Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us today. We want to look again at a very familiar story. I think this is the challenge as we discuss Christmas, is the familiarity that we have with it. It can be difficult to look with fresh eyes at the story that is so familiar for all of us. The coming of Jesus as a child.
[00:00:25] 700 years before the birth of Christ, there was a prophecy from the prophet Isaiah prophesied the coming of someone that would be called Emmanuel or God with us. And this is the prophecy that Matthew, as we're going to see in a second, would quote in regards to the birth of Jesus. This is who Isaiah was talking about. And this was striking to me because I've been in Isaiah all week preparing for today. Isaiah, chapter 7 and chapter 9, these very famous messianic prophecies. Isaiah 9 is where he says, you know, wonderful counselor, Almighty God, everlasting Father, the Prince of peace. You might be familiar with that in Isaiah, chapter seven. It's where Isaiah says that Immanuel will come. He will be God with us. And earlier on in that prophecy, as Isaiah is prophesying to the King of Judah in the moment, he actually is describing some things that would come to pass soon in Isaiah's day. And this is fascinating because in verse eight of chapter seven, Isaiah, chapter seven, this is not on the screen. This is a new ad today. It's fascinating. It says, for Syria is no stronger than its capital, Damascus, and Damascus is no stronger than its king. Now, if, you know, if you watch the news today, last night Damascus fell, and the government of Syria is gone. Like this is real time. Like this is happening. Now, if you look at front page of any newspaper today, it's gonna talk about the fall of Syria. Now, am I saying. And this was the prophecy that foretold today. No, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is it's a reminder that even from ancient times, God was speaking to things that were happening. And those kinds of things still happen today. Kingdoms rise and fall, and we would do well to anchor ourselves to those things which never change. Which I want to propose to us today is the prophecy that comes right after this, which says that God himself will give you a sign and a child will be born. His name will be Emmanuel, meaning God with us in a world that is topsy turvy. Can I say that? How old am I to use the phrase topsy turvy? That's not cool at all.
[00:02:37] In a world where kingdoms rise and fall and trends come and go, and powerful people are here one day and gone the next. Come on. We hold on to the truth that God has seen us and he has come near to us.
[00:02:51] That in Jesus we have this confidence and this promise that God himself is with us.
[00:02:58] And the way he arrives, the way he shows up, is strange for a king.
[00:03:05] This idea of messiah simply means anointed one. You could translate it. King. That one who is anointed to rule and have authority. And so how would a king arrive? Surely with an entourage, surely with fanfare. Certainly the king would arrive, as kings do, with a proclamation of his authority. And by the way, Jesus got one of those from the angels. But hilariously, no one's there to hear it except for a couple of lowly shepherds.
[00:03:35] How hilarious is that? You know, the king is born and literally nobody hears it. Well, except for some sheep and their caretakers.
[00:03:43] That the way that Jesus comes into this space and invades the kingdoms of this place is upside down.
[00:03:52] And somehow at the heart of this story is not an account of how a king sweeps into power and takes over the kingdoms that were present, but it's how God of the universe, almighty and powerful and majestic, came down in the most humble of ways that he could have come, like every other king, to just introduce a new agenda, but instead he chooses to enter into the condition of the lowly, the poor, the brokenhearted.
[00:04:26] And so within this story is just a lot of realness.
[00:04:31] I think oftentimes the Bible is actually much more gritty than we want to make it.
[00:04:35] And I get it, like when, you know, when you're working with kids or you have kids of your own and you're teaching them the Bible, like, you give them the Sunday school version of these stories, right?
[00:04:45] You know, Noah's ark and the animals two by two onto the boat, you don't focus on the drowning of all the people under the boat, right? Like, don't you have to talk to our kids, you know, like, for good reason? We want to sand off the rough edges of the grittiness of the story. And yet when we carry that same concept into our whole faith journey as adults, oftentimes we spend so much energy and trying to explain away or make more palatable the story of scripture or try to wrestle it into the box of, like, a pleasant devotional journal type guidebook, that we actually miss the rawness of the story, that this is actually an account of how people have been searching after almighty God in the middle of their mess and trouble and disease. And death and generation after generation, and they get it wrong. And there's. There's pain and there's suffering and there's a wrestling. And somehow God chose to step into that mess.
