emmanuel | hughdbryant

Sermon for Mattins on 21st November 2023

Bible readings: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=567498722

‘Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger—  the club in their hands is my fury!’

The club, the rod of anger, are for beating up Israel, because they have done what is evil in the sight of the Lord. You could say this is where we often come in when we are studying the Old Testament. The Old Testament has this overriding theme, of the relationship between God and his chosen people: to what extent his chosen people follow him and obey his commandments, in which case he brings them prosperity, or do evil in the sight of God or perhaps worship other gods, in which case God punishes them.

It’s not an image of God which is particularly like the one which we normally have, of a God of love in the person of Jesus Christ. This is entirely different. God is saying, through his prophet Isaiah that there will be a war. The Assyrians will attack Israel. God will use the Assyrians to carry out punishment of the Israelites on God’s behalf. They will be the rod of his anger and the club in their hands represents God’s fury.

But the king of Assyria is not just a supine servant acting on behalf of God. Because he gets above himself.

‘Against a godless nation I send him,  and against the people of my wrath I command him, to take spoil and seize plunder..’ 
But then a couple of verses later:
 ‘But this is not what he intends,  nor does he have this in mind; but it is in his heart to destroy,  and to cut off nations not a few.’

So the king of Assyria is not just after the Israelites under orders from God but he wants to go wider. He has already captured Carchemish and Arpad and Damascus, and now he has his sights on Calno and Hamath and Samaria.

‘Are not my commanders all kings?  Is not Calno like Carchemish?  Is not Hamath like Arpad?  Is not Samaria like Damascus?’

It’s quite eerie to hear these names, some of which we would still associate with violence and suffering today, 3000 years later. Isaiah’s prophecy continues that when the Lord has finished all his work on Mount Zion and Jerusalem, sorting out the Israelites, and punishing them for their faithlessness, he will punish the arrogant boasting of the king of Assyria.

And you hear all about what the king of Assyria has to say:

‘By the strength of my hand I have done it,  and by my wisdom, for I have understanding; I have removed the boundaries of peoples,  and have plundered their treasures;  like a bull I have brought down those who sat on thrones.  My hand has found, like a nest,  the wealth of the peoples; and as one gathers eggs that have been forsaken,  so I have gathered all the earth’.

This is the boast of the king of Assyria. And then you have this striking image about the relative merits of weapons as against those who wield them.

‘Shall the axe vaunt itself over the one who wields it,  or the saw magnify itself against the one who handles it?’

Again it makes us think of things today. When the Ukrainians were crying out for better weapons and our government agreed to send them Challenger 2 tanks and Storm Shadow missiles, somehow that seemed to be almost more of a consideration than the bravery of the soldiers who would use those weapons. One can’t go too far with that analogy, because obviously without the right weapons, a soldier is not able to fight at all.

But here in this passage from Isaiah the point that the prophet is making, that the king of Assyria is effectively God’s secret weapon, still requires that he must not get above himself. He still has to follow God’s orders. As between God and the Israelites, Assyria is the weapon, not the commander. So God will cut him down to size.

‘Therefore the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts,  will send wasting sickness among his stout warriors, and under his glory a burning will be kindled,  …… The remnant of the trees of his forest will be so few  that a child can write them down.’

Chilling imagery. What is it for? We really don’t have, as far as I can see, any equivalent today. People just don’t talk in those terms. We tend to think of prophets, if we think of them at all, as people who foretell the future. But that’s plainly not what Isaiah is doing here. Isaiah is the mouthpiece of God.

We really are a long way away when we read this. Isaiah was writing around 700BC – BCE – so 2,700 years ago. I’m not sure that there is any prophecy of this type these days. But if not, it’s even more difficult for us to make anything of what Jesus says in our New Testament lesson. How could we tell, if somebody claims to be a prophet, whether they are genuine? If someone pops up and tells us that God wants us to do something or other, the question arises, is he or she a false prophet?

