Hear the word of the Lord, from the prophet Isaiah:
The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned.
You have enlarged the nation
and increased their joy;
they rejoice before you
as people rejoice at the harvest,
as warriors rejoice
when dividing the plunder.
For as in the day of Midian’s defeat,
you have shattered
the yoke that burdens them,
the bar across their shoulders,
the rod of their oppressor.
Every warrior’s boot used in battle
and every garment rolled in blood
will be destined for burning,
will be fuel for the fire.
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the greatness of his government and peace
there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne
and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
with justice and righteousness
from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the LORD Almighty
will accomplish this.Isaiah 9:2-7
///
Today we welcome the King, friends. Christ is born—forever born. Born again in the world. Born again in our hearts.
Alleluia.
Isaiah identifies him, this One—just a child—saying that all authority and power rest upon his soft shoulders; he is called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,” and “of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end” (Is. 9:6-7).
The paradox splits the mind and rends the heart, but there it is, the very center of our faith: the Vulnerable One, the One Born of the Virgin—he and no other is our God, God in flesh, our hope divine, surrounded by animals, lying in a manger, weak and in need, hungry for milk and love, utterly dependent.
And that is what pushes the mind so—that it is before him, the Child, that all things in heaven and on earth and under the earth bow low in reverence; that it is he, this One, who is called Salvator Mundi, the Savior of the World; that it is he and no other who is our God.
Our holy human God. The fate of the world rests on him. And this is good news.
Alleluia.
///
It has been a year of disruption over in our little corner of the world. In conversation with folks across the course of the year, I found myself often saying that while I have had more painful stretches of ministry—when the agony went bone-deep and it felt like the nights of weeping might never end—I have never had a year that demanded more frequent sudden changes.
Disruption is the exact right word. So much disruption. Just when I thought I had my bearings, the landscape would shift yet again and a sense of disorientation—which became unwelcomingly familiar as the year progressed—would descend. On very many of these bewildering days, I simply could not see beyond the next moment, the next meeting, the next you-name-it. We talk glibly and altogether too romantically about “living in the present.” Sometimes that’s the only place you can live—when there is simply no time to dwell on the past, for the demand of the present is so breathlessly urgent, and the future is so maddeningly uncertain. You learn to walk by what lights you have. Too often, such lights are much less than you would like.
The people walking in darkness indeed. But where is the great light?
I gained a new appreciation for the doctrine of providence this year—a difficult doctrine, no doubt, but inescapably biblical and full of consolation. John Webster is most helpful:
Providence is knowledge of God, and known as God is known, in the act of faith … [and] faith is faith in the omnipresence of God to whom all occasions are seasons of mercy, faith in providence is knowledge of what will be true on all occasions … Without knowing our future course, faith in providence confesses that God orders our time.
Elsewhere Webster invokes Barth who teased out a doctrine of providence under the rubric of God’s “fatherly lordship” over all things; that is, providence is “faithful reason’s receiving of the consolation that, from before the foundation of the world and through all its course, God is for us”—which teaches us, he says, to live in time in the right way, full of confident trust. Biblically speaking, according to Webster (and I think he’s right) providence is not fate—nothing mechanistic about it. It is, rather, the conviction that our omnibenevolent and deeply personal God is getting God’s way. And God’s way is good. For everyone. Always.
The government shall rest upon his shoulders …
During one particularly dark episode this year—one in which I was, quite honestly, struggling just to breathe—a friend of mine sat across the desk from me in my office at church and said, “Andrew, I wonder what Jesus knows about you that you don’t (yet) know about yourself, that he knows that now is the exact right time for you to go through what you are going through …?”
Now that is the kind of question that I love: gloriously and deliberately circumlocutionary, witty and wise. Yes, what? What do you know, Lord?
If I had hoped for an answer to that question, the days and weeks ahead would surely have disappointed. But I think I know enough now at least to know that there are very many questions in the world that are salubrious not for the answers they provide but for the comforting light and nourishment that the very asking of them gives. “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart,” said the poet Rilke to an aspiring young colleague, “and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers,” he advises, “which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Good advice, if challenging, not least because our hunger for certitude is so great. And it is not wrong, this hunger. We live by very many certitudes—gravity, the general predictability of the seasons, the cycles of evening and morning. Such things as these orient us in the world, in time. They make life livable—these things of which we do not need to guess. Praise God for certitude, blessed certitude.
