Isaiah 9         

Christmas message preached at Christchurch Ewell December 2009

Christmas is here again. It seems to me that is conjours up a whole spectrum of reactions and responses in society, and maybe among Christians here. At one end of the spectrum there is the magic of small children on Christmas day when they wake up and jump on mum and dad at 4.30, wide-eyed because Father Christmas has been in the middle of the night.

A little way down the spectrum lots people use Christmas as a focus for a family party or a celebration for chasing away the mid-winter blues. And that’s good – you don’t have to read far in the Bible to find that God loves a good party. Jesus Christ was the life and soul of every party he ever went to.

Moving on you start to get folk who are a little more miserable and cynical. People who think its just an excuse for retailers to get us to spend our hard earned cash. And then, about as far from the wonder-filled child as you can get you have people who not only hate it, but want to ruin it for everyone else as well.  

This is how Tom Lehrer described Christmas in song:

Christmas time is here by golly

Disapproval would be folly

Deck the hall with hunks of holly

Fill the cup and don’t say when

Kill the turkeys ducks and chickens

Mix the punch, drag out the dickens

Even though the prospect sickens

Brother here we go again

He makes Ebeneezer Scrooge look charitable.

I wonder where you are on the spectrum. Do you love it or loathe it? Or loathe the consumerist feeding frenzy that the supermarkets want to turn it into? Do you relax and chill or do you stress out? I saw a figure last year that said that a third of Christmas dinners end with a heated family bust up and someone walking out. I don’t know how you discover that statistic, but it would be depressing if it is true.

I’ll tell you where I am on the spectrum. I’m basically towards the wonder end, but I often get left feeling slightly empty by the whole experience, and that is among Christians as well as with my wider family. I usually get to boxing day having had a great time but really feeling “well is that it for another year, then? I suppose it is.” And secretly wishing that it had been rather more than it was. More wonderful, more gripping, more thrilling. I wanted a time when my spirit soared, when I felt my pulse racing with excitement like I did when I was a kid. And I got family parties and that was lovely, but left something missing.

The Failure of British Christmas

I’ve been trying to analyse why I get that slight feeling of anti-climax and disappointment despite all the good stuff and come to the conclusion that it is because I and Christians have turned Christmas into much much less than it actually is. A baby in a manger, children’s activities and nativities, meals and festivities, cards and presents, carols and choirs are all nice, but they are a million miles away from the Christmas story in, for example, Isaiah 9. They are a sentimentalised version that is emotionally appealing but hardly life-changing. And if the birth of Jesus Christ as the Bible presents him is anything it ought to be life-changing. It ought to be world-changing. I want Christmas to change my life. I want it to shape my worldview. I want it to affect my deepest longings. I want it to speak to my heart aches and hurts. I want it to tell me about a God who loves me enough to come for me. And British Christmas basically fails.

Gloom and Darkness

Isaiah was writing for a people who were distressed. When he was writing they were in a dark time and it was going to get much darker. You see how he describes it:

• There will be no more gloom for those who were in distress 
• There are people who are walking in darkness v2

The reason is that they had walked away from God. They were his people but they had decided they didn’t want him anymore. Its like they had been gathered round a camp fire at night, enjoying the warmth, enjoying the light and the protection, but incomprehensibly decided they would prefer the darkness. So they turned their back on the fire and walked off into the night. And worse even than that, they had rejected God’s calls to return so often that he finally drew a line in the sand and said “if that’s how you want it, you are now under my judgement. You won’t be able to turn and come back. If you want to be away from me in the darkness, in the darkness you shall be.” After Isaiah’s time – and Isaiah prophecies it – God is going to exile them far from Jerusalem in the land of Babylon. There is gloom and darkness. They are in the tunnel and there is no light at either end.

I can scarcely think of a better way to describe much of the world as I look around at the moment. What a confused mess of a place. Huge economic bubbles built on non-existent money, teenage pregnancy crises to which the proposed answer is either epidemic abortion rates or teaching sex to 5 year olds in the hope that it will put them off. Interminable low level wars as muslim ideology clashes with what it perceives as Western decadence. Funeral cortege after funeral cortege driving through Wooton Bassett. Elected representatives not understanding the difference between expenses and entitlements. Neo-nazi fundamentalists gaining political mandates because people are so disenfranchised with everything else. This year has had it all, hasn’t it? Gloom and darkness, personally, nationally, and internationally.

Eat, Drink and be Merry

And just like the people in Isaiah’s day, nobody able to see their way out of the tunnel. Just stuck in the pain. In Isaiah’s day they looked for solutions in international politics and alliances, they looked for it in wealth generation, they even tried show religion where they mouthed right words thinking that if you just do the ritual maybe that will make God pleased and he will get you out of the mess. Remarkable how churches in the City of London reported a huge upsurge of bankers wanting to come and pray this year. And at the end they just decided to make the darkness go away by partying as if there was no tomorrow. Isaiah 22: “there is joy and revelry, slaughtering of cattle and killing of sheep, eating of meat and drinking of wine! Let us eat and drink, you say, for tomorrow we die.” And you thought that binge drinking was a new thing.

