Each year, our staff from Bethany gets together for a Christmas party in the early part of December. And each year, there is some kind of memorable activity that takes place.

In 2002, it was singing Christmas carols with everyone equipped with various and assorted percussion instruments. You’ve never heard carols quite like this!

This year, it was breaking into small groups to compose a new song. We did our own version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” except that rather than “My true love gave to me,” it was “We saw at Bethany.” So each of the days had the appropriate number of items…of things actually observed here at Bethany. For instance, on the twelfth day of Christmas, we saw at Bethany:

• Twelve styles of worship.
• Eleven babies crying.
• Ten ushers ushering.
• Nine … thousand lawyers!…

you get the idea.

Now, I share that with you just to lead into what I wanted to tell you. That song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” at one time actually had meaning to it beyond just pear trees and shopping malls it brings up today. Various interpretations have been affixed, but the underlying foundation behind it was this:

Christmas was a season …not just a day.

The season of Advent (waiting and preparation) was followed by Christmas Day, and then (contrary to today’s retail-driven season that ends on Christmas Eve) the season of Christmas, twelve days that end in January with the celebration of Epiphany.

Epiphany is a word that means “manifestation” or “appearance,” and it signifies the appearance of God to the gentile (non-Jewish) kings, the wisemen that find out about the birth of the Christ and bring him gifts. The celebration of Epiphany takes place this Tuesday, and really marks the end of Christmas season.

And so we meet this morning on what we might properly call “the tenth day of Christmas.”

We will continue well into this new year in our study of God’s word that comes to us through the prophet Isaiah. This morning we read in chapter 29, beginning with verse 13. I’ve put these things on the communion table: a copy of the Apostles’ Creed, a pottery pitcher and a cross to help us sort of “mark” this text as we hear it.

Sometimes Isaiah can be downright hard to figure out. His prophetic career stretched across a very turbulent time in Judah’s history. Linking a specific passage to a particular time in that history… and linking a specific passage to future events is very difficult work. What is not so difficult is catching the general direction of God’s word through this prophet.

Isaiah’s call is normally to encourage or pester whoever is the king of Judah in Jerusalem and call them to quit trusting in political and military power and alliances, and to instead focus on turning to God and trusting wholeheartedly in Him.

Over and over, Isaiah calls the rulers and the people of Judah to trust God and see what will happen. Over and over, the call falls on deaf ears. It doesn’t seem to matter who the king is (Ahaz, or Hezekiah his son) or if they are generally godly rulers (Ahaz really wasn’t and Hezekiah generally was) or who the country is that tempts Judah to align and rebel (Assyria, Syria, Egypt, Babylon). Judah can’t or won’t hear God speak through Isaiah.

Many people think this chapter takes us all the way to 701 BC. At that point, Hezekiah is the king. The country of Judah is heavily indebted to Assyria for the freedom they enjoy, and they pay vast amounts of tribute money to insure it. In fact, Assyria has conquered most of the Middle East, including the northern tribes of Israel. But the royal regime in Assyria changes and a new king is crowned, and Hezekiah seizes the moment to orchestrate an alliance to oppose Assyria. He arranges defenses, provides arms, fortifies Jerusalem’s walls, he digs a tunnel to bring water into the city.

Everything, from a political, human point of view looks very good. I’m sure Hezekiah’s ratings in the polls were running at an all-time high. He was pushing the right buttons.

To which Isaiah says: You just don’t get it. Or rather, God says through Isaiah: You just don’t get it.

And in this short passage, the Lord identifies a symptom, a root sickness and a surprise for the future. Wouldn’t you be offended if you brought a guest in here to Bethany, and it was a good worship service, a meaningful time and at the end of worship you turned to your guest and said,

“Well, that was great, wasn’t it?!”

And they said,

“What a bunch of meaningless ritual. And what a bunch of hypocrites who practice it.”

How offensive that would be!

But imagine that it is God’s voice which speaks those words. How horrible! God says in this passage,

“My people are far away from me. Oh, they say the right words, but it is their HEARTS that are far from me. Their worship of me is strictly something they have learned with their minds, they’ve memorized it and there’s nothing in the words to take offense at, but where are their hearts?”

What a difference between words spoken to sound good…and worship. Maybe we catch just a glimpse of it when we have a time in worship here and are invited to pray out loud like we just did. And you find yourself in a wrestling match with yourself:

“Should I pray out loud? What would I say? Would this sound okay to everybody? Do I pray too often out loud? Will I appear ignorant or immature?”

I suspect you’ve been there. I certainly have. What would it be like to honor God with our hearts…to give ourselves to worship, and see what the words would be that came from our hearts to our mouths? To worship with the heart.

Last Sunday I was off, and on Sunday night Anne and I went up to the 9:30 pm Compline service at St. Mark’s Cathedral on Capitol Hill. Years ago, in college and after, we had both gone quite a bit. If you’ve never been, you really should go. It’s just a half hour.

The service is sung by a men’s group, singing a cappella, chanting and reading so it feels a bit like a monastery. It’s very quiet and reflective. The congregation (and usually the cathedral is packed out, with mostly young people) sits quietly throughout the time. Just one time, late in the service, the lead person starts into the Apostle’s Creed:

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, make of heaven and earth…”

Everyone in the cathedral stands at that point. Everyone. Those who have been sitting on the floor, the sides, the chancel…everyone stands for the recitation of the Apostle’s Creed. It is an old tradition of the church.

