First Sunday of Christmas
State College, PA
Some years ago I was talking to a friend and heard someone else in the room say, “well, they got themselves into this trouble and now they’ll need to get themselves out.” They created this problem by their own irresponsibility or bad judgment and now they need to fix it themselves. It would be wrong to bail them out. I wasn’t part of that conversation, so I let it pass, but I found myself thinking later, “what if God had taken this attitude toward us? What if He had left us to get ourselves out of the consequences of our sins?” And, of course, the answer is that if He had done so we would have been utterly and completely lost, because getting ourselves out of this situation is beyond us. This is what we are celebrating in the Christmas season, that God is committed to rescuing His people from their sins. He has not said about us, “well, they got themselves into this trouble – which is true – and now they need to get themselves out.”
If we’ve been in the Church for any length of time we know this and have heard it over and over through the years. But that message gets drowned out by all the other things we hear and by all the pressures of just dealing with life. So, because of our forgetfulness, we need to regularly call to mind what God has done for His people throughout history, as the author does in verse 7: “I will recount all the steadfast love of the Lord, the praises of the Lord, according to all that the Lord has granted us, and the great goodness to the house of Israel.” The author is doing here what the psalmists do over and over. He’s remembering, in God’s presence, the things that God has done to redeem His people.
This is one of the things we’re doing when we use the Psalms as tools for prayer. Many of them do the very thing Isaiah is doing here, recounting “the steadfast love of the Lord.” But our dullness often gets in the way of this. We start to pray Psalm 105, “O give thanks to the Lord, call on his name, make known his deeds among the people,” (v. 1), but when the psalmist starts recounting these things our eyes glaze over and our mind starts to wander. We’ve heard all these things before.
At this point, we need to pause and take ourselves in hand. The problem isn’t with God’s Word; the problem is with us and our forgetfulness. So the thing to do is to stop and refocus. I often use this prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours: “Lord, open my lips to praise your holy name. Cleanse my heart of any worthless, evil or distracting thoughts. Give me the wisdom and love necessary to pray… with attention, reverence and devotion. Father, let my prayer be heard in your presence, for it is offered through Christ our Lord.” This prayer helps me to pull away from my distractions and back to what I am doing. It also reminds me that I need the Lord’s help as I enter His presence.
The importance of remembering as a spiritual discipline comes up again and again in Scripture. In Deuteronomy 8 the Israelites are warned against becoming proud when they do well in this world, and verse 18 urges them to “remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.” Knowing our tendency to be proud of our strength and ability, the author is Ecclesiastes says “Remember your creator in the days of your youth” (12:1). And Paul urges his disciple Timothy to “Remember Jesus Christ,” (2:8) knowing how easily we become distracted by other things in the course of our lives despite regular involvement in church and even in the work of ministering to others, as Timothy was doing.
So, the first problem is our forgetfulness. But there’s more; because of our sinfulness and our tendency to turn away from God, we are constantly in need of His mercy. Verse 8 says, “For he said, ‘Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely.’” But they did deal falsely, as Isaiah has been pointing out again and again in this book. And yet God has been persistently merciful and forgiving despite the rebellion and wandering of His people.
This is why we have this phrase in the Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Even if you have a busy day and can’t do anything else, you can lift your heart to God using the Lord’s Prayer, and it’s not a bad idea to include it in your daily prayers, both morning and evening. Eastern Orthodox spirituality makes extensive use of the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy,” or “have mercy on me, a sinner.” The order for night prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours begins with a time of self examination, asking where we have sinned against God during the day that is now ending. All of these remind us of our daily need of mercy and grace.
Contrary to what some churches have taught, especially in the past two centuries, God’s forgiveness is not dependent on our remembering and confessing every sin. Paul says that we are “standing in grace” (Romans 5), we are surrounded by His loving and merciful care. It’s probably not possible for us to remember every sin we’ve committed even in the last couple of days, and our acceptance before God is not based on this anyway. But the Church, throughout the centuries, has recognized the importance of entering God’s presence confessing our sins and need of forgiveness, as we do at the beginning of the service. It’s not a bad idea to begin your daily prayer time with the order of confession that we use in worship.
