Unexpected

Isaiah 64:1-5

December 5, 2021 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Do you have all your Christmas shopping done yet? Too soon to ask? I was thinking this week about how, when my brother and I were kids, we would pour over the catalogs that the stores put out (and yes, I know that I am really dating myself here!). We would circle the things we thought we just had to have and then we waited until Christmas to see if Santa or anyone else came through. When I was a kid, I thought the best gift was the one I really wanted (or thought I just had to have), but to tell you the truth, now I remember very few of those gifts. The gifts I remember now are the ones that were unexpected, the ones I never saw coming. I think of the cross that hangs in our dining room that was given to me when I was ordained. To look at it, you’d never think it was anything special. Most people who come to our house probably don’t even notice it. But it’s the cross that hung in the sanctuary of the Sedalia Methodist Episcopal Church where I was baptized. When that church was closed, the neighbor of ours who made the cross rescued it and kept it and when I was ordained, she gave it to me. It is one of my treasures. Another time comes to mind, my first time in Israel. I was supposedly the tour host but the couple I was with had been there before and I hadn’t so we kind of all worked together. We had a great time, and one evening in Jerusalem, she came with a small box. “I want to give you a blessing,” she said, and inside the box was a small silver chalice, a gift of appreciation, she said, for all I had done. I honestly didn’t think I had done that much, but it continues to remind me of the friendship and shared experiences in Israel.

Not all gifts are tangible either. Shortly after my appointment to Mount Pleasant was announced, I got a call from my first senior pastor. He was long since retired and not well, but he found my number and called to encourage me in the move. He said he hoped to come hear me preach again, and before he hung up he said something I will always treasure. He said, “I don’t know anything about the church, but I know they’re getting a great pastor.” Tom died this past year, and we never did connect after that phone call, but the call remains one of the greatest unexpected gifts I have ever received. The best gifts are the unexpected ones.

In this season of gift-giving and gift-getting, we are continuing our series looking at the gift of the incarnation. As we talked about last week, “incarnation” is the fancy theological word that describes what God did at Christmas, how God came in Christ, how the word was made flesh. And last week we talked about how when Jesus came he revealed and radiated God’s glory, how he is the exact representation of the Father. If you want to know what God’s like, look at Jesus (cf. John 14:9). I hope you had a good discussion about that in your small groups this week. This morning, we’re going to turn to one of those Old Testament prophets I mentioned last week, Isaiah (the prince of the prophets), and focus on a question he asks in today’s passage: “How then can we be saved?” (64:1).

That question comes in the midst of a longer section of Isaiah where the prophet is mostly complaining to God on behalf of the people. At the same time, he recognizes that the people have betrayed their relationship with God. They are not who they should be, and the prophet knows that’s why their temple and their land has been overrun by enemies. The people’s disobedience led to exile and to feeling abandoned by God. And, of course, the people are blaming God for what has happened, which makes me think about how people haven’t changed all that much in thousands of years. We still blame God for the consequences of our own disobedience, for our own troubles. We make bad financial decisions and then blame God for our lack of money. We drink too much and then ask why God allowed our license to be taken away. A nation turns its back on God and then claims their troubles are evidence that God doesn’t exist. We blame God for the things we do. If God really loved us, wouldn’t he step in and change things? If God really loves us, why doesn’t he do something to alleviate poverty, racism, injustice, cancer, and any number of other things that populate our prayer lists? Why doesn’t God do something? And in the words of singer Matthew West, God did. He created you.

The problem is, we want God to do something, even save us, on our terms. We want him to do it our way because, obviously, we already know best how things ought to be done, how the world ought to be fixed, how humanity needs to be saved. And so we pray, like the people of Israel in Isaiah’s time, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!” (64:1). But the prophet, in the next several verses, reminds the people that when God does show up, it will not be like they expect. God is coming to bring a gift, but it will be an unexpected gift. It will not be anything like they think they want. As Isaiah reminds the people, “Whenever God had manifested himself in the past, dramatic things occurred” (Oswalt, NIV Application Commentary: Isaiah, pg. 671). Isaiah says it was like mountains trembled, twigs caught fire and water began to boil (64:1-2). Not that those things literally happened. Isaiah’s point is that God showing up causes “awesome things” to happen. The Red Sea parts (cf. Exodus 13:17-14:31), rain stops falling for three years (cf. 1 Kings 17:1), the sun doesn’t move so a battle can be won (cf. Joshua 10:12-15)—things like that. Isaiah says God “did awesome things that we did not expect” (64:3; cf. Oswalt 671). So it’s not foolish or unreasonable to ask God to act, especially if you are ready to let him choose the way he is going to show up. Because God usually shows up in unexpected ways.

