Sermon for the Sabbath Celebrated on Sunday, December 20, 2020

December 20, 2020                 Sermon                        Isaiah 9: 1-9

            Is it four identifiers or five?  Thus is the controversy of Isaiah 9.  Is this, as laid out in Handel’s Messiah, Wonderful Counselor, Almighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace OR is it Wonderful, then Counselor, then Almighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace?  So what does it matter?  Well, for one thing, it begs the question: How thence shall we think about our Lord Jesus in the manner that the Bible calls us upon to do?

            Before we get bogged down into what we do not know about this passage, it would be helpful to consider what we do know so far, because this is powerful stuff.  This child is from the House of David, established for us in Jeremiah some three weeks ago.  Then the Micah verses, they confirm David, whose City is Bethlehem, but they mark this Messiah as the shepherd of the people, here again confirmed.  Isaiah says specifically, He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore.   Uphold what?  He will establish and uphold peace with justice and righteousness.  This is the shepherd of the people. 

            Then, last week, and two chapters ago, Isaiah lays down for us two more pieces of the Messianic expectation.  This will be the child of a virgin: the child that God is going to give to her.  AND his name is Emmanuel, God is With Us.  That is where we come to these celebratory titles that sing to us.  Jesus said the first shall be last and the last shall be first.   He was talking about people who consider their own importance in the world, but this precept applies to our passage today.  Let us look to the last title first.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace.  In John, Jesus said My peace I leave with you, I do not give to you as the world gives.  When we talk about peace, we are really talking about peace.  We are not talking about the stretches of ‘ceasefire’ that pass for peace in a sinful world.  Because that is really what it is.  Look at the world map and how many flashpoints are there that could draw us into a war tomorrow?  Jesus is going to establish the peace with justice and righteousness, with fair dealings and right behavior, as its underpinnings.     

            But what if I said that justice and righteousness is a redistribution of the wealth and the stuff of the world equally to everyone because there is enough in the world so that none should be in poverty, that we would have no more reason to make war?  In the eyes of this nation, I would not be speaking for the Prince of Peace, I would be a Communist.  So I defer to the power of the Almighty, to the Prince of Peace to make peace truly happen.  Because, continuing to work in reverse, the power and authority that Isaiah says this child is going to have, they are derived from the second and third to the last titles of our passage. 

            Jesus is Almighty God and Everlasting Father.  But wait, we might say, we already have one of those.  As we know in the trinitarian blessing, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the first one is Almighty God and Everlasting Father, when we segment out the roles and responsibilities.  And Jesus was a guy, when he came to earth.  Well, Jesus was fully guy and fully God.  He spends a lot of time in the Gospel of John talking about how God flows to Jesus which then flows to us, love, judgment, authority.  The things of God are upon this child who is born King of the Jews.

            And we divide these titles for an important reason.  Almighty God is the best we humans can do to sum up what it means to be God.  All Mighty.  We have a dozen or more other theological terms that break down what Almighty means, but this sums it all up.  And remember what theology is, it is thinking about God.  It is thinking about God and what Almighty means that leads to breaking out the various areas where God’s power is all-encompassing.  Helps us get a toe in the door of trying to understand what is truly beyond our comprehension.

            Everlasting Father, that is different from Almighty God because it marks Jesus in relationship, Father to all of humanity.  Again, this is a role that, in our Trinity thinking, Jesus is taking up from the Father; person 2, the Son, taking up what we understand as person 1, the Father.  And we can get thoroughly confused as trying to figure out the One in Three and Three in One when it is more important to understand that the meaning of God is not in the formula.  The meaning of God is in whom God explains Godself to be to us.  God the Everlasting Father is the loving father of all time for all humanity.  This is the role that Jesus is stepping into, through his Messianic work, for us.  The language is confusing, the Son of God becoming the Everlasting Father, but I hope it makes a lot more sense when we consider God’s plan.  Sin separated us from God the Father.  Jesus-the Son-came to us and restored that relationship through his death and resurrection.  In glory, Jesus then rises to return once again to the Everlasting Father. 

