Welcome to Advent! Thanksgiving is over, and the race to Christmas has begun here in the church – what with special services and Advent brunches and community meals and decorating. In the secular world, of course, the race officially started on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving with lines outside of Walmart at midnight (Doors open at 12:01 A.M.), the usual barrage of sales, and customers scrambling to take advantage of them. Then yesterday was Small Business Saturday (Buy local!), and tomorrow it will be Cyber Monday (Promo code is Cyberdeals 2019), followed by Giving Tuesday (Don’t buy but give instead) – with everyone – from small non-profits to big box stores getting into the act.
Of course, the race to Christmas really began earlier – and we all know that. It began sometime in late October or early November when Lowe’s and Home Depot and Walgreen’s ushered in the season with their Christmas tree displays and the stuffed animals that sing and dance to “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas”.
However, here in church this year, we are going to do what we can to not allow this season of Advent to become a race to Christmas – because that is not at all what Advent is about. Presbyterian pastor John Buchanan put it this way: “Advent is about hope, rooted in something new God did in human history two thousand years ago in Bethlehem and, at the same time, looking ahead to the future in which God will continue to act lovingly, creatively, redemptively.
The world (he goes on) is impatient to get on with Christmas, to recall the story briefly, and then to be immersed in the year-end festivities… But the church, in its liturgies and hymnody and scripture, invites us to pause; to sit in the darkness for a while before the light is here in all its beauty and brightness; to look both backward into history and into our personal histories and forward to the human future and our personal futures; and to prepare for the newness of God’s gift of love.”
And so for these four weeks leading up to Christmas, we are going to pause and sit in the darkness for a while, waiting, reflecting, yearning for the coming of the Light of the World. We are going to rest by the River of Joy about which that the ancient prophet Isaiah spoke. We are going to pause and sit and rest within the context of the beloved Christmas carol, “Joy to the World”, which Isaac Watts, who was one of our most prolific hymn writers, composed 300 years ago.
And so today, we begin by seeking the joy that is embedded in Advent hope, the kind of hope about which the Prophet Isaiah spoke in the passage we just read, the kind of hope that seemed so distant and unattainable in Isaiah’s time, a time not so different from what we experience today. His was a violent world (for us, think mass shootings and a complete lack of gun control); it was conflictive (think impeachment hearings and a President whom Rick Perry has said was sent by God). In many ways, both Isaiah’s world and ours has spun out-of-control, leaving people in a constant and deeply stressful state of fear.
In addition, as Presbyterian pastor Stephen Montgomery wrote, “human life was qualified on the basis of material possessions (Think the 1%). ‘I got mine, you get yours!’….The neediest of the needy, orphans and widows, were neglected. What's worse, many people didn't seem to care. ‘I might as well just go with the current. That's just the way it is...always has been...always will be. Nothing I can do about it.’” Where was the River of Joy?
Now, Isaiah was no Pollyanna in his preaching. In fact, the first half of the Biblical Book of Isaiah is dark and foreboding, emphasizing where God’s chosen people had fallen short and what they could expect in return for their indifference toward the Almighty – and it would not be a pretty sight.
Historically, in Isaiah’s time, the military and political powerhouse, Assyria, had been threatening Judah for years, gradually moving closer and closer, enslaving inhabitants and trampling the countryside along the way as only a massive army can do. Syria and Phoenicia had fallen. Samaria, the capital city of the Northern Kingdom, lay in rubble, leaving a clear path to Jerusalem.
In fact, the enemy was practically at the gates of the Holy City. Siege followed by capture seemed inevitable. As Presbyterian pastor Roger Allen mused, the Assyrians will “block any supplies from reaching Jerusalem, and the food will gradually run out and the people will become weak, and the Assyrians will break down the city wall and kill the king and take the people into slavery. The days of Israel as an independent nation will be over.” In short, the end was about to come.
Isaiah, realist that he was, envisioned all that. His word pictures in Chapter 1 are graphic with an evening news sort of quality about them:
Your country lies desolate,
your cities are burned with fire…
And daughter Zion is left like a booth in a vineyard,
like a shelter in a cucumber field, like a besieged city.