But there is much in the world that falls firmly outside the realm of certitude—more, in fact, than falls within it. These are the “secret things” of which Moses spoke (Dt. 29:29), and they do not belong to us. They belong to God, held deep within his private counsel. “Who has known the mind of the Lord” (Rom. 11:34), after all, is a rhetorical question for which the answer is not “me” and whose end, if followed properly, is not understanding but rather—and much better—pure doxology (vv. 35-36). We do well to remind ourselves of these things.
So, what does Jesus know about Andrew …? About any of us …?
///
I held that question for a great deal of the year—lived it, as Rilke advised. It did in fact provide me with some light—if not the “great light” spoken of by Isaiah, light all the same.
Or was it?
What I finally concluded was that what Jesus knows about Andrew is not all that interesting. Only that he knows certain things. That is what is of interest. And more—what he knows has far less to do with me—or any of us—than it does with him. God is the protagonist of his story. We are bit-players. What he knows about us is first and primarily what he knows about himself and his aims for us.
And this is light.
Not that we are unimportant—not at all. It is for us that he came, for us that he lived and died, for us that so great a salvation was accomplished. The pro me (“for me”) of the gospel can never be abandoned. God’s work is directed towards us, for God is love and love is not self-seeking (1 Cor. 13:5).
It’s just that he doesn’t really consult us, and the salvation he gives is not really—not ever—based on our readiness to receive it. It happens as a pure gift, as an act of divine fiat—a gracious order, originating from God and God alone, given from on high. Isaiah says that it is the people walking in darkness who have seen a great light. We might ask: just why are these people walking in darkness? The answer is ready at hand:
Consult God’s instruction and the testimony of warning. If anyone does not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God. Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness. (Is. 8:20-22)
Let the reader understand: these people are in darkness because they chose it. They cursed God and their curses plunged their world into a suffocating spiritual midnight. And then—just like that, seemingly out of nowhere—a light dawned upon them.
They didn’t want it. They certainly didn’t deserve it. But they got it anyway. The word for that is grace, and it is the lub-dub of the biblical story.
It was that sense of undeservedness, of pure grace, that unmade me many times over this year, as the Steady Hand guided us through each disruption and—not only that—used them to bring us into genuine newness. “We went through fire and water, and you brought us to a place of abundance …” said the psalmist (Ps. 66:12). Or—to bring it back to Isaiah—“… you have shattered the yoke that burdens them …” (Is. 9:4). “You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy …” (v. 3).
Which is just like our God—nothing wasted. Blessed be. How often it is the case in the biblical record that what looks like the end of the world is but in fact the beginning of a new world—one that God is making. He brings our little kingdoms to an end that he might establish his own. “Of the greatness of his government and his peace there shall be no end” (v. 7).
His government, his world—not ours.
And better—his government, his world—than ours.
Better.
Always better.
Forever better.
///
The thing that takes some time to learn is that you can’t muscle your way into it. You have to receive it. And often the receiving is very hard—precisely because the gift of God’s kingdom comes wrapped in forms we may not have expected, untrained in the mysteries of the kingdom as we are.
A friend of mine had a dream this year. In the dream, he saw a great storm coming over the mountaintop, barreling towards his house. He began rebuking the onrushing tempest until the voice of God spoke to him from amid the menacing clouds:
“I am the storm.”
Dream ended.
I thought often about my friend’s dream this year—how difficult and how true it is—and then more or less gasped when I ran into a poem of Rilke’s I had never read before. After describing the coming of a great storm upon the landscape—eerily similar in tone to my friend’s dream—the poet writes:
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
Is it possible that in our attempts to control our lives, we in fact make our lives smaller, more cramped, less livable? We think ourselves masters of our fates and captains of our souls, but are we? Control, I am more convinced than ever, is an illusion. Most—not all, but most—of what happens to us in our lives is beyond our control. Believing otherwise is a snare—and perhaps more than a snare, a dangerous toxin that poisons our hearts and diminishes our lives. The life of faith is not a matter of conquering our lives, but, in a manner of speaking, to be conquered by the purposes of God the Ever-Greater, whose will for us is good even if—much more often than we would like—it comes to us cloaked in darkness and mystery, concealed in tempest and storm.
