A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on December 10, 2023 by Revd Sally Hitchiner
Reading for address: Isaiah 40
It is possible to miss the most important moment in history. King Herod saw the same stars as the wise men, he heard the same ancient stories as Mary. And yet he missed it. He missed it because his frame of reference was off.
Long before that starry night, he had decided that the greatest power in the universe was the Roman Empire. He decided that the most significant actions were their actions, and that the largest effect on his life was the effect of the Emperor. His primary identity was as a subject of the oppressive military force that was Rome. And so, he lived in light of this, oppressing others and justifying it by how oppressed he was himself. And so he missed Christmas.
In late December 1983 Chris Rea was wrapping up recording a pop song at Abbey Road studios. He’d had one chart hit “Fool if you think it’s over” and was trying desperately to emulate that success. But the record companies didn’t like his style and he was about to be dropped. His money was running out. His wife June drove down from Middlesbrough to London at midnight to pick him up because he couldn’t afford the train fare home. They were about to lose the mortgage on their house. His whole life had been invested in the music industry and now this looked over. Who would he be if not the guy who wrote pop songs.
But as he left the studios it started snowing. They were young, in love and as they drove into the night, away from work and towards home, he had a thought. “All these people, we’ve all decided to drop everything for two weeks, just to do Christmas.” The thought changed him. Even though it was the wee small hours, even though there was a traffic jam, even though his life was falling apart, he rolled down the window, leant out to the driver in the car next door and shouted “Happy Christmas!”
And then a tune came into his head, then some words… a song almost fully formed in a few minutes.
“Top to toe in tailbacks,
oh I’ve got red lights all around.
But soon there’ll be a freeway.
Got my feet on holy ground.
So I’ll sing for you, though you can’t hear me.
When I get through and feel you near me.
Driving in my car. Driving home for Christmas.”
If you translate this feeling back a few thousand years, this is where the writers of our Old Testament reading are trying to get their community.
It had been a hard time. The first 39 chapters of Isaiah are a collection of sermons by Isaiah the prophet before disaster struck. He warned Israel’s leaders of the impending doom if they didn’t change their ways. Chapter 6 – Isaiah’s commissioning when the young Isaiah says “I don’t know what to say” and God takes a hot coal and touches his lips as commissioning. Isaiah’s first words start with referring to the faithless Israel as “This people” “This people are bent against me”. As well as a call to righteousness, Isaiah also spoke about hope in God who would somehow find a way through for his people, no matter how faithless they were.
The leaders did not change. The Holy Land was invaded by successive neighbouring nations, ransacked and most of the people were marched off into slavery in Babylon… modern day Iraq. The Exile. It is so monumental that it covers almost half of the Old Testament.
Our Old Testament reading picks up the story a hundred years later. A small group have treasured the writings of Isaiah and tried to live them out in their context. Finally, there has been a change of king of Babylon who declared that they could leave. They could go home. But what is home now? The gates may be open but how do these people, leave after all that time? Being a slave gets into your head.
So the followers of Isaiah decided to start preaching. They had read and reread his writings and tried to live by them, but now life is changing. Now they improvised on them. They preach fan fiction.
And what they believed God most wanted to say was summed up in one word: Comfort. In Hebrew they don’t have the word “very”. If you want to say something is very true, you say it twice. Comfort, Comfort.
Whatever else you hear, God wants to say to this beleaguered people – Comfort. In spite of all the words they had had spoken to them.
They are described as “My people” by God. If God is God and God calls them “my people” then the labels anyone else puts on them are foot notes. I mean, it’s God saying this.
And this doesn’t just tell us about God. This also tells us about us.
When I was young, I could tell I was in trouble because my name would be lengthened. Instead of Sally I would be Sally Hitchiner. If I was in real trouble middle names would be thrown in. And if I’d really blown it mum would simply refer to me in front of dad as “your daughter”. The occasion I broke our patio doors in a moment of high jinks, through the medium of shoving my little sister through them was a “your daughter” moment.
“My people” “Comfort my people” says “your God”. If you are the People of God then all other names, all other labels, are temporary… footnotes at best.
In case there was any doubt. They go on…
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and proclaim to her:
That her hard service has been completed – the exile is over. It’s done.
Proclaim that her sin has been paid for. She has received double from the Lord’s hand for her sin. This word double implies a piece of paper
that is folded up. All the folds have been unfolded. There is nothing more hidden in the folds that could come to bite them.
