Luke 2:34-35 “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.”

Before Jesus arrived, the religious scene in Israel was rather tame. You had various Jewish sects like the Pharisees or the Sadducees competing for a following among the people. They were little more than variations on the same theme, different shades of the same color. They were slightly different flavors of the religion of “save yourself.”

But when Jesus appeared, he introduced a radically different way of looking at the human dilemma and God’s solution. He offered a radically different way of looking at God and man themselves. Actually, he represented a return to the God of their fathers, the God of the prophets, so passionate in the demands of his law that no one could actually keep them, so passionate in the promises of his grace and mercy that not a single soul was beneath them.

It was Jesus’ unrelenting and uncompromising preaching of this God, especially his grace and forgiveness that extended to even the lowliest of sinners, that could not be ignored by the religious establishment of his time. They had to declare themselves either for or against– and most of them chose against. Jesus’ preaching of grace cut them open and exposed their hearts.

The Jesus of Scripture has the same effect on people today. I’m not talking about the sanitized, politically correct version of Jesus, one whose message has been watered down to an anemic, “Can’t we all just get along?” I’m talking about the Jesus who didn’t mince words about sins like divorce, lust, worry, or greed; who could publicly judge and condemn the prayers and the charity of the hypocrites; who could call his enemies blind guides and whitewashed tombs, and even call one of his own disciples Satan.

I’m talking about the Jesus who wrapped himself in our skin. He “learned how to walk, stumbled and fell, cried for his milk, sweated blood in the night, was lashed with a whip and showered with spit, was fixed to a cross and died whispering forgiveness on us all” (Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel).

You can’t be neutral about that Jesus. His message and person are like a swinging sword that cuts us open and exposes our hearts. That is the Jesus, and that is the God, that Thomas Jefferson once denounced as “a monster, and not a God.”  

But that is also the Jesus, and the God, that once led a man in Bible class to announce that he and his family were looking for another church after studying the story of God calling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mt. Moriah. In response to questions of “Why?” the man said, “Because when I look at that God, the God of Abraham, I feel like I’m near a real God, not the sort of dignified, businesslike, Rotary Club God we chatter about here on Sunday…. I want to know that God” (Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel).

When Jesus words expose our hearts, may they reveal the same sort of passion for knowing him that he had for saving us.

Isaiah 49:7 “This is what the Lord says–the Redeemer and Holy One of Israel– to him who was despised and abhorred by the nation, to the servant of rulers:  ‘Kings will see you and arise, princes will see and bow down, because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.’”

I believe my neighborhood is a safer place this time of year.  Most of the year the sidewalks are fairly dark–there aren’t many street lights along the streets.  But now the whole place is lit up with colored lights and flashing lights and even flood lights.  Unfortunately, many of my neighbors may not know why they are putting up all these lights, other than the fact that Christmas is coming.  Lights are just the way that people celebrate Christmas.  They don’t realize that the lights are pointing us to Jesus, the Light of the World.

Serving as the Light of the World was intimately connected to Jesus’ great work. He has attracted people of every kind back to God. Not everything that he went through to be the light to the nations was pleasant, as the prophet’s words imply.  Isaiah describes him as one who was despised and abhorred by his own nation.  Throughout his life Jesus was hounded and challenged and despised by every ruling group there was in Israel: the self-righteous Pharisees, the liberal Sadducees, the Sanhedrin, the priests.  Even the purely political supporters of Herod known as the Herodians hated him. 

By the time Good Friday came, it seemed as if the whole nation had turned against him.  His twelve best friends had betrayed or denied or deserted him.  Common criminals mocked and insulted him.  Even God turned away from the pitiful sight of Jesus hanging on a cross, and hated him for the sins he was made to carry.  Jesus was made guilty of everyone’s sin and suffered everyone’s damnation.  His death was not a pleasant sight.  It was something to be “despised and abhorred.”