If church leaders want to do particular things, are they following the word of God, or God’s command, or not? Jesus simply said, by their fruits you shall know them. So if somebody tells you that God wants you to do something which isn’t likely to turn out well, then Jesus suggests that you can take it that it is not genuine prophecy.

Perhaps although talking about prophecy seems to come quite strangely to us, nevertheless it could be good to look at what the implications are, in spiritual terms, of what people are telling us is a good thing to do.

In the first chapter of Isaiah’s prophecy, he identifies what it looks like to be godless.

‘Your rulers obey no rules and are hand in glove with thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and is greedy for his profit. They never defend the rights of the orphan and the widow’s cause never comes up before them.’

Again it’s frighteningly contemporary. Perhaps we should think again about prophets and prophecy. If you go away and have a little read of the first few chapters of the book of Isaiah, you will immediately stumble on the passages which we often read during Advent and at Christmas about the coming of the Messiah, about Emmanuel, God with us.

‘For to us a child will be born, to us a son will be given. The government rests upon his shoulders
and his name shall be
wonderful, counsellor, mighty God,
everlasting father, prince of peace.’

But we haven’t got there yet. As we move towards Advent, this picture, of God’s anger with his chosen people, is something which we need to reflect on and pray about, because it is uncomfortably close to home.

Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, 13th January 2019

Isaiah 55:1-11; Romans 6:1-11

What difference does it make? You know, being a Christian. We are past the lovely Christmas baby-fest. Now what difference does God-with-us, Emmanuel, make?

Isaiah is saying to the Israelites, come back to the true God. Don’t follow pagan idols.

‘Why spend money and get what is not bread,

why give the price of your labour and go unsatisfied?

Only listen to me and you will have good food to eat,

and you will enjoy the fat of the land.

Come to me and listen to my words,

hear me, and you shall have life:

I will make a covenant with you, this time for ever,

to love you faithfully as I loved David’ [Is. 55:2-3, NEB]

Salvation is coming. The Messiah will come. He will not be what you expect – he will be like a suffering servant, even – ‘ despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’ [Is. 53:3f]. But ‘all we like sheep have gone astray’. You can hear Handel’s ‘Messiah’ in it – but you mustn’t be seduced by the beautiful music into not hearing the Bible underneath.

It’s the major theme of much of the Old Testament. The chosen people, the Israelites, ‘like sheep have gone astray’. They have worshipped false gods. Isaiah asks, ‘Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not?’

We can recognise ourselves a bit in this, even though it was written nearly 3,000 years ago. Your eyes will probably glaze over if I say this. Yeah, yeah. Of course we shouldn’t get hung up on new cars and posh extensions to our houses. But – we do. What harm does it do? Worse things happen at sea.

Well, Isaiah said to the Israelites, according to some scholars about 700BC, that they needed to ‘Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near:
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord.’ It could still be valid for us today.

Because what the Israelites were doing was sin; they were sinning against the one true God. But he offers them a second chance. ‘Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.’

Sin is, in a sense, doing bad things. But underpinning that is the reason that something is sinful. It is, that it shows that the sinner is turning away from, is separated from, God. So if you steal, or envy someone their things, or elope with their wife, those are bad things, but they are also sins, because you are going against God’s commandments. ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments’ [John 14:15f].

But in our other reading, from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we have flashed forward 700 years from Isaiah, to the time of Jesus, and St Paul. Isaiah’s prophecies have come true. The Messiah has come. This morning in our services we were marking the Baptism of Christ. Christ meeting the last of the prophets, John the Baptist. You might perhaps think that because of the story of Jesus, there isn’t any need to bother with the Old Testament, with 60+ chapters of Isaiah and things, any more. But remember that Jesus himself said, ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am come not to destroy, but to fulfil.’ (Matt. 5:17). So when the dove came down on Jesus after his baptism in the River Jordan, and the voice from heaven said, ‘Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased’, it was a pivotal moment, joining the prophetic time with the incarnation of God on earth.