[00:05:52] Not the stained glass, you know, Thomas Kincaid version of the mess, the actual mess, man, I referenced Thomas Kincaid too. Yikes. Like 2024. Evan, let's go. Come on, man.
[00:06:07] God steps into the mess. He does not step around the mess to save humanity. He steps into it and he embraces the condition that we find ourselves in.
[00:06:17] And what's so great about that is that today, whatever condition you find yourself in, whatever kind of mess you find yourself in that you assume is not palatable to the God of the universe, in Jesus, we have the proof that he is very, very willing and interested in embracing you right now. Right in the mess, right in the trouble.
[00:06:42] Mark, chapter one.
[00:06:45] I think we have an illustration of the kind of work that Jesus came to do. Mark, chapter one. A very short story. I want to read it out of the message to illustrate this idea of God stepping into the messiness of humanity. It says, a leper came to him, him being Jesus, begging on his knees, if you want to, you can cleanse me.
[00:07:08] Deeply moved, Jesus put out his hand. He touched him and he said, I want to be clean. And then. And there the leprosy was gone.
[00:07:19] I just. I love. I love the conciseness of this story. I love how simple it is. Because here we have a desperate man arriving at the feet of Jesus. And in his day, a leper was like the lowest rung of outcasts in society. They were contagious, people were afraid of them, and not only were they seen as a health danger, but it was commonly held that if you had leprosy, it was because God was judging you for your sin, that your sin was worse than the average sin.
[00:07:53] And so people would avoid this person. These people, like the worst of humanity was seen as these lepers, right?
[00:08:06] And so when this man comes to Jesus, he is one that everyone else has been spending all their time getting away from. And he comes to Jesus and he says, listen, I've heard the stories about you, and I'm pretty sure you have the ability to do something about my condition, but I'm not quite so sure that you actually want to.
[00:08:25] And here's what is for me today.
[00:08:29] The distillation, like the boiling down of the whole gospel arc, God's story intersecting ours, is these three words that Jesus says in response to the man saying, I think you can do it, but I Don't know if you want to heal me. And Jesus says these three words, I want to.
[00:08:47] I want to.
[00:08:49] I want to heal you. I want to be close to you. I want to save you. Listen, there's a lot of things in my life that I do out of obligation. You know, I don't know anybody who pays their taxes because they're deeply moved by compassion for the irs. You know, like, you know, I don't.
[00:09:10] There's so many things that we do every day because we have to. And there's a whole different category of what motivates us to action that has nothing to do with obligation and everything to do with desire and being moved at the deepest part. And this is what is activated in the heart of Jesus.
[00:09:26] Not when he encounters someone who's pleasant. Not when he encounters somebody who has it all together. Not when he encounters someone who pleases him with his amazing, you know, thoughts about who God is. And he doesn't impress Jesus. He shows up in his state and his mess and his condition and his suffering. And Jesus says, I'm not obligated to heal you. I want to heal you.
[00:09:49] And this is, I think, at the heart of God sending Jesus to us is that he could have done it a thousand ways. But what he does is he sends Jesus out of desire to be close to us.
[00:10:03] He sends Emmanuel, God with us. Not with, as in, like, in the same general vicinity. Not with as in like, oh, he's over there and I'm here, and we're kind of together. No, with us in our condition, the lowest of lows and the highest of highs in our lives and circumstances and emotions. We have a faithful companion with us in Jesus that today, if you're having the best day of your life, Jesus can relate. If today. It's been a really hard December already. Come on. Jesus is there with you in the valley.
[00:10:38] God is with us because he wants to, because of the love that is in his heart. And I feel so confident that if today we have this prayer in our hearts, God help me to love and care and be generous, not out of obligation, but because I would be so deeply moved by your compassion. I believe that that is a prayer he is willing to answer today.
[00:11:05] And when we're tempted to delegate our love for others. Have you ever done this?
[00:11:12] I want to be part of the solution. And so who else is doing good work with hurting people? I'm going to support them in their work. Can you do this? Right?