But he comes for a purpose, which is the heart of Isaiah’s question. “How then can we be saved?” (64:5). Of course, to answer the question, we’ve got to know what it is we’re being saved from. The typical thought in Isaiah’s time and all the way down into the first century—and for some people, still today—is that they needed to be saved from their enemies. That’s a repeated refrain in the Hebrew prophets, that God would come on a day and rescue them from the hands of those who were constantly oppressing them. In the first century, that enemy, that oppressor had a name: Rome. The most powerful empire on earth had made Israel a province, a backwater little-desired province, and taken away all the political power the Jews had once had. The Jews had ceremonial power, power over the way they lived out their religion, as long as it didn’t interfere with Rome. But there was no mistaking who was really in power. And so hope was high that God would send someone, a messiah, a savior, to rescue the people from the power of Rome.

But is that what they really needed saving from? Is “rescue from our enemies” the focus of Isaiah’s question? The next few verses tell us no. Isaiah knew that the “saving” God wanted to do had more to do with the hearts of the people than it did with the politics of the nation. (We still get that confused, don’t we?) Listen to what Isaiah says:

All of us have become like one who is unclean,
    and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
    and like the wind our sins sweep us away.

No one calls on your name
    or strives to lay hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us
    and have given us over to our sins (64:6-7).

There it is: God is coming to deal with our sin, the ways we have broken our relationship with him. Talk about unexpected! That was not what the people were asking for. It’s not how we would have planned it! We would have expected God to come and take care of our comfort, our needs, the things we think we want. We expect God to come and make us comfortable, give us what we want, allow us to dictate the terms of our life, to give us the American dream. Where did we get that idea? Certainly not from Isaiah, because he has told us that when God comes down, the mountains tremble (64:3). Earth-shaking things happen when God shows up.

In what Paul describes as “the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4), God did come to earth in the most unexpected way of all. He did not come as a mighty warrior; he was born through a virgin girl. He did not arrive in a golden palace; he came and spent his first night, maybe his first several nights, sleeping in a feeding trough, wrapped not in a warm fuzzy blanket but in rags. He did not bring with him an army of angels; he gathered around him fishermen and tax collectors and men who weren’t good enough to make it in synagogue school, the leftovers, the also-rans. And “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). God moved into the neighborhood, a very ordinary neighborhood. This was not expected.

I’ve started reading a book this season by Scott Erickson called Honest Advent, and one of his contentions in this book is that we get so wrapped up in our traditions and trappings that we miss the wonder of the season. Christmas is a time of nostalgia, and there’s nothing wrong with that. For probably all of my 54 years, I’ve said it’s not Christmas until I watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. Yes, I’m 54 years old and I still want to hear Linus read the Christmas story from Luke 2 every year. There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia; it’s in familiarity that we find our roots. We tend to decorate our house pretty much the same way every year; I’d guess you do the same thing. This year, though, we lost the space where we used to put up our snow village, and that caused a crisis. We thought we had a new place chosen to put it, and then we remembered: we have a puppy. Barnabas is still at that stage where he climbs on everything and anything within his reach has the potential to end up in his mouth. So we had to change, and I’ve been a Methodist all my life—I don’t do change well! But, again, there’s nothing wrong with nostalgia, with familiarity, unless it kills all the wonder of this season. When we lose the wonder of the season, when we stop being amazed at the incarnation, at the reality that God came to earth to walk among us, then we’ve missed the point of this season. Advent is wasted without wonder.

Usually about this time of year there are lots of people denouncing the materialism of this season, the gift-giving and the gift-getting, preparing the meals and arranging the decorations, going to the parties and making sure we get the cards mailed to all the necessary people. And it is easy to get wrapped up in all those things and forget who we are actually celebrating. We act like it’s about us, when Christmas, as Pastor Mike Slaughter said so well a number of years ago, is not your birthday. It’s Jesus’; he’s the one who is coming to earth to be born in this quite unexpected way. I think a good question we should ask with anything we engage in during this season is this: where is Jesus in this? Where is the birthday boy? That’s not saying the material things are wrong; after all, the whole point of the birthday celebration is that Jesus was born. The word became flesh. He came in a body, in a real place and time. This is how Erickson puts it: “What I believe is that the essence of the Birthday Boy is hiding out in the mechanics of life—the one you’re living presently. That, yes, we can look to candles, songs, and pageantry to help us connect to the Divine…” (Apple Books edition, pgs. 25-26). As you celebrate the birth of Jesus with material things and spiritual activities, where is he in the midst of the celebration?