It’s common in many North American churches to think that theology doesn’t matter and that it’s divisive. I was taught this as a new Christian. But it’s important to know that bad theology does harm to our spiritual lives. I knew one man who was obsessed with remembering and confessing every sin and lived in fear that maybe he’d forgotten something (which I’m sure he had). He’d been taught that God only forgives sins that we’ve confessed, and it got to the point where he had to be hospitalized for depression. I also know of a man, one of the leaders in my former denomination, who would not pray the Lord’s Prayer because he believed he had been fully sanctified and no longer committed sins. He was very public in claiming this and lived with a complete lack of awareness of his need to receive mercy from God every day and to offer thanks to God for His patience. He thought he’d moved beyond that point, although I suspect many who knew him well had their doubts.
So, we’re forgetful and we sin repeatedly despite our best efforts. But there’s one more thing in this passage in Isaiah: because we so often suffer in this world, we need to know that God is not indifferent and has even entered compassionately into our suffering. You can see this in the translation we read from earlier in the service, but it comes across more clearly in some others. For example, the English Standard Version reads, “In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.” And here is The Message: “In all their troubles, he was troubled, too. He didn’t send someone else to help them. He did it himself, in person.” God Himself is troubled in all our troubles; He cares about the things that hurt us even to the extent of entering into our suffering.
We need to know this, because suffering can be devastating to our faith. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian and the former prime minister of Holland, said this: “When for the first time in our life the cross with its full weight is laid upon our shoulders, the first effect is that it makes us numb and dazed and causes all knowledge of God to be lost.” When this happens, it doesn’t mean that God is no longer with us or that we no longer belong to Him. I read a book by one of my former professors talking about his daughter’s death in a car accident. He said at the funeral one of his co-workers said to him, “Jesus is your rock,” and he responded: “well, right now that rock feels very slippery.” He hadn’t lost his faith; he was suffering from intense, overwhelming pain. He was experiencing what Abraham Kuyper described, the initial impact of the full weight of the cross.
Pope John Paul II was a sportsman in his early life and loved to spend time hiking, canoeing and kayaking with his friends. But as he got older he became increasingly frail physically and was no longer able to do the things he loved to do; even walking was difficult and painful for him. He meditated on his new situation and said: “I understood that I have to lead Christ’s Church into this third millennium by prayer; by various programs, but I saw that this is not enough: she must be led by suffering” (Witness to Hope, p. 721). Rather than deciding that he was no longer fit to lead the Church, he saw the importance of becoming a model of suffering in Christ’s name: “The Pope has to be attacked, the Pope has to suffer, so that every family and the world may see that there is… a higher Gospel: the Gospel of suffering” (ibid.).
In this he was following Jesus, who came to suffer. On the cross, He entered into the depths of our darkness and alienation when He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He didn’t observe our suffering from a safe distance and say, “oh, that’s a shame.” No, “In all [our] affliction he was afflicted.”
That’s what we are celebrating in this Christmas season, that the Word was made flesh and entered into our human existence in every way apart from sin. We’re remembering all that God has done to redeem us, which reminds us that we are sinners in need of mercy and grace. And we’re reminded that God is not indifferent to our weakness and suffering in this life. I don’t think it’s at all strange that Christmas day is immediately followed by the Feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr. Then the 28th is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the children murdered by Herod in his attempt to destroy Jesus. And the 29th is the Commemoration of Thomas Becket, who also died as a martyr. This is the world Jesus entered into at His birth, a world of overwhelming pain and sorrow and of deliberate evil. This is the world He came to redeem: “in his love and in his pity he redeemed them.” Isaiah says this looking back on the history of Israel, but it also points forward to the events we are celebrating now. May God enable us to seek Him and to grow in our knowledge of Him in the coming year.
