Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · December 20, 2009

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Litany of Praise and Invocation

From Psalm 80  

Hear us good shepherd, leading us like a flock, enthroned on our highest love!

Restore us in the awareness of your presence.

When tears become our only language,

            let us feel your hand upon us.

Let us pray:

            We will never turn away from you, our God;

            By faith, we will run the race with you in our running!  Amen.

Pastoral Prayer

Jacob Thorne

O God, Immanuel, God who is with us, God who graces us with steadfast love, this morning we give you thanks.  From the very beginning, to the very end, O God, you are the One who stands by our side.  As we celebrate the birth of your Son, we rejoice in the coming of Christmas. 

The mistletoe fills the night sky with kisses.  The bright star shining in the East fills our hearts with wishes and prayers that only you may know.  The candlelight shines in the windows, reminding us that you are the everlasting light shining in the darkness.  The light of the moon gently glides over the freshly-harvested fields, waiting once again for new life and new beginnings.  The white snow is a winter night that everyone remembers.  The bells are ringing, calling out the good news of your story, and the choir sings, “Glory, glory, glory.” 

During this season of Advent, O God, help us empty our hearts to make room for the birth of something new, of a new beginning.  Cast off the shadows of whatever is holding us back in order that we may receive the light of the future.  Let us open up our hearts, accept your invitation, and enter into the safeness of your love.

Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name.  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever.  Amen.

Old Testament Lesson

Micah 5:2-5

But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,

   who are one of the little clans of Judah,

From you shall come forth for me

   one who is to rule in Israel,

Whose origin is from of old,

   from ancient days.

Therefore he shall give them up until the time

   When she who is in labor has brought forth;

then the rest of his kindred shall return

   to the people of Israel.

And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord,

   in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.

And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great

   To the ends of the earth;

and he shall be the one of peace.

Message

Peace vs. Conflict

Tim Carson

This week, I struggled mightily with this text from Micah.  My wrestling with these ancient words was precipitated by two questions.  First, the more I studied the way that Micah functions in the Hebrew Scriptures, the less comfortable I felt with the way that Christians have appropriated the text and attributed it so easily to Jesus, in a certain kind of way.  And second, I wondered what relevancy they might have to human beings living in our own time and place.  Maybe the second question can be answered, in part, by addressing the first.

Micah’s long-suffering community has been waiting for God to deliver them.  As they wait, they hearken back to their collective, ancient past and remember the Davidic kingship, the shepherd king who arose out of the house of Bethlehem.  Then, as a part of their messianic hope, they look forward to and anticipate something that they think is similar to what they had in their past.  Something that God has done before that will happen again, a kind of re-run.  In this command performance, a reprise that is going to repeat the same thing, a warrior king is supposed to arise who will defeat their enemies and secure peace throughout the land.  That’s what they are waiting for God to do.  In that scenario, they are still waiting because nothing like they described from the time those words were first spoken has ever materialized.  Even with Jesus. 

Christians, of course, jumped on this and other Jewish hopes and attached Jesus of Nazareth to them.  It’s reflected in our gospels and then in the writings of Christians throughout the centuries.  “Here,” we say, “Jesus is the one about whom they are speaking.  He is the fulfillment of that hope.”  With a few subtle word changes and selective picking and choosing of passages, we have made him the fulfillment of that particular hope.

The fact that the Gospel birth stories attribute such importance to the location of Bethlehem simply confirms this Christian effort.  Christians have always reshaped their story to harmonize with these Hebrew expectations that we just heard from Micah.

But the problem is this: Anyone who reads these Hebrew Scriptures carefully knows that the Messiah they describe is not the Jesus we get.  They are two different things.  They do not resemble one another.  So what are we going to do with this?  Will you help me this morning?  Are we going to try to force a square peg into a round hole, creating some artificial harmony where it really doesn’t exist?

Could this really be a question of continuity and discontinuity; some things continue but others change?  Maybe so.  We know how that works; don’t we?

There is a need for news to be shared openly with the public, and freedom of the press is a hallmark of our Bill of Rights.  However, what happens when the printing press gives way to the digital domain, when respectable print-culture means of communicating are eclipsed by online web pages, blogs, tweets, and e-magazines?  The need for news is the same but the delivery system has changed.  There is continuity, but also discontinuity.

Another way of putting it is that there is a difference between form and substance.  Things of importance can take on different shapes, depending on the situation and context.  As long as the essential need is met, the form can be changeable.

We talk about the centrality of the family, for instance, but we know that the form families take has been in continual change forever.  When you hear the word, “family,” today, what comes to mind?  A Leave it to Beaver re-run?  Most probably not.  Our families take on different sizes and shapes and compositions today.  But the substance – that families should be harbors of love, safety, companionship, and provision – continues, however the shape changes.

When Micah announced his expectation of the Messiah, the form he described was familiar to Israel – the reigning Davidic King.  When that king comes, says Micah, all our problems will be solved.  We will live in peace, safety, and abundance.  But what if the form of that expectation changed even though the substance remained the same?  In fact, as we think of the biblical story, weren’t there as many times that God confounded our expectations as confirmed them?  If we have learned anything about the sacred underpinnings of life, isn’t it that God’s ways are not our ways, and that the Holy One confounds our little vision time and again with something larger, something deeper, something more profound than our vision can contain?  Maybe it’s not the text’s problem, or a Messiah problem.  Maybe it is our problem.

Our problem is generally our tunnel vision; we have a much too small view of what could be.  Normally, on the human level, we end up fulfilling our little vision with a self-fulfilling prophesy – we stay as small as our imagination keeps us.  But ever so often, the Spirit blows in, intimating another way of being human, of living our lives, of doing church, of seeking justice, and we realize that our pint-sized expectations have been holding back a God-sized dream.

What if … the problem isn’t that the coming of Jesus didn’t fit the expectation of the prophets, but rather that the prophets couldn’t begin to imagine how God was up to something entirely different, even in regard to the Messiah?

And what if Jesus is the embodiment of a whole new form and definition of Messiah?  And how then does that change even our understanding of the nature of God?

You have heard it said, “When the Messiah comes, there will be no more suffering.”  But I say to you, “Where there is suffering, there will be the Messiah” (Fred Craddock, Beecher Lectures, Yale Divinity School).

Elie Wiesel told a chilling story from one of the concentration camps during the 2^nd World War.  Several prisoners were selected out of the crowd to be executed as some punishment for the many.  And as these Jews stood by and watched their brothers die, a voice came out of the crowd, asking, “Where is God now?”  And a moment later another voice from the crowd answered, “There, hanging from that gallows.”

There is the Messiah, in the midst of struggle, at the point of every loss, in the breakdowns and breakouts of the spirit, at the edge of every ending and hope of every new beginning, in the middle of every injustice, weeping over every city of violence, grieving every church that has lost its way, surrounding every circumference of suffering, and weeping for Lazarus until he walks out of the tomb unencumbered.  You see, “only the suffering God can help” (Dietrich Bonheoffer, Letters and Papers from Prison).

“That day,” said Micah, “he will come and there will be peace.”

But I say to you, that time has already come, and wherever there is not peace, there will be the Messiah, waiting, watching, working until it does come.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Benediction

Now, in the joy of Christmas, in the love of Christ, go forth into the world God has created and find where Christ is at work and join him in that work.  God bless you all.  Amen.