2018 Advent Sermon 1: The Posture of Hope
Jeremiah
33:14-16—a righteous branch of David—named the Lord is our Righteous.
33:14 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when
I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of
Judah.
33:15 In those days and at that time I will cause a
righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and
righteousness in the land.
33:16 In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem
will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The
LORD is our righteousness."
25:1 To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul.
25:2 O my God, in you I trust; do not let me be put to
shame; do not let my enemies exult over me.
25:3 Do not let those who wait for you be put to
shame; let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
25:4 Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your
paths.
25:5 Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are
the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.
25:6 Be mindful of your mercy, O LORD, and of your
steadfast love, for they have been from of old.
25:7 Do not remember the sins of my youth or my
transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your
goodness' sake, O LORD!
25:8 Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he
instructs sinners in the way.
25:9 He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches
the humble his way.
25:10 All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and
faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.
3:9 How can we thank God enough for you in return for
all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?
3:10 Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may
see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.
3:11 Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord
Jesus direct our way to you.
3:12 And may the Lord make you increase and abound in
love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you.
3:13 And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness
that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord
Jesus with all his saints.
21:25 "There will be signs in the sun, the moon,
and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring
of the sea and the waves.
21:26 People will faint from fear and foreboding of
what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
21:27 Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a
cloud' with power and great glory.
21:28 Now when these things begin to take place, stand
up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."
21:29 Then he told them a parable: "Look at the
fig tree and all the trees;
21:30 as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for
yourselves and know that summer is already near.
21:31 So also, when you see these things taking place,
you know that the kingdom of God is near.
21:32 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass
away until all things have taken place.
21:33 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words
will not pass away.
21:34 "Be on guard so that your hearts are not
weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and
that day catch you unexpectedly,
21:35 like a trap. For it will come upon all who live
on the face of the whole earth.
21:36 Be alert at all times, praying that you may have
the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand
before the Son of Man."
All passages quoted from the New
Revised Standard Version.
Introduction—Shocked by the signs of the times
I knew what I was going to do with my day on Friday, which included the content of what I was going to put into writing for today’s sermon. I was going to drive to the office and join with Danna Larson in co-moderating a conference call meeting we had that day. I was going to make a series of phone calls needed to advance The Listening Way, a faith-based Healing Ministry we are bringing to the Native Ministries region of our presbytery. And, I was going to write this sermon.
I knew what I was going to do with my day on Friday, which included the content of what I was going to put into writing for today’s sermon. I was going to drive to the office and join with Danna Larson in co-moderating a conference call meeting we had that day. I was going to make a series of phone calls needed to advance The Listening Way, a faith-based Healing Ministry we are bringing to the Native Ministries region of our presbytery. And, I was going to write this sermon.
So, I was on track, driving through
the heart of downtown Anchorage toward my office, when the earthquake
struck. First, I felt the car begin to
twitch in a rhythm and, quite honestly, I thought I had a flat tire. Then the thing really started to buck, and I
thought I really had car problems, so I stopped right in the middle of the
street—but the car just kept bucking.
Then, the power went out on some of the buildings around me, and people
began pouring out of the buildings, while the ground continued to twitch and to
roll. Within only a couple of minutes
the radio announced a Tsunami warning for the whole Cook Inlet area. I felt like I was in some movie scene. This was truly a big one.
I was three minutes from my office, so
once the ground stopped, I got there pretty quickly. I walked in the building, and saw that people
in the building were even more strongly affected by the emotional impact of the
earthquake than I had been. I was
supposed to co-moderate a meeting that day, and in the 3-5 minutes it took me
to get to the office, Danna, my co-moderator, had already called to cancel the
meeting. In only a few minutes it was
clear to me that people needed to go home.
They needed to know if their loved ones were OK, and if their homes were
OK. A few people were already walking
through the building we were in, to assure it was OK.
I called my wife. She was still quaking. A pressure cooker stored on a high shelf fell
and hit her while she was getting out of the house. She was not injured, but it definitely added
to the surreal feeling of what this day was like. Power was out at our house, nearly everything
had fallen from every shelf in the house, including glass jars of food we had
spent months growing and preserving, which crashed when they hit the floor. The entire house looked like a disaster zone,
and she couldn’t tell in the dark if there was any real damage. The cat had run away, but no one was
injured.
After calling my wife, I sent a text
to all the pastors in the S Central region of our presbytery. Messages began coming in (I’m OK, I’m
OK. My family is OK, we’ll check on the
church building soon, but no injuries here).
So I cancelled my appointments and headed home, as did most of the
commuters in Anchorage, to see if there was damage. Clearly there was damage to the road system,
it took two hours to make the 40-minute drive to my house. Talk radio shows were helpful, because they
had people calling in and telling of driving routes that worked, and routes
that did not—of the airport closure, and of problems on the Glenn and Seward
Highways. People called-in, giving a
crowd-sourcing, real-time quality to the news that day. None of that was my plan for that day.