///
Isaiah was insistent upon these very things. Again and again his prophetic oracles assert that it is precisely what looks like not-God (Assyrian armies, to name but one example) that carries within it the good purposes of their promise-making, promise-keeping God. The conviction gives Isaiah courage to taunt the nations: “Devise your strategy, but it will be thwarted; propose your plan, but it will not stand, for God is with us” (8:10), and to direct and direct and direct again the people’s attention to their God: “The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread. And he will be a holy place …” (vv. 13-14). As the people come to fear God and God alone, they likewise come to know him as their “place” in the world, which means their place is forever secure, for the Lord is God and he changes not. Hemmed in on every side by the One who loves them and blesses them, they are therefore hemmed in by love and blessing—whatever else the visible circumstances might seem to dictate. An old hymn of the church by William Cowper gets it exactly right:
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform.
He plants his footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.Deep in unfathomable mines,
Of never-failing skill,
He fashions up his bright designs
And works his sov'reign will.Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds you so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.
What else can we do but fall down in worship? What more can we say but “Thank you, God”?
And yet there is more to say. As I’ve meditated on Isaiah’s words over the last several months, what I’ve been struck by is how much and how often his sense of the future constellates around a human figure. Across the texts that bear his name, a person looms—from the child called Immanuel (ch. 7), to the shoot from the stump of Jesse (ch. 11), to the stirring and gut-wrenching “servant songs” of the latter part of the book (chs. 42-53), and on grand display here in chapter 9 (“For to us a child is born, and to us a son is given …”). For Isaiah, it is not just Invisible God who is the ground and goal of all the people’s hope—it is this mysterious human figure as well.
Further—and here is the great shock—Isaiah is unambiguous in his ascription of deity to this human figure. Perhaps never more so than here, where of this child, this son, it is said that
…. he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
It would be blasphemy if it were not true. But in his own Spirit-inspired (if rudimentary) way, Isaiah knew—this is who God is. Not just “God Alone,” but “God and God Again”—Yahweh and the Child, whom the church would later identify as the Father and the Son, in the power of their mutual Holy Spirit. God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity.
We must not miss what Isaiah is saying, what Christmas teaches us over and over again: It is the Child in whom the Fullness of God dwells; it is the Child who is tangible, undiminished Deity; it is the Child who is the reign of God in human flesh.
This and no other. Veiled in flesh the Godhead see! Hail the Incarnate Deity!
Knowing this makes all the difference in the world.
///
I started seeing a spiritual director some years ago in the midst of a deep, personal crisis. The wheels had fallen off of my life and I needed someone to help me find my way back to a sense of where God was for me. David helped me do that. Our times together routinely called—and still call—me back home to God, to sense and sanity, to soundness of heart and mind.
I walked into his office a couple Advents ago, harried, breathless, and not a little stressed. He gave me a few moments to settle myself, prayed, and then asked if he could lead me in a short exercise. I said yes.
“I want you to imagine yourself in the Nativity, with the animals and the wise men and the shepherds, with Joseph and Mary and, of course, with Jesus. Mary is holding Jesus. Are you able to do that?”
I was able, and I did it. “What do you see?” he asked. I described the picture. “What’s happening?” I told of how the woman and the Child at rest in her arms had created a kind of focal point of attention for those of us who surrounded them.
“And what is happening in you?” he asked.
Then I noticed: without any effort, I had begun to slow down. It felt good. “Stay there,” he said. And I did.
After a few moments he said to me, “Andrew, I want you to imagine one more thing: Mary offers you the Baby. Will you take him?”
I have four kids of my own. The scene was familiar to me in its sheer bodily detail. The very thought was tactile—I have muscle memory for this, for the many times Mandi offered me one of our little ones, sleeping and at rest. There’s a kind of art to the handoff, a sort of maximal adjustment of one’s physical demeanor so as to maintain the tranquility of the child. The attentive reception of a baby modifies you in all the right ways.
So I received him, this One; took the “Son given” (Is. 9:6) into my arms, the Infant who is God; held him close, and adored. David gave me a minute or two to sink into the moment.
“What do you notice, Andrew?”
I did not answer right away. It felt wrong to shatter the exquisite, fragile sense of holiness that had descended upon us (I knew David felt it, too). Some experiences need little, or no, commentary. “The LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him” (Hab. 2:20).
Sometimes the temple is your arms.
It was several minutes before I spoke again. When I opened my eyes, David asked me to reflect. “What were you experiencing?” I told him of how my mind had slowed, how my breathing had regulated for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-many weeks, how my body had suddenly become quiet. I had come home—to God, to the sacrament of the present moment, to myself. I was very struck by how attention to the Child who is God—in my arms, of all places, peaceful and at rest—had done that for me. In tending to a fragile holiness, in holding the Baby, God’s unfragile, eternal reign—wonder of wonders—had re-established itself in me.
