The God Who Keeps His Word

Sermon delivered on the fourth Sunday of Advent, December 18, 2011, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: 2 Samuel 7.1-16; Canticle 54; Romans 16.25-27; Luke 1.26-38.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is the fourth Sunday of Advent and we have lighted the final purple candle on our wreath that represents the blessed Virgin Mary, whom our readings feature this morning. As we have seen over the past several weeks, Advent is a season of anticipation and expectation. As Christians, we believe we are going somewhere and that we have a future, a future assured by God himself. But as we saw last week this belief is being subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) undermined by a false teaching that came out of the Enlightenment known as deism, which essentially argues we have an absent God. It teaches that God did his creative work and retired to heaven to see how it all plays out. This, of course, is not a god we can worship or with whom we can have a real relationship. The deist god is bound to disappoint because he is not around to guide or rescue us. Therefore, this god cannot possibly be in control of history or our future, let alone our present situation.

Thankfully, a deist god is not the God of the Bible and today I want to continue to look at why this is. How do we know that we can confidently put our whole hope and trust in God? We know, in part, by God’s gift of faith and his Spirit living in us. But we also know when we examine the record of God’s interactions with his people. All of today’s lessons illustrate this truth and gives us further evidence that the God of the Bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is indeed a God who keeps his word to be with us always. And so I want us to look briefly at what today’s lessons have to tell us so that by God’s Spirit we can have our minds renewed and our hope and trust in Jesus strengthened (or maybe restored or even established).

In this morning’s gospel lesson, the angel Gabriel is sent to tell Mary that she is to become the Mother of God. Luke tells us that Mary was greatly troubled by what Gabriel had to tell her. And who wouldn’t be? After all, she was a virgin. So how was she going to be pregnant and give birth? Things like this just don’t happen so what did it all mean? It’s not unreasonable to think that Mary might have also envisioned accusations of adultery and its subsequent death penalty as she pondered this news. However, the angel reassured her and told her not to be afraid because nothing is impossible with God.

We can all relate to Mary on this level, can’t we? We are confronted with a variety of things in our life we don’t understand and that make us afraid—sickness, suffering, evil, injustice, death, and long sermons among others. Like Mary, we desperately enquire of God and long to hear the reassuring words, “Don’t be afraid. Nothing is impossible for God.” But if we believe that God has retired from this world and our lives or we are unfamiliar with the reliability of God’s track record in dealing with his people, we are not likely to find the peace or reassurance we seek.

Unfortunately, the Bible does not give us much of a direct answer to our questions about evil and all that bedevils us. Apparently God is not going to let us in on the joke. Instead, we are invited to examine the record of God’s dealings with his people and world, especially in the person of Jesus, and then to put our whole hope and trust in him based on that examination. Why? Because the record of Scripture clearly indicates that God is active and in control of his people and world, and intends to redeem both his fallen creatures and creation.

Of course, believing this is no easy task for us because we humans are control freaks. We like to have things nice and tidy—and solidly under our control. We want direct answers to our earnest questions and we want them now. This prideful desire for control is essentially what got us thrown out of paradise because God did not create us to be his equals. As Augustine reminds us, God created us for himself and we are to reflect God’s glory into the world. That’s what it means to be created in God’s image and it also means that we are not going to be let in on the joke about evil because we are not God.

Happily, however, we do have an extensive record of God’s dealing with his people and world, and from that record we can see that God is a God who keeps his word to be with us always. In today’s OT lesson, we see one of the most powerful examples in all Scripture of God’s faithfulness to his people in the poignant story of David wanting to build God a house and God’s response to David through the prophet Nathan.

The first thing we notice in today’s lesson is how much God has to say. At 197 words, God says more to David here than he had to say to any other human since the days of Moses, at least of which we have a record in Scripture. So we probably ought to pay attention to what God is telling David and us. (As an interesting sidebar, it appears that even God’s prophets can suffer from the pride of presumption on occasion as Nathan apparently had not consulted God before he gave David God’s approval of David’s plans to build God a temple.)

In response to David’s request to build God a temple (or house), God gently rebukes David and tells him that David is not going to do that. Instead, God would establish a house or dynasty for David and then God ups the ante. God makes the most remarkable promise to David that from his lineage there would be one in particular who would embody David’s house and dynasty for God and rule forever. In fact, while this person would be from David’s offspring, it would be God himself who would be this ruler’s father. Did you catch that? It sounds almost identical to what Gabriel promised Mary! Do tell.

And while it is true that this prophecy was partially fulfilled in David’s son, Solomon, who built the first temple, surely God did not have Solomon in mind when he promised David that this future ruler’s throne would last forever because Israel’s monarchy ended with the Babylonian exile in 586 B.C. No, as later writers thought about this passage and reflected on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, they realized that God’s promises to David were messianic in nature and had finally been fulfilled in Jesus.

