(Sermon 2006-12-17) Peace Lutheran Church Grass Valley CA

Advent 3: “God in Our Midst”

17 December 2006

O come, O come Emmanuel! That is a familiar song and a familiar prayer during this season, and we love that name for Christ: Emmanuel! God with us! How the world waited for that Bethlehem birth, that child who would be Jesus, our Emmanuel!

Yet there is a startling idea in our scripture lessons this morning. It comes in Zephaniah, in our psalmody, and even in Philippians, but let’s use the words in Zephaniah to summarize it: “The Lord,” he writes, “is in your midst.” The Lord is in your midst. It is a simple phrase, and one that appears dozens of times in the Bible. Why did the ancient writers find it to be so important?

In the first place, it was an unusual idea about God. Most ancient religions saw gods as being distant and far away. They could not be approached. And there is certainly something of that idea in some parts of the Old Testament. God is so powerful, so holy, that one cannot even look upon him or speak his name.

And yet there is always this other side to it. The Lord is in your midst. By this we understand that God is right here among us—not confined to a temple or a church, not far off and distant from us, but right here, right in our midst.

Now to me it is a bit puzzling that the Old Testament prophets, who were pointing to the coming of Messiah, could still say, in the present tense, “The Lord is in your midst.” How can that be? How is it that they could look for the coming of God in the future, and yet still affirm that, in the very present moment, God is already here?

I suspect it has something to do with something we’ve talked about often in our adult Sunday School class: the hiddenness of God. Sometimes it seems that God is nowhere to be found, he is hidden. And yet, even then, he is in our midst. Even when we seem to be in darkness, even when tragedy strikes, even when it seems that God has forsaken us, he is in our midst. And this suggests, you see, that at Bethlehem what is happening is not so much that God is coming among us, as if he were somehow before that time far away; no, at Bethlehem, he was revealing himself to us. He was letting us know that he was here among us.

And isn’t that still so often the way he operates? He is among us, in our midst, every moment—but there are times when he reveals himself in a vivid way. Brother Lawrence, the seventeenth century mystic, talked about “practicing the presence of God.” By this he meant that God is always in our midst, but much of the time we are not aware of him. We become so busy with life, so busy with chores and tasks and things to do, that we do not realize he is here. Brother Lawrence made an attempt to be aware of God’s presence at every moment—in church, to be sure, but also in the kitchen, doing his chores. To pray, he once said, is not to come into God’s presence, but to become aware of God’s presence—a presence that is always there, each moment.

What difference does this presence make? Let me tell you a couple of stories. The first is about the second grade class who had invited their fathers to come to school on a particular day to observe how their children were being taught. It was a great idea, the teacher thought, but unfortunately very few fathers were able to come. So the teacher had the children go around the room and explain why their fathers could not be there: one father owned a grocery store, and could not get away; another was a doctor, and was too busy healing people; another was a lawyer, and he was too busy helping people with their problems. The turn came for one little boy, whose father, the teacher knew, was unemployed. What would he say? “My dad . . .” he began haltingly . . . and then, glancing across the room with a smile lighting up his face, “My dad is here!”

For Christians, you see, the greatest thing to say about God is that he is here. He is here, right here with us, because he loves us, and because nothing is more important to him than to be with us. I love the line from the catechism: “I believe that God created me—and all that exists.” “All that exists” is important, of course; a God who could create the world and fling the stars into space is a pretty great God. But first and foremost, what I know about him is that he created me—that I am his own, and that nothing and no one is more beloved by him than me. That is God in our midst.

Another story. At the onset of World War II, the Queen Mother of England, mother of the present Queen Elizabeth and her sister Margaret, was asked whether the little princesses would be leaving England during the blitz of 1940. The queen replied, “The children will not leave England unless I do. I shall not leave unless their father does, and the king will not leave the country in any circumstances whatever.” What a wonderful word of reassurance that was to a frightened nation! It would have been easy for the royal family to flee to safety, but they would not. They would stay there, in the midst of their people.

God is like that. We do not need to be afraid that he will leave us; we do not need to be afraid that we will be left alone. God is in our midst—and that is where he will stay.

So this Advent is a time of waiting and expectation, to be sure; but also a time of opening our eyes to see that God is here. Where will we find him?

Perhaps we should say first that we find him in his Word. It is a remarkable thing, is it not, that God speaks to us? Yet that is what we believe. I love reading the Gospel lesson each week from the center aisle—in the midst of the congregation, if you will. It says, in a simple but eloquent way that when we hear these words—these “words of eternal life,” as we call them—when we hear these words, we are hearing Christ in our midst.

And then we can say as well that we find him in the Sacraments he has given us. For Lutherans, it is important to speak of the “real presence of Christ” in the Eucharist. We believe and confess that the bread which we break, and the wine which we share, are not merely symbols, but they are Christ in our midst. “Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face.”

I have often pondered the many dimensions of the Sacrament of Holy Communion. I sometimes think, for example, of how incredible it is that the great God, the Creator of the universe, would make himself visible in something as simple as bread and wine, as humble as bread and wine. Yet really, that is what Christmas is all about, isn’t it? God making himself visible in something as common as a baby, as humble as a child in a cow stall? Isn’t he telling us that he is here, in our midst, in simple and unexpected ways? Who would believe it? We would think that God should make himself known in majesty and power. That would be fitting. But a child in a manger? Or common bread and wine? Yet that is just how he comes to us.

And then of course we find him in his people. Go back a few verses before our passage from Zephaniah this morning and you will find a most interesting verse: “I will leave in the midst of you a people humble and lowly.” It is as if the prophet is suggesting that it is through God’s people, humble and lowly, that God himself is in the midst of the world.

One of the most popular holiday movies is Miracle on 34th Street, a wonderful parable about what it means to give. My eye was caught the other day by a poem entitled, “The Spirit of 34th Street.” Now poems are not everyone’s cup of tea, I know, and this is one of those that doesn’t even rhyme! But listen to the words and catch the image:

Doors opened with a silent scream,

like photographs of anguish;

the subway paused, shed cargo

and raged on.

She lurched aboard,

sagged into a vacant seat,

frail weight of her gray years

hunched with cold.

Numb fingers plucked at rags,

drawn close against raw misery.

Knuckles, cracked and swollen white,

clutched into a plea for warmth.

He, dark and lithe,

swung down the aisle,

taut jeans dancing

rhythmically.

With Latin grace

he, sidling past

her patient form,

in one smooth gesture

disappeared through subway doors,

leaving in her lap,

like folded dove wings,

his black leather gloves.

You see, the presence of God is sometimes known and seen through his people, through simple acts of giving and kindness which proclaim in a cold world that indeed, God is in our midst.