The Journey: From Honest Piety
Today’s Scripture readings have something of the quality that my Friday was like. In First Thessalonians, Paul seems so at pious and at peace. “How can we thank God enough for you?” Paul asks. He tells of praying for the faithful in Thessalonica. He prays that God will strengthen them and uphold them. He speaks of joy and Christian fellowship.
Today’s Scripture readings have something of the quality that my Friday was like. In First Thessalonians, Paul seems so at pious and at peace. “How can we thank God enough for you?” Paul asks. He tells of praying for the faithful in Thessalonica. He prays that God will strengthen them and uphold them. He speaks of joy and Christian fellowship.
This is how I like to think of the
Christian life, too. That kind of piety
is honest and heart-felt, and reflects our longings for life under God, and the
way that we like to think about Christmas.
“Silent night, Holy night. All is
calm, all is bright.” To be at peace,
and to be filled with joy is the destination to which God promises all creation
will eventually come. The Savior comes,
and this is what the Savior is about.
Jeremiah tells us this. Jeremiah wrote at a time of calamity for the
Hebrew nation of Judah. The Hebrew
people had failed God in so many ways.
Perhaps this is why God allowed the Persians to invade and conquer Jerusalem. Their armies were defeated, their Temple was
destroyed, and their leaders and wealthy people were led away into exile. At this moment, Jeremiah speaks about the
coming of the Savior. The Savior will
come, because you and your political policies and your armies could not save
you. God sends the Savior—a true
fulfillment of the promise for a king from the line of David. It is God, who will bring you salvation, and
you will all say it. You will say, “The
Lord is our righteousness.” And that
will be the source of your peace. “Silent
night, Holy night?” Jeremiah promises
that this is a good hope. A good
longing. But he says it to a people, who
had just suffered a bigger shock—a bigger earthquake—than what happened last
Friday.
Indeed, each of us suffers much bigger
shocks than what we saw last Friday. We
suffer the death of a loved, a friend with cancer or AIDS, an assault that
damages more than just our bodies; war, drought, disease, or famine. These things disrupt the peace of God.
“Silent night, Holy night”—that honest
piety and hope that we have in God is a good thing. It holds in front of us the hope for real
salvation in God. The hope for relationships
that matter, even when we struggle in our relationships. The hope for the
healing of our lives, when our lives break like glass jars that fall in an
earthquake, because there are moments when we know we need healing. The hope for a restored world, because our
sinfulness in this age brings calamity, as much as the Hebrew people’s
sinfulness brought a different kind of calamity in Jeremiah’s age. Our honest piety, speaking of peace and joy,
are important.
The Journey: From Honest Piety through Cutthroat Possibilities
But in our reading from Luke, Jesus speaks of the reality that the faithful need to read the signs of the times and to be ready to face what is coming. You see the trees, and watch their leaves, and they tell you when springtime is about to happen, or when the harvest is about to happen, or when fall and winter approach. We need also to be prepared to respond to the spiritual realities that the signs of the times are telling us about.
But in our reading from Luke, Jesus speaks of the reality that the faithful need to read the signs of the times and to be ready to face what is coming. You see the trees, and watch their leaves, and they tell you when springtime is about to happen, or when the harvest is about to happen, or when fall and winter approach. We need also to be prepared to respond to the spiritual realities that the signs of the times are telling us about.
Just as we are honest about our joy in
God’s salvation, and our hopes for what that salvation can mean, we must also
be honest about the sin in the world around us.
Human beings are capable of participating in the sin that brings the
real earthquakes to our experiences.
One writer said that we need to find
out how we can understand faithfulness both in our honest piety, and in the
realities that are presented by the cutthroat potential of human beings. What happens when there is war? What happens when we begin to treat our political
beliefs as so sacred that democratic debate begins to sound like holy war? What happens when prejudice against people,
who are different than ourselves rears its ugly head in the world around us, or
even in our own hearts?
In Luke, we hear Jesus telling his
followers, and that includes you and me, that we need to be prepared. When our spiritual experience is dealing with
moments of celebration and wonder, the awe of it all is truly inspiring. But when the awfulness of sin confronts us,
shaking our calm and quaking our expectations for this day, and for some of us even
our expectations for this generation, what does our witness to the faith look
like then?
Jesus tells us that at that time, don’t
lose hope. Don’t give up and fall into
depression. At that time, at the time
when even the world appears to be coming to an end, your faith shall guide the
posture you need to take. At that time
stand up and lift up your head—for your this also tells you that your
redemption is drawing near. AND this
raises two important questions: What
does it mean to “stand up and lift up our heads?” and What does it mean that we do this because
our redemption draws near?
The Posture of Hope: Stand up and lift up your heads
Jesus tells us that times of crisis is the time for our hope to stand out. “Stand up and lift up your heads” means that times of crisis are times to stand up and be noticed. Our hope is in our Savior, who is coming.
Jesus tells us that times of crisis is the time for our hope to stand out. “Stand up and lift up your heads” means that times of crisis are times to stand up and be noticed. Our hope is in our Savior, who is coming.
