“I Promise: To Challenge You”
Scripture Reading: 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Sermon Transcript for December 3, 2006
By Pastor Bob Coleman
It’s good to be back. Last week, if you weren’t aware, I had the joy of b baptizing my grandson. And I want to share with you the pictures at any time. I don’t want to be boring as parents or grandparents can be, but I do have a few to show. I plan on not boring you by taking over the opportunity to have them displayed up here. But in two weeks we are going to recognize all of the families that have had birth of children in this congregation since last Christmas which numbers, I think, close to twelve. There will be a letter going out this week. And we hope to be able to display all of the pictures of those children up there and mingled in their might be my grandson. I may take that privilege.
I want us to prepare our hearts and our minds this morning by listening, in a prayerful attitude, to the 4th and 5th verse of Psalm 25. Let us hear God’s Word: “Show me your ways, oh Lord, teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth and teach me for you are our God and my Savior and my hope is in you all the day long.” Amen.
God says, “I promise”. But promise what? We’re going to be looking at that in the next four Sundays for Advent. That is our theme. If you haven’t seen our signs out front or read it in the newsletter, this may be your first awareness. But we want to prepare you for it by saying that each Sunday we will answer or make reference to one of the promises that God has and today is, “I Promise: To Challenge You.” Now challenge is not something you expect to come to church necessarily particularly at the joyful time of the New Year. Yes, last Sunday was Christ, the King Sunday which is the end of the Christian year. Today is the first Sunday of the Christian year, so Happy New Year! I know, January is New Year’s. January, by the way named after the Roman God Janus, It is intentional to begin a new year and that is why people still today, as the two-headed face of Janus represents, looking to the past or looking to their future. And that’s appropriate within a culture to do that. In a sense it is no different in the beginning of the Christian year that we take some of those same steps. And for these four Sundays of Advent as we move toward the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, I would like for you to understand and remember that actually Advent is looking three ways. Yes, looking back to the time to prepare for the promise of that first Christmas so there are prophecy statements that are made. We look at the understanding of the birth of Jesus in a stable, the shepherds, the wise men, and all the rest. It is also preparation for the present to remember that this is the anniversary about remembering and bringing forth the stories of old. We renew them in our hearts and mind. But Advent does have a third part of looking into the future. And it is to understand that there is the final fulfillment of God’s promise to complete the full renewal of creation that is still before us and should never be forgotten when we understand this moment of Advent, these four Sundays which by the way is ancient and old within the life of the church, but there are some churches today who do not even recognize Advent. They have taken it out of their understanding. And there may be somewhat of a loss for that because if we don’t take these moments to prepare ourselves, well, Christmas can be on us and past and over. The old ways, though, of Advent, were very solemn. There was no party going, there were no buying of gifts before Christmas. There was no Black Friday, thank goodness for that! The awareness of centuries ago, even just barely a century and a half ago, was that these four Sundays were for us to reflect and then to prepare for the twelve days of Christmas which start on Christmas Day. And then the partying goes on until epiphany for those twelve days.
I want us to reflect on Samuel Well’s construct for all of creation, all of history, and all of the Scripture to help us see where we are in the process of God’s preparation and how Advent fits into that. Act I in Samuel Well’s construct is creation itself. It’s when God had too much love to keep in the Trinity and churned it out in a blaze of glory and creation. Act II was choosing the people to be God’s own people and giving them a covenant that they were to receive and live within, to develop a relationship. Great God Almighty, creator of all that is, having a relationship with God’s personal creation--human beings. And the third act of this story of God is namely Jesus, the Christ, as a dramatic revelation of God knowing Christ to be the creator, the sustainer, the present understanding. And Act IV is when God calls forth and creates the church by the Holy Spirit in which God gives us all that we need in Word and Spirit to be followers of Jesus Christ and to keep revealing the Word of God to all the world in each generation. That’s where we are right now—in the fourth act of God’s creation. The fifth act, or the final fulfillment—when God makes everything right and new again. It will happen in God’s own time. It’s not known just exactly when that will be, but God promises it will be in a variety of ways throughout the Scripture. God’s promise is a challenge to us to live within a present kingdom in a time when the world is building its own kingdom. When overindulgence and expectation of things of what’s the biggest and best for us in our lives is a challenge for the church to live within that in that fourth chapter. That’s why the Luke passage for this morning that you heard earlier read to you seems to be at cross purposes to the meaning of Christmas and all of the celebration, the shop-till-you-drop theme of life. Let me read to you again; it is so stark and so focused when Jesus said, “There will be signs of the sun, moon, and stars. On the earth nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the seas. Men will faint from terror apprehensive of what is coming on the world. For the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads because your redemption is drawing nigh.” That’s the fifth chapter, yet to come.
