The hopes and fears... are met in thee tonight

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

            I’ve had that hymn in my head all Advent-long and when something is stuck up there I suspect it is a good thing to investigate why, and when I investigated why I discovered a couple of things that were speaking to me that might also be speaking to you this Christmas.

            The first regards this town—this Bethlehem. It’s quiet. “How still we see thee lie.” And yet it’s also full of people, travelers, strangers, people required to check in with the governmental authorities. It’s a quiet town under the thumb of the empire.

“Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.”

The natural world does its thing; the stars above keep shining, things are as they always are. It might have been a night in Hallock, though perhaps we’re much too booming and trendy a metropolis nowadays to really capture it. Bethlehem was the original hipster town; it was quiet and cool before it was cool to be quiet.

Further up! Further in!

Isaiah 55:1-13

            One week on the book of Isaiah; that’s not remotely fair, but then again if your only exposure to the Bible is what I preach on Sunday mornings it’s going to be hard to get the whole picture. So, anyway, one reading from Isaiah to capture all of Isaiah is silly.

Firstly, you may not know this, but the book of Isaiah is the work of at least three authors from three different time period. We know this because chapters 1-39 cover the prophet, Isaiah, who lived in the 8^th century BC; chapters 40-55 tell us that Jerusalem has already been destroyed and take place either during the exile or just after, meaning we are talking about the 6^th century BC, and finally chapters 56-66 are written after the exile. Rather than taking away from the book of Isaiah, this gives it some arc. The book shows a movement of history over the course of centuries, and it holds a common theme, moving inexorably toward Jesus. It is for that reason that Isaiah has been called the fifth Gospel. Isaiah couldn’t have known about Jesus, but they anticipated something they couldn’t quite put their fingers on—something that turned out to be a baby born in a manger.

So, with that context in mind, it’s important to note that our reading from Isaiah 55 is the end of 2^nd Isaiah. It’s the conclusion of Book II if you want to think about this like Lord of the Rings or The Last Jedi or something; it’s the finale of the exile. Israel is coming home. But, as many of you know, you can never really come home again; at least home isn’t what it was before. In Israel’s case, the temple has been destroyed; the people residing in the land worship strange gods; their faith has been tested in exile and they have come back to the “Holy Land” with an understanding that God is no longer housed in a particular place. Their God went with them into the wilderness, so what does it look like for God to return home?

It’s easy to get complacent at home. Familiarity breeds complacency. We’ve all had this experience: We face a new thing in life—it’s scary; it’s stressful—and we can’t wait until it comes to some resolution. It might be a new job, a new project, a new business, a new child, or simply a new normal. We spend so much time stressing over the unfamiliarity of the situation, and often we discover some strength we didn’t know we had in the process of overcoming those new obstacles. The problem often comes in the new normal, because, having faced the obstacles of the past, we lose our edge.

Not Change, Death and Resurrection

Ezekiel 37:1-14

            It is extremely normal to be afraid of death, and not just physical death. It is natural to fear the death of things, the death of ideals, the death of the past. Ezekiel and the valley of the dry bones is a response to all of this. What better sign of death than dry bones—and this is a valley filled with them! It makes a person wonder: How did they die? Some brutal war, famine, genocide… For me, it brings to mind pictures from Auschwitz or from the genocide in Rwanda. Bones upon bones. Bodies upon bodies.

            That’s a heavy way to start on a Christmas program Sunday, but I think it’s important that we don’t too quickly romanticize this story. It’s important not apart from Christmas but because of it. I don’t want to jump ahead straight to the resolution; I want to sit for a moment in the silence of the valley of dry bones, because that feels like Advent to me—because in the dry bones we have whispers of resurrection.

            God does nothing apart from death. This is where God and the rest of us are profoundly different. We have a strong desire to keep things alive. We remember what was good, and we recognize that good thing (or good person) for what it was, and so we, quite logically, put that good thing on life support and try to keep it going and going and going both to honor the good thing that once was and to hope that that good thing may one day come back again.

            “I remember when the church was full on Sundays,” we say with a hint of sadness.

            “I remember when we had so many people in town…”

            “I remember when so-and-so was here, doing such-and-such a thing. It will never be the same as when they were here.”

            I suspect all of these things are true. I hear them all the time. We need to say a couple things about those things from the past. One is that it’s true, we absolute can’t make things to the same; but the second thing we must do is admit that the past was great but the past is those dry bones. Trying to keep it alive is fruitless. Keeping it on life support drains us, and it’s ultimately futile. It’s like telling somebody in the nursing home who has lost their mobility that if they just started playing basketball in the mornings—because hey, it works for me!—they’ll get stronger. It pains us to admit that some goals have to change, some things die. And that’s either the end of the world or it isn’t; that’s the real question for us: Is death the end of the world or not?

You need to think of a better question

Daniel 3

One of the wisest things I’ve ever heard was from a teacher of mine who was asked a question in class. The actual question doesn’t matter—I don’t remember it was at least—but he answered the question by saying, “Sir, you are not asking the right question. You need to think of a better question.”

I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve wanted to say that to a person. I mean, on the one hand you want people to be vulnerable and ask anything so those of us who teach like to say, “There are no stupid questions,” but that’s really an invitation to those who are shy or afraid to ask what they want to ask. The truth is that there are lots of stupid questions. Questions that are designed to show the correct-ness of the person asking it are bad questions; questions that are personal attacks are bad questions; questions asked to mock and belittle are bad questions. There are many cases where the best answer is: Think some more and come back with a better question.

            I thought of this today because the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is really the story of Nebuchadnezzar asking bad questions. He starts out by making a golden statue to worship; it’s a statue of him, by the way, in case you were wondering. The statue is the first example of Nebuchadnezzar asking the wrong question, because the kind of person who makes a giant golden statue of himself has to be asking a question like, “How do I demonstrate that I am powerful?”

If Nebuchadnezzar asked a different question—a better question—something along the lines of, “From where does my power come?” he would have likely a gone a different path. Most likely he instead tempted by the question, “How do I get more power?” which is the most tempting of all questions, but it also not the best question when it comes to living a good life, especially a life of faith.

            Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego show why. Being good Jews and knowing the idolatry is a big no-no in God’s eyes, they refuse to bow to the giant statue. Instead of asking, “How can we get power?” they are asking, “From where does true power come?” and they realize true power cannot come from Nebuchadnezzar. He’s just a man—a king, sure—but just a man. True power empowers not just the person in power but all people; it doesn’t seek power for its own ends; true power comes from God, because God is not in it for himself, like Nebuchadnezzar—and many politicians. They can’t worship this golden statue because it isn’t true. But that’s not the interesting thing; the interesting thing is that all the people in the land know this, right? Everybody knows that leaders who make statues and require loyalty oaths and whatnot do so not because they have a lot of power but because they feel vulnerable; the question is whether we pretend and give it to them, or stand up for what is actually true.