But as the last little flame of life in him flickered and failed, at just that moment the light of the world was blazing away, finally making it clear just how God would save all people.  His death may have been very humble, but it shows all the world the glory of God’s love.  It lights the only way back to the Father, the only way to heaven. 

Jesus’ humiliation–his humble birth, life, and death–light God’s way of salvation.  But that light goes out to the ends of the earth because of his exaltation.  The crucified Messiah is also a resurrected Messiah, and a triumphant Messiah.  Today he is lifted up for the whole world to see and worship.  Isaiah predicted this when he said, “Kings will see you and arise, princes will see and bow down.”  Isaiah’s words remind us of the wisemen coming to worship the Christ child.  But they include more. From the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 300’s to the Christian heads of state today, Kings and princes and rulers have been submitting themselves to this humble figure.  The whole story of Christian mission work has been one of our Savior conquering entire nations with the light of the Gospel.  The Apostle Paul explains, “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him a name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.”

Isn’t that what we want to do with our Christmas celebration?   We lift Jesus up as high as we can, and bow down ourselves, so that the whole world can see his light.  Jesus himself may be the light for the Gentiles, but we have also been given a role in reflecting that light around the world.  He has given us the responsibility to send pastors and evangelists and missionaries.  He has made all of his witnesses to reflect his light into every nook and cranny of our lives.  At Christmas we have a prime opportunity to do just that in the way that we celebrate his birth.

Isaiah 9:2 The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.”

Twice in my life I have toured a cave, the kind of cave that is large enough to be a tourist destination. Each time along the tour, the guides took us to a part of the cave where no natural light can get in. Then they turned out the lights, to demonstrate what total darkness looks like. In effect, you become totally blind, and no matter how long you sit there, it doesn’t become any better. Your eyes may try to adjust. But there is no light, so there is nothing you can see, not even a finger held just an inch from your eye. Darkness like that is disorienting. You can’t make out any direction. You have no idea what obstacles might be lying in the dark. It would be frightening if you had to try to make your way back to the outside through a darkness like that.

The lights in the cave were only out for a minute or two. Miners trapped in a collapsed mine, and subjects of scientific experiments, have sometimes had to endure days, and even months, in total darkness. The darkness changes you. In a relatively short time the eyes lose their ability to adjust and function in the light, and it takes some time to get it back again. The darkness skews your perception of reality. People may sleep for thirty hours and feel as though they have taken a short nap. One researcher who spent 126 days in a dark cave thought that he had been there only 66 days. Hallucinations can set in after only 48 hours. Emotions become hard to control. Short term memory disappears. Depression and suicidal thoughts set in. Over time too much darkness weakens our bones and raises our blood pressure. Jesus sometimes described hell as “the outer darkness.” Don’t imagine that’s a more appealing feature of the place than the other descriptions we hear.

The prophet Isaiah describes the people who lived where knowledge of God and his promises had been lost this way: “The people walking in darkness…those living in the land of the shadow of death.” Darkness is not a surprising metaphor for our lost spiritual condition. It begins with your inability to see your way. In that darkness we don’t know what direction to go to get back to God. The disorientation prevents us from seeing which way is right, and which way is wrong, what is good and what is bad. We have no idea of the obstacles in our way. As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” It is such a darkness, that only if someone came and took us by the hand to guide us out, only if someone picks us up in his arms and carries us out, can we escape.

But the darkness is worse than that. It changes us. It makes the light of truth painful to look at. We fear being blinded by it. It causes us to look away. We rage against the truth until that painful light stops shining. We don’t want to see.

The spiritual darkness skews our perception of reality. We imagine that we don’t have to get out. Maybe God lives here with us in the darkness. Maybe God is the object of my sensual desires. Maybe I am God. There can be no more ghastly hallucination than that. We become comfortable with the darkness. It wraps us like a warm blanket, even while it is literally sucking the very life out of us. “Those living in the land of the shadow of death” is Isaiah’s colorful way of describing it.