            To understand the Trinity is NOT to understand a formula.  It is to understand how God has revealed Godself to us in a way we can understand.  And the closer we come and the more we understand our God’s relationship to us, the less we need to lean on these divisions that God structured as our foundation of understanding the nature of what is otherwise unknowable.  So, Almighty God, the Messiah has all the power of the Divine.  Everlasting Father, the Messiah is the loving Father for all time to all God’s children.  Prince of Peace ties back into these two because this is what God has come to accomplish among us.

            Now we come to the controversy.  Is it Wonderful Counselor or Wonderful AND Counselor?  Counselor may be a confusing sort of word, does loving Jesus implies some kind of therapy in our relationship?  Confession is a mandate of Scripture, but therapy, at least as we might understand it in the psychological sense, maybe not so much.  Because Wonderful Counselor, if we go with the single term, means so much more than having a Great Therapist. 

            Actually, Jesus helps us understand this term, “Counselor”.  In John 14, when Jesus talks about peace, he also talks about Counselor.  Jesus is explaining to his disciples that he is going to return to heaven, but that he is not going to leave them alone.  He is sending another, the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, but referring to its role as that of “Advocate”, also translated as “Counselor”, that will be, to use the other name “Emmanuel”, God with Us, because Jesus will be there indwelling as the Counselor.  So it is not like Jesus is describing God like a pie, that when the Jesus piece is put back, the Holy Spirit piece will come out to replace it.

            No, Jesus identifies as this Counselor who will come down and indwell us.  That puts a different spin on Pentecost.  The Holy Spirit comes down to us, but that is Jesus come back to us.  Not in person, but into each person.  Jesus’ whole life experience is the model by which we do things as God would have us do.  As Holy Spirit, as Counselor, Jesus then indwells us to guide us to live into his teachings, his actions, his prayers, on how to live out the Love of God. 

            Only recently did I do some reading by a theologian who has done some deep thinking on what the Holy Spirit actually is.  I know the general bits, fire on the head, the Spirit gives us fruit to live by, it is Jesus in us after Jesus was with us.  But the entire argument this theologian constructed from Scripture is to understand the Holy Spirit as the Divine Love.  We know God is love, but that is practically a throw away statement.  Jesus lived a life to counsel us, to be our ‘how to’ manual, to be our ‘self help’ book on being a Christian.  Then Jesus is also the Divine Love which comes down upon us so that we might live it.

            How do self help books work?  Their work presumes we internalize the lessons that they present to us.  Thus the mantras and the buzz words and the catch phrases.  How about the original internalization?  Jesus, the Man, returned to heaven, so that Jesus, the Divine Love, could come down and internalize all that Jesus taught and showed us in his time on earth?  Again, the more we meditate on who God is, the more these foundational divisions that God laid out to help us understand what cannot be understood break down and we come more completely into the Love that is God.  I think that is why the words and descriptions of God by mystics sounds like so much mumbo jumbo, there is just not the language to describe our union with Christ, our God.

            So the Son in “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is taking upon himself the roles and the powers of the Father and the Holy Spirit.  Notice, this passage does not stand on its own.  Theology, thinking about God, it requires a broad application of our primary sources about God, the Bible.  To my understanding, this is a major distinction between Christianity and Islam.  We believe God has given us the Trinitarian understanding so that we can understand that God comes into a personal, redeeming relationship with each of us.  My understanding of Allah, of God in the Muslim tradition is a loving but unknowable Almighty power that must be obeyed.  In my Christian point of view, it is the Almighty God of our titles from Isaiah.  So the Trinity is not three Gods or one God divided three ways, but a division of roles and responsibilities that are meant to help us mere mortals wrap our brains around the God who loves us and has a Plan for us, that plan fulfilled in Jesus, born in the manger, whom we are celebrating inside of a week.

            Isaiah 9:2 is a powerful introduction to the coming of Jesus.  The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.  John 1, the New Testament Creation story, steps off from these words, telling us, What has come into being ⁴in him (Jesus) was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.  The darkness is the sin in the world that blinds us to the love and light of our God.  How God will accomplish this, God’s plan, we can see in the titles of Jesus given in Isaiah 9. 

            But we still have a problem.  Wonderful Counselor, Almighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  Is it four titles or is it five?  I will be honest with you, I can see arguments on both sides but I lean toward the five.  And the reason I do so is that before God even gets into the theological depths of what it means to receive the Messiah, God begins by telling us that Jesus is Wonderful.  Amen.