[00:11:21] And I think oftentimes when the Holy Spirit moves on our Hearts, we're given this grace to feel this deep movement of compassion that causes us to say, I'm not just going to delegate good work, but Jesus put me face to face with the least of these, the hurting and the outcast and the ostracized that I might be. What Jesus you were to everyone you encountered the face of God in mercy.
[00:11:52] Today, Jesus wants to come alongside you in the depths of your mess, in the height of your successes.
[00:12:03] There is nothing that scares him off from your experience and your life.
[00:12:11] This is the nature of the closeness of God. And, you know, it's interesting how revolutionary this would have been because, see, like today, we've all grown up around. Even if you're new to church, you've probably grown up around ideas of Western Christianity. And at the heart of our understanding of Christianity, right, is the love of God for people. And this is good. This is how it should be. But we sometimes lose how revolutionary and absolutely radical this was for those living in the first century because their view of God and how he interacted with humankind was not motivated by this deep, close intimacy or love.
[00:12:55] In fact, the earliest account that was written down and made it into our Bibles is not the book of Genesis, but the Book of Job.
[00:13:03] And the Book of Job is this fascinating. It's written as Hebrew poetry, but it's not written about Jewish people necessarily. There's these different people from different nation states going way, way back. So ancient, ancient history. And it's a picture into how people at the earliest days, when they were writing these stories down, understood and interacted with their faith in God.
[00:13:28] And in the Book of Job, you have Job. And the account says that he's a righteous man, he follows God, he loves God, and he's very successful.
[00:13:39] He's got stuff, and he's got wealth and big family and healthy guy.
[00:13:46] And throughout the story, all that's taken away. And God allows him to experience the loss of all that stuff. So he loses his money, he loses his stuff, he loses his family, he loses his health.
[00:14:00] And the Book of Job takes us to this moment where Job, after losing everything, he is literally sitting on the ground in ashes.
[00:14:10] His body is wrecked, his skin is all messed up. It's just a bleak, bleak story.
[00:14:16] And his friends come alongside him and they begin to talk with him. And then they're kind of like, so what did you do to deserve this?
[00:14:25] And back and forth, chapter after chapter, Job and his friends are talking. Job's like, guys, I didn't do anything.
[00:14:31] I didn't sin. To bring this on. I'm just trying to be godly and be righteous.
[00:14:38] But you can see in Job's responses to his friends that sometimes he's very faith filled. He says things like, well, the Lord gives and the Lord is taken away, so blessed be the name of the Lord. And other times he's like, actually, scratch that. I think God's being mean to me on purpose.
[00:14:58] And maybe you felt that way too. Some days you're in worship and you're like, you know, on my worst day, Lord, I'm gonna trust you and love you and worship you.
[00:15:07] And then you get in your car and you're like, I think he's being mean to me. Wait a second.
[00:15:13] And so Job is very normally having this kind of back and forth talking about who God is. And he's wrestling and philosophizing about, like, the nature of God. And then the story of Job says, then God responds.
[00:15:27] Then God responds. And so Job hears the voice of God coming, it says, from a whirlwind. So imagine like, you know the movie Twister, right? So like a tornado appears and a voice booms out of this tornado at Job as he's sitting in ashes on the ground.
[00:15:43] And the voice that comes out of that whirlwind is not one of comfort, it's one of challenge.
[00:15:48] Because Job has been talking to his friends about all the things he knows about God and his theology and all these things. And then God responds to him so harshly, God says, who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man and I will question you and you shall answer me. Come on, God, right?
[00:16:09] Like Job's been suffering. He's tried to remain faithful. And when you show up, you should show up with words of comfort.
[00:16:16] And instead, God basically says, listen, I have plans that you don't know about.
[00:16:21] I am so far above you. You should stop talking about me as if you know me and as if we're familiar. Cause you are not Job.
[00:16:30] And interestingly, Job says, okay, God, I'm sorry. I'll just trust your plan. And I won't. I won't try to think thoughts too big for me.
[00:16:39] And this is, at its heart, how people and God were known to interact.