Then God comes wading into that darkness and introduces the Light. “On those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.” Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ, is that dawn.

The Lord of heaven and earth, who measures out the moments of time, who is daily, hourly composing the story we live, arranged the events of Jesus’ birth to be filled with images of light. In the midnight darkness over the fields of Bethlehem, to simple shepherds, an angel appeared, and “…the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.” For wisemen living further away in the darkness, mysterious eastern “holy men,” the magi, a shining new star appears and lights their way to the child-king for the better part of two years.

The aged prophet Simeon, who took the forty-day old baby Jesus in his arms in the temple, declared him “…a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.” Jesus himself later laid claim on that description: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

Whoever follows him will never walk in darkness. In Jesus, the truth finally becomes clear. Martin Luther once observed that the theology of earthly glory, the kind that concerns itself with the most pleasant world we can create for ourselves now, “calls evil good and good evil.” This is more than a matter of turning sins into pleasures. Discipline is hard. It also turns me in the right direction and blesses me with strength. Suffering is, well, suffering. But it is often the only reason I have any real sympathy for others, the only dose of reality reminding me that the world in which we live is broken beyond repair and dying fast. The theology of earthly glory is actually darkness, because it can’t see the good.

But the theology that sees the world through Jesus, and especially the brilliant light of his cross, “calls the thing what it actually is.” Here we have truth. It sees God’s hand in our most difficult times, and trusts God’s love in our most painful moments, even if we can’t fully understand what he is doing. The death of God’s Son on a cross is not a horrible miscarriage of justice (or at least not that only). It is not terrible tragedy for an innocent man. It is the salvation of the world. It is the forgiveness of every sin. It is our one and only path out of the darkness back to God. Jesus’ life and teaching shed such light on our way.

But it is more than this. It gives us “the light of life.” Like darkness, literal light changes our bodies. We produce more vitamin D in it. We heal faster from injury. Our blood pressure is better regulated. Our bodies release the hormone melatonin on a more regular cycle and we sleep better. Our eyes not only retain the ability to adjust to various light levels. Regular exposure to natural light reduces the incidence and severity of nearsightedness. It makes us healthier people.

All of these are relatively minor changes compared to effects of the Light of the World on the human soul. He gives us a new heart. He rips into our chests, as the prophet Jeremiah once said, and he replaces hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. These new hearts beat with faith and love. They don’t stop beating, ever. They will support our new life in God’s light beyond the end of time. With Jesus we live and walk “in the light of life.”

Then we reflect that light to the rest of our world. “You are the light of the world,” Jesus announced in the Sermon on the Mount. Our lips speak God’s grace and forgiveness in the darkness of our world. Our hands show God’s love to people smothering in the darkness. Jesus continues to bring light to the world through our witness of faith and love.

Tonight we find our light where Isaiah prophesied we would. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be upon his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” That’s the baby, born in the darkness of this night, born in the darkness of a cave used to shelter animals, lighting the lamp of God’s love in our world. Congratulations! You have found your way out of the darkness into the light of God’s new day.

Micah 5:3 “Therefore Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor gives birth and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites.”

Some people read the Old Testament and believe that they see a particularly cruel and vengeful God there. Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed by fire and brimstone. Pharaoh’s army is drowned in the Red Sea. Canaanite nations cease to exist as separate peoples after the Lord wages war on them through Israel. Of course, to take this point of view, you have to lay the justice of God aside entirely and expect that sin on a mass scale should never have any consequences. It isn’t a fair or reasonable way to interpret the story.

It makes far more sense to read the Old Testament as an account of extended divine patience that stretches the bounds of belief. Every one of the patriarchs–Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob– and their successors like Moses and David gave the Lord multiple reasons to say, “That’s it; I’m done with these people” over the course of thousands of years.

