sermon excerpts: "God with Us" - Isaiah 7: 10-16

... I’m going to tell a secret that I hope will not shatter your belief in the Christian tradition and understanding of the Messiah. Isaiah was not speaking of Jesus the Christ when he made his prophecy here. The young women who is with child and bearing a son? One of Ahaz’s wives. The child? Hezekiah, who not like his father, would be born and would grow to be a noble and caring leader.

Which is reassuring that the hope and promise of our children will lead us into the right path. Such is the trust that we’ve place in our children today – that they will know right from wrong. God is with us, in the next generation. We put our faith and hope in the next generation, in people that are not yet born, or not yet known to us.

It seems that it is in the future, in the time to come, that our saviour comes. Even for one who would know right from wrong, the ideal is always elsewhere. Such seeking is magnified when we assign messianic expectations to such words. But Isaiah was just stating the promise and hope in a son to exceed his father. And don’t all parents want that for their children? Not to make the same mistakes, to be better than inherited shortcomings, to build upon and succeed beyond what the first generations could not do?

Which might be why Ahaz is so reluctant to hear what it was that Isaiah was going to say. Maybe he liked the idea of a saviour, of deliverance from enemies and oppression, but only in the abstract. Because in reality, such a promise would be mean drastic change and upheaval in his life. He governed through power and might, using side deals and relying on the greed and self-preservation of others to get what he wanted. He did not have the principles of justice and fairness in mind, because he did not want to be treated like everyone else. He was the king; he deserved special treatment and special privileges. To have God with us would mean that he would be exposed as the villain that he was, a sham, a puppet of corruption and a self-centered power monger.

... So what if Hezekiah wasn’t divinely conceived, wasn’t born in a stable under a star? That doesn’t diminish the worth of who he was, or the religious reforms he brought in to undo the work his father Ahaz. King Hezekiah put the kingdom of Judah back on the right track. It’s a comfort to know that a normal, ordinary person like him was able to do such great work. He was not the Christ, not the Saviour. He didn’t have miraculous powers or abilities. Just like each of us, living our lives as best we can, doing as much as we can for as long as we can, trusting that God is with us.

If that’s the lesson that our faith can give, that all our weeks in Sunday School, the efforts of our parents, of our community, is that God is with us. In our life, in our triumphs, in our sorrows, in celebration, in grief, in the face of change on the way, from the beginning, to beyond our end, we carry the name Immanuel: God with us. Our New Creed is based on this notion – we are not alone, God is with us. Thanks be to God.