A Sermon for Advent 4
December 22, 2024 at Holy Communion
Isaiah 40:1–9
“Say to the cities of Judah, Behold your God” (Isaiah 40:9). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.
Yesterday, Katy and I, along with our girls and our three exchange students, braved the weather to get our Christmas tree. As we merrily fishtailed our way down the empty East Sable Road, someone suggested that we put on Christmas music. So we look out our folder of CDs and put one in which didn’t have a title on the disc, but was decorated with a little church right out of a Christmas snow globe. To my delight, this is what we heard:
That is, of course, Handel’s Messiah, a seasonal staple in churches and concert halls and on public radio. It fills me with warm feelings—as it should; its message is “Comfort, comfort.”
I was doubly delighted, though, because these are also the first words of our Old Testament reading: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned” (Isaiah 40:1–2).
The perplexing thing about this message of comfort is where the Prophet Isaiah takes it. He tells us what he hears: “A voice says, Cry! And I said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass” (v 6–7).
By itself that hardly sounds like a message of comfort! Life passes quickly. We’re just like a hayfield: grown up and harvested in a single season. What makes it good news is what he says immediately afterward: “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (v 8). There’s some positivity, at least. The sun which both nourishes and withers us will continue its course through the eternal heavens. Not everything fades. This is a familiar thought. We heard it two weeks ago from Jesus: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Luke 21:33).
Yesterday, I also heard something else that helped me understand this. In our morning prayers, our family read a short passage from Galatians. It was a typical discussion from St Paul contrasting the law and faith, but it did it with particular simplicity and clarity. The promise of the law is that “if you do everything God commands, you will live,” but the promise of faith is that “if you have faith, you will live” (Galatians 3:11–12). What I got out of that yesterday is just this: my own ability to do everything God commands is uncertain. God’s goodwill to save all those to call on him is entirely certain. We are saved by faith because we are saved by God, not by ourselves. And even then, it’s not our faith that saves us; our faith is nothing other than a certain and trusting hope that God will save us (Hebrews 11:1).
And that helped me understand today’s reading. I already know that I am grass; the prophet Isaiah and John the Baptist hardly had to tell me that. And that’s why it does no good for me to trust my life here and in the beyond to the consistency of my own commitment to do good and be good. When I already knew that there was little constancy in me, then the message of comfort comes: “The word of our God will stand for ever.”
But God doesn’t come into the discussion just to make up for our inability to “do good and be good.” You could be a saint, and Isaiah would still tell you that all flesh is grass. In the bigger picture, Isaiah is just doing what the whole Bible, in one way or another, is trying to do: to shift the conversation away from human successes and failures, as if these were what mattered most, and towards God who draws near to remake good and bad men alike into spotless mirrors of his glory.
In short, our faith is not about us. It’s not about saints and sinners. It’s not about the kind of community we want to be for one another. It’s not about the difference we can make in society. It’s about God, living and true, the only Good, the only Real, the I AM THAT I AM whose glory fills heaven and earth.
And that is the only possible good news, the only message of comfort. Everything we do in life, every word we think and the every secret thought we breathe, are all for something. God, the end of all desiring, the hope of nations, the fountain of beauty and the well of light, is what everything else is for. The only possible good news is that God is both real and present, not passing us over, but giving his own self to us as the fulfillment of all our longings—and replacing all the idols, including our own very selves, which we thought were what our lives were for.
So with one voice all of our readings redirect our attention from man back to God. We’ve heard it from Isaiah already. In our Gospel reading, John the Baptist deflects the crowds who want to say that John is a promised Saviour (John 1:19–29). ”No, I’m not the Messiah. No, I’m not prophesied ‘Prophet like Moses.’ No, I’m not the reincarnation of Elijah. I’m just a messenger: pay attention to the one who comes after me.” Me makes nothing of himself, and almost begs the crowds to follow Jesus instead of following him. And our Epistle not only tells us to rejoice in the Lord (Philippians 4:4)—that is, instead of rejoicing in ourselves—but encourages us to disburden ourselves by prayer of any any anxiety we might have and let God deal with it (v 6–7).
In Christian life, self shifts out of view, and God shifts into view.
So the start of St John’s Gospel, which we will hear only two days from now, is the only meaningful way to talk about what happens at Christmas: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14). The Christmas good news is that even the difference between God’s nature and ours won’t stop God from being the ultimate meaning of human life. God shifts into view, spreading his glory into birth and death and parenthood and childhood and poverty and abundance.
Man by himself is just grass. But take heart; listen to a word of comfort. Because God draws near, your story matters more than the story of the grass—if, that is, you can tell it as a story about the living God.
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