God With Us

Back when I lived in Florida, I liked to take early morning walks around my development.  I would go when it was still dark out, when it was silent, when it was just me and the birds, the great blue herons and green herons that lingered by the water’s edge of the nearby retention pond, and the ospreys that sat high in the trees, mere shadows with wings, waiting for their chance to do a little fishing.

It was dark, very dark, when I went walking.

Depending on the time of year, the air could be hot and thick with humidity, even before the sunrise.  The only sounds were that of my own breathing, the soft clap of my sneakers on the pavement, a small splash in the water as the heron nosed its beak into the shallows.

One morning, I stopped at the pond and stared out toward the east.

I checked my watch and waited.

A moment later, a bright orange light appeared on the horizon.  It was blinding, a ball of fire that rose steadily into the sky.

It was so bright, the night sky seemed to pull back and retreat.  The darkness seemed to ripple and tremble, quivering as the light grew brighter and brighter.

You probably think I’m describing the sunrise.

But this is the east coast of Florida, specifically Brevard County, also known as the Space Coast.

If you have a Brevard County phone number, the area code is 321, as in three, two, one, liftoff.

I wasn’t watching the sunrise that morning.

I was watching a rocket launch.

The thing about rocket launches is that, if you are watching from a distance, you always see the rocket before you hear it.  The speed of light being far greater than the speed of sound.  If you wait until you hear the rumble to run outside, you’ve already missed the most exciting part.

When you watch an early morning launch, like I did that one day, the rumble seems even louder and more intense.  You might be tempted to mistake the rumble for thunder, but this thunder doesn’t come from the sky.  It builds through the ground.  It sounds more like a train coming than a storm.

This sound, this rumble fills you, and for a moment you feel as if you and everyone else around you, every living thing, every bird, every frog, every possum that had been scooting across the top of the fence but has now stopped in wonder … you feel as if you are all connected.  You are living this moment together.

It is a profoundly mystical moment.

In today’s readings from Isaiah and Matthew, we are treated to some of the more mystical moments of the story of Jesus’ birth.  We have a prophecy from Isaiah and Joseph with his own angelic visitation coming to him in a dream (not the first Joseph in the Bible to have interesting dreams).

All throughout the Christmas story, we have the wild and amazing, visitations by angels, annunciations, miraculous pregnancies for Elizabeth and Mary. 

Zechariah rendered mute because of his disbelief, finding his voice again only when he names his son, “John.”

The shepherds see not just one angel but a multitude of the heavenly host. 

The story of Jesus’ birth is filled with the mystical and the magical, the other-worldly, the extraordinary.

But let us not forget that Jesus enters this world in the most ordinary of places.  The “King of Kings, Salvation Brings,” is laid in a manger, surrounded by sheep and goats, possibly cows, definitely a donkey and later maybe even camels.

The story of Jesus’ birth is the story of the son of God making His entrance into the ordinary so that His extraordinary love, His extraordinary restoration and redemption of humanity, His extraordinary saving grace might be accessible to all people.

Jesus arrives in the ordinary.

God is found in the ordinary.

And since we are surrounded most days by the ordinary, we can feel certain that we are surrounded by God.

Immanuel, Isaiah names Him.

It’s repeated again in today’s gospel reading from Matthew.  Emmanuel.

God with us.

When was the last time you felt God’s presence in your life?  When was the last time you felt that God was with you?  Not just at Christmas but all year round?

Not only on the extraordinary days, the weddings and births, the baptisms and graduations, but on the ordinary days in between.

Where have you seen God today?

Yesterday?

When I was going through a particular rough patch in my life—physically I was very ill—a friend of mine, who knew I loved nature photography recommended a book by Mark Hirsch called That Tree.  In this book, the author takes a picture of the same tree every day for a year.  My friend texted me six words that would forever change where and how I saw God in this world.  She said, “You can do something like this.”

And, so I did.  Every day for about 300 days—I didn’t quite make it the whole year—I drove to my church which sat on an acre or so of Florida woodlands, and even on days when I felt so sick, I could barely take two steps out of the car, I took a picture—sometimes it was just the nearest palm tree, palm fronds chattering in the breeze—and then I went home and wrote about it—where God had revealed Himself to me that day.

Beyond the palm tree, though, I marveled at the things I saw, at the pileated woodpecker, the lumberjack of woodpeckers with its shock of red hair, ripping and tearing through the trees, showering the ground below with chunks of bark.

I watched two hawks settle in a nest in one of the tallest pine trees.  I learned to wait and watch each day until their babies hatched.

I spoke softly to a hibiscus bloom that was struggling, wilted, a lone bloom on what looked like a pitiful stick someone had jammed into the ground.

On Day 54, I took a picture of a cardinal, sitting in a tree.  In the sunlight, the cardinal looked like it was on fire, more phoenix than red bird.  And this is what I wrote: There is sunlight.  And there is Godlight.  There is the light we lounge by, the light we read by, and then there is Godlight. 

This is the light from God that touched the prophets of old.  Sunlight only goes skin deep.  Godlight goes directly to the soul.  This is the light we search for, the light that seems so fleeting, this is the light that if we don’t stop for it now, we may not find it again for decades.  This is the light we cannot hold, so we let it hold us instead.  This is Godlight.

Those 300 days that I went out to take pictures were ordinary days.

But in those ordinary days, I found myself surrounded by the extraordinary.  It was not suddenly there.  It had always been there.

God had always been there.

It’s just now I was paying attention.

God was there, with me.  And He had always been there with me.

As He is with you.

Emmanuel.

During those days I drove out to the church, the most extraordinary thing happened to me.  I wasn’t healed physically, but I was restored spiritually.

Our psalm today, psalm 80, carries that refrain, saying three times:

“Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.”

Restore us.

Let your face shine upon us.

How does God restore us?  By being present with us.

The birth of Jesus is the birth of Emmanuel, the God who is with us.

The God who walks with us, laughs with us, mourns with us, takes delight in us, the God who shines His light upon us, so that we don’t ever have to walk in darkness.

The God who walks alongside us on our own roads to Emmaus and waits for us to “see” Him, truly see Him, because then His joy and our joy can be complete.

God is with us.

That sunrise rocket launch I saw a few years ago … sometimes when you see a rocket launch right at sunrise, as the rocket appears high in the night sky, the incoming rays of the sun will reflect off the gases emitted from the rocket and create something known as the jellyfish effect.

What you see from the ground is this ever-expanding bubble of light, this loop of diaphanous silken thread, growing bigger and bigger in the sky.  It’s a balloon of light, filled not with air, but with stars.

It is the divine artist at work.

And, if you’re like me, you can’t help but grin like a little kid, because it is awe-inspiring work.

It is the extraordinary appearing on an ordinary early morning walk.

And I am not, by far, the only one to ever see something wonderful in the night sky, am I?

To feel my spirit filled by wonder.

It’s the same wonder I feel every Christmas no matter how old I get.  It’s the same excitement I always felt opening that last door, that last window on the Advent Calendar.  It’s the anticipation.  Something beautiful is being born.  It’s more than gifts under the tree.  It is a gift bigger than the whole of the universe and yet it chooses to walk with us, to infuse the dirt under our feet and the trees over our heads, the mountains, the rainstorms, the wind that rushes past us, to infuse it all with a holiness and a love beyond imagination.

It's extraordinary.

It’s Emmanuel.

God with us.

Amen.