Nativity of Our Lord B
Text: Isaiah 11:1; Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
December 24, 2020
Light In Our Darkness
“A shoot shall come from the stump of Jesse ….” so it was written in the book of the prophet Isaiah.
That image is all around this time of year. If you recognize it, it’s probably because of the great Advent hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel:
O come, O Branch of Jesse, free
Your own from Satan’s tyranny ….
Jesse was the father of King David, from whose family tree the Savior would come.
And that stump? Isaiah offers this image after Israel has been conquered and taken off into exile. Everything Israel had ever known, every single thing they had once taken pride in, had been cut down. The nation was a mere stump of its former self. Sound like any nation you know?
We look around here at a medical system overwhelmed by Covid, and we share the pain of suffering, grieving families, and a gutted economy, and struggling school systems. “Can anything grow here, ever again?,” we wonder. The rock is too hard, the stump too dead. Like ancient Israel we sit on the stump of utter disbelief, at that place where hope is cut off, where loss and despair have deadened our hearts.
And yet … Isaiah prophesies that a shoot shall come. It’s such a fragile sign, but what if we believe that it’s *always* a fragile sign that is God’s beginning? We have spent 4 weeks of an Advent season as we always do – and we have spent 9 months of a pandemic time as we have never done before – tending the seedling of hope in our hearts, carefully tending the place where faith longs to break through the hardness of our despair. We have been sitting on that stump for a very long time, and God has been sitting with us. But God has also, all along, been nudging us: “Look! Look — there on the stump. A shoot shall come …!”
And now, on this night, it has come indeed. The prophet Isaiah speaks again this night: “The people who walked in darkness, have seen a great light.” Unto those who sit terrified – whether shepherds in an ancient field, or we who sit at home terrified in a pandemic time – unto us angels have appeared with their message: “Do not be afraid! Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”
Now, the most remarkable thing about the coming of this great light, this great joy, this great event this night, is that it comes without any of the usual signs of greatness. The great light, is but the glimmer of a single star over a stable. The great joy, comes packaged in the tiniest of newborn life. It is no great oak that springs from the stump of Jesse. No; the new hope is small, fragile, a mere shoot.
It is the unique and perhaps scandalous claim of Christian faith that God humbles himself; it is the unique and perhaps scandalous claim of Christian faith that it is *always* a fragile sign, that is God’s new beginning. You know, most of us have held Christian faith our entire lives and so the unique and scandalous, perhaps even offensive nature of this is not something we think about much – we’re used to hearing about a God who does such things. But most other ways of faith hold God in a much more exalted place, understand God as no one who would ever stoop to human form. What kind of God would do such a thing, take form that is as fragile and vulnerable as that of a newborn baby?
Christians say: *Our* God would do that. Our God does exactly that, on this night that is so magical as to bring together heavenly song and humble earthly reply. Don’t be looking for this God then in the palaces of Rome or Jerusalem, in the centers of power in Washington or on Wall Street. Instead, on this night, if you seek him, come on over to any old Christian household. In any old Christian household this night you will find a small stable, and the figures of two poor, border-crossing immigrants named Joseph and Mary. In any Christian household this night you will find little shepherds and probably a donkey. And it’s there you will find Him, wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. God comes to us this night in something just that small, because He is Immanuel, God with us. To be God with us, He’s got to be small, as small as a newborn child, to fit into the humble, small-time household and life of every one of us. Go to any old Christian household this night, and there you will find Him.
And there as you look upon Him this night, maybe God will teach you a thing or two about appropriate sizing, about how what is small might humble so many things that pass themselves off to us as so big and so important. For what have we learned in this time of pandemic? The things, the stuff of this world – are they really as important and big as we’ve always assumed? Are they as big as they like to tell us they are? And the things of God – humble stable; helpless baby; vulnerability; true humility; endurance in suffering; the tiny but diamond-hard gem of hope, in an overwhelmingly bad-news world like the one we know these days – do not the small and oh-so-fragile things of God take on magnitude you never knew they had?
I know what we get tonight is small on the face of it. It’s only a shoot that comes from that hard old stump; it is only a baby that is born this night. But carried within the particular and the small – carried within someone as particular and small as this baby, and someone as particular and small as you – is something as big as God enfleshed, something as big as everything that God wants and that God will make happen for this world. Embodied in the baby that is born this night and, I submit to you, embodied in you. For He is Immanuel, God, with us.
Hear again the words of the prophet Isaiah, concerning the events of this night, concerning what God will do and how God will do it:
2The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who live … in a land of deep darkness—
on them light has shined.
…
4For the yoke of their burden,
and the bar across their shoulders,
the rod of their oppressor,
you have broken[, Lord,] as on the day of Midian.
…
6For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time onward and forevermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.
In the midst of our deep darkness, O people of God, a shoot has broken forth for us, from the dead old stump of Jesse in this world. Unto us, a child is born.