Now, this passage speaks about the
Second Coming of Jesus at the end of time.
“At that time, they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud in great
glory,” says Luke. This is a reminder
that this is what was prophesied in the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Testament
of the Bible. But at the time Luke was
writing this, we know that the Christians were facing persecution from the
Roman empire. It is not only the very
last days that call for us to “stand up and lift up our heads.” It is in every age and in every crisis.
This is important, because the proper
interpretation of this Scripture is about what we are to do in our own
generation, not just what we are to do at the very last days. Indeed, Sometimes, people tell me that with
all the signs of the times (not just this one earthquake), we are surely in the
last days, so we should relax and let it all happen. There seems to be an abdication of the
responsibility that goes along with faith.
It is people of faith, who stand
against tyranny, recognizing that God does not want sin to prevail. It is people of faith, who raise the
questions of the morality of an overpopulated earth that overconsumes the earth’s
resources. It is people of faith, who
insist that human efforts should be to create societies that mirror “The City
of God” that is depicted in our Scriptures, because creating societies that
reflect God’s will is as much a part of the Good News as is raising up
individuals, who are disciples of Jesus Christ.
Stand up and lift up your heads is
about daring to be like Jeremiah was in our Scriptures. Jeremiah always spoke so honestly. He always spoke of the dangers of continuing
in our sinful ways, and he always spoke of God’s enduring love, justice and
salvation.
In this passage from Luke, Jesus
cautions us about giving in. He cautions
against becoming complacent, and just resting on our laurels. He cautions against seeing the sin of the
world and just giving up. Neither of
these two responses—just doing nothing out of faith, or giving up on God, are
faithful, or even helpful. Stand up and
lift up your heads means to be faithful, and to let your hope show, even when
the fulfillment of that hope is somewhere in the future.
Jeremiah is such a great example to us
of what that looks like. Jeremiah had to
watch people totally ignore his message about the signs of the times. Again and again he spoke about the calamity
that was coming if the people did not respond and change their ways. At one point, this led the king to throw him
into a dry well that he was using for a prison!
Yet, when the calamity that Jeremiah predicted actually happened, then
he stood up and spoke about the new beginning that God would bring—and the amazing
hope that God would send a Savior.
Conclusion:
This Christmas, I will be singing “Silent Night,” along with the rest of us. The joy and wonder of those moments of peace are powerful, and I hold them dear. But the challenge for us is in recognizing that Jesus comes to bring salvation to a sinful and broken world.
This Christmas, I will be singing “Silent Night,” along with the rest of us. The joy and wonder of those moments of peace are powerful, and I hold them dear. But the challenge for us is in recognizing that Jesus comes to bring salvation to a sinful and broken world.
Where do you see that brokenness?
· Is it in your personal life: perhaps a
broken heart, or an illness, or grief because of death or other loss?
· Is it in the world, as you watch the
political processes devolve into holy wars, where we fail to listen to
different sides, and instead act as if we are in a Crusade against our foes?
· Is it in something else—perhaps the
overpopulation of the world, or something I cannot even name?
Then hear the good news of the
scriptures. In times of crisis, your
Savior comes. Just as Jesus will come in
the very last crisis, on a cloud, in great glory, to bring in the new age, so
Jesus comes through the Holy Spirit this day, and in the face of this
crisis. Hear the good news, your
faithfulness matters, and will make a great difference.
But hear also Jesus’ caution:
But hear also Jesus’ caution:
21:34 "Be on guard so that your hearts are not
weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and
that day catch you unexpectedly,
21:35 like a trap. For it will come upon all who live
on the face of the whole earth.
21:36 Be alert at all times, praying that you may have
the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand
before the Son of Man."
How does that speak to you?
Have you fallen into complacency, and
forgotten the urgency of the Christian witness for this time? This Scripture passage challenges you to
renew your vigor…to renew your zeal. Do
you need to re-kindle your faith? Then
speak up and say so! Tell us today after
worship, we are ready to pray with you, and to encourage you. Indeed, when things are shaken we need to
help one another. We know this intuitively. Even during this earthquake, my neighbor was
putting out the word: “I have a generator!
Come on over and charge your cell phones or your computers!” We know this.
Dare to ask for help, because we are there for you.
Or have you fallen into depression,
and are tempted to give up hope in the saving grace of Jesus Christ for your
situation? Again, speak to us. We want to pray with you, and to encourage
you.
And do you know others, who have
fallen into complacency, or worse, into hopelessness? The Gospel is a Gospel of hope! Let others know this. Let them know that you are ready to pray with
them, and to encourage them, too. It is
our posture in times of difficulty. We
stand up, and lift our heads to the glory of God.
Indeed, stand up in hope. Lift up your head. And ask yourself: What does this mean for you
now?
Endurance is a faith stance, and an important one. Live for the hope of God. The Savior comes in this crisis moment and in every crisis moment. And in the end, He is coming to bring all things
Endurance is a faith stance, and an important one. Live for the hope of God. The Savior comes in this crisis moment and in every crisis moment. And in the end, He is coming to bring all things
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