When God Draws Near

November 28, 1993

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There may just be an Advent theme here, lurking around, if we can break it loose, and polish it up. I grant it’s not the usual emphasis we think of when we think of an Advent theme--- it’s not the traditional emphasis---STILL, it’s part of the picture, and maybe, in a way, the foundation for all the rest.

The operative word for today is HOPE, but we need to be careful when we talk about HOPE. Hope in the Christian sense is a special kind of thing. It’s not fluffy optimism, or idle pipe dreams, or castles-in-the-air wistfulness. THAT’S NOT HOPE, at least not Christian hope.

Christian HOPE is a red-blooded confidence that emanates from an open-eyed realism. It’s a bare knuckles kind of belief, an assurance with spine, a faith that has faced the worst, frankly and honestly, and still believes the best. That’s Christian hope.

You can gloss over the fullness of it in Advent if you’re not careful, simply because we already know how the story comes out. Probably the most misguided approach to Advent we can make is the sugar-coated approach, and it’s so easy to do. To see it simply as sentimental and saccharine, as pastel preparation for a non-challenging Christ, as pious prelude for the pure, innocent Babe who never grows up... That, as Arnold Schwarzenegger would say, “That’s a big mistake.”

I have a friend in the ministry who preached an Advent sermon one year and entitled it, “The Trouble With Kittens”. Now you have to know that he’s an old huntin’ dog man and never one to get emotional over the positive attributes of felines, but he had a point. He used as a text an old Ogden Nash couplet: “The trouble with a kitten is that Eventually it becomes a cat.”

AND THE PARALLEL STINGS. The Kitten of Bethlehem became the Tiger of Jerusalem. Why else would they have bothered to crucify Him? The Advent that prepares us only for manger tranquility is more distortion than revelation.

Are we ready yet for the true HOPE of Advent? The word “advent”, of course, means “the coming”, “the coming to”. In Latin, “adventus”. Our word adventure comes from the same root. It’s not a syrupy word, it’s a strong word, a muscular word.... The connotation is one of excitement, tinged with hazard, danger, and racing pulse. AND NO WONDER...the coming of God to His world, downward mobility, if you please, the Divine condescension, the purposeful restraint of unlimited power....to share the common life with His people. What can you call that but adventure?

But see it whole. See it in its entirety.... THE BIG PICTURE. He came to redeem us, that’s our Gospel, but before we claim the gracious acceptance of the forgiving God, the God who removes our sin as far as the east is from the west....WE MUST FIRST SEE HIM AS THE GOD TO WHO THAT SIN IS LOATHSOME. That’s the ruthless honesty of Advent.

Before we can bask in the warmth of His mercy, we must first be chilled by the frozen stringency of His justice. We must know Him as JUDGE before we can know Him as Savior. We must know Him as ENEMY before we can know Him as FRIEND.

The God who draws near, the God of whom we sing so glibly, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” ...how easily the words form on our lips.... this Advent God....WHAT IS IT REALLY LIKE TO HAVE HIM AROUND? What would it really be like suddenly to have Him on our hands? Kitten...or Tiger? Maybe it’s worth thinking about before we get too close to Christmas Day.

Our Scripture lesson for this morning. It doesn’t tell the whole thing, but it does tell something important. In itself it’s hardly an Advent story. It’s an Old Testament story...and an EARLY Old Testament story at that---quite frankly, a crude, primitive, unsophisticated, militaristic story that comes out of a time when religion was shaped by geography, and one’s concept of God was narrowly nationalistic.

But don’t let it fool you. Don’t let its rustic nature keep you from catching its truth, an Advent truth: HAVING GOD AROUND IS NOT ALWAYS A COMFORTABLE EXPERIENCE.

Go back with me to the setting. We’re in the time of Samuel. Remember your Old Testament history? This is post-conquest, and pre-monarchy. The days of the Judges are over, but there is still no king.

The Hebrews and the Philistines are at war as usual. They were always fighting inn those days. It was sort of an ancient semitic Hatfield-McCoy relationship, or Magic-Heat, or Florida-Florida State...THEY WERE CONSTANTLY AT IT. Sometimes it went one way, sometimes the other.

