The banquet speaker at a conference I attended last summer, an Episcopal priest from St. Louis, made the following comment in the course of his address that I thought was worth repeating: “This month,” he said, “my daughter graduated from high school, and paging through her yearbook, I notice the page of a classmate of hers. This bright, young, Harvard-bound fellow, placed at the top of his yearbook page the phrase: ‘Bow to no gods; serve no masters.’ His assumption is that you’ve got these pushy, arm-twisting god-servers, culturally bound to a point of view, while he strives to maintain his innocent, untainted autonomy. Which is all well and good, except who taught him to ‘bow to no gods and serve no masters?’ He didn’t come out of the womb thinking that way. Who is it who has had their way with him? Well, don’t ask him, he hasn’t got a clue.”

The speaker used this illustration to assert what many know to be true, that modern secularism has become the new dominant religion of the West. He pointed to a major study of this phenomenon as it pertains to the UK by the Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling. Cowling’s argument is that “secularization, so far from involving liberation from religion, has involved merely liberation from Christianity and the establishment in its place of a modern religion whose advocates so much assume its truth that they do not understand that it is a religion to which they are committed.” This new faith of the West is becoming, in fact, a more and more intolerant religion that demands absolute loyalty and unquestioning obedience, or should we say, compliance. It is a religion, as the after-dinner speaker obviously wanted to emphasize, that is so much a part of the air we breathe that even high school students can spout its creeds in their sleep.

Modern secular culture is truly a kind of spirituality, a view of the purpose and meaning of life, even if that purpose is vague and that meaning meaningless. How else can we understand the conflict between the current Muslim world and the so-called democracies of the West? And wasn’t it Luther who said about the 1st commandment in his Large Catechism, “What does ‘to have a god’ mean, or what is God? A ‘god’ is the term for that to which we are to look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need. Therefore, to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart. As I have often said, it is the trust and faith of the heart alone that make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true one. Conversely, where your trust is false and wrong, there you do not have the true God. For these belong together, faith and God. Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, that is really your God.” So, on whomever or whatever you set your heart, and in whomever or whatever you place your trust, that is your God, says Luther. The idol on which we have set our hearts and in which we have placed our trust is what any high school student knows, “Bow to no gods; serve no masters.”

Ahaz the king of Judah had misplaced his trust. In the face of a coalition of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Arameans, who together posed a serious threat to the Southern Kingdom of Judah, Ahaz sought the help and protection of the Assyrians. The Lord, “wearied” by the king’s refusal, as he complained, to “be put to the test” (what ruler likes to have his decisions questioned?), regarded this move to form an alliance with Assyria--what I’m sure many of the king’s counselors simply saw as a wise, obvious and prudent choice--as a monumental breach of faith. The Lord, therefore, will give Ahaz a sign. A child will be born who will be named “Emmanuel,” or “God is with us!” Before the child grows up to be a man, the Lord says that, “the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.” Not Ahaz, not the northern kingdom, not the Arameans, not the Assyrians, but the Lord is in control of history and events, and even of the future before which we stand fearful, impatient, and questioning. Yet despite, and indeed overriding, our resignation, our lack of faith and our rush to judgment, Emmanuel, God is with us!

Ahaz’s problem is a familiar one. He lacked trust in the God of Israel, who despite outward appearances, is ever faithful and keeps his word. Still, in Ahaz’s situation would we not have done as he did? It’s very likely we would

have done the same thing. Many gods demand our attention and solicit our loyalty, and they are persistent and attractive gods indeed: security, independence, self-determination, freedom from gods and masters. We have noted that this so-called freedom from gods and masters, along with the rest of it, is itself a thriving and successful religion. This new dogma of individual choice and freedom from faith is a creed our society has embraced and which it regards as a precious right that is to be asserted with the intolerance and passion of a true believer. It is also assumed to be the more rational option, though ironically that has never been proved, yielding a strange kind of rationalism based on pure faith. That so-called “freedom” is our greatest temptation and our culture’s idol. The combination of individualism, materialism, and self-absorption is the alliance we have entered into. In seeking his alliance with Assyria, therefore, Ahaz chose what he and his counselors assumed was the more reasonable and politically astute course of action, though in the end it would prove to be futile and thus an unrealistic and imprudent choice after all, as will all our alliances prove to be; for Israel’s salvation eventually would come from a completely different direction and from an unexpected source, as a child born in Bethlehem.

Joseph receives a message from an angel of the Lord, who announces that the child Mary is carrying will be Isaiah’s Emmanuel. That it is an angel who announces this news is significant, because angels are emissaries, messengers, who communicate the Lord’s words directly from his “lips” as it were. It is the Lord himself, therefore, who declares that this child will fulfill not only Isaiah’s but also all the prophets’ promises and hopes, and thus the promise and hope of all Israel, whom God established to be a light to the nations. Moreover, this child will be the embodiment of the Lord’s own presence, a redeeming, forgiving, renewing presence that will save his people from their sins, establish lasting peace and justice for them and for all people, and deliver the world from death. In addition to all that, we must note also that Joseph is called “son of David,” for this child will be Israel’s longed-for Messiah-king, the ruler of princes and nations, whose alliances and coalitions he will over-rule, just as he will over-rule all of the unholy spiritual alliances we typically, and instinctively given our culture, enter into freely and practically unconsciously, all the coalitions we make with a host of modern idols. Renouncing those dumb idols that even high school students pay homage to in their yearbooks, therefore, let us pray the ancient prayer of Advent: “Stir up your power, O Lord, and come.”

-Amen-