As I sat down to write this sermon on Tuesday afternoon, our home was being invaded. Two nice men from Stanley Steemer had arrived at the front door and were proceeding to clean the carpets in the parsonage.
Our Shih Tzu Brownie was not impressed.
And so, I went back the hallway to my office and Brownie followed me, reminding me every step of the way that there were MEN! MEN! In the HOUSE! She barked with every step.
Finally, she followed me into my office and I closed the door. She jumped into my chair and as I sat down, she snuggled up tight against the small of my back. And so far, while I’ve put together the service, she has stayed snuggled up tightly against me, letting me know about once a minute that there are still MEN out there, doing who knows what to our house.
Brownie understands that she wants to be close to me, because, unlike some dogs like our friend Kelsey’s Beau (who is a 120-pound mastiff), Brownie trusts me to protect her, not the other way around. And so Brownie likes to be close to me.
There are people today who argue that the story of Jesus Christ must be made up, a fictional story, a legend with little basis in fact because so much of the story and the prophecies of the Old Testament fit the Christian message. What most of these people don’t realize is just how revolutionary the Jesus story was for ancient times. Today, the story makes sense – but that is only because for 2000 years people have been writing stories and making movies which have Christian ideas and Christian story lines at their heart. Let’s see if we can go back in time and understand how revolutionary the Jesus story really was.
This is the story of the birth of the Messiah, the savior and future king of Israel.
First of all, Jesus was descended from King David, the greatest King of Israel. His ancestors were forced to leave Jerusalem when Jerusalem was burned, but they escaped and lived in another country until the time was right for the Princess Mary to be married to the Emperor of Rome.
WHOA!
Did you see anything different?
Yes, our Mary – the real Mary – was not a Princess of the royal Davidic family, but instead was a 14 or 15 year old ordinary virgin living in a small village out in the sticks, a hundred miles from Jerusalem, when an angel came to her and said she would become pregnant through the Holy Spirit. And so Mary instantly became an unwed pregnant teenage girl, which was far more damaging to her reputation in those days than it would be today.
But Joseph, her fiancé, had a particularly notable ancestry. Not only was Joseph descended from David and Solomon, but he was also descended from the main line of kings of Judea, which included Ahaz (found in our first reading), Hezekiah (who famously prayed for help from God and God destroyed 185,000 Assyrians who were besieging the town one night) and Josiah, the last godly king of Judea before the Babylonia exile (Josiah restored the worship of God and destroyed untold numbers of idols in Judea). Joseph did not have any of the final ungodly kings of Judea in his lineage. In addition, after the exile, when the kingdom of Judea was re-established by the Maccabees, a man named Zadok was Joseph's ancestor and may have been the founder of the Sadducees who became the high priests of the Temple. But by the time of Joseph and Mary, the family was decidedly middle-class – Joseph was a carpenter.
And Mary? An unwed teenage mother was hardly the woman a writer would pick to be the mother of a sinless religious leader and king. No. Instead, she would have been a princess, cloistered in a tower since her birth and wed by a powerful emperor whose son would now become the king. But that wasn’t the story either.
At this time in Israel, an engagement was almost the same as marriage. At that time a breakup was considered a divorce and was shameful, especially for the one being divorced. And a pregnancy with a wild story about the father being an unseen spirit was definitely grounds for divorce – or even for Mary to be considered an adulteress, worthy of being stoned. But Joseph sticks with Mary.
But lest we think Joseph is so noble and and such a good guy, we need to remember that Joseph doesn’t stick with Mary because he believes her or because he is in love with her. No, he has to be persuaded by an angelic vision. Joe’s idea of being a good guy was to break off the engagement quietly, keeping her from being stoned, but letting her live in disgrace for the rest of her life.
And what about the names? Is the child called Jesus or is he called Emmanuel? Let’s look at the two names and their meaning.
Jesus is the English version of Iesious, which is the Greek verson of Y’shua, the Aramaic and Hebrew name that we first encounter as Joshua. Jesus is the new Joshua. Joshua means “Yahweh saves”. Yahweh is the ancient Hebrew name of God. So the name Jesus ultimately means “God saves.”
Yet there is a bit more to the name Jesus than that. For Joshua was the great military leader who led the Israelites into the Holy Land. Imagine the meaning of having such a name. It would be similar to a man running for President today with the name “George Washington III”. So Jesus was the new Joshua, the man who would lead the Jews into a new Promised Land.
And so He did. Jesus leads all who will follow Him into a Promised Land of peace, a land of purpose, a land of eternity spent under God’s protection. What better outcome for the new Joshua?
And you know – we get that. We understand that God saves, Jesus saves. He leads us to the new Promised Land, to Heaven. But what the world wants us to forget is the second part, the name Emmanuel.
You see, the world is happy to let us think about God saving us – as long as we don’t get too close to God. The world wants God to stay up here at the front of the church and all of us to sit in the back row, in the balcony, maybe even out in the narthex. It’s ok to believe in God, just keep your distance. After all, we want the governor to stay in Charleston, the President to stay in Washington, the Secretary-General of the United Nations to stay in UN headquarters in New York City. Keep them all away from us – we’ll stay here in our place – let God stay in Heaven where He belongs and we’ll stay here in the back of the church or, even better, we’ll stay outside the church at home. That’s what the world wants of us.