But this time, DOOM and DESTRUCTION for the Good Guys. The Philistines crash through, with unstoppable force. There’s a rout of the Hebrew army, almost an annihilation.... dead bodies everywhere, survivors fleeing to the rear. Hophni and Phineas the 2 wicked sons of Eli, the high priest, are slain on the field of battle, and the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred, the most holy possession the Hebrews owned.... THE ARK ITSELF, representing nothing less than the presence of Almighty God in their midst---they had taken it out on the battlefield, thinking it would assure victory---

THE HOLY ARK IS CAPTURED BY THE ENEMY. Nothing worse could even be conceived.

The Philistines, pagan and insensitive, haul it off bodily, carry it away as booty into captivity. It’s the absolute end of the world for God’s chosen people, and the Philistines chortle in their joy.But now the comic part---Well, comic if you consider comeuppance comic, comic if you like banana peels and pratfalls comic depending on your perspective---No sooner does the caravan bearing the Ark get to Ashdod than the trouble breaks out. Their chortling turns to choking.

They place the Ark in the Temple at Ashdod, in the Temple of Dagon, their chief god. They place it in a subservient position, at Dagon’s feet, where their own deity can gloat over the glorious victory.

But the next morning, when the priests come in to check things out, they find the statue of Dagon smashed to smithereens. It has toppled to the floor in the night and lies broken in pieces before the Ark. What kind of manners is this for a guest?

And that’s just for starters. Next a plague breaks out and the town erupts with boils all over their bodies....AND THEN...the rats. It’s that Hebrew God.

The politicians, the clergymen, the health department, the academicians, the courthouse crowd, and I suppose even the members of the Chamber of Commerce are so terrified by this strange thing they have brought to town that they ship the Ark off to Gath just to get it out of their hair.

BUT IT HAPPENS AGAIN. The same identical phenomenon repeats itself in Gath, so those city fathers send it to Ekron. AND ROUND AND ROUND IT DOES. 3 different times it happens. From Ashdod to Gath to Ekron. It sounds almost like a double play in baseball... Tinker to Evers to Chance.

Everybody passes it to somebody else. Nobody wants it. Nobody knows what to do with it. WHAT CAN WE DO WITH THIS THING, they say.... It’s too hot to handle; it’s shattering the security of our communal life....GET IT OUT OF HERE.

So finally in chastened desperation, they strap it to a cow, and point it back in the direction of Shiloh, and turn it loose across the mountain for the Hebrews to retrieve.

Well, you say, it’s an unsophisticated story.... Sure it is, just bristling with crudities and improbabilities...We don’t have a corresponding Philistine account to give us a more balanced picture.

But really now...DO YOU LAUGH OR DO YOU CRY? Is it just humorous, or is it somehow, at the same time, painfully real?

Transpose it, modernize it a bit, and what do you have? ARE YOU INVOLVED IN ANY ACTIVITIES THAT WOULD BE REDUCED TO SHAMBLES IF THE PRESENCE OF THE REAL GOD WERE SUDDENLY TO BE MANIFESTED?

Are there things going on in your schedule that are discordant with what HE is and what HE stands for? What if God suddenly were to show up unannounced one day at home or office? Are there actions, nor attitudes, or thoughts that wouldn’t stand up very well under His relentless scrutiny? It’s an Advent theme we’d do well not to gloss over.... AND BEFORE WE GET CARRIED AWAY IN THE FRENZIED RUSH OF CHRISTMAS PREPARATION before we get choked up with the nostalgia of Christmas glow, before we get too syrupy about welcoming the cuddly, undemanding “baby” Jesus, maybe we should spend some time considering what it means to allow God a place in the heart.

TWO COMPLEMENTARY THINGS, AND THEY’RE  BOTH ESSENTIAL.

1) It means in the first place, doesn’t it, a recurring recognition of God’s TRANSCENDANCE. That’s a word we don’t use as much as our grandfathers did. Some of the great minds in earlier generations in our country, people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau liked to call themselves “transcendentalists”. It’s a word with an honorable history.

In theological terms, it refers to God’s “otherness”, to what makes God different. It refers to His power and might, to His majesty, to His glory, to what distinguishes Creator from creature. It refers to the unsullied purity of His love, which burns and cleanses, Malachi says, “like a refiner’s fire.” You don’t snicker in the presence of this. To know the real God you must first know His TRANSCENDANCE.