Paul made powerful use of baptism in his preaching to non-Jews. Baptism was a ritual common in Greek cults as well as in Christianity. ‘To his pagan converts it appealed as a sacrament parallel to those of the Greek mysteries’ (C.H. Dodd, 1950 (1920), The Meaning of Paul for Today, Glasgow, Wm Collins Sons and Co, p.130). In the Greek mysteries, by performing sacramental acts ‘spiritual effects could be obtained’ (Dodd).

Running through St Paul’s letters is the idea of the Christians being ‘in Christ’, intimately bound up with Christ. So, in a sense, Christ’s baptism was a symbol of being dead and then resurrected; going down into the water and then rising up out of it. By being baptised ‘along with’ or ‘into’ Christ, Christians were symbolically sharing in his death and resurrection.

At the same time, there was a problem: even after being baptised, Christians were still human, they still did sinful things. Paul said that we need to be ‘dead to sin’ in the way that Jesus was. That is, as Jesus died, he couldn’t be prey to sinful influences. He was ‘dead to sin’. So as a Christian, if I am ‘alive to Christ’, baptised, sacramentally dead and resurrected with him, I too should be ‘dead to sin’.

But it isn’t magic. It’s a sacrament. The essence of a sacrament is that it is ‘an outward visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’, as the Catechism in the BCP puts it (p294 of the Cambridge edition). It’s worth reading this bit of the Catechism. Things aren’t as fierce today as they were in the 16th century, when the heading to the Catechism in the BCP was ‘an Instruction to be learned of every Person before he be brought to be confirmed by the Bishop’. That is, learned by heart, at about 10 years old…

Anyway, if you’re up for it, this is what you have to learn about being baptised.

‘Question.

How many parts are there in a Sacrament?

Answer.

Two: the outward visible sign, and the inward spiritual grace.

Question.

What is the outward visible sign or form in Baptism?

Answer.

Water: wherein the person is baptized, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Question.

What is the inward and spiritual grace?

Answer.

A death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness: for being by nature born in sin, and the children of wrath, we are hereby made the children of grace.

Question.

What is required of persons to be baptized?

Answer.

Repentance, whereby they forsake sin: and faith, whereby they stedfastly believe the promises of God, made to them in that Sacrament.’

‘A death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness’. That’s what you get in Christian baptism. But just as sin doesn’t just mean doing bad things, so conversely, being a child of grace doesn’t mean just going with the flow, being baptised and doing nothing in consequence of it. You need repentance, μετάνοια, change of mind, as a prerequisite.

Paul has posed the problem, the puzzle. Why is there still sin around, or rather, can we still get away with committing sins, after we have been baptised? Indeed, he starts with a rather nerdy argument that sounds as though it has come out of a philosophy essay, to the effect that we need to carry on sinning in order to demonstrate by contrast the weight of grace which we have got. It’s almost like saying you can’t understand what it is to be black unless you have white as well.

Paul answers his puzzle not philosophically, but by explaining how we are joined with Christ in the sacrament. Dead with him; dead to sin. Alive, resurrected, with Christ. So, I come back round to my original question. ‘What difference does it make? You know, being a Christian. We are past the lovely Christmas baby-fest. Now what difference does God-with-us, Emmanuel, make?’

This is tough stuff. It really means that, if we put our heads above the parapet and let people know that we are Christians, it should be evident in what we do, evident in how we behave.

It means that in business, if we say that our actions are dictated solely by the need to make value, or profit, for shareholders; or in public affairs, if we say that we would like to do something good, but that money, or the market, dictates otherwise; if we see poor people risking their lives to escape poverty and danger, and try to keep them out instead of giving them a place of refuge; in all those cases, we will show ourselves as still not being dead to sin and alive to Christ.

Think of Jesus’ teaching. God and mammon: the good Samaritan; the prodigal son; giving and not counting the cost. As Jesus said just before he was baptised, in St Luke’s Gospel, ‘The man with two shirts must share with him who has none, and anyone who has food must do the same.’ It’s not enough – although it’s a good start – just to go to church. Think what you have to do, to really do, in order to be really dead to sin.

Ah, Assyria

Dead and Alive