Friday, December 20, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Bethlehem
I will not ask! I will not tempt the Lord!
King Ahaz of Judah is afraid of the surrounding nations, which have banded together to attack him. He will make a pact with them to save his skin. Isaiah demands that he trust God and reject the alliance, but Ahaz refuses. Isaiah relays God’s promise to provide a sign – any sign! – but Ahaz doubles down, using language implying respect and worship but which in fact is simple stubborn obstinance.
The Lord himself will give you this sign: the virgin (young woman in Hebrew, virgin in Latin) shall conceive and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.
So goes the history. What matters more to us is how both Mary and Joseph respond to their own signs from God – a message and a dream. Because they consent in humility and faith, trusting God’s words, they become the bearers of the baby Jesus, the Messiah, with his gift of salvation for the entire earth. That includes us!
Walter Brueggemann in his commentary on Isaiah says:
Faith is not a matter of intellectual content or cognitive belief. It is rather a matter of quite practical reliance upon the assurance of God in a context of risk where one’s own resources are not adequate.
In fact that is all the time, always, on every day of every life, but it does not seem so since I’ve grown accustomed to being satisfied with my own incomplete answers and paltry resources. God’s blessings provide cattle on a thousand hills, but mostly I am happy with a meal of meat and potatoes. Whether I say so or not I live according to a fictional economics of scarcity, where there is only enough for some of us, so I must fight tooth and nail for what I need, what I think I must have to stay alive, stay successful, stay on track. My track.
This is not what I want at all, and not what God wants. God’s way guides me down a path through a world abundant with blessing, where there is always more than enough for all of us, so that we share and share and share. No matter how it looks from my tiny window. Out of her 14 year old innocence, Anne Frank wrote about this.
People will always follow a good example. Be the one to set a good example, then it won’t be long before the others follow. How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world! How lovely that everyone, great and small, can make their contribution toward introducing justice straight away… and you can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness!
Unlike King Ahaz, Mary and then Joseph heard the word of God and said, “YES.” First Mary will become pregnant, embarrassing her family and her fiancée with an unheard of way of getting pregnant. Still, she said YES.
I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done unto me according to thy word.
And in another house near Mary’s home, in Joseph’s bedroom, late a night soon after …
An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” When Joseph (son of David) woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.
A few months later they traveled to Bethlehem, which means “house of bread.” They found an inn and Mary gave birth to Jesus. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. And many other amazing things happened to the Holy Family in the days and years to come.
Isn’t that … well, wonderful? I don’t know what happened to Ahaz, but I know about that child, that Emmanuel!
O Key of David, open the gates of God’s eternal Kingdom: come and free the prisoners of darkness!
 (Isaiah 7, Psalm 24, Luke 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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