12/16/56

Scripture: Isaiah 40: 1-11

We look forward joyfully to Christmas because we need it. Christmas belongs in our living. We cannot seize it, or make it. It comes to us as a gift from God in His own good time.

When a small ship sails in a storm, its master longs for a good light. Of course there is a light up atop the ship’s own mast. But that is not what the mariner wants to see. For, actually, that light tosses more violently than does the deck. The helmsman longs for the sight of some beam from a lighthouse. Or, better yet, the sight of a few stars through the low scudding clouds.

So it is with our lives tossed about on stormy waves and cross currents. The mast lights which we ourselves have so bravely lit are not enough. We long for the light that comes from the dependable, non-varying truth of the Eternal.

Christmas is such a light. It comes as a miracle of God’s grace. It is a reassurance that God dwells among us. It is a time for the poetry of perception.

The joy of Christmas is that God answers a need. It is not a time to find only a manufactured excitement in tinsel and lights and gay shouts. Its joy is that God is with us -- “Emmanuel” -- by His own choosing, and in His own time, when we need Him so! And if we see this marvel of blessing we sing, we laugh, we worship, we pray. That is why we believe in stars, like a mariner does; or like the wise men from the East did; and like wise folk still do.

This is the Advent season. It is for those who look for a star; for people, like Isaiah, who, having set a watchman on a high place called out “Watchman, tell us of the night, what its signs of promise are!” It is for those who look beyond the horizons that confine them. It is a time for those who are tired of the giddy swaying of man-made lights and who know the need for better guidance and assurance. Christmas is joyous, for its great gift to us is God’s fulfillment of our needs. Advent is for those whose eagerness looks for the fulfillment.

Many of us do not know our need. In our blindness and unawareness, we may trample under foot the blessedness of God’s gift; just as men trampled it under foot on Good Friday, crucifying instead of adoring.

Both Christmas and Good Friday remind us that God is faithful. And we build our lives on what we believe to be dependable.

We ourselves are often undependable. We falter in temptation. We fail to shoulder responsibility. The good that we want to do we do not; and that which we would not, we do. A Bethlehem inn-keeper was so busy that he had not time or space for an urgently needy couple from Nazareth. Herod found himself uneasy over the call of some inquiring wise men. The holy family had to hurry off in flight to Egypt because of human perversity. But God is faithful. He is forever. And Advent is the celebration of His faithfulness.

The tradition of the Hebrews is the one in which the Advent celebration becomes possible. It would not be so among those who worshipped the Greek gods. For their gods were as bad, and as unfaithful, as the Greeks themselves. Not so the God of Abraham or of David. The God of Jesus of Nazareth is the God of whom the prophet Isaiah had spoken saying:

Have you not known? Have you not heard?

The Lord is the everlasting God,

the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He does not faint or grow weary,

his understanding is unsearchable.

It was this God in whom the Hebrews hoped and trusted. They looked forward with eager anticipation and great expectation. The Hebrews knew that their own outlook was dark, very dark indeed. But in their upward look, their expectation of the Messiah, there was confidence.

At this time of the year, we hear cheerful passages from Isaiah sung again in Handel’s great oratorio, “The Messiah.” One of the pleasant occurrences of our community in Wisconsin Rapids is the fact that a business firm whose leaders come of Hebrew antecedents, presents each year over our local radio station, the complete recording of “The Messiah” as an expression of good will to the Christian community.

Listeners hear the assuring words of the prophet: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

Our city is Jerusalem in a sense. That Holy City was no better than any other city. It was merely the city where it was supposed that God would appear. It was a city where people were to wait with anticipation. Any city is a holy city where people so wait.

Here in our city is where the comfort of God, promised by Isaiah, may be found. Surrounded by so much of the earth’s security, we seek a more enduring foundation. In the midst of all our man-made miracles, we yet need the heavenly miracle, a miracle to change faithless people into faithful ones, to change dishonest hearts to true hearts, to transform our pain and fear into hope, to set our minds above armies, above the taxes of Herod or any other earthly power, above man’s inhumanity, above public deceit.