From the narrative of punishment, you would think God revolves around us. But ultimately it is impossible to be so destructive that you can force God away from goodness towards you. It’s impossible for someone else to destroy your life to the extent that God will not, one day, bring all things to right.
But their heads were still in Babylon. The gods of Babylon seemed to have the upper hand, even now. How could they leave if they could not imagine anything beyond where they had been for so long? How could they rediscover their rootedness in the God of their fathers?
They get three voices…each addressing a different chain holding them back.
The first voice is coming from the desert, the wilderness. They lived in a city. Most of them probably hadn’t seen a desert. The only life they or their parents or their grandparents had known was that of slavery in a huge city.
But there is a voice crying from the wilderness, from the desert, from out there. Something out there, beyond the city. Something on the wind. If you listen carefully, you can hear a distant trumpet.
The most powerful figure in their lives was the King of Babylon. They had probably never seen him in person but this one man held every aspect of their lives and everyone, everything they could see in his hands. The prophets in Isaiah call the people to listen for something outside of where they are. A voice crying in the wilderness, in the desert. A trumpet on the wind.
When a king comes to a city, we roll out the red carpet. For international tours, they built bridges, reset the roads, get rid of potholes, get rid of all obstructions. They are told a new king is coming. Not the king of the Babylonians who held them captive. This is their King. He is coming to personally take them home and mountains, valleys, entire landscapes will not stand in his way to get to them.
The second voice speaks to the second chain in their minds: Who has significance? “Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall” For slaves in an oppressive regime life seemed cheap. You put your trust in someone, you marry, you have a slightly better boss at work, but then in a word immersed in disease, lack of health and safety at work and in general crime and violence, a lot of people either let you down or died unexpectedly. What difference did their lives make? They were born they worked for Babylon, they died. It’s place remembers it no more.
But there is something else, the prophets said. The word of the Lord was before Babylon, and it will will outlast it.
They can be reframed. They are not slaves, they become heralds of good tidings! They are invited to go back to their home city, Jerusalem, the city on a hill, and to become the mouthpieces for this herald to the people languishing back home and to the world. All the people will see it together. Here is your God. These oppressed slaves are invited to the place of the angels in the Christmas story.
The third voice addresses the final chain in their minds. Does God care? It’s easy to exclude ourselves even if we acknowledge something is true for others. Here God promises, not just to meet Israel as King to ensure safe envoy home, but to roll up his sleeves and personally care for the weakest in the group. No one is to be left behind.
He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.
God sets a new bar for care. Their lives are now not defined by the mistreatment they have received where only the useful were valued, but by the care they will ALL receive from God.
God did care for his people. Most of them returned to Jerusalem. But not everything was fulfilled. By the time of the start of the New Testament they were under another oppressive empire. Rome. The prophesy was still waiting for completion.
Until one starry night, a king arrived closer than they could have imagined… close enough to have come from a human body, to rest in human arms. This king was heralded by John the Baptist… the voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord. This king spoke about God’s care for the grasses of the field and promised how much more would their heavenly father care for them.
And this king came to us not only as the Good Shepherd but also is with us as the vulnerable lamb. There is no where you can go in this story where God is not.
Today historians have a detached interest in the kings of Babylon, the emperors of the Rome. Even specialists could just as easily study other periods of history with no material consequence to their lives. These kings that seemed so significant then are now like grass. Like ancient Babylon, London will one day be ruins that archaeologists excavate and with merely academic interest and the rest of the world won’t care. One day the conflict in the middle east and the Pandemic will be niche interests of PhD students because everyone else will have forgotten about them. I bet most people here don’t know the name of your great grandfather, let alone anything he did of lasting significance. But not Christmas.
Whatever the religious trends, whether people acknowledge it or not, the fact that God joined us in our humanity changes everything. The cosmos is forever different. To be a Christian is to believe that time is not a continuum measured with reference to the actions of other human beings… good or bad. Christians in the past even aligned events in history BC and AD, measured everything up before Christ and after Christ. For in this one event, the whole of human history takes its meaning, shape and coherence. By this one event all times are judged: Christmas is where we come from. Christmas is the norm experience of your life, the definition of your life… everything else is footnotes. Whatever is going on in your life, make time to remember Christmas. You might get a pop song out of it… but more importantly refocus your life because to align with this thing that will outlast us all, is the only way to lead a truly significant life. All times, good and bad, ultimately fall before the one time: God’s time with us.
