4th Sunday of Advent: God In Your Business

Isaiah 7:10-14
Romans 1:1-7
Matthew 1:18-24

(The video just has a photo while the audio plays)

It seems that there are a good many of us who think God is polite.  God will come when invited and stay away when not.  If we are faithful and pray, then God will arrive, but otherwise God will maintain a polite distance.  We start our prayers with, “let us put ourselves in the presence of God.”  My teenagers sure do seem to think this way.  They think they have a choice of whether or not God is involved in their life.  The truth is that I often think that way too.  I know there have been times when I have been inattentive to my prayer life and said that God is far away, as if my prayers have that much power over God. 

Now we all know how wrong that assumption is.  We know that we don’t put ourselves in the presence of God, we merely notice the presence of God.  We don’t summon God with our prayers, we merely acknowledge that God has always been there.  We don’t choose God, God chooses us.  We merely reciprocate.  But I think that a lot of us carry an assumption that if we drop our faith and walk away, God will just let us go.  God will evaporate from our lives and be gone. 

Once I was visiting with a sister from St. Gertrude’s.  She taught a middle school catechesis class and told a story about a boy who felt he had a committed a grave sin.  I think he was about twelve years old.  As he confided to this sister about it, he said that he had committed an unforgivable sin and was obviously going to hell.   He was unworthy of God.  In a moment of inspiration, she replied, “Jesus died on the cross for you, he won’t give you up so easily.” 

Our readings today show on right she was.   God gets involved without invitation, because God won’t give up on us so easily.  In the first reading, the prophet Isaiah has gone to King Ahaz, the king of Judah, the southern part of Israel.  Ahaz thought they were about to be attacked, and he was right.  He wanted guidance from the prophet: should we get ready for a siege? What’s the best way to win this war? But Isaiah only told him, don’t worry about it.  And then Isaiah tells Ahaz to ask for a sign of God’s power.  But Ahaz doesn’t want a sign, he just wants advance about this war, about this coming attack.  He says “I won’t tempt the Lord,” but what he really means is, “don’t bother me with that religious stuff, just talk to me about the war.”  But God did bother him and gave him a sign anyway.  God wouldn’t give up on Ahaz so easily.

Now, in Isaiah’s time, about 700 years before Christ, they figured the sign would happen soon, within a year or two, and maybe it did, but seven centuries later, something miraculous did happen and the Jewish Christian Church, the community from which Matthew wrote, saw parallels between the sign Isaiah talked about and Jesus the Christ.  The story recorded in today’s gospel shows God getting involved again.

See, Joseph had it all figured out.  He would just divorce Mary, then she wouldn’t bring shame on her family and be stoned — that was the punishment for getting pregnant between the betrothal, usually about age twelve or thirteen, and the marriage several years later.  They could both put it behind them and get on with their lives.  But God had another idea.  It’s a nice story that we’ve all heard many times before, but if you really look at it, the angel basically told Joseph, “your plan is terrible and here’s what you need to do instead.”  You know, I’ve got to tell ya, if I was in a tough position, finally got it all figured out, and then an angel told me I had it all wrong, I’d have a hard time taking it. We don’t know if Joseph had a hard time, but we do know that he did what the angel told him.

When I hear these readings, I think, well of course God gets involved without invitation.  Of course, our God, our Great God, should get involved when things aren’t right.  That’s God’s job. But I sort of thought that God only caused trouble for people who deserved it, you know, like king Ahaz, and how good could he have been?  But God caused trouble for Joseph too, the wonderful man chosen to raise our Lord and Savior, the one first one who Jesus would call Abba, Daddy.

The God of the Bible is getting in everybody’s business all the time, whether they want it or not.  God wouldn’t give up on any of those people so easily.  We can see in hindsight how God’s intervention is always for the good, but in the moment it wasn’t so obvious, and it wasn’t so easy. 

It wasn’t easy for King Ahaz.  The Assyrians would conquer northern Israel and it would cease to be. Judah would survive, but they would go through much hardship.  God didn’t give up on them, but God didn’t take away the struggle either. 

It wasn’t easy for Joseph either.  After Mary delivered, King Herod ordered the execution of every baby boy.  Joseph had to take Mary and Jesus and flee to Egypt... and we don’t know what their immigration law was like.  God didn’t give up on them, but God didn’t take away the struggle either.

It won’t be easy for us either.  Things will happen in our lives that will be hard to live with, and maybe harder to live through.  There will be struggles that God won’t take away.  In fact, it may seem that God is actually causing us the trouble.  But God will save us — whether we pray or notice or even if we want God.  Whether we have a plan or need to concentrate on something else, God will still be there intervening for the good. 

As we walk this last week before Christmas, we remember that it is God who chooses us and not we who choose God.  It is God who comes to us and we merely notice.  It is God who comes to us in the form a little baby, who will grow up to be the one who dies on the cross for each of us.  It is God who will not let us go so easily.