But that’s where the world and God have a disagreement. For it is the second name, Emmanuel, that we have to take into account, for that is also the name by which Jesus was called.
And the name Emmanuel? What does Emmanuel mean?
The name Emmanu-el literally means “with us – God”, or more commonly, “God with us”.
And so, recognizing the divine nature of Jesus Christ, Matthew tells us that Jesus is the presence of God with us on Earth. God is with us. And this is the very important part of the entire Christmas story which we often forget – the New Testament writers were very clear that Jesus is not only a little baby boy who was Mary’s son, but was fathered by the Holy Spirit, and has a truly divine nature which amounts to God walking on this earth.
Theologians over the next three hundred years puzzled and made sense of all of this and came to two conclusions which are accepted by different Christian groups, from the Greek Orthodox church to the Roman Catholic church, from the Episcopal Church to the Southern Baptist Convention, from the Presbyterians to the Churches of Christ, from the American Baptists to the Lutherans, from the Dutch Reformed Church to the United Methodist Church.
The first conclusion is that the Christian “God” is actually a complex fusion, a mixture, a semi-blending of three personalities – God the Father, the divine super-spirit who is the power of Creation; God the Son, who is the Word of God, the Angel of the Lord, and is most commonly known as the God-man Jesus Christ; and God the Holy Spirit, who is everywhere and is found inside Christian believers and guides us in our communications with the Father and the Son. Three persons, of the same divine substance, communicating perfectly in harmony with each other, in perfect love with each other, and all eternal in existence beyond time. We call this three-in-one Being the Holy Trinity or the Godhead or simply God.
The second conclusion is that Jesus Christ has two natures. He is both an ordinary man, born of Mary, made of flesh and blood and bones like all men, needing to eat, drink, and sleep, limited by his body – and He is also the son of God, with a divine nature, far superior to us in wisdom and knowledge, eternally alive, overflowing with God-ness!
Let me be clear. Jesus was not just a wise man. He was God walking on this earth.
But let me be clear the other way. Jesus was not God the Father just looking like a man. He really was a man.
What makes Jesus the Christ unique is that He was and is 100% man and 100% God, undiluted, unblended, possessed of both natures.
And that has consequences…
First, it means that when Jesus died on the cross, he really died. He really died and then came back to life. He didn’t just pretend to die – his human nature meant that he really did feel that death because He really did die.
Second, His human nature meant that when He died, He really was a human sacrificing himself for all other humans. He showed his love for you and me and every other human that day and so his sacrifice meant something.
Third, His divine nature meant that He was of infinite value, for He was God being sacrificed. Only because of His divine nature could Jesus’ death be worth more than all the animal sacrifices that were required by the law, only because of His godliness could that sacrifice be of a perfect Being, only because He was the divine Son of God could He show that God truly loves all people to the point where He was willing to die for each of us.And He would have died just for you if you were the only person who needed His sacrifice.
Fourth, it was His particular God-nature that meant He had the creation energy inside Him which allowed Him to come back to life through the Resurrection. Only because of His God-natured goodness can we believe His promise that we will also be resurrected. Only because of his divine nature can we know that He has the power to make good on His promise that we will have eternal life.
And Fifth, it is only because of His Human nature that we humans could be close enough to Him to hear his daily teachings, to feel his healing touch, to know that He was one of us, born to an ordinary family in the ordinary way, growing up just like one of us, learning what it meant to fall and scrape a knee, to trip and fall into the dirt, to wake up in the morning with bad breath, to grow tired and hungry and thirsty, to be tempted to try to control the things and people around us that are so irritating and troublesome and tiring to us. In short, it is only because of Human nature that we could actually know He knew us and had experienced those problems that being human brings to us.
Our God is with us: Emmanuel. Our God saves: Jesus. Yes, our God saves. But our God is with us.
And that is how the Christian God is so different from Buddha, from Allah, from the Force, from all the other gods that people have invented over time.
Our God is with us. He does not live just in a temple or a church building or in a distant Heaven. He is here with us and can be approached and talked with and listened to wherever we are, for wherever we are, there He is. Whatever we run into in our life, He has already encountered it. And He came to earth as a baby boy to experience our lives, growing up in Mary’s arms, working with Joseph, walking alongside the lake with His friends, probably skipping a stone or two across the water...
When you or your friend are wondering about how to get through a tough part of this life, remember to tell yourself or your friend: Emmanuel. God with us. Christ is with us – no matter what.
And just like my little dog Brownie, snuggle in close to your Protector when you are afraid, for He is close by.
Jesus – God saves. A distant and powerful God. But Emmanuel – God with us. A very close God. We aren’t to stay outside the church, we aren’t to stay in the narthex, we aren’t to be in the back row, we are to come into the front row, no, we are to come right up to the altar and stand where we can touch Jesus and Jesus can touch us.
He wants you close to Him. Come forward and grow close. Bow down at His feet. Apologize to Him for trying to keep your distance. Feel His warmth, the heat of the candles, the smell of the wax, the wonderful touch of His love.
And this Christmas…snuggle in close to God. Read a gospel book. Speak with Jesus in two-way prayer. And be blessed by Emmanuel. God with us.
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