[00:16:48] Until a baby is born in Bethlehem and all of a sudden the God of the whirlwind, the God who says, you don't know me like that, who looks down at somebody suffering and says, you gotta just trust me. Cause you just don't know what I know. You can't see what I Can see. And so you just need to be okay with trusting me and stop talking like we're buddies, because we're not. That same God comes as a child in a stable, which is likely a cave behind a ratty inn.
[00:17:23] And the God Almighty who spoke from the whirlwind is now a child who will experience the lowest of lows and the highest of highs. And he will be with us. So that no longer is God so far removed and challenging us for thinking we know him too much. To the God who is with us, who walks our streets, who has our dust on his feet, who weeps at the side of our graves, who heals our kids when they get sick, who shows up on our worst day and says, if you are looking to see God, just look at me.
[00:17:59] And here's what's so cool, is his disciples. They wrote about him long after they walked alongside him. And John, in John 1, John, chapter 1, he says, we testify about this word of life, and it makes our joy complete. Because we saw him with our eyes, we heard him with our ears, and we touched him with our hands. He was making it clear that the God up there somewhere far away, was now the one that was with them, alongside them, and understood them. And this is the best news. This is what makes the good news. Good news is that God did not stay distant, but he came close to experience life like we experience it. So that when we have times of suffering and heartache and pain, and we look up to God, expecting the whirlwind challenge, that instead we find a friend in Jesus.
[00:18:55] What a comfort to know that God has come close.
[00:18:59] What a gift to understand. Like Paul would say in Acts 17, that he is not far from any one of us, but that he came close.
[00:19:15] If you grew up in church, or maybe you've been in church your whole life, I think it can be common to get comfortable with God at a distance, that we come to the realization that the closeness of God can be a little intimidating.
[00:19:38] Like, I would rather God not know about all the mess that's inside of me. And so maybe God in the stained glass is more safe, right?
[00:19:49] But it's interesting, because of Jesus, we're invited to understand God as the one who finds us in the messiness of our lives.
[00:20:00] And in the Gospel account of Matthew of the birth of Jesus, he quotes Isaiah, says all this in verse 22 of Matthew, chapter 1. All this occurred to fulfill the Lord's message through the prophet. He said, look, look, the virgin will conceive a child. She will give birth To a son. And they will call him Emmanuel, which means God is with us.
[00:20:23] Matthew begins to tell the story of the birth of Jesus by quoting from the prophet Isaiah. And man, this is a, if you're writing like a screenplay, a really dramatic screenplay, this is a great place to start. Like check it out, 700 years ago, the old man, Isaiah by candlelight, you know, it's like very dramatic.
[00:20:41] That's a great place to start. But unfortunately for the readability of the gospel, Matthew doesn't start there because you'll see in the whole section before he gets to this dramatic fulfilling of prophecy, Matthew goes through and he begins to list out all of Jesus ancestors in a genealogy like snooze fest, right?
[00:21:04] This is the record of the ancestors of Jesus, the Messiah, descendant of David and of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. Judah was the father of Paris. On and on it goes for 17 verses of names of people that nobody knows who they are.
[00:21:23] Except they do know who they are.
[00:21:25] Because for Matthew's audience, as they're looking and reading through this list of names, each of these names, for many of them came with a story.
[00:21:36] And those stories were not always all that neat and clean and tidy.
[00:21:41] For this to be the lineage of the Promised one, the anointed one, the Messiah. You'd think you'd clean up the list a little bit.
[00:21:49] And yet in this list there's people like Judah.
[00:21:54] I assume Judah was an upstanding guy. Well, yeah, except for the part where he got his brothers together and said, hey, we don't like our little brother. He's annoying. So let's throw him in a pit. Actually, no, no, I got a better idea. Let's sell him as a slave. That's a good idea. So he did that.
[00:22:11] Oh well, maybe that was a lapse in judgment. Well then his daughter in law seduced him and he had a child by her.
[00:22:17] Okay, not good.
[00:22:21] But yet he's in the line. Okay, let's. Well, maybe Judah was a mistake to be in there. Seems like he's got some issues, right? Let's see, who else is it? Rahab. Huh? Rahab the pagan prostitute from Jericho.
