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Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church
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First Sunday after Christmas |
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Isaiah 7;14-16 God With Us The
Gospel for this morning is the fulfillment of a passage from the prophet
Isaiah 7:14, “a virgin shall
conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”
To cut through all the theological jargon and analysis; Jesus, that
very tiny, helpless baby, child of poverty, born in a barn, and laid in a
feed trough, is Immanuel. He
is God with us. “God
with us,” as you know, is the meaning of the word, “Immanuel,” or
“Emmanuel,” as St Matthew writes it in his Gospel.
God is with us. This
is the “Good News.” Some
times we of the more conservative denominations speak so much about sin
and God’s wrath upon it, that we lose sight of the real point, the Good
News. The Good News is not that we’re sinners.
The Good News is that God loves us anyway, and has sent the Savior
into the world to forgive our sins and to bring us out of them and into
friendship with God. Do
not misunderstand me. I am
not minimizing sin or its devastating effects on the world or the soul.
All of our problems are the result of sin.
Because of sin we are alienated from one another, and from God. Because
of sin we face strife, war, social ills, and, ultimately, death and hell.
And I know we must preach sin, clearly and without compromise.
Such preaching is unpopular today.
It always has been, but it must be done or else the souls of those
who are dead in their trespasses
and sins will never be prepared to hear the Good News.
But sin is the bad news. The
wrath of God is the bad news. War,
hatred, violence, alienation, isolation, abuse, loneliness, stress,
rejection and pain are the bad news.
The Good News is that God has entered this planet of pain with the
medicine of grace. The Savior
has come. Emmanuel has been
born, and God is with us. God Is Present “God
with us” means He is present with us.
He is here. When I
come to church my family is with
me. When I am in church I am
in church with you. We are together and present in the same area.
Likewise God is with us because He is here. How can that be? God
dwells in a different dimension from us.
We live in time and space; God is above all of that.
We are physically separated from Him.
We can’t see, feel or touch Him.
But in Emmanuel, God added flesh to Himself and became visible to
us, and lived on earth in time and space with us.
He became physically present in our dimension.
God with us. He
is with us spiritually. Our
greatest form of separation from God is the separation of our souls from
His. This separation is so
radical and so complete that the Bible refers to it as being dead toward
God. We have all seen
corpses: they are dead to the world.
We can bring good food and drink to them, we can place them in
pleasant surroundings, we can place all the pleasures of life before them
so they have only to stretch forth their hands to receive them, but they
cannot. They are dead to
those things. In the same way
our souls are dead to God, apart from Christ.
The great feast of God is spread before us. All things necessary to spiritual life and true happiness are
there. We need only reach out
and take them for ourselves, but we cannot.
We are dead to those things. That
is how complete our separation from God is.
The cause of spiritual separation is sin. We have offended God, and separated ourselves from Him by our
actions just as we separate ourselves from other people by offending them.
“We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own
hearts. We have offended
against [His] holy laws. We
have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have
done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health
in us,” as we pray in the General
Confession. Our sins
separate us from God. But
our sinfulness
separates us also. Sinfulness
is that general tendency to follow our own devices and desires, rather
than the will of God. Can two walk together unless they be agreed?
If not, how can we expect to be anything but separated from God,
since we in our very essence are not agreed with Him?
We have all met people we just don’t like.
Maybe they are rude or hateful and cruel.
And it is not so much what they do but what they are that offends
us. There is something in
their personalities and in their souls that causes them to act in an
offensive way. That
“something in their souls” is in all of us.
Some are more willing to let it control them than others, but it is
in all of us, and it is that “something” which separates us from God. In
Christ, Emmanuel, God crosses over the barriers that separate us from Him.
He comes to us when we can not go to Him.
He comes into our dimension to take us into His.
God is with us. God Is For Us “God
with us” has a second meaning. It
means God is for us. God is
on our side. In The
Chronicles of Narnia movie, facing the army of the White Witch, Peter
turns to the centaur and says, “Are you with me?”
He is not asking about physical proximity. He means, “are you willing to stand with me?
Are you on my side? Are
you for me?” That was the primary meaning of Immanuel in Isaiah’s time.
God was for Judah in their suffering, and for them in their
battles, and for them in this life. He was on their side against the Assyrians and the
Babylonians. It is only
because they left God’s side that they were finally conquered by their
enemies. God
is for us too. Immanuel is
God for us,
God on our side. The
centaur whom Peter asked, “Are you with me?”
Replied, “To the death.” That
is how much Christ is with us, and how much Christ is for us.
He spared not His own life, and counted it not too much of a
sacrifice to make to save us. That is truly God for us. Christ,
as God for us is our Great Defender.
One of the major points of Isaiah’s prophecy is that God was
going to deliver Judah from the enemies that were facing her at that time.
Other Jewish tribes had
united with Assyria to make war on Judah, and the king was paralyzed with
fear. But God gave the king a
sign and a promise. A virgin
would conceive and give birth. Before
that child would be old enough to know right from wrong, God would deliver
Judah from her enemies. And
so with us, all the sin and evil that threaten us are conquered by Christ.
He overcame the devil when He was tempted in the wilderness.
He overcame our sins when He died for them on the cross.
He destroyed death when He died and rose again.
And one day all His and our enemies will be finally and forever
vanquished. We can not defeat
them. We are as helpless
before them as sheep among wolves. Christ,
our Savior has delivered us from them.
“If Christ be for us, who
can be against us?” As
God for us, Christ is our advocate in the court of God’s justice.
The Bible warns us that “it
is appointed unto men once to die, and after that, the judgment.”
We must all stand before God and give an account of our lives.
Now, if we are honest with ourselves, we will have to admit that we
cannot justify ourselves before God on that day because of the sins and
sinfulness I spoke about a few minutes ago.
We would be condemned at the bar of God’s justice, except for one
thing, Christ is on our side. By His vicarious death, He paid the price of our sins, and we
are regarded as just and righteous because of His work. “There is, therefore,
no condemnation to those who are in Christ.”
And even now He intercedes for us
before the Father. This
is the real message of Christmas. That
baby born in an animal shed is not
just a quaint story or a pretty manger scene to put on mantles and cards.
He is God with us. Christ came down from Heaven to be our Savior, and in Him,
God is with
us. Thanks be to God. In
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. R. Dennis Campbell, Vicar, Holy Trinity Anglican Church,
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