"I Will Give You a Sign"

Isaiah 7:10-16:7-9; Matthew 1:18-25

Is there any sign from the Lord?  That's a question people ask ,especially when things get tough.  In a pinch we wonder if God is with us. People caught in the mix of environmental peril, ongoing conflicts, and perpetual suffering are likely to ask, "Are we totally on our own, or is God with us?" Well, this morning our scripture readings from Isaiah and Matthew focus on two men, Ahaz and Joseph, both of whom find themselves in a very tight spot. And to each of these men God says, "I will give you a sign?"

In our first reading today, King Ahaz of Judah is given the opportunity to receive a sign from God.  God speaks through the prophet Isaiah, and says to Ahaz, "Ask a sign of the Lord our God, and the sky's the limit.  "Make it as deep as Sheol or high as heaven."  Sounds like a great offer, doesn't it?  We'd think Ahaz would be thrilled.  After all, King Ahaz is in a desperate situation.  His neighbors to the north, Israel and Syria, want Ahaz to join them in an alliance against the emerging superpower, Assyria.  At the same time, Assyria has offered to protect Ahaz and Judah if, in return, Judah will submit to becoming a vassal state of Assyria. In short, Ahaz is in a geo-political jam.  Not surprisingly, he's terrified. The verses immediately preceding the ones we read this morning declare, "…the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind."  So we'd think Ahaz would jump at the prophet's invitation to seek a sign from the Lord. 

Wouldn't you, if you had the opportunity, welcome God's offer to give you a sign?  After all, belief is hard, faith is a struggle.  A sign would boost our confidence that God is with us.   You may identify with a comment made by the famous atheist, Bertrand Russell.  A friend of Russell's once asked Russell what he'd say if, when he died, he suddenly found himself in heaven before the throne of God Russell replied, "I’d say, 'But God, you gave us insufficient evidence!’"  Well, in this war-torn, environmentally endangered world, the evidence for God's existence seems incomplete at best.  But what if, like Ahaz, we had a chance to receive a sign--maybe an unexpected check in the mail just when you were wondering how to pay this month's bills, or a winning lottery ticket, or a clean bill of health when you had experienced worrisome symptoms.  Or maybe you'd ask for a sign with a broader, more global, reach.  You'd ask God for a breakthrough in the Middle East peace plan, a way to end the war in Iraq, a solution to global warming. Well, Ahaz gets a chance most of us would be thrilled to have.  God offers to give him a sign.

But—can you believe it?—Ahaz politely declines God's offer.  He blurts out some pious excuse about not want to put the Lord to the test.  Truth is, Ahaz wants the Lord to stay out of his business.  Isaiah , the prophet, has encouraged Ahaz to avoid all military alliances. "Put you trust in the Lord," the prophet pleads.  But Ahaz has already decided what he will do, and he doesn’t want God confusing the issue.  The issue, as Ahaz and his military advisors see it, is clear enough: Assyria has the biggest army, the best weapons, and the most power, so an alliance with Assyria is clearly in the nation’s best interest. Sure, Ahaz pays lip service to God, but a king needs more to go on than an obscure promise about the birth of some unidentified child. What good is a helpless child when the security of the nation is at risk?  That's why, when God offers to give Ahaz a sign, the king replies, 'Thanks, but no thanks."

And we shouldn't be surprised.  Oh, at first we think, sure, we'd like a sign from the Lord.  But think again. We know from scripture that God is mysterious, inscrutable, full of surprises.  We know that God doesn't see things exactly as we see them, and God's love is impartial, inclusive and as broad as the cosmos. Give Ahaz some credit. He at least understood that the God who was offering to give him a sign was a God who could not be conscripted into the service of any one nation.  The sign God gives us just might undermine our own agendas,  push us beyond our comfort zones, or ask us to love and serve people we prefer to keep at a distance.  Do we really want to hear from God, whose purpose has something to do with bringing down the mighty and lifting up the poor? A God whose Kingdom involves feeding the hungry with justice a while sending the rich away empty? Maybe, like Ahaz, we're a little bit reluctant to put our trust in a God we can neither control nor contain.

But now let's turn our attention away from Ahaz and focus for a moment on Joseph.  Like Ahaz, Joseph finds himself in a mess, but unlike Ahaz, Joseph is able to see that the mess he's in is a holy mess. While Ahaz's problem was related to international threats, Joseph's trouble involves personal humiliation and deep disappointment. Joseph's plans are shattered when Mary, his intended, announces she is with child, and that could logically be assumed to have taken place through an adulterous relationship. Recall that in that day, should charges be pressed against Mary, the punishment was death. Given the legal requirements and social conventions of that day, Joseph really has no choice but to abandon Mary.  Still, being a just man, a compassionate man, he decides to spare Mary a public disgrace and arranges to dismiss her quietly. Yet that night Joseph has a dream. He wakes up convinced that in this embarrassing and unexpected turn of events, God is with him.  He's able to see beyond his own humiliating experience to the larger redemptive purpose of God. With nothing more substantial than a dream to go on, Joseph believes God has given him a sign, a signal that the redemptive purposes of God promised by the prophets are being fulfilled in Mary's child.    

So which of these two men will we take for our model?  Perhaps Ahaz and Joseph represent the faith struggle that goes on in each one of us.  Like Ahaz, we tend to limit ourselves to those things that are most familiar, reliable and within our control. We put our trust in the things that make us feel most secure, safe and comfortable.  Yes, there's a little bit of Ahaz in each one of us.

But, thank God, we've also got Joseph in us.  We have the capacity to trust, to hope, to believe that—despite evidence to the contrary--God is with us.  Not just in a manger long ago. Not just during Jesus’ earthly lifetime.  “Lo, I am with you always,” proclaimed the resurrected Christ.  The translation of Emmanuel to mean “God with us” doesn’t completely capture the sense of the Hebrew. The words further suggest that “God is in common with us people” As John says, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  Dwells with us, dwells in us.  This, then, is the sign that God offers us today:  To discover God no longer merely as the One up-there or back- then, but as our own deepest and truest self. Emmanuel is not only a child born long ago.  Emmanuel is the One who continues to live in us and with us. It is through our eyes that God looks out upon the world.  It is with our hands and feet that God’s love reaches out to others.  It is through our imagination that God dreams of a peaceful and just world.

Friends, now as never before, the world needs a sign that God is with us.  Here’s the joy and the terror of Christmas:  the sign lives in us, or it doesn’t live at all.