"Ask for a sign," whispered Isaiah the prophet generations ago to a king standing at the brink of catastrophe, and, reading those words, I thought suddenly of the story of an old Jewish man, who, coming up from the subway into his street in Brooklyn, saw his neighbor’s business burning, and, pointing to the flames leaping against the sky, said in a trembling voice to any within earshot, The Finger, the Finger!
Catastrophe or miracle, that’s what we think of, what we pray for or fear, when we listen, when we hear the word Sign. But God doesn’t seem to be so much in the sign business these days—or, if God is, he’s gone off-message somehow—because the signs of our times are confusing, ambiguous, obscure. Thursday night, in California, a man named Johnnie Carl had an argument with a colleague, barricaded himself in his office, and committed suicide. Carl was the conductor of the Crystal Cathedral orchestra, and Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power, a respected and successful man who had been an integral leader of the ministry of the Cathedral of Hope for nearly thirty years… he struggled with depression, and tragically ended his life just before the congregation’s televised annual Christmas pageant. Look around you, and listen carefully: tidings of comfort and joy are just not that readily apparent to everyone, even those who willingly faces the signs of Christmas.
Is Christmas is the season of signs—of stars and portents, of dreams and whispered words of courage; of the mingling of men and angels, of strange goings-on in the places we had least expected? Do we imagine that the time in which we live is unique—more distressed, more imperiled, more confused and confusing than any time before (or even since)? —well, others have felt the same.
In the days of Ahaz the king, after good King Uzziah died and the world had gone to hell in a handbasket, the nation of Judah was surrounded by enemies and sure to be overrun. On the east, the rising superpower of Assyria. On the north, the bitter enmity of brothers. To the south, restless, mighty Egypt. Huddled against the edge of the Mediterranean Sea like a cowering child, Ahaz looked at his options and saw, he had no options. It was the end of the world he knew, the beginning of despair…and, not coincidentally, the season of the prophet Isaiah.
Ask for a sign, the prophet urged, compassion flooding his voice with conviction and warming his far-seeing eyes. Ask for a sign—any sign. Make it as high as heaven, or as low as hell. Let God speak—only ask, and a sign will be yours, something to hold on to in the midst of this spiraling uncertainty. Things may not be as bad as you think. But Ahaz—almost a modern man, when you think about it, in the matter of signs and dreams and portents—Ahaz said no. No, I am not signing on to this god-game of hope and possibility. I will not ask for a sign, I will not put the Lord to the test. Ahaz put his faith where any sensible, clear thinking person would—in the strength of his military, in the possibility of the survival of the canniest, and the best prepared.
Maybe there are times in our lives when the risk of a sign is too much to be borne…the fear of what might be, more hideous than the reality of the hopeless and barren present. Maybe we have made our peace with disillusionment, with disappointment, with despair, learned to moderate our expectations, compromised. Better the hell we know, we reason, than a sign in the sky or a dream in the darkness that adds possibility and uncertainty to the already overbalanced burden we are reluctantly bearing. We will not ask for a sign, we will just take life as it comes.
But prophets see the world through different eyes. When you look at them, you suspect that their minds and hearts are elsewhere, their vision turned inward, their souls making sense of your world in a way you cannot hope to comprehend. Their Signs are neither miracles nor catastrophes: they are evidence, however subtle, that against all odds, God is in the picture. Emmanuel. It means: God is with us. And whatever it means, there is hope there, and the whiff of incense, and the rustling sound of angels’ wings passing by. Ask for a sign.
Ask for a sign, the prophet said, and you can almost hear the eagerness in his voice, ringing down over some twenty-six centuries, ask. Who knows what God will do? Who can tell what the people of God may become? If you don’t ask, if you won’t ask, then the possibility dies unborn, and the hope of the future dissipates like a forgotten dream.
Oh, ask for a sign, so that God has room to grow; so that the barren present can be put in its place, so that light may shine forth in the darkness. But Ahaz would not ask.
Some centuries later, another man stood at the brink of personal disaster, and who knows? Maybe he, too, believed, it’s better not to ask. In his case, what he didn’t want to know was personal. Humiliating. Devastating. His fiancee was pregnant. The child wasn’t his. There was some wild tale of angels, and the Spirit of God walking abroad amongst the souls of people. Coincidentally (or maybe not), it was the same sign Ahaz had had, generations before. A pregnant girl, another tawdry story, an excuse, a family’s disaster.What had that to do with God? A young woman with child is not always good news.
