Awaiting the Sign

This week we are reading Isaiah 7. There, 
Isaiah is sent by God to Ahaz, the king of Judah, as he wrings his hands and prepares for invasion by the water supply.
Ahaz has the unenviable title of being the one to seal Judah’s fate for Exile.
You can picture him there, can’t you? Doing everything in his power to protect himself and his people from invasion. 
But this is exactly the problem to which Isaiah speaks: 

Ahaz, be careful to do nothing. God will take care of you. 

And just for good measure, Isaiah says - To prove it, God will give you a sign. Ask anything you want. 

Well, because you can imagine him there, writing his hands, preparing for war, you also can imagine how ridiculous this sounds to Ahaz.

"Be careful to do...nothing? What does that even mean? Hope is not a strategy."

Ahaz doesn’t need a sign. Or maybe he doesn’t want a sign from God. 

Isaiah says, whether you want it or not, the sign will come anyway. And the sign is this -

a child born to a young woman (or virgin). And she will call her son Immanuel “God is with us”. 

And the relevant point for us, I think is this: Ahaz, the king - the king of Judah! - has no faith. But a young woman has faith enough to name her son “God is with us” it a time when it seems to everyone that God is very clearly not. And, even though the king has no faith, the sign comes anyway. 

You do not make Christmas come by your effort, or your happy disposition. You can’t stop Christmas from coming by being a sour-puss or a perpetual scrooge. Our preparations and emotions simply do not have that much power. God’s presence doesn’t rise and fall on the vibrancy of our faith. 
God’s presence creates faith in the faithless world; and in faithless people like us.

So, if you just don’t have it right now, I bring some glad tidings to you - 
The Word became flesh; even though his own didn’t recognize him. 
The light shines in the darkness; and the darkness cannot overtake it.