There is a Lutheran church in Denmark, I am told, which is notable principally because it houses a statue of Christ carved from wood by the famous artist, Thorwaldsen. The statue is larger than life size. Christ stands at the front of the sanctuary, just off center, inside the chancel rail, with head bowed and arms unpraised in blessing. The bowed head and lifted arms hide the face. You can’t see the face of Christ from the front when you stand back and look at it. You can’t see it from the side. Even if you walk all around the statue, there is no point from which the face is visible. There is only one perspective, one place in the Church from which it can be seen. To see the face of Christ in Thorwaldsen’s representation, you must kneel at His feet and look up.

They say there is something palpably gripping about the experience of doing that. Maybe it’s partly the position you must be in, but it’s more than that, they say.

IT’S THE EYES. The artist, through inspiration and his own genius, has rendered them so that they seem almost to look right through you. They’re not unkind, they’re not cold, but there is an austerity, a dignity, an otherness, an unmistakable sense of moral purity there that penetrates your very being and shames the dinginess of your soul. Better not look into those eyes, they say, if you want to hold on to your old way of life.

Simon Peter knew what those eyes could do to you. That night in the courtyard, following the betrayal, right after he had vigorously denied even being acquainted with Jesus— the pressure of public opinion will make you do strange things— Matthew reports it.... the old rooster crowed, and the hollowness of his previous boast hit him.... THEN THEY LED THE LORD PAST to the next stage of trumped-up justice. And as He went by, Jesus looked at him. That’s all, JUST LOOKED AT HIM. Peter must have carried to his grace the recollection of that gaze that pierced his heart.

It’s the transcendence we so often miss in our religious life. Even in spiritual matters, familiarity can breed a kind of contempt.

We can become “chummy” with God. Can there be a worse heresy? We can think of him as a kind of celestial Grandfather, avuncular and pudgy, doting and always good natured... Or even more heretical, we can think of Him as a sort of heavenly Bellhop, whom we can manipulate if we do it right, or control, or program by ringing for Him when we need Him. That’s a more dangerous form of blasphemy than outright denial. It puts ME at the center, ME in the limelight, ME as the pivot around which everything revolves, and makes God nothing but an adjunct to my comfort and wellbeing, which is about as removed as it’s possible to get from authentic Biblical religion.

God is NOT my Co-Pilot, God is NOT my Business partner....Somebody wrote a book awhile back and entitled it, “How God and I made a Million Dollars on the Stock Market”....There was no suggestion that the partners split the profits 50-50.

God is not any of these. God is GOD---that’s the Biblical understanding.... holy and mighty....TRANSCENDANT...and for us to live in any kind of genuine sense of living we must begin by acknowledging that relationship.

Isn’t it the Biblical pattern, over and over? Jacob would never have gotten a new name, and a new future, and a reconciliation with the brother he had grievously wronged if he hadn’t first wrestled all night long on the riverbank with his unrelenting conscience.

Paul could never have written that rhapsody of love, the 13th Chapter of First Corinthians, if he hadn’t first had to fight the battle of his unworthiness before the purity of God----“O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?”

And even Jesus Himself was not able fully to say, “It is finished”, until after He had said, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

There’s an Advent theme here all right, lurking in the shadows. It’s a word of stringency, that reminds us we’re not playing games. The God who comes, the God who draws near is not always comfortable to have around. Until we face that honestly, there really is no HOPE.

2) But now, the other side. We’ve only come halfway. Thank God we’ve only come halfway. Thank God for the rest of the story. Transcendence is real, but if there were ONLY transcendence, how cold there by GOSPEL?

The flip side of Transcendence is IMMANENCE...I-M-M-A-N-E-N-C-E. It’s another of those

unnecessarily big theological words that really stands for something remarkably intimate—GOD’S CLOSENESS.

If transcendence emphasizes what distinguishes Creator from creature, immanence emphasizes what UNITES us. If transcendence separates, immanence JOINS---the story’s incomplete without both. The otherness of God---the identity of God. the distance of God---the nearness of God...majesty---mercy; power---persuasiveness; glory---grace.

