Sermon for Advent 4

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Advent 4 (Year C)

Isaiah 7.10-16; Matthew 1.18-25

Among the things that are haunting me is... How... Trump? How Trump? I probably don't need to say any more. I'm speaking about the President Elect of the USA and how he got to be that. Well, one line among the commentators is that some took Trump literally, and some took him seriously.

• Those who took him literally saw a man of misogyny, racism, treason indeed and voted against him.
• Those who took him seriously heard him as a change-maker, and they voted for him, as they wanted change above all else.

Personally, I doubt that works (though it would be nice in some ways if it were that). But! But it's a good distinction to make - when it comes to today's readings.

Let's be clear about the difference.

• To take a statement literally is to understand each of the words in their simplest, plainest most obvious sense. Nothing can 'stand for' something else. If you say 'it's literally raining cats and dogs' you can only mean furry animals are falling from the sky, woofing and miaowing as they fall.
• On the other hand, to take a statement seriously is to look at it as a whole, and think about what the speaker meant in the whole string of words. So someone can't literally have meant 'it's literally raining cats and dogs'. I take that statement seriously as meaning: 'it's raining very heavily'.

There are of course Christians - many millions of them perhaps - who think (or think they think) that to take the Bible seriously, you must take the Bible literally. A literal and a serious reading of the Bible are the same thing, they'd say. But today is one of the many occasions when they are – not to be unduly diplomatic about it – proved wrong.

Take the Gospel. Matthew tells us that Jesus' birth is to fulfil Isaiah's prophecy

'the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel'.

Literally - taking this prophecy literally - this does not happen. This passage is clear. The child is, we know, called Jesus. Not Emmanuel. If you say: 'But surely his other name (middle name, nickname, whatever) was Emmanuel', I'd say: When? Where is the evidence? When is Jesus ever called Emmanuel?' You'll have guessed the answer is never. If we try to read Matthew today literally, we tie ourselves in knots. The text denies us. The prophecy is of a child called Emmanuel; The fulfilment is a child called Jesus.

But it gets worse for the literalists. Go back to the first reading, and you'll see that Isaiah actually says 'the young woman is with child and shall bear a son'. Young woman, not virgin. There is no implication here of a virgin birth. This is because the first reading we have looks to the classic Hebrew text. But Matthew was almost certainly looking instead to an ancient Greek translation. In that Greek translation, the word for virgin is indeed found. But the people that want to take the Bible literally (or think they want to take the Bible literally) tend not to value the Greek translation, but stick to the Hebrew. So they have another problem.

And such problems as these happen time and time again, whenever anyone one tries to take the Bible literally. What about: 'If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off'. What about: 'Leave the dead to bury the dead?' Which Christian community has ever taken these phrases 'literally'?

So let us take today's gospel not literally but seriously. That the name of the Christ-child, of Jesus, is also Emmanuel, or Immanuel (Immanuel gets us closer to the underlying Hebrew). Immanu El means literally 'With us Gd'. But biblical Hebrew does not have a word for is. So if you want to say 'Gd is with us', what you say is 'with us, Gd'. So indeed Immanuel means 'Gd is with us'.

Gd is with us. There is no sentence in the history of language and of languages that is more worthy of being taken seriously. And it's perfectly natural that we attend to this now.

Where are we? There's a lovely (I think it's lovely) Irish expression (from the Irish language): 'to be in the mouth of Christmas'. And we are 'in the mouth of Christmas'. Almost there. On the point of. And with today's gospel, the sense that Gd is with us is intimately linked to Christ's birth, to Christmas. But it's worth remembering that for Isaiah too it was possible, natural, encouraged to think that 'Gd is with us'. It's not an idea that enters into history with Jesus, as if all others thought that Gd was uninterested, distant, too busy with His own majesty.

I'm going to go further. I'd say it can be said that the conviction that Gd is with us is a theme that runs naturally between the Old and New Testaments. It runs through the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Genesis. Think about that evocative phrase that in Eden Gd was walking in the garden in the cool of the day. You can say that's a crude idea about Gd that we need to get over. Or you can say it's dropping the hint, right at the beginning of the Bible, that Gd is with us. Of course, Gd is not like us. Gd does not benefit from taking an early evening stroll. But Gd chooses to do what is necessary to come to us, as if one us, to communicate to us, to be with us.

Think of the call of Abraham (or Abram as he then was). The text says simply 'And Gd said to Abram'. Nothing more complicated than that. Think of Moses. We are told 'Gd spoke to him face to face, as one speaks to a friend'. And so on, and so on. Jews and Christians, sharing this biblical heritage, take heart time and time again from hearing that Gd is with us. Things go wrong when we think 'Gd is with us' means 'and not with them'. No. Surely, we are meant to hear and proclaim that Gd is with us, human beings.

Gd is with us human beings. We need to hear this now. Even more than Trump, another thing is haunting me. Aleppo.

The whole of the catastrophe which is the violence and militarism and the lies in and around Syria. And Aleppo quite specifically. In the unspeakable horrors that are taking place there – unfilmable, let us be clear about that; any shocking footage we see on our screens is but the bits which are safe to be shown – in these current horrors, we are reminded that it is not natural in the sense of obvious to think that Gd is with us, with humanity. It seems that Gd has left humanity to it. And indeed it seems that our bit of humanity has left that bit of humanity to it. As one commentator has put it: Let us never again say 'never again'. For we don't mean it. We let it happen again and again.

Now, I don't know quite what 'letting it happen' means in this context – quite how we could have stopped it. There may some myth of the West's omnipotence revealing itself here. As if we could solve all problems with a bomb here and a stern word there. Nevertheless, how can we not feel not only grief but also shame, as the news of yet more children killed – they are not just dying; they are being killed – comes in.

I have no answers. What I am saying is that to believe that Gd is with us can be an act of defiance, the defiance we need – and are going to need in abundance

• in the face of those who want us either to resign ourselves ('there's absolutely nothing I can do, so I won't even pay attention...')
• and in the face of the calls to vengeance ('we've got to teach them a lesson; ultimately only violence works...').

So I am quite simply going to invite us all to say it now.

Not shout it, we can say it softly. It's more a prayer than a battle-cry. Say it with me.

Gd is with us human beings.

Gd is with us human beings.

Gd is with us human beings.

Amen.