Advent 1: HOPE
December 1, 2024 + Faith-Lilac Way Lutheran+ Pastor Pam Stalheim Lane
Happy New Year! Today marks the beginning of the new church year. But to celebrate the New Year and to prepare for the coming of Christ into our world, the church does not throw a party with noisemakers and champaign. Instead, the church year begins with Advent. Advent is a season of preparation, of waiting and watching, praying and lighting candles and anticipating the coming of Jesus into our world. But it is also a time to tell the harsh truth about the world we live in – and why we need a Savior.
In this season of physically decreasing light, we begin our first Sunday in the year of Luke’s Gospel, not at the beginning of the book or with a story of the newborn baby Jesus – it’s coming – but we begin near the end of the Gospel. We begin with this fairly frightening apocalyptic sounding message from Jesus. Jesus says, “There will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars…” The whole cosmos seems to be shaken with foreboding of what is coming. Fear runs amok.
It may seem odd that we start the new year with this foreboding apocalyptic message. It is just three days after Thanksgiving. Why not just stay with the message of gratitude?
Gratitude was my word for the day last week. And don’t misunderstand, it is good to be thankful in every season. But today, as we begin Advent, our focus turns to the word Hope. And yet, at first read, the Gospel doesn’t sound hopeful. It sounds absolutely frighting.
Let me set the context for you. Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem and one of them remarked with awe and wonder on the beauty and majesty of the temple. From all reports, it was beautiful and pilgrims came just to worship in this spot. It was well built and looked as if it would last forever. But Jesus told his disciples – and the growing number of people who were following him – “Don’t put your faith or trust in this building. It will not last. It will all be put to ruin.” What a devasting statement. It was like saying that a symbol of American prosperity and commerce – like say, the Twin Towers in New York City, could be destroyed – except even worse! The temple was not only a strong and beautiful building, it was the center of their life as a people; it was God’s home. Who would ever, who could ever do such a thing?
And yet, in 70 AD, after a very unsuccessful uprising against the Roman occupation, the temple was demolished by the Roman army – just as Jesus had prophesied. The people were devastated. They wondered: where was God?
Luke – and the other Gospel writers – were writing after the destruction of the temple to a people who were shaken and trying to make sense of the world around them. People were afraid. And with reason! There were wars and rumors of wars and the whole world seemed to be going to “hell in a handbasket.”
One of the rights of passage in my family when I was growing up was that when we turned 12, we could stay for a week with our cousins who lived in Iowa. While I was there, my cousin gave me a book to read – it was part of the “Left behind” series – that tells stories of the apocalypse and the end of the world. I was so afraid - the books gave me nightmares. I think that was actually the point of these books -- to “scare” people into following Jesus.
Fear is a powerful force. There have been false messiahs – like James Jones- who have led people astray with these kinds of apocalyptic fears. But this is not what Jesus is doing in our Gospel. Jesus tells the truth about the challenges of our world – which seem eerily contemporary. There were wars and there are now wars. We hear of horrific acts of done by and to the “enemy” – people who used to be called neighbors – in Ukraine, in Gaza, and even in our own streets. So how are we to respond? It can be overwhelming. When we feel fearful, hopeless and helpless, it can make us want to run away and hide.
But that is not what Jesus tells us to do. Jesus tells his followers then and now that we do not need to react in fear. Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be weighed down with worry. Don’t drown your sorrows in mind-numbing activities.”
As American novelist Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind, you draw large and startling figures.” That’s precisely what Jesus does in his prophetic wake-up call. He shouts, he draws startling figures, and he uses every rhetorical device at his disposal to snap his listeners to attention. “Be on guard,” he warns his disciples. “Be alert.” “Stand up and raise your heads.” Look. 1
As we begin this season of Advent, we are being called to tell the truth, to be honest about the state of our world and our lives. Most of the problems in our world were human caused – fighting over land, over resources, taking trees from the forest and not replanting, dumping garbage in the ocean, petroleum gasses in the air. Some of these problems feel big and out of control but some are local - not picking up the garbage that our neighbor throws in the street, driving as fast as we like because we prioritize our agenda more than the law someone else made, not wanting to pay for schools now that our children are grown, evicting the family of the neighborhood child because they don’t have the right paperwork…The list is long.
As Rev. Debie Thomas writes, “Advent is a brutally candid season; it calls for honesty, even when honesty leads us straight to lamentation. In Advent, we are invited to describe life “on earth as it is," and not as we wish it would be. “We are invited to “shout forth our pain and bewilderment. To name the seeming absence of God. To draw the large, startling figures of the apocalypse.” In Advent, we are invited to set aside our self-righteous denial (it wasn’t me), polite piety –– (I don’t want to tell someone else how to do something) or cheap cheer (let’s just ignore it all and wish it would go away.) Instead, “we are invited to allow the radical honesty of Scripture to make us honest, too… Advent reminds us that we are not called to an escapist, denial-based piety. We are called to dwell courageously in the truth.”1 We are called to the truth. But that doesn’t mean that speaking the truth is going to be easy.
Jesus calls us to tell the truth about ourselves – and about God. And the truth about God is that even when we don’t keep our promises, even when we tell the story that we want to be true instead of the hard truth of how the world really is, Jesus not only knows the truth, Jesus IS the Truth. Jesus calls us out of fear and into hope.
Have you ever seen an old tree that has fallen down in the woods. It looks dead and useless– maybe even rotting away. But if you look again, you just might see some new life sprouting out of the stump of the old tree. That is the hope to which God calls us.
Jeremiah writes – from prison – to the people of Israel. Most of the book is Jeremiah reminding the people that they have not kept their covenant with God. But in today’s lesson, Jeremiah turns his focus, and reminds the Israelites – and us – of God’s covenant. For out of the seemingly dead stump of Israel, God has promised to raise up a new sprout.
The Gospel and New Testament writers knew that scripture – and others in the Hebrew scripture that talk about the stump of Jesse and understood Jesus to be the fulfillment of this prophecy. This scripture takes on yet another meaning for us when we see the new life that Jesus calls us into.
Jesus calls us to notice, to pay attention to the details of nature – the fig tree and all the other trees – and the world around us. Notice the buds, the sprouting leaves. Notice the oceans and streams and the tiny drops of water on the window. Pay attention to the little nudges of God’s Holy Spirit on you. For, as Debie Thomas says, “The God who shows up in a teenager’s womb might show up anywhere.” 1
This is the message of Advent. It begins with noticing the world around us and yearning for a better future, longing for GOD’s future, a future of hope for tomorrow. This is not a passive hope. Instead, Jesus calls us to Stand up. Stand up with humble confidence. We stand up with humility because we are not perfect and we stand up with confidence because we know that God is good, God is faithful, and that God can be trusted with our future. So let us pray that we can follow where God leads… and not be too surprised to find ourselves at the manger, celebrating the incarnation of Jesus and at the cross, rejoicing in the gift of resurrection freedom, and at the side of our neighbor, working and praying together for the sake of God’s world. Thanks be to God. Amen.
1Debie Thomas – Journeys with Jesus https://webmail.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2018-when-you-see-these-things