I’ve been to Bethlehem a number of times. When I first visited in 1995, the tourist busses could park just across the street from the Church of the Nativity, the traditional site of Jesus’ birth, but now, because of the congestion in the narrow streets of this Palestinian town, they built a parking garage a couple of blocks away where all the busses go. Even getting to the town is a challenge. Bethlehem is in Palestinian territory, and there is a wall between it and Jerusalem, so you have to go through a security checkpoint to get into the city. It’s not as hard for tourists to get through as it is for residents because everyone wants the tourist money. So once you get in and the bus is parked, it’s a short walk up the hill to the church. You pass by a coffee shop named Stars & Bucks (I’ve never stopped there but I want to) and a gift shop called “John the Baptist Souvenir Shop” (I’m glad he found another job after he lost his head). And then you round the corner and enter the church itself through a tiny little door that forces you to bow your head. It’s called the Door of Humility. Once inside, the church is wide and has rafters like a barn, and usually it’s crowded. But the last time I was there, in 2017, it wasn’t as busy so we were able to take more time in the cave under the altar, the place where tradition says Jesus was born. We were each able to kneel down and touch the star that is said to mark the spot, and to stand off to the side and sing “Silent Night” in that place. Now is that the exact spot where Jesus was born? I don’t know, and even if it is, it doesn’t look anything like it did when Mary and Joseph were there. And I’ve been there, as I said, several times, and have often been put off by the somewhat gaudy decorations. But there was something this last time that struck me as I did the touristy thing and knelt to touch the star. Even if this isn’t the place, there is a place, an actual place, where he was born. Where the word became flesh. It’s true, and it happened in a real place. God came down in a way no one expected, a way no one was looking for. I think that’s why only shepherds and animals saw him that first night, because no one else was looking for him and even if they were, they certainly weren’t looking in a cave. “How then can we be saved?” No one’s answer in the first century was, “By a baby in a manger.”

On many Sundays, I will give a benediction (one I stole from Max Lucado) that says, “The one who came still comes to us.” Because he does. And he often comes in unexpected and surprising ways. He comes to a hole in the ground and transforms a feeding trough into an altar (cf. Luke 2:1-20). He comes to a wedding and transforms dry barrels into the best wine of the party (cf. John 2:1-12). He shows up at a funeral and raises a woman’s only child from the dead (cf. Luke 7:11-17). He doesn't invite the wealthy and the well-to-do, the intellectual or the influential to follow him; he asks fishermen and their friends, people who really have nothing to lose (cf. Matthew 4:18-22). When the crowds surround him asking for more, he goes away to solitary places to pray and gather strength (cf. Mark 1:35-39). And when the people demand a king, he surrenders his life to the cross (cf. John 6:14-15; 10:17-18). As Bishop Will Willimon puts it, “We didn’t know how far God intended to take Incarnation until we stood at the foot of the cross. ‘Love came down at Christmas,’ as we sometimes sing, and love also came down on Good Friday” (Incarnation, pg. 43). “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). Some other translations say that the darkness has not “understood” it. I wonder if that might not be the better translation after all.

Because we don’t understand this God who shows up. We don’t understand this one who is the answer to Isaiah’s question. What he does and who he is just doesn’t make sense. He is unexpected in every way. Oh, we pretend that we understand. After all, we don’t want others to think we’re stupid or that we’re not in on the “secret.” But, right here and right now, let’s just be honest. I don’t always understand Jesus. The incarnation doesn’t make a lot of sense humanly speaking. After all we had done, after all the ways we reject God, why would he show up? Why would he come down here? Sometimes I hear people talk about their loved ones coming back to be near them after they’ve gone on to eternity, and I know it’s a popular idea in movies and books and such, but I’m going to tell you this: if eternity is even half as good as I think it is, I’m not coming back here. Sorry, if I’m with Jesus I’m not going to be all that interested in what happens here. I’ve said before, I don’t think Jesus did Lazarus any favors by raising him from the dead (cf. John 11). For one, he had to die again. For another, why would he want to come back here? Why would Jesus, “being in very nature God” (Philippians 2:6), want to give that up to come here, as the incarnation affirms? Why?

There’s only one reason that begins to make any sort of sense, and that’s love. He loves us. He loves you. He loves me. He loves us so much he can’t imagine being without us. “How then can we be saved?” Isaiah knew the answer: we can’t unless God shows up. We can’t do it on our own. It’s going to take God acting on his love for us, which is exactly what he did in Jesus, in a manger in Bethlehem, on a cross at Calvary. God comes unexpectedly to bring us a gift: himself. He is the answer to Isaiah’s question.

In between the cradle and the cross, Jesus gave us a practice, a material, physical practice, to remind us of his love for us. It was a Passover feast, something that had been part of the disciples’ upbringing, something they had celebrated every year with the same meal, same ritual, same decorations. And in the midst of that celebration, Jesus did the unexpected. He took bread, and he took wine, and he gave it all new meaning. This bread is my body; this wine is my blood. Together, these symbols remind us of how far God will go to save us. “How then can we be saved?” This way: his body, his blood, his incarnation—he is the way, the one the bread and the juice point toward. As you receive these symbols this morning, I pray you make room in your life and in your Christmas celebrations for Jesus to show up in unexpected ways.

So hear these words from Isaiah, a prayer to lead us to the table this morning. Let us pray:

Yet you, Lord, are our Father.
    We are the clay, you are the potter;
    we are all the work of your hand.

Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord;
    do not remember our sins forever.
Oh, look on us, we pray,
    for we are all your people (64:8-9).