And they were the good and faithful ones, by and large! As a nation Israel complained about God’s care on their march through the wilderness to their new home, abandoned him for other gods when they got there, and sunk further and further into rebellion, materialism, and perversion with each passing year. They experienced some short-lived revivals along the way. But for something like 1400 years the Lord continued to work with them, continued to forgive them, continued to give them second chances, continued to intervene and confront and reconcile with them.

Micah prophesied at a time when the Lord’s patience with them as a whole was about to run out. He would always be faithful to the believing and obedient remnant among his people. But as a whole nation, his patience with Israel was done. He removed the special protections he had given them. First, they suffered a long exile. Then came waves of foreign invasions, and subjection to heathen empires, first the Greeks, then the Romans. For almost 600 years, more than double the age of our own nation, the Lord abandoned the nation as a political entity to the other nations around them.

“…until the time when she who is in labor gives birth and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites.” The birth of Jesus marks yet another example of God’s great patience and faithfulness, another dramatic attempt to win this people for himself. Jesus’ ministry was all seeking love. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37). It turned some minority of the Jews back to their Lord. It marked the beginning of “brothers” who were not Jewish, people of many different races all around the world, returning to the God of the Bible. It demonstrated God’s grace in coming to Israel again, this unlikely King coming from a people he had long ago abandoned with good reason.

I suppose there are two lessons for us to draw from the prophecy at this point. It is never safe to impose on God’s patience. He is incredibly patient and forgiving, but if we choose to harden ourselves against him, we shouldn’t be surprised if his patience ends. If the words “Israel will be abandoned” don’t strike you as frightening, you aren’t listening.

At the same time God’s patience to Israel itself is powerful encouragement to seek his grace. Neither the size of our sins, their repetition, nor their duration is any obstacle for his forgiveness. Without saying that he excuses our sin or lowers his perfect standards, it is not so much our obedience he desires as our genuine repentance and faith. He wants to forgive us like nothing else.

Micah 5:2 “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.

”Sometimes God does his best work with some of the humblest and smallest things. Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is a comfort for people like you and me.

What constitutes a small town isn’t the same for everyone. My family moved to Norman, OK from Dallas, TX, which has over a million people. Norman’s population around 120,000 seems small by comparison. But it is surrounded by smaller towns less than one tenth the size. If you are coming from one of them, Norman may feel more like the big city.

Today, Bethlehem, Israel, isn’t so much the “Little Town of Bethlehem” we sing about in the Christmas carol. It’s a thriving bedroom community for Jerusalem with about 30,000 people. As recently as the late 1960’s, however, it was half that size. In Jesus’ day there were at most 2000 people who lived there. When Micah wrote, the population may have been in the hundreds.

There sat this little town. In over a thousand years of history, it had produced one famous person: King David. And, of course, David didn’t hang around Bethlehem once he reached his late teens. It was off to the capital city where big things happened. The town he left behind remained a quiet place whose chief industry seemed to be sheep.

This is where The Lord chose to make his grand entry when he came to earth. This was the unlikely birthplace of our unlikely King. Of course, it had those ancient connections to King David, but then, so did Jerusalem, the city David made his capital. Bethlehem had little more going for it than the fact that it was a geographical location on planet earth, in Israel, and that’s where our King came to live and serve.

“Where are you from?” is one of the first questions we ask a person when getting to know them. It is one of the first phrases you learn when you are learning another language. “De donde esta?” “Var kommer du ifran?” “Wo kommst du her?” As a matter of information there is nothing wrong with this.

But we are tempted to put entirely too much stock in a person’s origin. You know that some who live in the big cities on the East and West Coasts refer to the middle of the country as “flyover territory.” It is not a compliment. It implies that there is nothing and no one of value or importance where people like me live.

