Sermon for December 2, 2018 
Read Jeremiah 33:14-16 and Luke 21:25-36Well, the season of advent is upon us again. The season of waiting. The time that turns us towards the watching and waiting and preparing for the birth of Christ. We count down the next few Sundays to the anniversary of Jesus' birth.
And this season begins on what seems a profoundly unsettling note. The gospel lectionary for today is always a passage that, whether taken from Matthew, Mark, or this morning’s Luke, is known as "the little apocalypse." Each year the first gospel lectionary of Advent challenges us to remember that this season is a time not only of remembering the Christ who has already come to us but who, the gospels tell us, will come again, with attendant signs and wonders. Jesus calls his hearers, calls us, in these passages to make sure that the day does not catch us unexpectedly. Even though he spends a considerable amount of time telling us to be prepared for it, Jesus says we may still be surprised.
This may sound like a paradox, but it’s actually pretty common in our daily lives. Just ask any woman who has had a child. A common phrase to refer to a woman’s pregnancy is that "she is expecting." She is expecting the child and makes many preparations to be ready. The nursery is put together. She has a baby showers and shops for all the supplies needed for a child: toys, clothing, baby monitors, car seats, a stroller. It's no secret the baby is coming.
Yet it is not that unusual to hear a story that goes like this: "There we were, nearly 3 weeks out from our due date, stuck in traffic during a terrific snowstorm. Out of nowhere I went into labor! I ended up having the baby in the backseat of the car with two police officers assisting! We never expected anything like that!"
They had been expecting. But they had not "expected" it just then and in just that way. Surprises can come even when we know what’s coming. And so, Jesus said, it will be when the Son of Man returns. We may have been talking about it and praying for it for the last two thousand years, but that doesn’t mean that the actual event won’t shock and surprise us. But as with the birth of a child, because what we had been expecting was a good and joyous thing, once the surprise of just when and how it happened wears off, we’ll be left with just the joy.
But, for now, we find ourselves still in that waiting period. At the beginning of our Advent for the year. And that waiting and watching begins with a week where we celebrate hope. It makes sense that we start our period of preparation for Christ by looking at Hope. After all, hope is inextricably tied in with waiting. If we did not hope, why would we bother to wait? We hope for a change, for something to happen. We hope for a phone call or a job offer. It is because we hope, that we bother to wait or prepare at all.
Hope changes things. It changes how we think and how we act. In 1981 a self-made millionaire Eugene Land, greatly changed the lives of a sixth-grade class in East Harlem. He told them, "Stay in school," he admonished, "and I'll help pay the college tuition for every one of you." At that moment the lives of these students changed. For the first time they had hope. Said one student, "I had something to look forward to, something waiting for me. It was a golden feeling." Nearly 90 percent of that class went on to graduate from high school.
They had a reason to hope. They had a reason to keep going.
Advent is the season of hope, a season to remind us that we worship the God of things that are not yet, the God of things that will be as well God's past miracles. We start Advent by talking about the future. Advent is the season to hold up before us visions of things that sound impossible – Advent images, like a branch shooting out of a stump that had all but died, weapons of war turned into tools for producing food, the lion lying down with the lamb, light that the darkness will never quench, and a child born of a virgin, whose name shall be called Wonderful, counselor, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
The church dangles these images before us in these Advent days, not in protest against the more prevalent images of red-nosed reindeer, elves, and mistletoe, but because the church knows that Christian hope must keep the future before us, not nostalgia for the past. In the future is our hope. And Christian hope should be big and bold. Hope for a time without war, hope that the world around us will look like the Kingdom of God.
But let’s be honest. It’s hard to hope big. It's much easier to hope for small, private things. Sometimes our hope seems doomed or just foolish when we try to hope on that big scale. I mean, can we really hope for swords beaten into plowshares, or spears into pruning hooks, or Christ descending on clouds to call a halt to all the pain or boredom or stress or evil or tension of everyday life on earth, so that God’s reign of peace can begin? I mean, in this day and age that sounds kind of crazy. Maybe we're a little afraid that all those Advent images of lions and lambs, and an end to war are just wishful thinking?
Have you looked at a magazine rack lately? Starting in the fall, magazines start appearing in the grocery stores and bookstores giving helpful advice for the holidays. You know: Christmas cookie recipes and home decorating ideas and ideas for reducing stress. How to manage relatives visiting and that kind of thing. Sometimes those magazines provide sound advice, such as to be more realistic in expectations of ourselves and others. You need not do everything perfectly, choose perfect gifts, please everybody, lose weight, decorate your house, cook like a gourmet, and satisfy your child’s every desire. No. In a nutshell, holiday articles advise us to do three things: set more attainable goals; learn from the past; and be more realistic about what’s possible. The result of all this is a shorter to-do list, a smaller set of expectations, more limited hopes.
Well, oddly enough, the church, in our observance of Advent, advises exactly the same things, but with dramatically different results. The church’s Advent advice is the same: set attainable goals, learn from the past, and be realistic about what’s possible. But the anticipated results of said advice aren’t smaller expectations, but greater ones; not limited hopes, but bigger ones. We become people who dream of swords beaten into plowshares, and lions and lambs lying down together. We hope for world peace, not as wishful thinking, but as something we’re expecting God will accomplish, and we want to help.
We must learn from the past. The Bible is a record of divine promises made and kept. God, who was faithful in the past, will be faithful in the future. We are free to give up any obsession we have with the past, past wounds, past anxieties, past hurts, fears, and doubts, and live freely in the present, hoping for the future because God kept God’s promises. God will keep God’s promises.
We are realistic about what is possible. Realistic about who God is. That is different than being realistic about we as humans can do. By trusting in God, we are realistic when we hope for things yet unseen, even big things, like joy and peace and salvation and wholeness. But we are realistic: all of these things lie ahead of us. All of these things are in our future. All our real wholeness, our real joy, our real love, completely, fully realized, is in our future. Without having a future, the past no longer matters.
That’s why Advent, and our Christian faith, is future-oriented. Yes, Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. Yes, he actually died and was buried and rose again and appeared openly to his disciples. Yes, all these things, historically, in the past, happened. But they all happened so that we can live into the future which awaits us, a future for which God is preparing us, a future of which Christ, raised from the dead, is the first fruits.
Hoping for the future is Advent hope – realistic, possible, practical hope, because God is the God who holds the future; God is the one preparing you for the future; God is the one calling us into that future and using prophets and wise people from every generation and even God’s own Son, to dangle some Advent images before us to whet our appetite: they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and, behold, a girl shall conceive and bear a son, and God will be with us.