They believed this because they examined the evidence (of which today’s gospel lesson is a part) and concluded that it was God himself who had come in the person of Jesus to be God’s anointed Messiah, the true representative of Israel, to finally fulfill Israel’s mission to bring rescue, healing, and redemption to a world and its people exiled from God’s love and Presence by human sin. God did this in Jesus by dying on a cross for us and bearing his own wrath himself so that we would not have to. By his wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53.5b) and we have found peace and reconciliation with God through him (cf. Colossians 1.20; Ephesians 1.7). But we are not being saved so that we can retire to heaven and hang out with God forever while the rest of the world rots away. That would make a farce of God’s promises to David in today’s OT lesson! After all, there is no reason to have an eternal throne in David’s house to rule over the earth if earth and its people are destined for destruction. No, we are saved to be agents of God’s healing and redemption in the exact way God intended Israel to be when he made his covenant with Abraham (cf. Genesis 12.1-3; 15.1-6). In other words, we have God’s work to do in this world and God has come to us in Jesus, in part, to show us what that work looks like.

And the NT writers believed God’s promises to David had been fulfilled in the cross of Jesus because they had also seen his mighty resurrection and ascension. This made them realize that Jesus had not only conquered death and defeated evil but had also ushered in God’s promised new creation to put to rights all that was wrong with the world, the very work Jesus had started in his earthly ministry by his healing and other works, and which would finally be consummated at his Second Coming. After all, God created all things to be good (cf. Genesis 1-2). Why would he not want to restore what human sin had caused to go wrong?

God’s promised coming to his people Israel in Jesus also meant there would be a radical difference in how humans interact with God here on earth. No longer, for example, would we need to visit a temple to be in the Presence of God because Jesus himself had become the new temple, the place where heaven and earth intersect, and so when we interact with Jesus in prayer, Scripture, worship, and fellowship we interact with God himself. If we understand this, the passages about Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his cleansing the temple, and his curious saying about rebuilding the temple in three days should his enemies destroy it start to make total sense (cf. Mark 11.1-26; John 2.19). In Jesus, God was coming as King to live with his people forever in fulfillment of God’s promises to David in today’s OT lesson and elsewhere, but not in the manner God’s people expected and certainly not on their timetable or ours.

Once again, notice carefully that these promises were foretold long before they happened and that they are essentially the same promises that Gabriel made to Mary in today’s gospel lesson. God is not making things up as history unfolds. Neither is he remote or uninterested in our lives and this world because he has entered our history as Jesus, the Messiah and faithful representative of God’s called-out (holy) people Israel, to redeem both his creation and us. God has always used his called-out people, both ancient Israel and Israel constituted as those of us in the church who follow Jesus, to help him in his redemptive work until he returns again in great power and glory to finish what only God can do. This is further evidence that God has not retired and abandoned his people or his world and we miss a massive part of God’s presence in this world and our lives if we ignore this truth or turn a blind eye to it. All this is in the Scriptural record if we will only take the time and use our minds to learn and examine that record, aided by the power and Presence of the Spirit living in us. When we really start to understand the whole biblical narrative and the nature of God’s rescue plan for us and his world, we really do have good reason not to be afraid, even in the most desperate of circumstances.

We have this confidence because we see that God is a God who works in and through Jesus and his people to keep his promises and for whom nothing is impossible. We see it illustrated in Luke’s report of Gabriel and the Virgin Mary and manifested spectacularly in Jesus’ subsequent birth, life, death, and resurrection. This is essentially what Paul confirms in our epistle lesson today. Paul reminds us to give God the glory because he has fulfilled his ancient promises to redeem and heal us through Jesus.

All this reminds us that Jesus is Lord, not just of heaven but of heaven and earth. And if that is true and we really believe this, we had better get busy—with the help of his Spirit living in and through us—and do the things that show him and others we do indeed think he is our Lord and king. Here again, we can take our cue from Mary’s response to God’s great gift to her. She didn’t fully understand but she had faith in God because she knew God and therefore she knew God is good to his word. So she obeyed and cooperated with God’s plan.

Likewise for us. That means, for example, (besides the obvious need for us to thoroughly learn Scripture’s story), we will find ourselves denying ourselves and taking up our cross each day as we follow Jesus in obedience to his command to do this. In doing so, we will discover that he helps shape us and mold our character, even in the most dire of circumstances, so that we become like him. We will then find ourselves doing outrageous things like forgiving our enemies and praying for them, serving the least and the lost, and thereby bringing real hope and healing to them. We will resist our natural inclination to take the credit because we know that it isn’t us or even about us, but rather our Risen Lord working in and through us to bring about his promised new creation. And when that happens, we realize that we are doing exactly what we were saved to do! This, in turn, gives us reason to have a real and living hope because we realize we are living out God’s promises, even in all the messiness of our lives, and that God really is good to his word to be with us always. And when that happens, folks, we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.