David nodded in approval. I continued, “But I think what I am struck most by is the thought that there is never a moment of my life—of any of our lives—when this experience is not available to us. At any time, I can take the Child in my arms and let the presence of this fragile holiness quiet me.”
Any time, any place, however and wherever we find ourselves, we may enter the Silent Night of the Lord, the beauty of God’s peace.
It is worth saying that if the thought of this shocks you, well, perhaps it should. That’s part of the scandal of the Incarnation. God, to the biblical mind, is supra-temporal, situated above and beyond space and time. Not, mind you, as One apart from it, but rather as the One in whom all things live and move and have their being (Acts 17:28). From a metaphysical standpoint, God is our environment. This is basic.
What is not often noticed, however, is that this supra-temporality applies not just to God in his essence, as it were, but to God as God reveals God-self in the economy of salvation. That is, in Jesus (who, by the way, is God in his essence—or else the whole Jesus-as-God thing is a cruel charade). To put a finer point on it: Jesus as we meet him in the Gospels, at every stage of how we meet him in the Gospels, is the One in whom we live and move and have our being. Not without reason is he called “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). The Jesus of the Gospels is not just “one thing” that happens in time; rather, he is the “happening” of God to all time; he is the Time that encompasses all time; his is the Time of times.
Which is why we can—whenever we choose—worship him not only in the agony of Gethsemane but in the sunny climes of Galilee; not only at the cross but at the empty tomb; not only seated at the right hand of the Father but tucked away in a manger. He is God with us, God for us, in all these ways, in all these places, in all these “times.”
It is the sheer this-and-thatness of our God that over the years I have come to find so deeply consoling. Yes, he is God in the storm, moving in a mysterious way to perform wonders. And also, he is God in the arms, quieting us as we attend to him while the wind and waves sweep over our worried heads. He is God in both of these modes—the One who shakes the heavens and the earth, and the One who keeps company with us in the shaking, dilating and softening of our hearts which are ever-prone to close and harden in doubtful fear.
For as long as I can remember, Psalm 139 has been my favorite psalm. The affirmation “Where can I go from your Spirit, where can I flee from your presence?” (v. 7) has wrapped itself many times like a warm blanket around my terrified and bewildered heart. “You hem me in, behind and before, you have laid your hand upon me” (v. 5) has—how many times it has—fallen upon me as a direct and personal blessing of the Lord, a benediction cascading from the infinite heights of the Almighty.
The New Testament tells me that it is in Jesus Christ—the One in the Manger, the One on the Cross, the One at the Right Hand—that all these things are so (2 Cor. 1:20). It is in him that Psalm 139 is true. As the year unfolded, I found myself more than ever clinging to him for my very life. “When my spirit grows faint within me, it is you who watch over my way” (Ps. 142:3).
And the gospel tells us further that he—our good Jesus—not only knows the way, he is the Way. Thomas, in exasperation: “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” (John 14:5). And the Lord replies, in words that resound down through the dark corridors of history, lighting up all things with the Great Light that he is and has:
“I am the way …” (John 14:6)
///
He is the Way—capital ‘W’. Which, I am learning (slowly learning) means that I don’t really need to know anything about my “way”—just that he is with me and for me upon my way—as he is with and for all of us. That Jesus is both our goal and our path, even when it all seems so bewildering and terrifying. We are in good hands with him.
One day, Scripture tells us, everything will be made plain to us (though I have a suspicion that when we see the Lord face-to-face, all that we spent our lives fretting about will not matter much). For now, we walk in dark mysteries—though not without the Light. It is not part of our discipleship to have our lives figured out, to solve the mysteries. “The secret things belong to the LORD our God” after all, while “the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Dt. 29:29).
And Jesus is “The Thing Revealed.” He belongs to us, and we to him. We have God—and everything—as we have Jesus.
And we’re going to make it. You’re going to make it. I promise.
Said Teresa of Avila:
“For our sight is poor and the dust which we meet on the road blinds us; but in contemplation the Lord brings us to the end of the day’s journey without our understanding how.”
And the gospel assures us: not just a day’s journey, friend, but a life’s.
Stay close to the Child. Adore him. He’s taking you by the hand straight to the Father. And he’ll never lead you astray.