The "little" things

Scripture:

Isaiah 7:10-16

Matthew 1:18-25

 

Preached 12/22/2013

The astronomers were captivated.  Much of the world was captivated too.  An asteroid was coming.  It was big—about the size of a football field.  And, as asteroids go, it was coming close to earth.  They called it a “near miss.”  It would pass by the earth about 17,000 miles away, far enough that we didn’t have to worry about it crashing into us, but close enough to see.  They called it asteroid 2012 DA 24, in what has to be one of the least exciting names possible for an event that caused so much excitement.  And, while the world was watching this huge, asteroid in the sky, it missed something else.

It was smaller, only about 10 tons and the size of an SUV.  But it was also much closer.  Too close, in fact.  This asteroid didn’t escape earth’s gravitational field.  It was pulled into the atmosphere at an unbelievably fast speed—more than 33,000 miles per hour. It broke into pieces and exploded over Russia with the force of a nuclear bomb. A sonic boom, shock wave, and waves of shattered glass in more than 3,000 buildings followed. The residents of those buildings were exposed to freezing cold temperatures.  More than 1,000 people were injured.  How could NASA, how could the Russian Space Agency, how could all the professional and amateur astronomers and stargazers who were so trained on the sky already, have missed this?

Well, it turns out that size matters. While that football field sized asteroid is easy to spot, apparently, an SUV sized one is not. NASA’s Near Earth Object Program estimates that there are 100 million of SUV sized asteroids floating around in space, and they just can’t and don’t bother tracking them.  They’re too common and too small to be worth NASA’s attention.

Too common and too small to be worthy of attention.  Kind of like Isiah’s prophecy.  Though many Christians have romanticized this prophecy over the years, it really isn’t that extraordinary.  Isaiah is speaking to King Ahaz, the ruler of Judah, where Isaiah lives.  Judah is under siege right now, and is looking to find protection from the Assyrians, the powerful neighboring nation, and the big empire of the day.  So clearly, Ahaz, as the king, is worried about the fight and is worried about his nation.  And what Isaiah says to him is basically- don’t worry.  This will all be over soon—before a child that is to be born is a few years old.  Even though Ahaz is refusing to ask God for a sign, Isaiah says God is sending one any way.

Now, in Isaiah we have God sending some very clear miracles—but this child isn’t one of them.  To paraphrase Isaiah, what we have here is, “Look, King Ahaz.  This is going to happen like everything always happens.  Somewhere, a woman is going to have a child, just like women have children every day.  And this woman will have faith in God and know that God is with us.  Do you get that Ahaz?  God is still with us.  And this child of this woman who has faith in God will grow, and by the time they’re a few years old, this whole battle will be over and the enemies you’re worried about will be gone.” The child himself doesn’t actually do anything in the prophecy.  They’re just born, and then they grow up a bit.

It has to be one of the least exciting prophecies ever.  It’s like an astronomer pointing out each of the hundred million small asteroids to us.  It’s a small event, and a common one.  Time will pass, God will stay, and normalcy will resume. Woo.  Isaiah isn’t looking hundreds of years forward with this prophecy.  He’s not attempting to predict the coming of Christ, of a Savior, for the whole of Israel.  In fact, at this point, Israel was one of the nations fighting against Judah.  What Isaiah is doing is looking at the situation right in front of him, and seeing God, and seeing hope, in that.  Isaiah isn’t a magician, or some kind of fortune teller.  He’s a man deeply connected to God, and deeply in tune with the will and the love of God, even in a difficult situation.  Much like astronomers scan the sky for asteroids, Isaiah scans his present situation for the presence of God that he notices, and the presence he sees God wills.

And Isaiah’s prophetic scan and assessment is right.  Women have children.  Time passes.  The struggle for protection ends, and the enemies eventually lose power.  And in a few years, the struggle is over.  The prophecy is fulfilled, not hundreds of years later, but in just a few, as Isaiah said.

Before you try to kick me out of the pulpit, let me say that this doesn’t mean that Matthew was wrong to draw on this prophecy to describe Jesus.  Matthew does this kind of thing all the time—drawing on the Hebrew Scriptures he knows and loves to show his understanding of Jesus, the anointed one.  Matthew is deeply concerned with the Jewishness of Jesus, and his ancient readers were too.  They were Jewish, and would have been familiar with this same scripture.  Matthew seeks to show his readers that this new movement of Jesus followers that is popping up isn’t some kind of crazy new cult.  It’s not worshipping a different God.  It’s ancient, like the Jewish scriptures, and prophets.  It’s eternal, it’s the same God known in a different way. This search for continuity is why Matthew draws tons of parallels between the Hebrew Scriptures and the life of Jesus. 

