So today is the first day of the new church year, it’s the
first Sunday in Advent and Advent is a time of reflection, it’s a time of
preparation, and at least for me the most visible sign of Advent is the Advent
Wreath, and I just learned something recently.
Did you know that each Sunday in Advent, that each candle in
the advent wreath, has a name. Does
anybody know what the names of the candles are?
This is a bit of congregational participation so if you know, just shout
it. (As an aside, several people did know some of them!)
Well the first week is the week of hope, the second week is
the candle of the peace, the third week is the candle of love, and the fourth
week is the candle of joy The concepts
comes from the readings assigned for that Sunday. So today is the candle of hope…
And I know that as we get close to Christmas, it’s easy to
start thinking presents, you know what we want for Christmas, what we hope for,
but it’s not that kind of hope that we are talking about. It’s not a hope for a big television or a new
Xbox or jewelry or anything material like that.
Instead the hope that we proclaim today is the hope for salvation, it’s
the hope that we will feel the presence of God in our lives, changing our
situation, changing this world, bringing justice and equality. It’s the hope that we would be filled with
love and that wars would cease. We’re
talking about that kind of deep and powerful hope.
And it’s hard to talk about that kind of hope when you look
around the world. I mean two weeks ago we
watched in horror the attacks in Paris.
This week we saw armed people storm a hotel in Mali and kill innocent
people. We see two countries appear to
be on the brink of war when we look at Russia and Turkey. We see hundreds of thousands of people fleeing
death and destruction in their homelands and seeking safety and refuge in the
people of Syria. And if that weren’t
tragic enough we see people who call themselves Christian declare that these
people are not worthy of our compassion and love. Friday afternoon we watched what can only be
described as terrorists attack a clinic in Colorado and kill four people And as if that wasn’t enough we watched a
video of another young man being executed by the police in Chicago. And the list could, sadly, just keep going.
And you just wonder when it’s going to end. And I think it’s challenging to talk about
hope in the midst of this. It’s
challenging to talk about the light when it seems like everything is getting
darker. So we are living in a time when
it is easy to say that we recognize the signs that Luke talks about in today’s
readings. We see frightening things in
the sky and in our weather patterns, we see discontent amongst nations, we
watch the news and we see things that make us quake in fear.
But before you get nervous and think that I’m about to preach
that it’s the end of the world, the same signs that we see are signs that would
have been recognizable to the original readers of Luke, who had witnessed the
temple get destroyed, who were living through the intense persecution of
Christians by the Romans. Since then we
can look all through history and easily see over and over again times when it
looked it was all about to end.
And think that’s part of what Luke is telling us. That we live in an in between period. We live between the death and resurrection of
Jesus and the coming again of Jesus to fully bring the kingdom here. And what we are reminded of is that what
Jesus was talking to the disciples about is still relevant for us today. This text is still speaking to us about our
world around us right now.
We face a situation, like the disciples are about to face
because it’s after this speech in Luke that we enter into the Passion story in
Luke and hear about the trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. We face a situation like the original hearers
of this Gospel. We face a situation like
the one that the community that Jeremiah was prophesying to.
We face a situation where we can do one of two things, we can
give into fear and let fear and everything that comes from living in fear rule
our lives, or we can have hope. And
Jesus is very clear about what he asks us to do in the face of these daunting
challenges.
Jesus says that when we are faced with all these signs, with
this oppression, with this despair that we see around us that we should stand
up straight and raise our heads. Jesus
says that we should have hope.
The thing is, our natural tendency is to embrace fear. Fear causes us to seek our own needs and
desires over those of our neighbor. Fear
leads us to push out people who don’t like us, or think like us, or love the
same way that we do. Fear, in other
words, separates us. I would argue that
fear often forms the basis of sinfulness as it sees us thinking more and more
about ourselves and focusing only on our own desires. Luther talks about sin as being this curving
in so that we only seek our own good.
So what Jesus is telling us is that the things which may seem
like signs of the end aren’t actually signs of the end. They are instead simply things that we will
experience until the coming again of Jesus.
We will know what the signs look like, that’s what Jesus tells us, they
will be blindingly obvious, but until then we will continue to see and
experience suffering in this world. But
we also know that in the midst of that we should not be paralyzed and cower in
fear.
The Jewish Talmud, echoing Micah 6:8, tells us, ‘Do not be
daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.
Do justly now. Love Mercy
now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work,
but neither are you free to abandon it.’
And so we begin the church year with the reminder that the
first coming of Christ was not the end, but was just the beginning and that
there is still time until Christ comes again, but until then we continue to be
filled with God’s presence so that we might be prepared, so that we might live
out that sense of hope in our relationships.
Advent, while a time of preparation, is not a time of
despair. It is a time of hope. A time of peace and love and joy as we
remember what God has done for us through Christ and as we prepare for what God
is still do for this world.
Advent tells us to hold onto hope. It tells us about a God who makes promises to
us and who keeps those promises. A God
who heard the cries of Israelites and delivered them from slavery. A God who heard the cries of the exiled
people of Judah and Jerusalem and returned them to Israel. Advent tells us to have hope in the God who
is still present with us.
And I get it, a lot of us have a hard time grasping hold of
that hope. A recent poll showed that the
number of people who thought that terrorism was the biggest issue facing the
United States today had jumped in the past two weeks so that it was now equal
to the number of people who felt that the economy was the most pressing issue
facing the country. What we see here are
people becoming more and more fearful in the face of those who seek to do us
harm.
Rather than standing strong, joining with our neighbors and
facing this threat, examining what it means to respond as Christians and to
respond as people called to love our enemies, we are, like Luther said, curving
in, turning inward and forgetting about all that Jesus has taught us.
We quickly abandon that Christian hope as if it is just
mindless chatter. But the thing that we
are reminded of, both in the readings today and in our ongoing daily life and
work, is that our hope is built on a firm foundation. It is anchored to something. Our hope is real and tangible.
Hebrews describes the hope we have as being anchor for our
soul. Our hope is tangible. Our hope is based in the experience of the
cross. Our hope is made manifest by the
reality of the God who came down to us, walk amongst us and through the cross
freed us from sin and death and fear. We
have been freed to live into this hope through Jesus.
And so now our calling is to embrace this hope and to live it
out through a life dedicated to comforting those who are discouraged, to
helping those who are weak, to always seeking to do good for all people, even
our enemies. Our hope leads us to live a
life of prayer and service, to a life where we are filled by God’s spirit so that
we might be a light unto the world so that other’s might experience this hope
and stand against fear.
And we can always remember the reality of this hope through
the experience of the bread and the wine.
Through the knowledge that the same God who created the heavens and the
earth, who has intervened on our behalf throughout history, the same God who
loves us in spite of our sinfulness meets us here in the experience of the
Eucharist. We have the real presence of
Christ with us to ground our hope in. So
as we enter this new year, as we begin advent let us go out into this world
with our back straight and our heads high, proclaiming hope to the world and
telling them about the real hope that God gives each of us. And because of that hope, we can truly say,
thanks be to God. Amen.
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