Jesus later in another setting said, “The Son of Man does not even know when that is, so do not prepare for the exact day but prepare your life as it is now with the anticipation that it could come at any moment.” And that begins, then, in the reading of Scripture, on purpose by the construct of the church, to begin with the description of the end of the world. We are to prepare not for Christmas as a shopping season. We are to prepare not for Christmas even just for the celebration of the birth of Jesus but we are to prepare for the coming of God. The presence of God is the presence of the Kingdom of God.
Now Jesus shared this in a time He knew His own demise was coming. It was also to happen within forty years that the very Temple of God was destroyed. And it is still not rebuilt. And those who see that at the center of their faith still mourn its loss. People today, we don’t have to believe that that was the worse of times then and it is so great now. Although nostalgia can sometimes play a trick on us. As a Christian community we even get enthralled by the end time description thro. ugh the Left Behind series as if it is something to look forward to. And it is not a winsome kind of passage that I read to you earlier. The more secular world makes many disaster movies of all types and shapes. The Jericho TV series is based upon after the bomb has been dropped. Jesus’ prophetic words give us a chill down our spine because it feels like it might be happening now. There is distress among the nations; they are faint from hearing all the worries that are around. The context of today is just as relevant for the Scripture as it was when Jesus spoke it 2,000 years ago. Now the Courier and Ives approach, you’ll hear it, the older you get the more you take a look backwards and say, “Oh, if it could just be like that.” Well, I want to tell you, if you look at history, the Twentieth Century was the pits! We had three major wars, we were involved in two other minor wars, there were over a hundred other minor wars. And by the way, no war is minor when it hits you. There was a depression. There was starvation. There was genocide in multiple places at multiple times. There was racism, injustice of all kinds. That’s what we want to go back to? I even have problems with going back to the Bible.
I think we need to go forward with God’s Word and prepare for the coming of God. There is not a nostalgic reclaiming. Not when you think and look at all of the hurt and harm that has been done in our past by humans to humans. But like Jesus, sometimes you have to say these things prophetically to get people’s attention. Like Jesus you have to tell people the awful truth, straightforward, clear, that things are a mess. And somehow we are responsible for it, at least part of it. Like Jesus sometimes you have to say disturbing things to get people agitated enough to change their behavior. But we have had so many crises we’ve become filled with compassion fatigue. We begin to set back as a church and just hope that we can come and hear good, comfortable, soft story. Feel good about it and go home and hold off until next time we can come back and hear some pleasant things. That’s not the way we are to be. We must prepare for the coming of God!
Just like churches that will get this time of year, somewhat ignore their visitors. The story goes of a couple that was visiting a church at this time of year and they came in and everybody was bustling around because of a Cantata getting ready. And the ushers were trying to take care of the details back there. And everyone seemed to have a job to do and they were busy doing it to the point where a couple came and worshiped with and left and no one said, “Hi”. Everyone thought they were doing the right thing—being busy for the Lord instead of preparing for the visitation of God, the visitors, strangers, looking out for the next light that could be Jesus. Think if we lived like that as a church.
Eugene Peterson in the paraphrase of this part helps us when he says in Verse 24, “Don’t let the sharp edge of your expectation get dull by parties and drinking and shopping.” Now those are his words, but I also say don’t let the sharp edge of your expectation get dull by all the flurry and hurry to get, even with the decorations, with no disclaimer for the gift that that meets. But are we decorating the church spiritually for the coming of God?
