Hope in the Waiting
Sermon Notes:
The sermon was not recorded this week. Comprehensive sermon notes are available here.
Scripture: Isaiah 61:1 – 4, 8 – 11
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed… Read more…
Scripture: John 1:6 – 8, 19 – 28
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. Read more…
Looking to Sunday
by Elaine Poproski
One of the things I’ve newly appreciated about the season of Advent is the lament-y overtone to everything. There’s a minor key cry for Jesus’ return – for God’s kingdom to come and for all that’s wrong in our world to be put to rights. I feel it this year more profoundly than I have in years past. Perhaps it’s because of COVID. Perhaps it’s all this isolating and waiting for a vaccine.
And yet, Advent progresses. We don’t stay in the same, stuck, waiting place crying out to God. We move; we progress; we remember; we reach out; we hope. Advent draws the eye to Christmas, where we are invited to hear the angels sing their welcome of Emmanuel – God-With-Us – Jesus.
On Sunday we’re going to be reading from Isaiah 61 and from John 1. Both passages strive to pull us out, a little bit, from the dark and despair of lament. Both passages speak of the one who proclaims hope, the one who declares that God is not absent and is not silent; they speak of promise. Hear it in Isaiah 61:11:
For as the earth brings forth its shoots,
and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,
so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
to spring up before all the nations.
I think lament is good. I think it’s healthy. I think we would do well to learn the language of lament and teach it to others. But I also think we who know Jesus cannot – must not – just sit in that place. We are a people of hope because we know that no matter what the world looks like today, the end of the story has already been written. Christmas foreshadows what’s coming. It draws out God’s promise of spring. In John 1:7 we read that a man named John “came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.” That light is Jesus – the hope of the world. We have inherited John’s call. We are witnesses to the light.
As you prepare for Sunday, you may not be feeling the hope of Christmas just yet. It’s hard. We’re locked in. We’re afraid of a virus against which we have no viable offensive strategy. We’re facing difficult choices about travel and visiting at a time of year that often sees us gathering over food with family and friends. It’s good that we lament. It’s o.k. that we’re grieving. But we are still people of hope. We are people who know the truth of God’s extraordinary love and redemptive, reconciling work in the world. We know the truth that the angels’ songs on Christmas are but simple folk songs when compared to the way all creation will sing when Jesus returns. As you prepare for Sunday, I invite you to consider how, with everything going on in our world and all that is especially difficult, you will witness to those truths in your own life.