I found myself looking around and wondering:

• Are these people standing because they believe and honor the gospel that the words of the Creed speak out?
• Or are they standing because it is a tradition to stand?
• Are they worshipping with “a human commandment learned by rote?”
• Or are their hearts close to God and they offer it in genuine worship?

And then, I found God bringing the same question coming back to me:

• Am I standing because I believe these things about God,
• Am I offering it back to God in worship out of the fullness of my heart, acknowledging who He is and what He has done?
• Would I stand if others weren’t?

By the way, it is hard to answer these questions when you are wondering what everyone else is doing.

The symptom that God identifies here is insincere worship. It is a symptom…of people whose hearts are far from God.

But why are their hearts far from God? Why are people planning, plotting, hiding in the dark, acting as though somehow God doesn’t know what they are doing? What is the root cause? That appears in verse 16 and following. Things are upside down.

“Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? Shall the thing made say of its maker, ‘he did not make me?’ Will the created thing rebel against the One who created it?”

It seems to be part of the human sickness for us to try and control God. Most of us are very comfortable with God…when things go well for us. When they don’t go so well is when the objections pop up.

Is God in control, or not?

And if things are out of control, then maybe God is not there.

I received a lovely new book for Christmas of some of the short stories of the American writer, John Updike. One of them, called Pigeon Feathers is the story of a boy who is concerned about whether he can really trust that God exists. He genuinely is wrestling with faith. He asks his mom,

“You think, then, that there is a God?“
“Of course I do.”
“He made everything? You feel that?”
“Yes.”
“Then who made Him?”
“Why, Man. Man.”
“…that amounts to saying He doesn’t exist.”

The boy was disgusted. He wanted proof in a particular way that God existed. And it was a long while…before he was convinced in an utterly different and surprising way.

We want God on our terms. If he is in control, then he will be in control the way I desire, things will go well for me. So I will follow after God…so long as God follows after me.

We have some friends, and the woman now has cancer, a rare kind of cancer which no thirty-something mom should ever contract and which is proving very hard to treat. They are strong believers.

• What will they do now?
• Is God being unfaithful to them?
• Shall they quit believing?
• Was theirs a contract with God which made belief contingent upon circumstances?
• Or something bigger?

I have been amazed to get recent emails that continue to give thanks to God for his goodness, his grace, his community.

Shall the thing made say of its maker, “he did not make me?” Are we self-sufficient pots free to rework the potter to please us? Or are we the Potter’s people? And if we belong to God…can we trust in his upside down ways?

The symptom is worship in words only. The root sickness is an unwillingness to grant that God is free to act however he will. And if we cannot see that God is acting in a way different than what we expected, we assume God is not acting at all. And therefore we will not trust. Something has to shake us out of our rut. Something surprising.

In 701 BC, the new Assyrian king had enough of Hezekiah and his rebellion. Assyrian troops filled the valleys of Judah; city after city fell. People were deported. Assyria camped out on Jerusalem’s doorstep and demanded its surrender. Hezekiah didn’t know what to do. Isaiah’s word, one more time, was to not scurry toward new alliances or saviors, but to trust in what God was doing. In fact, Isaiah said, Assyria will not take Jerusalem.

What would Hezekiah do?

From a political, military, human point of view…things were now a disaster. His popularity in the polls plummeted.

• Will he now be able to trust that there not only is a God, but a God who has a hand in history?
• Can he trust that the inner state of his people is more important than the number of warriors it employs?
• Can he trust a God who may not act at all in the way he wants?

If Hezekiah trusts the word through the prophet, he stays behind the walls of the city and does not give in. He puts up with the criticisms, the screaming of those around him. It means putting his faith forward in a way that affects not only himself, but all of the people around him. It sounds different. Shocking. Even foolish.

Would we be willing to act in such a way that seems so contrary to conventional wisdom?

Would we throw our lot in with a God whose words and ways appear foolish?

God says, “I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing. The wisdom of their wise shall perish. The discernment of the discerning shall be hidden.” God, you see, has not abandoned Judah.

Hezekiah stays behind the walls of Jerusalem, and God does a very, very surprising thing. The Assyrian army is poised at the gate of Jerusalem, laying siege to it and ready to attack. And if we read in 2 Kings 18, or Isaiah 37 (the words are the same in both places), here is what happens:

“Then the angel of the Lord set out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians; when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies. Then (the king) of Assyria left, and went home.”

Jerusalem was saved. In spite of the unwillingness of the people to put their trust in God, or maybe because of their unwillingness…God has a solution for his people. It was so surprising, so shocking it seemed foolish. But God was after their hearts.

Some things have not changed.

When the apostle Paul wrote the first letter to the Corinthians, he said,

“The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

And then Paul quotes this scripture from Isaiah, the Lord saying,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

The New Testament applies this sense of foolishness and surprise to the cross of Christ.The ways of God seemed foolish to the people around Isaiah. The ways of Jesus seemed foolish to those around the Apostle Paul. The ways of the cross seem foolish to the world around us.

What sort of God would give up worldly power for the sake of reclaiming his people?

What sort of God would give his life for people who had willingly turned their backs on him?

Only one God, I think. A God who loved his people. Who came to earth at Christmas. Who was made manifest to the nations in Epiphany. Who was revealed in Jesus Christ. The One God, whom alone we worship and serve.

If you are able, and willing, please stand with me for the Apostles’ Creed.