Ah, another Advent
season has arrived. It has arrived on
our church calendars and it has arrived yet again in our hearts and minds. With
our bodies full of thanksgiving and the Black Friday brouhaha behind us, we now
focus on this special, sacred time set apart for us as faithful individuals and
as a believing community to prepare for Christmas. It’s time to really ready ourselves for the
sacred reason of this season! When we
are intentional about taking this time to spiritually prepare for the “celebration
of Christ’s birth in ancient Bethlehem,” we can come to realize that “Christ is
reborn in the Bethlehems of our homes and daily lives.”[i]
Specifically and
biblically, we intentionally prepare by spending four weeks reflecting on what the
coming – the advent -- of our
Emmanuel, of God with us, of Jesus, means
for our lives and for this whole world.
In our worship services, we are
guided in this consideration by specific biblical topics – today, the topic of hope; on the 4th, the topic
of love; on the 11th the
topic of joy; and peace will be our focus on the 18th. Come the beautiful moment of Silent Night, Holy Night, may we light
the candle with a fresh fire of holy hope, love, joy and peace ablaze within
us. We start faithfully striking flint
today by turning to Isaiah 64 and focusing in on hope.
Let’s begin by building a bridge between hope as a broad ideal and hope
as an intimate, heartfelt reality. Stepping
on this bridge, consider this question for self-reflection -- What was the most
recent request you made? Further, what
exactly was it you needed to be given or have done? Who did you make this request for favor or
courtesy of? Did you so with a sense of
urgency or complacency? When you stop
to think about it, we do make a lot of requests every day. We do so because we have many needs and
because we inherently live with hope that one way or another these needs are
going to be attended to. Hope
fuels our need fulfillment.
I invited us to think
about this because Isaiah 64 begins and ends with request. The
author of the words had a finger on the pulse of his people’s needs and spoke
with hope that those needs would be met.
The people are the ancient Israelites and God is squarely the one whose
favor is being requested.
The request is made in
very dramatic, very poetic fashion – “O that You, God, would tear open the
heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake in Your presence.” This is not a poetically framed request for
God to stretch open the sky in order to come down, strike fear and
destroy. It is instead a request for
God to come and be directly present in order to fire things up the way fire
kindles brushwood and boils water.
The request for God’s
presence reflects a historic time of conflict within the Jewish community. A great many people had returned to
Jerusalem after having been forced to live in exile some sixty years in the
neighboring Babylonian Empire (present day Iraq). Upon their return, there was a commonly
felt great hope amongst the Jewish people for Jerusalem to be restored to its
former glory. “All hopes were pinned to
that return,” writes one Bible scholar, for “coming home to Jerusalem was going
to mean the end of all Israel’s shame and discontent.”[ii] Can you relate, as I sure can, to having a
great hope that God’s children can somehow come home together to a common holy
place and be liberated from sin and discord?
Alas, instead of the
great community abiding by a unifying faithful fire, power struggles blazed amongst
the people. Conflict crackled. Divisiveness simmered. “Problems multiplied rather than
disappeared; ugliness and evil continued to exist.”[iii] The need and hope of holy restoration was thus
pulled down by lamentable sinful behavior.
Isaiah’s prophetic
word to this community was even more metaphorically dramatic than his request
to the Almighty. He compared the people to
filthy, faded cloth – the kind of filth that clearly marked them as ritually
unclean and impure before the Lord. A
gross rag sure is a hopeless image. He
further gave voice to the fear that God had been so angry about the people
sinfully soiling themselves into this condition that God had decided to turn away
from receiving requests and realizing hopes.
But great prophets
call out people’s sin in order to inspire them to return to a vigorous hope in
the greatness of God. So we read in
Isaiah 64 the reminder that God had done some unexpected, totally awesome deeds
throughout Hebrew history. Implied here
are such moments as the miraculous delivery from enslavement in Egypt, the
mercy of manna given to griping people in exodus, and the mighty military hand
shown through a shepherd boy with his iddy-biddy slingshot. Isaiah not only reminded the people, but also
God. We hear this in Isaiah’s plea -- “Do
not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever …
consider, we are all Your people.” (64:9)
Inspired by this
Scripture, we can conclude that there are two essential aspects of living with
holy hope. First, we are reminded that despite laments, hope
comes alive each time God’s past unexpected acts of deliverance are
recalled. And second, we are reminded hope
also comes alive when we acknowledge our sin and make humble requests for God to
yet again mercifully, miraculously deliver us.
What do these two
reminders about hope have to do with Advent?
Doesn’t it sound more like they belong more to the repentant season of Lent?
Last week, I mentioned
that our Christ the King celebration marked the end of the year on the church
calendar. Today, the first Sunday in
Advent, then, is like New Year’s Day.
It marks not only the beginning of our preparation for Christmas, for
the birth of Jesus, but also our preparation for Jesus as the Christ who is
fully revealed to us at Easter and whose reign we live in as Easter people. It’s not coincidental that the color purple
marks our sanctuary during both Advent and Lent. So this is indeed a time for repentant
self-reflection, of realizing and turning away from behavior that burns down
instead of builds up faith as we live alongside our loved ones and neighbors
near and far. Along with Isaiah, we do
so not to feel guilty and live only in lament that God has justifiable reason
to hide from us forever. We do so to
name it while also saying “Yet, O Lord …” in order to turn our full attention
to hoping in the Holy One who acts to deliver us from sin in awesome,
unexpected ways.
When God spoke through
Isaiah, we can trust the divine plan was already in full-swing for God to “tear
open the heavens and come down” in the most completely astonishing,
earth-shaking way ever. Not by angry
thunderbolt and lightening, but by gentle, darkness illumining starlight; the
starlight that shone on field-filthy, socially outcast shepherds and on wealthy,
worldly respected wise men alike. Not
by a massive physical display of military and political might, but by way of a
fragile-fleshed human child born to an impoverished family. We must faithfully contemplate that the
ultimate coming down and our ultimate hope began with simple, stark
reality. It began by entering the
physical cells of sinfully soiled humanity.
It began by eternal revelation made in the midst of lowly manger
mud.
Perhaps you have made a
recent request of your loved ones expressing your hope for a certain gift you
feel you want or need to receive this Christmas? If so, also intentionally take
time this Advent season to lament sin, to consider all of humanity’s truest
need and to make a humble request of God to please come down to hearts and
minds and give us all afresh the greatest gift of all – the gift of Emmanuel,
God with us, Jesus. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment