Isaiah 64.1-8; Mark 13.24-37
Welcome to the Season of Advent … four Sundays to Christmas.
Four Sundays to remember the foundations of our faith.
Four Sundays to ask the big questions of life …
Four Sundays … four words … hope, peace, joy, and love.
Today, the First Sunday of Advent: Hope!
My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus' blood and righteousness
I dare not trust the sweetest frame
But wholly lean on Jesus' name
On Christ the solid rock I stand
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand
Hope!
I hope our world will solve some of its terrible problems …
I hope for good health and good times …
I hope the best for my family, my friends, the church of Jesus Christ … I hope for our government, and the leaders of the world …
All of us share many of the same hopes:
Good health, good work, sufficient income and safety … food on the table, and a roof over our heads … the material things of life, because we’re material creatures.
And hope that pushes a little deeper.
We hope to discover ourselves - who are we? … what are we to do with our life?
What kinds of goals shall we set, what kinds of work shall we do? Who am I at 15 … and then 30 … what am I at 50 … 70 or 80 … or older?
We want to be worthwhile … more than just consumers of life … we want to be contributors to life … we want to build, we want to press our hand onto the clay of life, we want to leave our mark, we want to be remembered … remembered as people of good will and good ideas …
Few of us will be remembers beyond a few generations, but that’s enough, isn't it?
When I was a child, our family had a picture of my great-grandfather, seated on a chair, outside the home, his wife beside him, and a large family gathered around him … he was a veteran of the Civil War.
Everyone said of him: He was a kindly man. Folks said I looked like him.
I remember the picture - he had a gentle face, and a beard … sort of like General Grant … I remember so vividly, saying to myself, When I grow up, I’m gonna have a beard, just like him … and in my own childish way, I wanted to be kind, as he was.
I remember that picture … and maybe my children will remember me remembering him … but in time, memories take their place in the halls of eternity … time moves on … in time, no one will remember my great grandfather.
I hope for many things - material things, spiritual things …
Hope beckons us to put our shoulders to the wheel … put our hand on the plow and not look back.
Hope rolls up its sleeves, and goes to work … Jesus on the road to Jerusalem … Paul on the Road to Athens … Elizabeth Elliot in Ecuador … Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Edmund Pettus Bridge … every time any of us cross the threshold of this church, we’re engaged in the work and power of hope!
Without hope, we’re lost …
My first ministry fresh outta seminary - the West Virginia Mountain Project - in one of the nation’s poorest counties … I saw what hopelessness does, but especially what hopelessness does to young women and men, the youth … children always have hope, children are born with it, but life can knock it outta ‘em - persistent poverty, lack of opportunity, ill-health, poorly equipped schools, parents too sick to help, drugs, alcohol … when hope is gone, there’s nothing more than a fast car on Friday night, with a six pack …
Religion can help people ward off the worst of it … religion holds body and soul together … but if religion is used to gaslight the poor, while withholding the needed legislation and economic policies essential to general prosperity, God judges those nations without mercy:
Thus says the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals— they trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way.
Woe to those who destroy another person’s hope.
Here in this place, and places like this all around the world … it’s all about hope, because it’s all about God …
What we want, what we need, what we must do, comes only from God … only God can do the ultimate … we wait upon God … we do so, with hope, because God does not disappoint us … the God of the Cradle, the God of the Cross - the God of eternal hope!
If God judges a nation without mercy, that is mercy at the extreme …
The judgement of God is never to harm, but only to heal … and sometimes the healing is painful … but painful or not, the work of God is always filled with mercy.
No matter the crowd size, no matter the hunger, when all have been fed, there are still twelve baskets left over … the mercy of God never ends.
When we need guidance, we have it in Jesus …
when we need encouragement, we receive it by the Spirit.
when we’re lost, we’re found by the Good Shepherd,
when we’re blind, our eyes are opened by the truth,
when we’re burdened with cares and weariness, God comes to us …
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope …
Because the creator of the heavens and the earth is faithful … the God and Father of our LORD Jesus Christ is at work in all things for good … when the world chooses the worst, God offers the best … when the world decides to hate, God calls upon a people within that world - you and me - to remember the goodness and the ways of love … to never forget, to push ahead in faith, hope, and love … to the the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
And so it is, for us, the First Sunday of Advent:
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Amen and Amen!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have – as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.
