To fulfill what has been spoken by the Lord

January 03, 2016

The Second Sunday after Christmas

Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

NB: Much of this sermon relies on the thought and wisdom of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks especially as found in his book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning

 

Matthew is so sure of himself!  “To fulfill what has been spoken by the Lord through the prophet…” He repeats this phrase 16 times in the Gospel of Matthew, twice in our reading today. These so-called “fulfillment citations” are specific to Matthew, who insistently aims his narrative at his fellow Jews, working to convince them that Jesus is the Messiah. Matthew lays out his evidence using techniques that his Jewish audience would have easily understood. The first chapter of Matthew begins with a genealogy. Matthew uses that genealogy to prove that Jesus was a true Israelite, of the line of Abraham and David. We then hear the several ways that Jesus’s name and birth fulfilled prophecy. We are told that his parents received dreams and messages from angels. Matthew makes a web of connections, embedding Jesus’s biography firmly within the sacred history of Israel.

We no longer use the sorts of rhetorical strategies Matthew favored, but Christians today still maintain that the story of who we are is a continuation of the story of Israel. We have been “grafted on”, “adopted”. The story of Israel has become our story, too.

Let us remember, in brief outline, what that story is. It is the story of a transcendent God who creates both life and time. That God then enters into history, sets a people free, and calls those freed people to holiness and to relationship. What Matthew tells us is that Jesus’s life manifests this same story. For Matthew, Jesus is both an affirmation and a “filling up” of the story of Israel. Jesus, he is saying, is God entering historythat much more, setting people freethat much more, calling people to holiness and to relationshipthat much more. This word that is translated here as “fulfill,” might be understood as “filled to the utmost, jam-packed and crammed to the top.” Jesus, says Matthew, is the story of Israel brought to fullness and fruition.

Having been adopted into the story of Israel, we Christians, too, share the belief that there is a real Presence outside ourselves, that we have been set free and that we have been called to respond to that Presence. At our baptism, we placed our individual lives within a larger story—God’s story. Like Joseph and Mary, we look at the challenging, disparate facts of our lives and ask, “what do they mean? How am I to live?” To live within the frame of God’s purpose, to live as a person of faith, is to risk an answer to those questions. That was true in Jesus’s lifetime and it is true now. Perhaps Joseph’s decisions were as clear and easy as Matthew makes them sound. Perhaps they were not.

How will you tell the story of your life? How will you interpret the facts of your existence and propose its meaning (or lack of meaning)? In the ancient world, just like now, there were many possible “framing stories” for people to draw on.  Judaism stood in contrast not only to paganism, but also to a variety of Greek philosophies—the Stoics, the Sceptics, the Cynics, the Epicureans. We have our own plentiful options in what we call “a secular age.” Some of the ideas we think of as “new” and “post-modern” may not be as distinctive as we believe. The Epicureans of ancient Greece, for example, had an outlook that might feel familiar. They believed that “material is the only reality, that the world is just atoms, rearranging themselves; that there is no soul, no meaning in history, and no transcending purpose to life.” (Sacks) The Epicurean formula for happiness was to maximize pleasure and to minimize risk. There have always been many possible, viable responses to the questions posed by human experience.

It can be easy to think that faith was a simpler choice for the ancient people of Israel than it is for us. When we read Matthew it can seem that meaning and purpose glimmered everywhere on the surface of life, that God’s presence was obvious-- (Sacks) but that is not actually what history and Scripture tell us. Perceiving and responding to God’s presence has never been easy. Perhaps that is why Matthew is so insistent with his fulfillment citations. No matter which time period you dip into in Scripture, people in the Bible are struggling to see and hear and understand God’s message. Then, and now, human experience affirms what Isaiah says: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” (Isaiah 45:15) When God reveals himself to us, we may or may not have “eyes to see and ears to hear.”

And so, in places of worship, we have been practicing the arts of seeing, hearing, and making sacred meaning together with God for a long time. It is good to have a place, set apart, where we can affirm and grow our understanding and build our relationships with God and with one another.  At our baptism, we commit ourselves to working together with God to unfold God’s meaning and purpose. We, too, like Jesus, are called to “fill to the fullest” God’s hopes and plans for the world.

The world is in need of the particular, Abrahamic story we belong to—the story of the sacredness of life, the assertion that each and every human life is made in the image of God, that God is love. For some who wander in, and for many who pass by, a church may seem a strange sort of place.  They are right. It is. When we enter, we find an alternate universe: people in strange clothing, visual symbols, ritualized movement, unusual words, ancient texts, (smoking incense).  We do, in fact, proclaim an alternate world of moral meaning here. We gather together as a community to proclaim and sustain a shared vision of human dignity and transcendence; then we disperse into the world to live it.

We can read Scripture with respect, knowing that the ancients we hear about struggled, just as we do, to see purpose and meaning in the confusion of life. Just as they did, we look back and reflect on what things meant, we ponder how to understand them, consider what implications they have for our futures. In short, we look for meaning.

When we need to know how things work; when we want to know things about the world that are verifiable, predictive, repeatable, we gratefully turn to the language and methods of science. Science describes, calculates and quantifies. But, if you happen to live in the messy world of relationships, if you are a parent or a spouse or a child or a friend, then you already know that logic and reason, calculation and verifiability only take you so far. Human beings have always wanted to solve mysteries, to understand things; (Sacks) but science alone will not solve all the mysteries. This is not a form of failure. This is what it is to be human. I would even go further. I would say that perhaps it is a gift. The facts of our lives as we experience them are disordered, unrepeatable. We do not live in controlled laboratories; we live in the world of human relationship and history. Our response, our interpretation of what it all means, and how we decide to live, matters.

Ultimately, we must choose. Is there transcendent meaning to this life, or is there not? If we choose to believe in the God of Scripture, this God of surprises, who tells us, “I will be who I will be”; if we believe in God’s call and God’s revelations to us, then, as people of faith, we view the world with hope, and with a specific lens of understanding. We see dignity in each and every person we encounter; we obey God’s command to love the other, and to care for the weak and vulnerable. We ask questions—not just how? but why? Or why not? To be a person of faith is to believe that there is an author and that we have been invited to become co-authors of the human story. To be a person of faith is to believe that we are part of a sacred task; we are called to inscribe a holy history of hope and dignity into the landscape of time.

If we gather together in the name of this God; if we work together in the world, if we behaveas ifwe are sureof God’s presence and God’s call to us, then perhaps those who come after us will read in our biography the traces of God’s work in the world. Perhaps, one day, centuries from now, another Matthew will say of us, too, “Look and see. What they did fulfilled what has been spoken by the Lord.”

As people of God, may this hope always be the prayer of our hearts. Amen.