Let There Be Hope

Old Testament Reading: Isaiah 64:1-9 (NRSV)
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
    so that the mountains would quake at your presence--
2 as when fire kindles brushwood
    and the fire causes water to boil--
to make your name known to your adversaries,
    so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
3 When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
    you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
4 From ages past no one has heard,
    no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
    who works for those who wait for him.
5 You meet those who gladly do right,
    those who remember you in your ways.
But you were angry, and we sinned;
    because you hid yourself we transgressed.
6 We have all become like one who is unclean,
    and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf,
    and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
7 There is no one who calls on your name,
    or attempts to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us,
    and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
8 Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
    we are the clay, and you are our potter;
    we are all the work of your hand.
9 Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,
    and do not remember iniquity forever.
    Now consider, we are all your people.
 
Gospel Reading: Mark 13:24-37
The Coming of the Son of Man
24 “But in those days, after that suffering,
the sun will be darkened,
    and the moon will not give its light,
25 and the stars will be falling from heaven,
    and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
 
26 Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
 
28 “From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. 29 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he[e] is near, at the very gates. 30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. 31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
 
32 “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. 34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. 35 Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, 36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. 37 And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

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Today begins what has come to be one of my favorite seasons in the church liturgical season, the season of advent. The word advent means, “coming,” and it was added to our church calendar to give us time to pause and reflect on the reasons why we need a Savior in the first place, and to understand why it is that the birth of Jesus that we celebrate in Christmas is such very good news. The season of Advent is a season of waiting, which gives us time and permission to recognize our longings; to admit that things are not the way they should be in our world, and to voice our hope against hope for things to get better, for our world to be restored. It gives us the opportunity to tune our ears to the suffering of God’s people throughout time, and including our own time, in order to prepare our hearts to fully recognize and receive the coming reign of Christ’s kingdom which ends the domination of the world’s powers, oppression, disorder and injustice.

Christmas is a time when we celebrate the already, and the not yet. Christ has come! And Christ will come again. And today, we are focusing on what it means to wait in hope, for what is not yet, but what we are promised will be. So as we consider what this means for us today, I want you to close your eyes for a moment and think of a time when you have had to wait for something in your life to get better, or to be resolved. It may even be a situation you find yourself in today. So take a moment, and allow yourself to feel that longing for a better day, a resolution.

Prayer: O that you would open up the heavens and come down. All around the world there are wars and rumors of wars. In our daily living, we are frenzied with anxiety and worry. We feel distant from you and from one another. We long to hear once again the assurance that you are with us. Come, Lord Jesus, come.

I’ve mentioned to you all before that my college years were years of struggle for me, as I rebelled against my very conservative upbringing and left behind a religious system that seemed focused on trying to earn God’s love by being a moral, good person, which developed in me a sense that God was an angry, vengeful, and distant God, always disappointed in me. And after years of feeling that I could never measure up, I gave up on religion altogether. As a music major, though, I could not escape God. Did you know that until the middle ages, all western music was written for one reason only, and that was to praise God, or sing about God. It was all church music! And I had grown up in a singing church and a singing family, and those songs had woven themselves into my heart. And so even as I tried very hard to discount the messages of “Amazing Grace” and “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” their truths had taken root.

I was part of a Madrigal choir in college that presented a dinner each fall and included a concert in the style of a “Lessons and Carols” service. Our choir would sing the carols that told the Christian story, from the creation to the birth of Christ, with scripture and poetry readings interspersed. Each year, when we would sing those carols, I would feel a stirring, a longing… “Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask you to stay close by me forever, and love me, I pray.” And part of me would hope against hope that these songs, that these scriptures, were true; that there really is a Jesus who is tender and loving who was born to show us a tender and loving God; that God might love even me. In my life at that time, everything was falling apart. I needed the hope of a loving God who was willing to come down to earth, to draw near to us, to show us that love looks like being born to a poor, unwed couple, in the midst of a dirty, messy barn and being laid in a feeding trough.

In our Old Testament reading today, Isaiah was writing at a time when he and his people had returned to Jerusalem after living in exile in Babylon for a full generation. They returned to find their city and their temple, the dwelling place of God, in ruins. Everything would have to be rebuilt, replanted and restored. The life they knew before no longer existed, and they had no idea what their future held now. “O, that you would open up the heavens and come down!” Isaiah seems to be pleading with God. It is one of those heart-wrenching scriptures of lament that are sprinkled throughout our sacred writings. Throughout all of human history, humans have known pain and loss. We have reason to lament, to grieve, to cry out for God to come near. “Get down here!” we may want to shout, as if calling down an anti-social teen from their bedroom. Isaiah writes about the experience of feeling that God is no where to be found at the time. And he even wonders if God has become angry because of the way that the people have forgotten God.