Everyone loves a bribe
and runs after gifts.
They do not defend the orphan,
and the widow’s cause does not come before them.
And yet, into this all-consuming darkness and gloom, Isaiah sends forth a beacon of light. “In the days to come”, he says….
“In the days to come, what?” his listeners surely asked.
“In the days to come….the prophet replied….People will stream to Zion, the mountain of God.” They will flow like a mighty river – a River of Joy. Because God built it, they will come.
Because in the beginning God fashioned a dream for the world – a dream of hope, a dream of peace and joy and love – they will come. They will come to dream the same dream and to learn to walk in the path God has created for them. And when they begin to dream God’s dream, swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.
Come, House of Jacob, (Isaiah implores,) come and walk in the light of God’s dream for the world and sit by the River of Joy. Come build a community, come build a church with a courageous vision that reflects the dream of God. Come build a community, come build a church that reflects the joy that only living that dream will bring.
“In the days to come….” Isaiah says, “It shall be so.”
And therein lies the hope of Advent. Simple as that! Heaven knows that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. Heaven knows that we surely need the assurance of “In the days to come…”
And so in the great high hope – in the “days to come” kind of hope - that only Advent can bring, we walk toward the light of God, seeking the River of Joy.
Why? Because “in the days to come”, we trust – in spite of all the jadedness and cynicism that the world spews forth, in spite of all the secularism that encroaches on our spirituality – we trust that God’s promises will be fulfilled. “In the days to come,” we trust that our swords will be beaten into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. We trust that assault rifles will become obsolete, that civil discourse rather than wars of words will define us once more, that we will cease to fear for our children’s lives – or for our own.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in our lifetimes either, but in the days to come, Isaiah tells us. And for now, that needs to be enough. And so, in this in-between time, God challenges us to live as if these sacred promises have been fulfilled. God invites us to live as if compassion is our calling, as if seeking justice is who we are, as if the world is worth saving.
I know at least some young people today question whether bringing children into this world plagued by conflict and climate change and fueled by fear is morally right. And somedays I can almost agree with them. However, then I remember a quote by Carl Sandburg that was embroidered on a pillow Heather received as a baby gift quite a few years ago. “A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.”
With my daughter-in-law pregnant and me preparing to be a grandmother come May, that quote is especially meaningful. It makes me think a lot about this Advent hope and the River of Joy.
And so another year passes, and another Advent begins. As a preacher, I have faced December in the church for a lot of years now, and I know that I run a serious risk of saying the same things I have said previously. And yet, today, once more, I am called to preach about hope in a world that too often seems more hopeless than ever.
But then, again, you keep coming to hear that message. You could be shopping. You could be decorating. You could be baking Christmas cookies. However, you chose to be here - to listen to me preach once again about Advent hope – and the challenges and opportunities such hope brings.
You come to hear me remind you that hope was born in a stable in Bethlehem and that hope, in ways we shall never understand, is being fulfilled now. You come because, in spite of so many signs to the contrary, you still trust deep down inside that the world is about to turn, that the coming of Jesus – God with us, God among us – has the power to transform this crazy world we live in.
You come because you know that for us as Christians, he is the foundation of our Advent hope – and deserves our dedication and commitment. In the days to come, in the days to come – and so Isaiah speaks of hope and the River of Joy that touches the very deepest part of us. As theologian Frederick Buechner once wrote, “I think it is hope that lies at our hearts and hope that finally brings us all here (to church). Hope that in spite of all the devastating evidence to the contrary, the ground we stand on is holy ground because Christ walked here and walks here still. Hope that we are known, each one of us, by name, and that out of the burning moments of our lives he will call us by our names to the lives he would have us live and the selves he would have us become. Hope that into the secret grief and pain and bewilderment of each of us and of our world he will come at last to heal and to save.”
Maybe not today, maybe not this year, but in the days to come…And for me – that phrase that I simply cannot let go of and a grand-daughter arriving in May – must be enough – and my prayer is that this Advent it will be enough for you too. For it is in such Advent hope that we will discover true joy. “Joy to the world. The Lord is come.”
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