Sermon – Where’s Jesus?
Isaiah 63:7-9; Matthew 2:13-23
Farmville Presbyterian Church
12/28/25
You know how there are different sides to us. There is the “Pete the parent” side, “Pete the preacher” side, “Pete the ‘I grew up in the 80s and have a nerdy personality’” side, “Pete the child of God” side (that is a pretty important one that is holding up all of these, and “Pete the husband of dear Anne” side. That Pete is especially looking forward to our vacation this week. Well, there is at least one more side in there: “Pete who grew up in church every Sunday with Sunday School and Vacation Bible School” side. It is that side that I am finding today – today, the first Sunday of Christmas. We just celebrated Christmas Day and had a nice Christmas Eve service. We had a filling Christmas Breakfast – filling in many ways. We sang the familiar songs and continue to. We even had an amazing collection of nativity sets pop up to remind us of this story of the baby Jesus born in a manger two thousand years ago. I grew up with that story. Many of you did also. It is comfortable and comforting. It is sweet and endearing. It is so innocent and easy that we even invite children to participate in nativity pageants wearing their parents’ bathrobes and towels around their heads. This is the story of cute Advent calendars. This is the idea of Christmas that we like; it is familiar and it is good. Once that baby Jesus was born so many years ago, the world was ok. The worries of the world could be resolved in the glory of the birth of Christ. Everything was good when God-With-Us, Immanuel, was finally born.
Except, that is exactly not the truth. Just when we thought we could breathe easy and take a rest, just when we thought we had arrived at the stable in peace and joy, just when the “answer” to the world’s problems was finally with us, things went absolutely bonkers. My children’s Sunday school version of the birth of Jesus did not include the wanton massacre of who knows how many toddler boys. The children’s Sunday school version that I learned did not include Jesus’ family fleeing for their very lives and having to live in a faraway country as refugees, traveling precariously as it was quite dangerous. The children’s Sunday school version that I held in my heart all these years did not include the family of Jesus displaced from their intended home and forced to locate in a backwater good-for-nothing town on the outskirts of society such that one of the disciples of Jesus would even one day remark, “Can anything good even come from Nazareth?” Jesus became public enemy #1 the moment he took his first breath. Stop and appreciate that. He became a threat to every earthly power, and his existence made his family’s life very difficult.
Once the presence of God put on flesh and dwelt among us, things got a whole lot messier, a whole lot more difficult, a whole lot more confusing. But it was not something that just happened here with Jesus.
Isaiah gives us this beautiful piece of poetry in the passage that I read. It recalls the presence of God being a saving force. It was God’s very self who saved God’s people then – not some other agent, angel, or messenger but the very Spirit of our God for God’s children. That is exciting and explains why this passage is suggested as a companion text to the birth of Jesus. God’s very own presence is our salvation, but the very next word in Isaiah after this passage is exactly that: BUT. God presence is salvation. God has been very good in the past, BUT those who were hearing Isaiah all those years ago had been brutally beaten by a foreign people. They had lost their land and their heritage. They were humiliated and defeated and left wondering “where is God, now?” That’s why this passage begins with recalling God’s great deeds of ages past. The people had forgotten. Isaiah’s challenge is to remember what was gone. No one was talking about God’s goodness or faithfulness or love until it was too late, if at all. God had been their savior in the past, but NOW they felt like they were some other people unknown to God. This is exactly what it says in Isaiah by the end of this chapter. God’s presence wasn’t some get-out-of-jail-free card or a magic fix, but it made life more difficult. People thought they could coast on God’s faithfulness, but then it felt like God pulled the rug out. My childish thinking might have considered that the birth of Jesus gave us the sure and certain, level and wide path that Jesus needed, but there was far more trouble for this family than anyone seriously recognizes. Besides running for their lives and living in difficult places, imagine being Jesus’ parents and being responsible for his spiritual upbringing in addition to every other way of raising him. Who gets in trouble when Jesus learns things he shouldn’t? Did they panic in an even mightier way when they lost him? The only story we have from his childhood is his parents’ leaving him for three days in Jerusalem and their failure to understand him and his place in this world. Jospeh was spared watching the Son of God being executed after a sham trial, but Mary was right there the whole time as our best hope for salvation was murdered before her eyes. “This could not have been the plan,” was most certainly in her heart. Who would have wanted that responsibility and pain?
The presence of God is tough and tremendous. If we are a Christmas people, we also embrace and celebrate God’s presence, God’s actual presence today. I’ll just go ahead and add that it is no accident that we collectively are literally called the “Body of Christ.” Jesus was born in the flesh and he is still here, in a sense … in you and me. Let that sink in. It is so important that God is PRESENT in this world that we who are in Christ are at least part of that world-changing presence.
But, as I am proposing, having the presence or being the presence makes things more complicated. COVID broke our “presence button.” It made it impossible to be present with others as we wished, and it still costs us that ability to feel more comfortable with others. There may have been some who rejoiced with being able to stay in seclusion, but this was devastating to so much of the world’s population, and it hit close to home. We still don’t know how to reclaim the gift of presence. It is a gift. The same Jesus who was born into humanity said where two or three are gathered in his name, THERE HE IS among them. The same Jesus who was Immanuel (or GOD-WITH-US) told us that as we DO for the least of people (as we are present in helping ways), we also do for him. The actual presence of God is a tremendous gift and responsibility. God is not some far-off, clock maker deity as some historically have thought – no matter how much it might feel like that. The people in Isaiah’s day were right there: where are you now, God? Why are you ghosting us, ignoring our pleas? We used to be so close. Help us to remember what that was like. Come back. Be with us.
Being present is always the better thing if we can do it. There is a reason why we love getting together, even why the livestream is so important. For people who cannot be here in person at this moment, they can at least share in worship as it is happening and be a part of this grace.
This year was a good year, maybe my best year here in my five years, in no small part because we were better able to be present here in this community and with each other through our missions and fellowship. We had some very nice events and some beautiful service. We also had more funerals than we would want, but that is also a ministry of presence. This is the model of Jesus. He was present through it all, even in the valley of the shadow of death. He still is, but we can and must follow in his footsteps going into 2026. We must be just as present, if not more, in the coming year. It will not be easy or simple. It may be downright difficult, but that is where we find Jesus, and we need to be present, also. To God be the glory. Amen.