“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[1]
Introduction
Sermons on love are commonplace; this sermon being no exception. From weddings to funerals, from Easter to Pentecost, from Sunday to Sunday, one will encounter some religious and spiritual reflection on love. In fact, one could argue, most sermons probably end on a note that emphasizes love in one form or another. Why all this emphasis? Because we don’t get it.
I don’t blame the audience; I blame the people teaching on love. Too often love is spoken of as a feeling no different from the feeling of comfort, something that is nice and cozy. When speaking of God and God’s essence as love, it’s just mentioned that “God is love” without following up explaining what that means for fleshy meat creatures here on planet Earth. Or, someone will say, “God loves you,” without making it known through their deeds causing this love to remain abstract. People aren’t given love as the substance of action; rather, they are given love that is oil through fingers desperate to hold on to anything and grasping nothing.
As I look around, I feel that we love the idea of love, we are in love with the word, and we love the way it makes us feel when we say it or hear it said. However, in general, we encounter and are more oriented toward lovelessness than love. In a world built on the virtue of austerity, love—real love, the type of love that speaks and does—seems a costly extravagance of energy, energy we don’t have being caught in perpetual hyper-vigilance while swimming in a sea of chaos and confusion. Love is too risky; we are too vulnerable. It’s better to lose love than to lose in love.
But, yet,: Advent.
Advent slips in through the back door and dares to suggest Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. The fourth Sunday in Advent solidifies the interruption to our normal, day-to-day descent into chaos and tumult, where lovelessness reigns. And I think this is why the fourth Sunday of Advent carries love with it; the fourth Sunday in Advent is the manger of Love and thus we must come face to face and contend with it as it speaks to us and illuminates our lovelessness .
Isaiah 7:10-16
Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.
Isaiah tells us that God spoke to Ahaz encouraging him to ask for a sign. Ahaz refuses. In so many situations, Ahaz’s actions would be considered upright and good. However, in this instance, God, through Isaiah, is asking Ahaz to ask for a sign. Thus, not to ask for one, not to seek one is—in this moment—disobedience to God, it is a spurning of God’s grace, it is a rejection of God’s mercy, it is a turning one’s nose up to an invitation from God to see something different.[i] Then Isaiah said:
“Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.”
God, through Isaiah, addresses Ahaz’s callousness and not only Ahaz’s but the callousness of the people of Israel, too.[ii] Isaiah is a prophet speaking to both the authorities of Israel as well as the people with whom he identifies; his love for both is palpable because it is the love of God for both. Isaiah also feels God’s pain and sorrow in experiencing and feeling Israel’s turning away (both leader and person alike).[iii] So, Isaiah is not going to let Ahaz off the hook here, and he won’t let the people either. As the leadership leads, so the people follow suit. For Ahaz to reject God’s invitation to ask for a sign is an indication of a heart that is closed to what is possible, to that new thing; it is a hard heart; a loveless heart.[iv] And if the leader feels this way, then the people do, too. They have all left God and God feels this abandonment. So, consumed by the passion of God, Isaiah must expose this hardness of heart and he does so by expressing God’s weary towards the people to expose their own agony and lovelessness.[v]
While Isaiah exposes Ahaz’s hardness of heart thus also the hardness of heart of the people, Isaiah deeply identifies with the people eager to hear and feel God among them and moving toward them. So, Isaiah prophesies a sign that God is coming to them, a child will be born to an unmarried young woman (not a young virginal girl (non-menstruating)).[vi] Through Isaiah, God promises that this son will barely come of age when Israel’s oppression will be eliminated, the land of the two kings—whom Israel dreads—will be deserted. The promise here in Isaiah isn’t necessarily the boy born to the young woman; the promise is that before he comes of age, Israel will be liberated. The promise is of God’s liberation of which this child named Immanuel is a sign that the two kings and their nations will be removed from the backs and necks of the people of Israel. This one named Immanuel reminds Israel that God is with them and that when God is with them, they need not fear any person for God is with them and God is for them and if God is for them then who can be against them? This one named Immanuel will be the sign that God loves them and is coming to take their hearts of stone (loveless hearts) and give them hearts of flesh, hearts able to and filled with love.
Immanuel. God is with Israel. Immanuel. Love is with Israel and where there is love there is neither fear nor dread. Isaiah is summoning the people back into love with Abba God, their first love, the one who loved them from the first.
Conclusion
Love isn’t something we cause ourselves to have or something we drum up from the depths of our souls. It’s a gift. It’s life. It’s God. Love comes to us. Love comes low to us, to seek us as we are, wherever we are even when we are absolutely loveless. Love takes our hand to guide us into God. Love will even come down so low that it will be born into fleshy vulnerability, among dirty animals and unclean people, in straw and hay, wrapped in meager swaddling clothes, laying in the lap of an unwed, woman of color without a proper place to lay her head. He, Jesus the Christ, Immanuel—God with us—is our Love, is our Love for right now, in the darkness of late fall, in the tumult of our lives, in the fatigue of our bodies and minds, and dwells with us transforming our lovelessness—part by part—into love. Incarnated love knowing God is with us and God is faithful.
God comes, Beloved, bringing love to the loveless.
[1] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.
[i] Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah: A Commentary, The Old Testament Library (Louisville: WJK, 2001), 65. “It is not merely a suggestion from the prophet, but an invitation from God himself to request a sign.”
[ii] Abraham K. Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: JPS, 1962), 16-17. “The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority, and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words. Had the purpose been to express great ideas, prophecy would have had to be acclaimed as a triumph. Yet the purpose of prophecy is to conquer callousness, to change the inner man as well as to revolutionize history.”
[iii] Heschel, Prophets, 81. “…the sympathy for God’s injured love overwhelms his whole being. What he feels about the size of God’s sorrow and the enormous scandal of man’s desertion of God is expressed in the two lines …which introduce God’s lamentation. ‘Hear, then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also?’ (7:13). In different words addressed to the king, the prophet conveys his impression of the mood of God: As happened in the time of Noah and as is happening again, God’s patience and longsuffering are exhausted. He is tired of man. He hates man’s homage, his festivals, his celebrations. Man has become a burden and a sorrow for God.”
[iv] Heschel, Prophets, 208. “The fault is in the hearts, not alone in the deeds.”
[v] Heschel, Prophets, 17. “It is embarrassing to be a prophet. There are so many pretenders, predicting peace and prosperity, offering cheerful words, adding strength to self-reliance, while the prophet predicts disaster, pestilence, agony, and destruction.”
[vi] Childs, Isaiah, 66. Unmarried maiden of full sexual age (‘almāh) and not a young virginal girl
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