaiah 11:1 we
know He is from the line of Jesse, the father of King David: “A shoot will come
up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a branch will bear fruit. The spirit
of the Lord will rest on him.”
· From Jeremiah 23:5-6 we
know He is from the line of King David: “The days are coming, declares the
Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign
wisely and do what is just and right in the land … This is the name by which he
will be called: the Lord our righteous savior.”
· From the prophecy of
Micah, 5:2 we know He was born into the tribe of Judah in the region of
Ephrathah, in the town of Bethlehem: “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you
are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be
ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.”
· From Isaiah 7:14 we
know that He was born from a virgin: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you
a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and you
will call him Immanuel.” The name Immanuel means “God with us” and
indicates the divinity of Jesus.
· That Jesus would be
worshipped by shepherds from the desert, and that foreign kings would present
gifts to Him is revealed in Psalm 72:9,10: “May the desert tribes bow before
him and his enemies lick the dust. May the Kings of Tarshish and of distant
shores bring tribute to him. May the Kings of Sheba and Seba present him gifts.
May all Kings bow down to him and all nations serve him.”
· When Jesus was born, King
Herod slaughtered a number of children in an attempt to kill Him. This is
predicted in Jeremiah 31:15: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great
weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because
they are no more.”
· In response to this
attempt on the life of Jesus, Joseph is warned in a dream to take Jesus to
Egypt, where they stayed until Herod died. This is predicted in Hosea 11:1:
“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.”
Yes, we have much to
anticipate in this celebration of birth.
So how do you and I
view this birth?
·
We
celebrate it every year and every year His importance for the season seems to
become less and less a factor. We celebrate with the giving and receiving of
gifts.
·
Yes,
we do give more eagerly to those less fortunate than ourselves but we give extravagantly
to ourselves first. Did that hurt? Not sorry!
·
Do
we celebrate with our children on Christmas morning by singing Happy Birthday
to Jesus or have a cupcake or birthday cake for Jesus at our Christmas meal?
Not usually! Do we truly appreciate what God has made new for us in the birth
of God’s own son in this humble birth?
·
Do
we sense the changing of the old guard for something new in the birth of Jesus
that will overturn Hebrew leadership and tradition and the whole world order by
the time we have reached this place in our lives, some two thousand years
later? We should!
We should realize that
God wants us to appreciate what God was and is doing in the humble setting in Bethlehem
with a birth to two ordinary Hebrew people who are of the lineage of David. God
proclaimed over 700 years before the birth where it would happen and to whom
and we still do not get it or appreciate even though it becomes more obvious the
more we study it. God is making the world anew in the midst of corruption,
violence, oppression, hate and hurt. And we are the instruments of that desire
to make the world a world of peace, compassion and love. Yes, we have much to
anticipate in this celebration of birth.
We come to this moment,
at least I hope that you do, a little humbled by what we have just heard about
what God is doing in this season. God is proclaiming to you and to me how
important we are to God, how much God loves us and how we are to proclaim the
Good News to the world. God in this season is calling us to learn new things,
new ways and new attitudes about our fellow human beings. God sent us God, as a
newborn baby in a humble cave, laid in a manger, a feeding trough for animals
so that we might know that God is doing a new thing. Yet, for all of this God
is not done with the world or with you and me. God is calling us even now to
share this story to the world. Not through the commercialization of gift giving
and receiving though at Epiphany, I will elaborate more on that, but by sharing
love. It is my message today, tomorrow and the rest of my life. I wonder as I
wonder what the world might look like if we celebrate this birth by renewing
our desire to reach out to the world in love. God is reaching out to us to say
to us, I love you beyond your deepest understanding and I want you to love one
another the same way. Jesus arrived in a humble way, in human form that we
might see God’s love in a way we could understand it. Jesus died on the cross
that we might experience that love in our lives and receive the greatest gift
or all, a promise of eternal love. Jesus will come again to transform the world
into the peaceful kingdom God intended from the beginning. But between His
death and resurrection and His coming again, we have been passed the mantle to
share love in the world. Yes, there is much to anticipate in this season.
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