The expectations, the welcoming of visitors, the opportunity to witness to God’s great plan and law is what we are here for to do. The passages that we have from Luke are also supported by the understanding that as Pastor Nancy shared in her message, she gave us the word that says, “Give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of life.” We have to live in this world. Wars will not go away just because we wish them to. But we must live as children of light pointing with the light toward the coming of God. It’s a gracious prayer that helps us to recognize that we need the abiding grace of God. Now God gives us wisdom and the ability to fix problems. But it is God who needs to redeem the messes that we make. The messes that we make corporately as a whole culture and country and nation and world, and the message that we make individually that we call sin.
So let’s play the scene again on that Sunday morning. The visitors come and this time someone greets them and says, “Will you come and sit with me. We are sure glad to have you here today. Come on back to the Coffee Hour. What would you like to know about this church? What about your life? What’s been in your journey?” Getting to know a person well enough so that they can tell you their story and you can find and see God in and through them. In Jeremiah, in the Old Testament, God is not all doom and gloom. He says in the 33rd Chapter of Jeremiah through the prophet, “In those days and at that time, I will make a righteous branch sprout fro David’s line. He will do what is just and right in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called, the Lord, our righteousness.” You see, God will fulfill His plan. God will complete that fifth chapter in time and place. And in Jeremiah and the New Testament, those words of hope are always there just like we had the candle of hope lit for us this morning. It is to remind us that in the deepest, darkest, most dismal hour of our lives, in our history, there is hope. There will be injustice. Racism will not be corrected just by laws. It can only be done by a change of hearts; and it is only God who can truly change those hearts. But Jeremiah gives that word of hope. This passage proclaims God’s intention that justice and righteousness will come across the land in time. For God will redeem our messes.
There is an old story of a preacher, back in the 1800’s because of some of the particular parts of it, but I will tell the more modern message. A boy came to the preacher and said, “Pastor, I have been out collecting birds.” And he had trapped birds, about six or seven, and put them in a bird cage. He said, “They are not very pretty birds. They don’t sing very well. But I think I will keep them around and play with them for awhile and then I will feed them to my old cat.” The preacher thought that seemed to be a bad end for the birds so he said, “Let me do something. Why don’t I buy them from you and I’ll take care of them from there.” So the boy said, “I don’t know, it might be worth a whole lot.” (A good bargain hunter at an early age) But the preacher said, “I’ll pay you what’s fair.” They struck a bargain; he bought the birds and went around behind the church and opened the cage and let the birds, wild as they were, go free to be the way God meant them to be. The next Sunday he brought that cage before the congregation and he told the story of the boy who had captured the birds and what he was going to do with them. He said, “I bought them just as God buys us with a price. And I took them out and I released them. And that boy told me those boys couldn’t sing, but I could hear them sing when they left. But they were singing, “Redeemed, free, free at last!” The words of those birds through a song are what we hope we can always carry within our hearts even when the world is singing a funeral dirge. We can sing in our hearts, “I’m free, because God has set me free. Redeemed because God has set and redeemed me.”
To do so we need to imitate Christ, that’s part of the gift of turning in that way. So Paul tells us in the Letter of the Thessalonians in Chapter Three, “May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else just as ours does for you.” May you be strengthened, may God strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus Christ comes with all His holy love. Yes, we are at Act IV, Chapter IV of the book with only one more to go. We do not know when it will be written. But Advent is not a time of preparation just to decorate trees and buy gifts and give those gifts. Advent is a time for us to prepare for the coming of God first in our own hearts and to the world. It’s a powerful image that we stand up, raise our heads, because we proclaim that our redemption is drawing nigh. May you this time of year and throughout all of the year, don’t stop with Christmas day, continue on for the whole Christian year so that next Christ, the King Sunday, next year, will be a time for you to reflect that you have seen your redemption. It has come near. You have sung your song of freedom and redemption. Your have seen the signs of Christmas throughout the whole year so that you can stand up, lifting your heads high, all around you to see your redemption.
Let us continue with a time of silence. Let us reflect upon these words of God read to us from God’s holy word. Let us prepare for the coming of God.
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