[00:22:37] Well, that doesn't feel like that's very kingly in the line of the Messiah. And on and on it goes.
[00:22:44] And it's one thing to have this hidden, you know, in like chapter six and a half, just hiding there because it needs to be in there. But this is how Matthew starts his argument that Jesus is who Jesus claimed to be. He said, look at this mess that Jesus was born into.
[00:23:01] And if you're wondering why Matthew, and he's the only one of the gospel writers that does this, why would he include the mess before he gets to the promised coming of the child? Why would he paint such a bleak picture about the origins of Jesus? You know why it is? I think it's because Matthew himself was an outsider.
[00:23:21] Because Jesus came along and he called his other disciples. So he called James and John and Peter, and they're like all Galilee boys, you know, hardworking guys. They all played tennis together or whatever. I don't know, what would it be in the first century? They all played, like, kick the rock together. I don't know what sports were like back then.
[00:23:44] Wood carving. Wood carving competitions. There you go. They were all, like, buddies, and they knew each other because they all grew up in the same town around Nazareth and Galilee.
[00:23:55] And so they get called by Jesus, right? And they're walking around, and they got called first. And I would imagine they're walking around and they come to a town and they're like, oh, my goodness, look. Look at that tax collector. What a traitor he is.
[00:24:10] Like, he works for Rome and he takes our taxes and he puts a little bit on the top for himself. It is disgusting what people like him do.
[00:24:23] And so they're having this conversation, wait, where did Jesus go? And they look back, and Jesus is standing at the tax collector's booth, and he's talking to the tax collector, and he's saying, matthew, I want you to be in my group, too. And you can imagine Peter and James and John are like, oh, no, we got a bunk with that guy.
[00:24:44] And this is so cool, because as soon as Jesus calls him Matthew, who would have been wealthy and well educated because of his position as a tax collector for the state for Rome, he's like, you know what? It would be really cool guys. And they're like, oh, gosh, what? You guys should come over to my house.
[00:25:01] So Matthew brings Jesus and the rest of the disciples over to his house, and they open the door, and around the table are prostitutes and sinners and other tax collectors.
[00:25:13] And you can imagine Peter, James, and John, the good hometown boys, are like, what is he doing? Does he understand that we're with the rabbi?
[00:25:22] And the rabbi won't appreciate these kinds of people. And they're like, where did Jesus go? Oh, Jesus is sitting at the table right in between a tax collector and a prostitute. And he's talking about the kingdom of God that was going to come and turn everything on its head.
[00:25:37] No wonder when Matthew sits down to write the story of Jesus, he starts with the genealogy. Because Matthew is like, check this out. The history of Jesus lineage. Those were the kind of people that then Jesus was eating with all the time we knew him.
[00:25:54] This was the kind of person that God came close to be next to. And if we take out the grittiness and the messiness of the humanity within the story, we miss the point that God has come not to sidestep or erase the messiness of our human condition, but to enter fully into it.
[00:26:14] And so what an invitation. If you've ever felt like you're on the outside of religious circles and communities, oh, I got great news. Jesus, he, like, that was all he was about.
[00:26:27] Like, here's all the religious groups. And then he's like, okay, now who got left behind? Let's have lunch.
[00:26:33] Let's have lunch.
[00:26:36] This is the closeness of God with us. I love it.
[00:26:42] I love that this gives me permission to be fully human, to not have to project the best side of me, to appeal to the God of the universe. But the God of the universe has come and entered into my condition, to know me so that I might know him.
[00:27:00] And so my encouragement today, and we're gonna close in just a minute, we're gonna enter into a time of community, is let's not put God back in the whirlwind.
[00:27:07] Let's not lift God back up into that distant place where we just kind of do what we do and trust that He's God and we suffer alone and we just hope that he doesn't get too mad at us. No, no. Let's allow God to be God with us. The child that is close to us, the Jesus that walks alongside of us, and the Jesus who, when we say, I think you can heal me, I think you can save me, I think you can forgive me. I just don't know if you want to.
[00:27:36] That we would hear the voice of Jesus loud and clear, saying, I want to.
[00:27:41] I want to. Amen.