Only the miracle of God’s grace can do this. In Christmas we have the event in which the Eternal became finite fact. It should be enough to move us to get up into a high mountain, to lift our voices with strength and cry to one another, “Behold your God.” Many other loud voices will be heard during this Christmas tide. Why not that sound? It can be the joyful shout of the faithful.

And what of the comfort that is promised? It is not ease; for if it were, it would hold no promise for us. We already have one kind of ease such as nine tenths of the world’s people do not know. But the comfort is for us. It is confidence in God, on the part of the family of believers, which makes this city a holy city. Not “ease,” but “assurance,” this is the comfort of which the prophet speaks.

A truly holy city would be a complete city. Without faith in the real promises of God in this season, our city is incomplete. Its incompleteness appears in raging newspaper headlines, in the family concerns of the well-to-do as well as of the ne’er-do-well, in the financial worries of the secure, in unfulfilled longings and ambitions, in unexplained loneliness of so many of us.

Confidence in so much more than the recorded music heard on the street; more than bustling activity, more that celebration is needed. Comfort, assurance, is offered for each aching heart, for each body in pain, through the knowledge that God is faithful and dependable. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.”

“Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished.” Thus continues the advent assurance in Isaiah’s prophecy and in Handel’s oratorio. But is our warfare ended? Is it ever done? Not at all. It is never accomplished in the sense of being done away with. It is only accomplished in the sense that victory is promised, not because we have strength, or shrewdness, or a just cause. In fact it isn’t even our victory at all, but God’s, and ours through Him. It is like an announcement that one’s term of service in the king’s army is completed; and now one begins the further struggle of responsible civilian life. But we cannot stray beyond God’s love and care with all our coming and going. Because of this our victory is secure.

A stable manger was far aside from the beaten paths, but God in Christ was there. There is victory in the knowledge that truth may be shut away from the door of the inn; it may be crucified; but we cannot kill it. Here is our confidence that our warfare sees its end.

“Cry unto her -- that her iniquity is pardoned,” says the prophet. We are guilt-ridden people. Those who never hear the gospel nor go near a church may be much guilt-ridden. But so are also those of us who do go, because we know how unfaithful, undependable, incomplete, and sinful we can be. We need pardon. And this gospel brings the good news that our iniquity can be pardoned. Yet we live in a world where guilt is held to be unpardonable. Behind the iron curtain or behind the bamboo curtain one dares not make a bad guess or a mistake, for guilt is pardonless. The atmosphere seems to be one of alert fear, caution and distrust, lest one’s errors be betrayed by some brother.

Even we feel the pressure not to think or to have independent ideas, or to talk about or debate controversial issues, lest our imprudence prove our undoing. The atmosphere is like that when God did enter, upon that first Christmas.

As if in anticipation of His coming, the prophet felt moved to cry unto Jerusalem that her iniquity was pardoned. There is comfort in this advent promise that the Lord does not deal with us after our sins nor reward us according to our iniquities.

“If thou, O Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?”

There is comfort in this message of deliverance; in this assurance of new life and renewed life. That new life is the anticipation of the season.

A second part of the Advent message is this: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” Seeing the promise, we are to make it known throughout the land! To this end, carols are sung, gifts are given, worship is offered, service is undertaken, good will is evidenced --- announcing and acknowledging the promises.

The God who rescues us is the God who requires of us that His way be prepared -- a highway for Him.

So we celebrate Advent; for we are anticipators. We embrace its comfort; we stand under its judgment. If in our holiday rush we fail to acknowledge the promise of the season we still stand under its judgment, though we fail of its comfort.

The story is told of a college professor, of the absent-minded sort, who was absorbed in reading a book while sitting in the waiting room of the hospital where his own child was being born. A nurse came briskly from the delivery room to say to him: “It’s a boy!” The professor, scarcely looking up from his book, and conditioned, perhaps, by many student interviews, replied: “Ask him what he wants.”

Advent looks for the birth of a boy -- a very unusual boy. Shall we be preoccupied? “Ask him what he wants.” And -- O then -- do and be what he wants!

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, December 16, 1956

Wisconsin Rapids, November 29, 1959