Have you ever noticed where Joseph stands in many manger scenes? Behind Mary, a way back from the baby upon whom every eye is fixed except his. He is outside the circle of light, waiting in the dark, his gaze turned inward. Not quite adoring, not a bit sure of his role in this gauzy tale of God and angels and miracles; barely accepting the “sign” that has shattered the life he once thought would be his. In most nativity sets, Joseph stands alone, his arms folded across his chest—and, as a minister colleague of mine pointed out recently, you can scarcely tell him from the shepherds…leaving us to wonder, did I choose the right father? Which one is he? Which was, of course, precisely Joseph’s dilemma.
Joseph, seeking order in a world turned suddenly upside down, appealed (as most of us will) to the rule of law. Hoping, as we do, that by so doing he could find again a world that made sense and his place in it. He did not ask for a sign. He merely considered—what is the right thing to do? The legal thing? To stay? To go? To punish? To forgive? In time, he determined an appropriate course of action. Legal, but not devoid of compassion. Right, but not self-righteous. He did not ask for a sign, he decided not to sign up. He wouldn’t hurt anyone, but he would remove himself from the nativity scene, he would step out of the circle of light and get on with his life.
He resolved to dismiss her quietly, and spare her public disgrace. And that might have been the end of it—for Joseph, at least, but perhaps for Mary and her unborn son, just another impoverished, disgraced, single mother, trying to fend for herself in a harsh and unforgiving world. But then there was a sign. Or, to be more precise, a dream. And the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary for your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” And when he had dreamed, he woke up to a world that was changed. He had not asked for a sign, but a sign had been given anyway, because when God wants to be with us, Emmanuel, God is like that. And Joseph, who turned out to be more of a dreamer than he thought, let it be. He laid aside the proper thing, the tidy thing, the legal thing, and, letting disorder stand, he made Mary a home. And in the midst of that brave act of disorder; in that quiet act of defiance against the rule of law; in that hopeful investment in the new world of dreams and signs, suddenly, there was Emmanuel: God with Joseph, God with Mary, God in Jesus the Christ, God with us.
I know a young woman, a newlywed, whose beloved is about to go to war in Iraq. She knows that the conventional wisdom that says, wait for a child. Don’t’ burden a young marriage, a marriage at risk, with the responsibility of parenting. But, two weeks ago, a close friend was blown up when he stepped on an IED, an improvised explosive device. And the young woman says, I know what’s prudent, but I want to be open. I’m not afraid, but anything could happen, and if it does, I don’t want to have been careful, to have said “not yet” to the sign of the love we share, and the life we want to live together.
The prophet said, a young woman shall be with child, and bear a son, and his name will be: God-is-with-us, Emmanuel. Ahaz wouldn’t trust it, but against all odds, Joseph did.
Asking for a sign—and believing one will be granted—is the work of Hope, and the work of people who claim that once upon a time, hope was born in a dark stable and lived to make a world of difference, against all odds. This kind of hope-work is not optimism—it is as far from optimism, the-sun-will-come-out-tomorrow kind of belief that everything always works out for the best—as it is possible to get. It is believing God is with us—despite circumstances, indeed, sometimes, precisely because circumstances are dark and dangerous and almost entirely without the possibility of an optimistic resolution. It is choosing to make a space in the dark emptiness for God to visit us, to visit our world. It is waiting for something to be born…waiting with hope and attentiveness…sometimes, for a long time.
Waiting for miracles or catastrophes to speak to us of God is like the accident of being a brilliant inventor: a flash of genius, a frenzy of creativity, good luck, with an astonishing new creation at the end of it all. But the hope that waits for a sign, Isaiah-hope, Joseph-hope, is something else altogether. It is more like an assembly line, where we take our place, building on the work of those who have gone before us, doing our part as competently as we can, doing it over and over without losing interest or flagging in our consistency, and then passing on what we have done to the next person on the line. It is the Design that holds us together, and keeps us working and listening and waiting. That which we are building is being completed on down the line, and we will have a share in it. We live, I know, in a hard world. A world where disorder reigns, and the light shining in the darkness is too often, it seems, overcome.
A world in which the commitment to be a seeker after signs and a dreamer of dreams is a brave, tedious, and foolhardy calling. But—and this is very important—it is our calling, our heritage and birthright, what we were born and baptized to do…and if we do not believe Emmanuel—that in all things, God is with us—who will? It is not, after all, such a very hard thing to do—just to ask, to ask for a sign. And then, to see in whatever comes, God with us. Emmanuel. God be with you—God be with us all.
Amen.