We do the same thing. We try to build our sense of personal worth by finding something unique and noteworthy about the place we come from, and by finding some other place to ridicule. It is a strange thing, isn’t it, to feed our pride and give ourselves value based on something for which we had no choice in the process: the place in which we were born? I was born and raised in Rochester, Minnesota, the home of the world-famous Mayo Clinic. But there is nothing about that place or institution for which I can take any credit.

The Lord isn’t impressed with this, or any of the other factoids I might be tempted to put on my spiritual resume: the family tree into which I was born, where I went to school, what my GPA was, how many degrees I have earned, what I do for a living, titles I have held at work or in the community. The only thing that concerns him is how I have loved him and treated my neighbor. And this is just the problem, if we are honest. That part of our resumes associates us far too closely with that place where it is far too hot and miserable all the time. Hell may not be the place where we were born, but it could easily become the place to which we retire.

Our Lord did not come to save anyone because they were famous, or smart, or had good family connections, or came from a city you could be proud of. He came to save ordinary sinners, including people practically no one else knows exist, from places you may never have heard of and might find difficult to pronounce. Our King was born in Nowheresville, Israel, because he didn’t need to impress anyone with shallow credentials like a prestigious address. His love and his sacrifice would be impressive enough to save us all. He comes out of the little town of Bethlehem, the unlikely birthplace of our King.

Zephaniah 3:15 “Sing, O Daughter of Zion; shout aloud, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O Daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away your punishment, he has turned back your enemy.”

Zephaniah proclaims God’s judgment on five nations neighboring Judah in his prophecy. You won’t find them on a modern map. They don’t exist anymore. Philistia was once a formidable rival of Israel along the southeastern coast of the Mediterranean. That’s the nation the giant Goliath came from. Today there is no race or people known by that name. Moab and Ammon suffered a similar fate. They were once located where we find the modern nation of Jordan. Cush was a powerful country where we now find Ethiopia. Assyria was one of the great empires of ancient times. After they fell to the Babylonians they never really existed as their own country again.

All these nations managed to anger God with their arrogance and their opposition to his plans for Israel. In the Old Testament, that was essentially the same as opposing God’s plan of salvation. One by one the Lord simply got rid of them. You can’t openly and persistently defy God and expect to live to tell about it.

The Jews themselves hadn’t lived a remarkably better life than their neighbors in the ancient Middle East. Their institutions were corrupt, Zephaniah says. The politicians used their power to enrich themselves and prey on the people. The prophets and priests had no integrity. They corrupted the religion to make themselves popular and preserve the high standard of living their positions gave them.

Nor were the ordinary people without fault. Many if not most dabbled in the highly sexualized and violent religions of their non-Jewish neighbors. They, too, were getting in the way of God’s saving plans by the lifestyle and values they were adopting, maybe even more than the pagan nations just across their borders. You can’t openly and persistently defy God and expect to live to tell about it.

Take a moment to compare Zephaniah’s concerns to our own times, and our own lives. Nations set themselves up against God’s saving work. Think communist and Muslim countries today. Politics for personal gain, religion twisted and manipulated so that clergy can remain popular and prosperous, everyday people sucked more and more into a culture of sex and violence. How should we expect God to react to the world we have created for ourselves?

Certainly not with the promises Zephaniah gave God’s people! “The Lord has taken away your punishment.” Do you know what it feels like to escape the just consequences of your behavior? I have always said that if you want to get somewhere fast and travel over the speed limit, you should let my wife drive. Seven times in her life she has been pulled over and given a warning instead of a ticket. Seven times! You know the dread you feel when you see the patrol car pull out of the median or off the shoulder and start following you. You look at your speedometer and know you have been going way too fast. Then the red and blue lights start flashing. You pull over. The officer approaches your car. Your heart races. Your stomach turns. How much is this going to cost? You hand the officer your license and your insurance and you wait. But he doesn’t return with a citation for you to sign with a date at the courthouse. He hands you back your documentation. “I’m letting you go with a warning. Please slow down and drive carefully. Have a nice day.”

