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Messengers of Hope
Boy, do we need some hopeful messages about now.
A man was run over in Avondale on Wednesday as he tried to cross Route 41 near Pyle’s Hardware Store.
Terrorists take hostages and kill almost 200 people in a multi-day attack across the Indian city of Mumbai.
Stocks continue to nosedive. Daily losses of 3, 4, or 500 hundred points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average are now commonplace.
Companies laid off more than half a million workers in the month of November alone, creating the worst unemployment report in 34 years.
Everywhere we look, everyone we talk to seems to be doom and gloom lately. This is supposed to be the Christmas season, everybody! We’re supposed to be happy and cheerful and merry. It is, after all, the most wonderful time of the year.
So we get up too early on a Sunday morning and decide to come to church. Surely at church we will sing Christmas carols about a sleeping baby boy and angels singing hallelujah. Surely we will get to hear Scripture lessons about stables and mangers. We will hear a message of hope there, of all places.
And now, you’ve just heard two lessons about crusty and dusty, probably literally, old prophets. One of the prophets, Isaiah, is telling the Israelites to leave their homes in Babylon, trek through the dangerous wilderness and desert and make their new homes in Jerusalem, which has been destroyed and is in ruins. Oh, and be joyful and happy about it while you’re there.
The second prophet, John the Baptist, is a crazy man living in the desert who eats bugs and wears the skins of dead animals. He’s telling the Jewish people who come to him that they better turn their entire lives upside down, repent of their sins and get back in the saddle. And even after all that, he’s still not the savior of the world. I’m not even good enough to be the slave or the servant who unties his shoes, John says.
Wow. All of that, and there’s still not a Christmas carol in sight. Welcome to the second Sunday of Advent.
The season of Advent, these four weeks before Christmas Eve, are given to us by the church hundreds of years ago to be a season of preparation, a time to examine our hearts and our lives, so that when Christmas Day comes, we are ready to celebrate the birth of Christ in the world and in each of our lives in a new and powerful way.
Because it’s a season of preparing for Christ, we don’t read much about his birth until the week before Christmas. The other three weeks we spend with the idea of getting ready, and so we journey not with wise men or shepherds like we might want, but with these prophets who bring us Good News, even though at first glance, it doesn’t look so great.
We’ve all experienced receiving good news wrapped up in a package that doesn’t look so hot. We know the stories of people who get a CAT scan after hitting their head in a car accident and find out they have a brain tumor. Or someone who gets laid off but one hour later is offered another, better job they applied for months ago. Or you took a wrong turn on the way home, had to turn around, and wound up missing a car accident by two or three minutes.
In a way, that’s exactly what we have in the messages we receive from Isaiah and from John. On the surface, they don’t like much to get excited about. They seem impossible. Undertake a huge construction project in the middle of barren and isolated land, Isaiah says, and make a highway through the desert. Change your life, John says, repent, be baptized and get ready to wait for the Son of God to come.
But if we look deeper at these messages and the messengers who carry them, we see, that in both of them, grace is at the center. Both of these texts are about God doing the impossible, which is the definition of grace: God giving and accomplishing that which humans find impossible. When the Israelites heard Isaiah’s promise that God will take care of them if they will only go back to their ruined homeland in Jerusalem, they must have been depressed. Why would they want to return to a place that has nothing for them, no homes, no temple, no rule of law? That feels impossible.
When the Jewish people heard John tell them to turn their lives around, their hearts must have sunk to their feet. Can’t we give up our clothes or make a meal for a neighbor, they asked? Why would they change the way they think and act and turn their priorities upside down to resemble God’s priorities? That feels impossible.
It feels impossible. How often do we say that same phrase in our own lives? Making a career change to do something fulfilling instead of just earning a paycheck feels impossible, and so we stay where we are. Forgiving our brother who said terrible things about us while were growing up feels impossible, and so we keep the family fractured. Extending love and compassion to the co-worker or classmate who gossips behind our back feels impossible so we return in kind or ignore her. Stopping genocide in Darfur or the war in Iraq feels impossible and so we remain paralyzed by apathy and don’t raise our voices in protest. You want to know more about this Jesus and experience him personally, but making any changes to your life that he may be calling you to feels impossible, and so you hold back.
Where in your life are stuck with an impossible? What is feeling out of reach for you? What is causing you pain that you can’t see an end to? What is frustrating or scary or so huge that you ignore it or run away?
As you think about your impossible, hear this Good News, this Gospel, this proclamation straight from Jesus: with humans it is impossible; but with God, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26).
Into places of impossible, God sends messengers of hope. For the Israelites, Isaiah was the messenger, assuring them that God was with them as they returned to their homeland even when it was desolate and forlorn. For the Jewish people, John was the messenger, calling them to repent of their sin and their hearts would be made ready for the coming of the Son of God, of Emmanuel, of God with them. And ultimately, for all of us today, for the world, Jesus is the messenger, reminding us that when we only see roadblocks or mountains or insurmountable pain or stubborn apathy that God sees grace and love and forgiveness and hope.
Advent is more than a season to prepare for the birth of a baby Jesus. It is a time to prepare to live the way Jesus did: a life full of possibility and hope, a way of living out the Good News of God’s reign and rule of love to a world that lies in the destruction of war, to a nation that teeters on the brink of economic collapse, to members of our community that suffer the pangs of loneliness and despair, and to ourselves, who sometimes feel like our hearts and minds are barren, dusty and broken, as forgotten as the wilderness. Advent is a season to prepare to expect the unexpected, to get ready to experience unmatched grace.
On the communion table, we have signs of the possibility of God through Jesus. We have the water of our baptism that washes us clean from our sin and gives us the possibility of a new life of love and grace in Jesus. We have the bread and the cup, signs to us of Jesus’ sacrificial love that nothing could prevent from being poured out. We have the cross, a visible sign to us of God’s power over death and of God’s promise of eternal life, a life that begins now and continues forever. You came this morning needing to hear a message of hope. Hear, then, this message: in a world of loneliness and death, God sends Jesus to offer hope and life. In a world of fear and uncertainty, God sends Jesus to be our rock and our salvation. In to a world of injustice and oppression, God sends Jesus to offer us freedom and empower us to free others in his name. He is our messenger of from God. Come, receive his message, and let your life be a message of hope to the world. Amen.