​This advent season is a good time for us to think about others, and possibly ourselves, for whom God may seem absent, or distant. Those who, like the Israelites, may have been exiled from their homes because of wildfires and hurricanes, or because of domestic violence, or because of war or famine or political unrest. Others may be adjusting to devastation of another kind; loss of a job, loss of a loved one, loss of a relationship, or loss of their own good health – losses which force them to adjust to a new way of living, which feels painfully like being exiled from life as they knew it. “O that you would open up the heavens and come down!” “Be near us, Lord Jesus.”

But Isaiah clings to hope as he writes his lament. He has seen God open the heavens before. He knows that in the past, God has been faithful to God’s promises. And so he holds out this hope to his people.

Like Isaiah, we may find ourselves asking, “Where are you, God?” We may not be ready to rush headlong into tidings of great joy. We may still be sitting in the darkness of the ‘not knowing what lies ahead;’ of grieving over what is no more; like those whose homes have been destroyed by recent fires, and those camped out along borders who are seeking safety and asylum, it may feel like the world has been turned upside down. And that’s precisely what Jesus is telling the disciples in the gospel reading today. Just a few verses before our reading, Jesus tells them, “you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. . . Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. . . There will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. . .But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be, then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains; the one on the housetop must not go down or enter the house to take anything away; the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days! Pray that it may not be in winter. For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, no, and ever will be" (Mark 13: 7-8, 14-19).

I believe that people today understand this kind of suffering. There are wars and rumors of wars; there are nations turning against nations; there are people fleeing their homes and countries because of war and violence, and there are mothers who are pregnant and nursing babies, who just last week endured being tear-gassed while seeking safety. As winter approaches, we think of those in our part of the world who sleep in tents and under bridges. There is great suffering today, as there has been in the past. But Jesus says, when it feels like the sun has turned to darkness, and even the moon won’t shine its light – when you feel like the world as you know it has ended – then look for the coming of Christ, and Christ’s kingdom!

The hope we cling to during advent is the hope we cling to throughout our lives – that even when God’s people forget God, God does not turn God’s back on us! That even when we have been forced to endure pain and suffering, loss and alienation, and endings that were not of our choosing, Jesus is always waiting to come breaking into our world, once again, and again! When Jesus first spoke these words to his disciples, he told them that they would see the Son of Man coming before the end of this generation! Many have taken these words of Jesus to point to some distant, actual end of the world. But maybe Jesus is speaking to that feeling of our own person end of the world, when our fears grip us and make us forget about the hope we have in Christ. Christ comes to us again and again when we pause to acknowledge that the darkness we experience cannot overcome the Light of the World.

This Sunday, we’ve lit one advent candle to remind us that there may be dark times in our lives, but that when we cling to hope, there is a flicker of light that promises to give way to more and more light as we open our hearts to the inbreaking of Christ’s kingdom in this lifetime. Our fear would sometimes convince us that we need an escape plan – I have a cousin whose favorite response to any expressed dissatisfaction with suffering in this world is, “Jesus just needs to come back soon and take us out of this mess.” I do believe in a glorious life after this one, lived with Jesus forever. But sometimes I think we actually hurt Christ’s witness in the world by only hoping to escape from the world, instead of waiting for and joining with Christ’s kingdom of restoration in this world in the here and now. As we continue our advent preparation, we’ll consider what it means that Christ comes to bring good news to the hurting and oppressed in this life. For today, I want to leave you with the words of a Christmas song that allows us to sit with the idea of the not yet, but still coming hoped-for reign of Christ.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was filled with sorrow at the tragic death of his wife in a fire in 1861. The Civil War broke out the same year, and it seemed this was an additional punishment. Two years later, Longfellow was again saddened to learn that his own son had been seriously wounded in the Army of the Potomac.

Sitting down to his desk, one Christmas Day, he heard the church bells ringing. It was in this setting that Longfellow wrote these lines:
 
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
 
And thought how, as the day had come
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
 
Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
 
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
 
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
 
And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."
 
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep.
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep!
The wrong shall fail,
The right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men!"
 
Would you pray with me:
 
“Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask thee to stay close by me forever, and love me, I pray. Bless all the dear children in thy tender care; and fit us for heaven to live with thee there.”