A sermon given by Fr. Tim Sean Youmans on the 4th Sunday of Advent at St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, Oklahoma City, OK. Isaiah 7:10-16, Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25, Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
I needed a sign.
It was the summer before my senior year of high school in Cheyenne, WY, and for the previous three years I had been embroiled in painful conflict with my step-father. A family therapist we had sought out for help suggested it might be a good idea to give everyone a break. I spent spent the summer with my grandparents in Bartlesville, OK.
It was a whirlwind summer. To make friends, I attended my Grandparents church, First Baptist Bartlesville, which had a youth group of over 100 kids. I’d never seen anything like that, having grown up in a small American Baptist Church in Wyoming. I met a girl named Gigi, and she invited me to Falls Creek (which if you do not know is a Southern Baptist encampment that has over 5,000 kids in attendance every week. For some perspective, St. Crispin’s, our camp, has around 60 kids kids a week).
Well, I fell in love with Gigi, as much as an 18 year old kid can fall in love, but I also fell in love with Jesus, as much as an 18 year kid old can fall in love with Jesus. Gigi and Jesus. At the end of the summer I was sure of one thing; I did not want to go back to Wyoming. And so, I asked if I could spend my senior year in Oklahoma.
So I made my case to my mother. And to my surprise she said, “It’s up to you. It’s your decision.”
I desperately wanted to go. I was weary, and living at home with my step-father was exhausting. To me, a new beginning made sense. But, even at 18, I was intuitive enough to see that it was going to break my mother’s heart.
She had been through a divorce, the only one of her six siblings whose marriage had failed, and she had married a man that brought conflict into our house. I knew she did want to fail as a parent, also. I sensed it then, but as a parent, I know it now.
But, she said, it was my decision.
I remember it as if it were yesterday, not some 30 years ago. I laid on our back patio and looked up into the cool Wyoming August night and I prayed. “God, I want to go, but I don’t know if it is the right thing.
At that moment, a shooting star streaked across the night sky. At 18 I was egocentric enough to believe that God had hurled a meteor through the earth’s atmosphere just for me.
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Joseph wanted to do the right thing. St. Chrysostom, our 4th century golden mouth preacher, delineated his inward struggle.
“To keep Mary in his house appeared to be a transgression of God’s law, but to expose and bring her to trial would cause him to deliver her to die. He would do nothing of the sort. So Joseph determined to conduct himself now by a higher rule than the law. Now, Chrysostom writes, grace was appearing, and this event would be the first of many “Tokens of exalted citizenship.” 1
Even in utero, the spirit of Jesus was reimagining the precepts of God.
King Ahaz in our Hebrew reading. He did NOT want a sign. In fact, the backdrop of that story has to do with Ahaz wanting to embrace the most expedient political solution to a complicated social and religious problem. And God desperately dares Ahaz to ask for a sign. Ahaz refuses, God sends one anyway. A young woman will give birth to a son, and his name will be Immanuel, God with us. But Ahaz wasn’t interested in that answer.
You must be careful in asking God for things, God may just give you something you do not want.
God gave Joseph a sign also, in the form of a dream. I’d be curious to hear from those of you who have vivid dream lives. There have been a few rare occasions when I have awoke from a dream and everything, the contents of the dream, the way my body felt, the notions I had about what I was supposed to do, they all pointed to the dream being from God. Carl Jung had language for this, he called the compensatory dream, dreams that are putting in work. What about you?
Joseph wanted to stay true to the Torah, he was a righteous man, but he also wanted to be kind to Mary. Into the midst of his weariness, her weariness, God gave him a sign. This situation, God would say in the dream, requires you to do the hard thing, which as is often the case, also the right thing.
Do you look for signs? Let me ask it this way, “What is the degree and manner of your superstition?” I have little doubt that all of you make most of your decisions with a good measure of reason and common sense. But what of the mystical? Superstition, comes from the Latin and old french, meaning to stand over, to stand outside the basics of a thing. Do you do that? And don’t mishear me, I am a Christian priest, I’m pretty superstitious. It’s what I do for a living.
Maybe it is your weariness that creates the context for God to work mystically in your life. Weariness makes you vulnerable to the fantastic.
God gets weary. Did you hear that? Weary in getting our attention. “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary human beings, that you weary my God also?
And in the Psalms,
O Lord God of hosts,
how long will you be angered
despite the prayers of your people?
You have fed them with the bread of tears;
you have given them bowls of tears to drink.
What has broken your heart this year? What has worn you out? A job that frustrates you, a family member that is sick, your own wavering health, a job that seems to take more joy than it remotely gives you, struggling to improve your performance and never quite feeling like you are achieving what you are supposed to achieve.
The child, Isaiah tells Ahaz and the House of David, His name will be Immanuel, which means God is with us. Jesus steps in your wavering confidence, your frustration with a broken life. God in fact is weary along with you. This is the dream that God implants in Isaiah’s mind, and it is the dream that he put into Joseph's mind. Mary will have a child and you will name him Yeshua, God saves. And he will be born into your weariness and walk with you.
I want to give you some homework this week, in these final cold days as we approach the Christmastide. And this is form of an Ignatian exercise, a version of the examen that occurs at the end of the day. Take a piece of paper and on one side, write something that is a struggle for you, and on the other side make an attempt to identify how God is present in that struggle. And then, as strange as this may sound, place it under your pillow as you go to sleep.
Gracious and loving God, visit us in our weariness, vulnerable to your fantastic grace. Give us sign that we too might reimagine your law, be tokens of your exalted citizenship.
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1 Chrysostom, The Gospel of Matthew, Homily 4.4
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