And, in our scripture reading this morning, I think Matthew is completely right that Jesus does indeed fit the description that Isaiah put forth, so many years ago.  Yes, the prophecy had already been fulfilled.  But that didn’t mean it was over.  Matthew is like a wise astronomer, not discounting the small stuff.  He even knows where to look, in that massive collection of little asteroids of God’s presence, and God’s will.

Matthew sees what Isaiah saw.  He sees the most ordinary thing—a woman having a child.  And he tells us the birth story almost in passing—it’s half a verse.  She bore a son, and named him Jesus.  Matthew has no angels singing, no shepherds coming, none of the spectacle of the birth that Luke gives us.  And it’s in this minutia that Matthew sees God. Because he knew, and we know, that it wasn’t just any baby who was born and named Jesus.  It was God, somehow human and God at the same time, in a tiny, vulnerable little package.  God looked just like all the other little babies who were being born.  Be honest here-- we all know that with the exception of our own, newborns tend to look a whole lot alike.

But just because God’s grand entry into humanity in the form of Jesus doesn’t look big, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t big.  And Matthew sees this.  He isn’t distracted by all the other, seemingly big things going on in his time.  Much like Isaiah he too lives in a time of chaos, of destruction, and of change. 

To be honest though, we all live in such times.  The seemingly big stuff grabs our attention.  And then it actually turns out to be not such a big deal.  And when we focus on the wrong stuff, we miss the small stuff.  But the small stuff is actually huge, especially in the case of the baby that Mary bore.  It’s God right in front of our faces.

Two people will got married, like people get married every day.  And the woman will has a child, like women have children every day.  There are be acts of compassion, of faith, of pure love.  Mary does these, in carrying God’s child.  Joseph does this, in marrying Mary, an act sure to bring shame and hardship on him and his family.  They may seem small actions, but they’re really huge.  They’re the kind of huge thing that explodes in the sky for the world to see and sends shockwaves that still move us thousands of years later.  And Matthew sees this.

He sees that these things that look small, and in particular this child that is so small and so weak and helpless, are not small in God’s plan.  He sees that this is God, living and breathing right in our midst.  And he knows that the prophets talked about this, and so he draws on the prophetic language because nothing else is quite good enough to describe the miracle of the birth and the life and the enduring presence of Jesus Christ.

This child is God’s love incarnate.  This child is God loving the world so much that she comes to earth and touches it, and touches us, and heals us and saves us and raises us to new life.  This child is Emmanuel, God-with-us, as Isaiah spoke it.  And this child is also more.  He is more than simply than God with us.  He doesn’t actually get named Emmanuel, does he?  He gets named Jesus.  And Jesus means not God with us, but God saves.  Jesus both fills the description that Isaiah gives, and goes beyond it.  He is more than simple presence of God, if God’s presence can ever be called simple.  He is God’s love, saving us all, even though he’s only a little baby at this point.

Here’s the most beautiful thing about this prophecy, in Isaiah, and in Matthew.  It’s not finished yet.  That’s the problem with seeing prophets as fortune tellers—we’re then tricked into thinking the miraculous is over, rather than seeing it still happening, and still coming.  We are still in Advent, after all.  We’re still waiting for Christ to come.  We’re waiting for his coming on Christmas.  And we’re waiting for him to come again in final victory, as we believe he will.  We can’t be lulled into complacency by thinking that the big things—those prophecies of Isaiah and Matthew-- have already gone past us. 

God is still all around us, and all within us.  And God in Jesus is still coming, too.  Our task is to be careful astronomer-prophets, to continue to look for God in Christ breaking into this world, in the smallest of ways.  Because it is in these small things, like babies, like acts of love, that God continues to speak to us.  And it is these seemingly small things that God’s presence will burst across the sky, shock us, and knock us off our feet and hopefully to our knees in prayers of thanksgiving and tears of joy.  Keep your eyes and ears and hearts open.  Jesus is coming. Let it be so. Amen.