It’s probably best not to try to think of it in spatial terms. It’s all wrapped up together. The MIRACLE is that this God who made us, this God who formed us out of the dust of the earth and breathed the breath of His own life into us... this God who is so far above us that we can only begin to catch a glimpse of the outskirts of His ways.... this God whom we dare not presume to whittle down to manageable size, has deigned, as it were, TO WHITTLE HIMSELF DOWN TO MANAGEABLE SIZE, and come to us in terms we can touch.

He has not in the process diluted His transcendence, He is still the King of Glory. We are not off the hook with respect to moral demand. We are still accountable, still responsible, still subject to an unremitting demand. The coming of Jesus didn’t unhinge the 10 Commandments one whit.

But there is something new now, a new element in the story, a new twist in the plot which the Divine Dramatist has stuck in. WE ARE NOT ALL BY OURSELVES ANY LONGER IN THE TIME OF EVALUATION. We have an ADVOCATE who represents us. In the Spanish translation the word is “abogado”. It literally means a LAWYER. We have an abogado with us now, Jesus Christ the righteous, who stands by our side, all the way to the end, in personal, intercessory identification.

I saw Ray Cozzen this past week. I don’t know how many of you know Ray. He brought his packet in for the Stewardship campaign and I had a chance to visit with him a few minutes. Ray’s not well now. He hasn’t been able to get to Church much. But seeing him brought back a vivid memory from a few years back.

Ray and Barbara moved here from Virginia in early 1988. This was their chosen retirement spot where they planned to enjoy the Golden Years. They joined the Church, never missed a Sunday....sat back there on the left as I look at it from here. About 6 months after that, it was discovered that Barbara had a tumor. It proved to be malignant and fast growing. I visited her in the hospital and over time got to know her pretty well.... a lovely person, a courageous person, and as I discovered, a person of deep faith.

She said to me one day in a weak voice, “I’ve been doing a lot of praying lately. This isn’t the way I wanted it to turn out. I hate it for Ray as much as for me. But I’m ready to go if I must. I don’t want to die, but I know I have to sometime. I’ve had a good life: I’ve been married to a good man, and I believe in God.” Then she quoted that line from the Messiah that comes from the Book of Job: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

It was the last time I spoke with her.....When I went to see her the next time, she was unconscious in the ICU...I can remember it as if it were yesterday....

I went into the little cubicle and watched her lying there, struggling to breathe, tubes attached, body almost motionless. I thought of the faith she had shared with me, the courage of her actions, the hope that motivated her. AND THEN SOMETHING ALMOST MYSTICAL BEGAN TO HAPPEN.

I said a brief prayer by her bedside, and as I finished, her nurse came in and began to attend her...a male nurse...his name was Joe---I saw the tag on his shirt. He checked tubes and adjusted dials. He moved quickly and efficiently from one thing to another, measuring fluids, keeping records, doing all the things that have to be done with a critical patient.

I marveled as I watched him. There was more going on than just biology. He worked deftly, but with a sense of extraordinary care, and I think it would not be stretching it to say....love.

When he finished with the apparati, he turned to the simple touch of flesh. He moistened her lips, wiped her brow, and placed his hand on hers. HOW STRANGELY MOVING IT WAS. I don’t think she was conscious of his presence, but I felt almost as if I were intruding on an intimate, spiritual trust.

They were together, dependent on each other, no secrets between them, as close almost as man and wife, she near the end commit in faith, and he, only beginning, but committed in service.

They owned no common past; their separate roads had never crossed before, but they shared at that moment an intense present that bound them together as tightly as any vow.

AND IT HIT ME---really 2 things....You don’t know whose hands will stroke from you the final bubbles of life. That alone should make you kinder to strangers.

But then the larger truth dawned. As I slipped out of the unit subdued and touched, I realized---Maybe in a way what I had just witnessed, written on a larger scale, is the drama of the human situation.

Advent---the presence of the Ark that disrupts---that’s part of the story. BUT IT’S ONLY HALF.

Barbara and Joe is the other half. Into a sick, dying world, a world fully deserving of the wrath of God’s transcendent justice, comes one from God who with infinite care ministers in loving patience and stands by us to the end.

The immanence of transcendence is called INCARNATION. That’s why we have hope. He draws near, not ultimately to destroy, but to make whole. Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.