You have just been given a gift worth hundreds of dollars: no fine to pay, no increase on your insurance rates, no hassle with the court, no time in a defensive driving course. All that, though you were as guilty as sin. As nervous and anxious as you were a few minutes earlier, you are filled with relief, even joy, to be let go. Maybe you feel a little song coming on, even your happy dance. But don’t do that. You are still in the car and don’t want to get pulled over again for reckless driving.

Now, compare that relatively minor escape from a relatively insignificant punishment, to the release God has given us from the mountain of sins we pile up day after day and the hell that they deserve! For Jesus’ sake we don’t have to pay the price for our repeat offenses, or any others for that matter. He paid the price for them all. The Lord has turned back our enemy, the devil. He has lost all claim on our souls. He cannot drag us away to the flames, the maggots, the darkness, the endless grief and misery. The Lord has taken away your punishment, and that’s reason for our hearts to be so full of joy they sing.

Malachi 3:5-6 “So I will come near to you for judgment. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty. ‘I the Lord do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.’”

Jesus was a real person, fully human and fully God, son of Mary and Son of God. He is not a myth, as some people claim. But the Jesus who was only sweet, only mild, only gentle; who overlooked bad behavior and didn’t care how people lived their lives–that Jesus is a myth. Malachi says that he was coming near for judgment. It was not the main mission of his earthly ministry. But you hear it in the Sermon on the Mount as he confronts the rather loose interpretation of God’s law popular in his day. You hear it in the seven woes he pronounces on the Pharisees.

You hear it four hundred years earlier in the words of Malachi. He has no tolerance for sorcery, dabbling in the occult. It is flirting with the enemy. It is evidence of a divided heart, unwilling to accept and embrace the measure of health or prosperity our loving Father has carefully decided serves us best.

He is quick to testify against the adulterers. There may be no area of life in which the human race has been in more of a hurry to throw off God’s plan for our well-being than in his plan for love and marriage. Even in his day Jesus had to confront easy divorce; lustful, leering, dirty-minded men; and the apparent failure of his people to grasp why God made two genders in the first place.

Look closely at the other sins listed in the prophet: “those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice.” In 1879 American Church Father C.F.W. Walther delivered a series of lectures to his congregation explaining why the Lutheran Church opposed Communism and Socialism: mostly because those movements were atheistic, defended violence, and did not recognize the right to private property.

But he went on to say, “When the rich…look upon (the poor) as existing simply for their profit…if they will not give the laborer proper wages…if they will not support the laborer and his family in case of sickness, if they can live in luxury and be unconcerned when the laborer is suffering: then we are not their friends, but, from principle, their enemies! O my brethren, what terms of reproach might not be justly applied to us, if we sided with the human vampires and not with the oppressed!” (Communism and Socialism, p. 36).

All of this flows from one great sin, the Lord points out: “(They) do not fear me.” Even the most faithful Christian may stumble into any of these sins in a moment of weakness, even multiple times. That God forgives. But when there is no fear of God, and the sin is embraced, and no repentance follows, then the Lord comes for judgment.

So our God and Savior is just. But he is more than just. He comes to spare his people. “I the Lord do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.”

God does not change. Since the opening chapters of the Bible story, the Lord has shown himself to be the God who comes looking for people who aren’t looking for him. He wants to repair the relationship he did not destroy. He wants to find people who don’t know they are lost. He intends to rescue people who aren’t aware they are in danger. He gives life back to people who don’t realize they are dead.

So the descendants of Jacob, the Jews to whom Malachi wrote, were not destroyed. They were spared, time after time. The Lord kept coming to them through leaders and prophets. Finally Jesus came to them himself. He called them back. He died for their sins.

He still seeks our return. More than that, he offers to carry us all the way home. He gave us his word, and baptized us into his family, and feeds us with his Supper, not so that he can judge us, but so that he can spare us. Don’t dismiss his judgment. Don’t forget his grace.