So the lights were going out for the people of God. They were stuck in rebellion and sin and pain and disaster. And then we get Isaiah 9. Which is a promise that God is going to do something about it. He is going to provide an answer to rebellion and sin, and that answer is a child born at Christmas. What I want at Christmas is how God deals with my life being mucked up and the whole world being mucked up.  My experience of the world often being difficult.

Pause and read Is.9:1-7

Now these lands of Zebulun and Naphtali were in the north of Palestine and were among the first to fall under judgement as enemy armies swept in. They are under gloom and distress. But God says “that was once the case you people in the north of Israel, but it won’t be the case any more.” The gloom is going, the darkness is ceasing, the winter is over and the spring is on its way. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. All the lights go on at Christmas.

Glorious Opposites

Do you see how its described, opposites:

• You were in darkness, there is going to be great light
• You were diminished and your joy had evaporated, now God will enlarge them and increase their joy before him – there is going to be vibrant worship
• Once these people were slaves, but now they are released and the yoke of slavery is shattered
• Once they were occupied territory, the soldiers kit is burned in the fire        

You see in v6-7, all because a child is born. He is going to be born in Bethleham and He will rule over each of our lives and over the nations with justice and righteousness and peace. So, no ordinary child? Look with me briefly at v6-7, verses we all know and love.

A Child Who is Treasure from God

This child is a gift, a wonderful treasure from God to people who don’t deserve it. The secular message of Christmas is give to the deserving:  “He knows if you are sleeping, he knows if you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake.” spells it out. Good things come to good people, right? I tend to give gifts to people who deserve them, or family members who don’t deserve them but its better to do it. Self-interest. God’s Christmas gift of his son is given to these people who are undeserving and helpless

This child is the best gift and it is given to us because we are bad, for our good. He is going to reign in righteousness, establishing and upholding justice. Don’t you long for that? Well Christmas is a sign to us that it is coming, because we are celebrating this child. Every day up till Christmas, and at all your services you are saying to God and to the community around you – there is a rescuer from this mess, there is a saviour, there is a Lord who doesn’t leave us terrified in the shadow of death. That’s what we are celebrating

A Child Who Will Rule The Nations

How is the child going to make this happen. Well, he is going to rule. He is going to be the King. The government is on His shoulders. And unlike Brown and Cameron these shoulders are perfect shoulders. It will be a perfect government, hard as that seems to imagine. It is a government that will grow and grow. Everything is under this government for ever. And yet nothing need fear because the child is the king who brings everlasting peace.

Now, no king in the history of the world has accomplished anything like that. Even the best of them, nowhere near. Because power tends to corrupt, right? No president, no prime minister, no ideology. Its not that they are all bad, its just that they are human. I fear for Barack Obama because so many people want him to be a superhuman messiah and he will fail them.

How can this son accomplish all of this? Well its there in v6. This child, given so freely, tender, vulnerable and small, is none other than God Himself. He will be called wonderful counsellor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. In other words He is the one who stands with us telling us the truth. He is the creator who rules over us with power and controls the whole of life and eternity. He is our Father, who we can talk to, who takes us by the hand and encourages us to call Him Abba – daddy. He is the Prince of Peace – so much more than the absence of war. Genuine peace with God and peace on earth under His rule.

All this will be accomplished by this child, born at Christmas. The Lord Jesus lying in a manger. The great light. There is a lot to this familiar reading.  We hear it so often, maybe you sing it if you are in a choir that ever does Handel’s messiah. But we can forget what it means. Oppression to freedom, darkness to light, death to life because of Him and Him alone. And, promises Isaiah, you can be sure of it because God has promised that the zeal of the Lord almighty will do it.

The novelist Douglas Coupland said this:

“My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love as I seem to be beyond being able to love.” All from a man who apparently has written off the idea of God existing.

What would you want to say to him. Or to your neighbour or work colleague who thinks like that. I want to say“Yes. Yes! We need God, Yes we are incapable of loving without Him, Yes life is worthless without Him.

And Isaiah 9 is a wonderful promise. And the Christmas reality All the inequity that makes human society so degraded and dirty, all the scandal and deceit of the human heart, will be dealt with by the Christ-child as his government expands until across the whole earth until He comes again in glory. Creation will be renewed on right foundations. People find perfect fulfilment with Christ, because of the rescue that God planned at Christmas. No wonder Isaiah talks about a new day dawning.

I pray that everyone who hears Isaiah 9 this morning will rejoice that Christmas is refreshment for a thirsty world. I pray that coming to Christmas renews your expectations of all that God will do. The promise of Isaiah 9 is new life, new direction, new hope because of a new king. All because of a child, promised so long ago and born at Christmas.

Isaiah could say to Israel “look at your shattered dreams, look at the state of your nation, but look too at what God has in store at Christmas, and seek him with excitement and hope. Love him, hunger for him, pursue him, seek him. That’s what the Christ child in the manger is all about.