First Sunday in Advent
“Hope”
Communion Sunday
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Jeremiah 33:14-16 / NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 21:25-36/NRSVUE
For our entire childhoods, my sister and I were the only grandkids on my Mom’s side of the family which meant that, at Christmas, we were spoiled absolutely rotten. After opening our presents from Mom and Dad (and Santa) at home in the morning, we’d head over to Grandma and Pop’s house in the late afternoon for Christmas dinner and, of course, for what might be best described as Gift-a-palooza.
If there happened to be a new game or action figure on the market, I was getting it that day for sure. And while I definitely enjoyed being on the receiving end of all this generosity at the time, in retrospect, I now find myself feeling a little embarrassed by how completely over-the-top it was.
My grandmother, God rest her soul, was a pretty regimented person and so there was a process in her house for most things — including, but not limited to, the dispensation of the aforementioned Christmas bounty. Before we were allowed to open all of the toys and games under the tree, we first had to make our way through the items in our stockings that were hanging neatly from the fireplace mantle.
Now, don’t get me wrong, what was in there was kinda cool too, but it tended to have a more practical bias to it than did all of the other gifts. There were things like gift certificates for McDonalds, and Chap Stik and the batteries we’d soon need for what awaited.
One year, though, there was also a plain white envelope in my stocking, which was kind of an unusual find. Upon opening it, I discovered a piece of fancy and official-looking paper with some numbers and a whole lot of small words printed on it. Unbeknownst to me, I had just received my very first savings bond.
I was only nine years old at the time so the value of this gift was, admittedly, a little lost on me. I looked at the certificate for a second, said the obligatory “thank you,” dropped that thing like a hot potato, and ran across the room in search of the Battlestar Galactica spaceship I just knew I’d find amidst that mountain of stuff.
Many years later, when I was in graduate school and saving up bottle deposits (which were — and I believe still are — ten whole cents in the State of Michigan) in order to get Taco Bell for dinner, I came across that plain white envelope in a box of things my parents had sent me from home. I opened it and found the saving bond inside. Not knowing quite what to do with it, I took it to the bank to see if they could help me figure it out, which they did. And I ended up stumbling into a multitude of blessings:
I discovered how much interest can accrue over a period of thirteen years; I determined that I could buy all of the books I needed for class that semester and pay my rent; and I decided I was getting a Chalupas Supreme Combo instead of a couple of ninety-nine cent tacos for dinner that night. But the most important things I came by that day were these timeless piece of wisdom: sometimes you end up getting the gift you really need instead of the one you simply wanted, and sometimes it takes a while for a gift to make its full impact known.
You may have gotten up this morning and opened that first little window on your Advent calendar, then listened to Mariah Carey singing “All I Want for Christmas Is You” for the umpteenth time (since they’ve been playing it on the radio non-stop since Halloween) in the car on your way to church, then walked into this sanctuary, which is now completely tricked-out for the season, and thought to yourself, “Ahh… At last! Christmastime is here!”
But then, as you were sitting there listening to today’s readings, there’s a better than average chance that you were thinking something along the lines of: “Well, it looks like Pastor Brent put the wrong texts in the bulletin again (in fairness, I have done that before); thanks for killing the ole’ Christmas cheer. I mean while justice and righteousness are great things, they’re not obviously festive ones. And all that stuff about distress and fainting and fear and foreboding and shaking just screams ‘Happy Holidays!’”
You may have come here this morning expecting to hear about mangers and a star in the sky and baby Jesus lying there in swaddling clothes but, I assure you, I didn’t screw this up; these are, in fact, the readings for this first Sunday in Advent: the first day of the first season of the new church year. I promise that we’ll get to all of that other stuff eventually, just not today — because Christmas is Christmas, and Advent is Advent. And Advent means waiting.
Actually, the word Advent itself means “arrival” — in this case the arrival of Christ — and so this is the season in which we anticipate both his birth into this world on Christmas, and his eventual return at some unknown point in the future. But since Jesus isn’t here yet, in either sense, this is a period of waiting.
It’s not really a big surprise, then, that many people choose to skip right over Advent and head directly to Christmas; I mean if there’s one thing that tends to be in short supply among humans, it’s patience. So while these readings about deferred blessings may not be what we wanted to hear this morning, perhaps they’re what we needed to hear this morning.
Today’s Gospel text is from near the end of Luke’s version of the “Little Apocalypse,” which we looked at in Mark just a few weeks ago. As we discussed, these words that speak about all sorts of bad stuff on the horizon — foretelling the time when “heaven and earth will pass away” — probably didn’t sound all that bad to Jesus’s disciples and the Gospel writers’ audiences, most of whom were being oppressed by a combination of Roman and Jewish authorities at time. The end of this age was going to be rough, for sure, but the birth of a new one was definitely something for people in that situation to look forward to. The waiting around for that to happen, not so much.
Things were apparently not all that great way back in Jeremiah’s time either. The prophet Jeremiah ben Hilkiah was a priest from a long line of priests in the village of Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, which was a little northeast of Jerusalem. Today’s reading comes from a section known as the “Little Book of Comfort,” which sounds nice. But let me tell you, people definitely needed some comfort at that point.
Most scholars believe that the book of Jeremiah was written in the late sixth century BCE, right about the time that Jerusalem was basically destroyed by the Babylonians and many Israelite elites, including priests like Jeremiah, were forcibly sent into exile in Babylon — and, in Jeremiah’s case, also imprisoned.
If you read only today’s sunshiny little passage from Jeremiah and no more, you might conclude that the message here is something along the lines of “Grey skies are gonna clear up, so put on a happy face,” but that’s not the case at all; indeed, Jeremiah spends much of the book wailing in lamentation — and rightfully so. His country is in ashes, it’s people have been driven from their homeland, many of them (including him) have been imprisoned, others have been tortured and killed. But there, amidst all of this present awfulness, Jeremiah speaks powerful words of hope for the future, of the God who vows to rescue the people from the misery wrought by politics and power…. someday. I imagine that this might resonate with at least some of you right about now.
Look, I get it. We all want things to change for the better and we want them to change immediately. But that’s not the way the world works — I’ll be darned if I know why. For some reason, God presents us with the promise of better times to come and makes us wait for them amidst a combination of despair, on the one hand, and hope, on the other. We want the Battlestar Gallatica spaceship and the happiness it us brings right now, but we get the savings bond instead. It’ll all work out fine in the end but in the meantime, there’s the meantime.
Sure, things kinda stink these days but know this: God assures us that they will get better someday, and God always keeps God’s promises.
While you wait for that to happen, don’t just sit there doing nothing and feeling sorry for yourself: Go and do God’s work in the world. Love your neighbor, tend to the poor, seek justice and righteousness for all God’s people, care for creation, do all that stuff that God has called you (and everybody else) to do. As long as you’ve got some time on your hands, you might as well do something worthwhile with it.
And as you wait and work for a better world, know that God is with you always.
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I fulfill the promise I made.” This is the gift of Advent.