Sermon preached at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
December 22, 2019 / Fourth Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 7:10-16
Matthew 1:18-25
What are you hoping for this Christmas? To consider that question, I am taking us backwards.
At the end of the week before Thanksgiving, I was on a flight across the Atlantic. Having finished my book and the newspaper, and unable to sleep, I had no recourse but the inflight entertainment system. The selections were weak (to put it mildly), and as a result of this, I ended up flipping from show to show, and I heard in close succession two theme songs which caught my attention.
I will read aloud their first lines, so listen to them and think about what they have in common. Are you ready? Here’s the first:
What ever happened to predictability, the milkman, the paper boy, and evening TV?
That’s one. Here’s the second:
It seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV. But where are those good old-fashioned values on which we used to rely?
What do you notice?
Both of these TV theme songs rely on nostalgia, on a memory of the way things used to be. I submit to you that nostalgia is perhaps the overarching theme in our contemporary American life. How many of our political candidates try to gain ground over the competition by promising to get America “back on track,” returning us to the groove of some golden past age. It is common to hear people refer to the “good old days,” or some variation on that theme. And what about you? Are you dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones you used to know?
The historian and author Stephanie Coontz wrote a book a couple of years ago, called The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, and “trap” is a good way of thinking about nostalgia.[1] It binds us to the false belief that the only good things are past things, and convinces us that a good future is nothing but the return to an imagined past. This is pernicious thinking, and perhaps even dangerous. It is not incidental that in Dante’s Inferno, the inner circle of Hell is imagined not as a fiery furnace, but as frozen lake… a place where nothing changes, ever, and where the only future is an eternal past, where the cursèd dead re-live their memories, over and over again.
It may seem that Christmas is the nostalgic feast par excellence. But here on the fourth and last Sunday in Advent, we are reminded that this season, this period when we prepare for Christmas, is not principally designed for us to look backward to something that happened two thousand years ago in a stable in Bethlehem of Judea. Advent is time of anticipation and of expectation, and what we expect is the coming of Emmanuel, God with us.
We hear in this morning’s Gospel lesson St Matthew’s familiar quotation of the Prophet Isaiah, which we have also just heard:
Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.[2]
This is but one part of the prophesy. The significance of this birth, Isaiah declares, is that “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.”[3] This is not the Hallmark channel at Christmas. This is not snow and mistletoe and presents under the tree. This is cataclysm; it is apocalypse; it is the end of the world as we know it.
When we hear the word apocalyptic, we tend to think of earthquakes and fires and social upheaval. But this is not the end of the world… it is the end of the world as we know it. In Greek, the word apocalypsis means to “uncover” or “reveal,” and what is revealed is God’s decisive plan for the world, God’s decisive plan for the ages, which is the advent of the Word made Flesh in Jesus Christ, who has come to reclaim for God the whole of creation. St Paul writes that “the whole creation has been groaning in travail, and not only the creation, but we ourselves.”[4]
We know that we continue to groan. We still live in a world of warfare, and strife, and discord. We live in a world where people get ill, and people die. When the glitter is blown off of nostalgia, it is revealed as no more than the same old, same old.
This is why Christians are a people who are decisively oriented toward the future, toward the promise of the ages. It is a future that looks decidedly different from what we have known before. As St Paul writes,
Behold, I [tell] you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump[et]: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.[5]
It is not the raising of the dead that is so scandalous about that passage, but Paul’s confident assertion that “we shall be changed.” With the advent of Emmanuel, God has taken our very nature upon himself, and through that union in the person of Jesus Christ, has enacted the means by which our natures will be remade and the corruptibility that afflicts the human person will be blotted out. The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.[6]
It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? It’s much easier to look to a future, just like the one we used to know, the way we never were.
That’s why it’s a good thing that we’re not the principal actors in the story of salvation. In Christ, God has done the work, he has set the future in motion, and it’s a future that began in Bethlehem of Judea but whose final fulfillment we still await, eager, expectant.
That’s what we’re hoping for at Christmas: the consummation of God’s plan for this old world. We hope for a future that looks nothing like anything we have ever known, and which exceeds all expectation. On Christmas Day, let those presents under the tree be not a reminder of times past, or a lull into the nostalgia trap, but a foretaste, a sign and signal of the future that awaits us. For with God, all things are possible.
AMEN.