1st Sunday of Advent
November 29, 2015
Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Thessalonians
3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36
(or watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8s76DEoFRw&feature=em-upload_owner )
“The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will
fulfill my gracious promise with the people of Israel and Judah. In those days and at that time, I will raise
up a righteous branch from David’s line… In those days, Judah will be saved and
Jerusalem will live in safety.”[1] I don’t know about you, but when I first read
that passage from Jeremiah, my first reaction was “Uh-oh.” I’m sure God appreciated that response. “The time is coming,” says the Lord, “when I
will fulfill my promise,” and my initial thought is “Uh-oh. What’s
coming? Hold on just a second there,
Lord, there’s enough going on already. What do you mean something else is coming?” Except this thing coming is different than
what has come before, it’s different than what’s going on now. This thing coming is the long-expected
Messiah, our Savior, who we’ve been waiting quite impatiently to come, as Christmas
sales and music and decorations start earlier each year. God says, “I’m coming,” and my first thought
is wait a minute, I don’t want you to come just now. I’ve got too much to do, sermons to write,
services to prepare for, children to take care of, parishioners to visit,
meetings to go to, evaluations, holiday dinners, family visits, cleaning,
cooking, washing, laundry, dogs, vets, cars, husbands – wait, only one of
those. Either way, Lord, there’s just
too much right now. I can’t add you to
the list.
And then if we jump to our Gospel reading from Luke,
Jesus is again describing that day,
that time when God is coming. Look closely
at verse 34. Jesus says, “Take care that
your hearts aren’t dulled by …the anxieties of day-to-day life.”[2] Be careful, so that your hearts are not
weighed down with the worries of this life.[3] Be careful. Guard your hearts. They can be
made heavy with the hassles of daily life.[4] Your hearts can be made heavy, your hearts
can be dulled by the worries and anxieties of everyday life. Now, I want to be clear that I’m not talking
about clinical depression or a medical disease.
I’m talking about when you’ve got that long list and life is just too
full and you’re managing, although it may be a time when Jesus is carrying you
and there’s only one set of footprints in the sand. Your heart can become dull by the hassles of
daily life and not enough time or energy set aside for self-care.
Now, y’all have learned that I like words, and I looked
up ‘dull’ in the thesaurus. It makes for
better writing, you know, when you use different words and don’t repeat the
same word over and over. First, it
talked about ‘dull’ like being cloudy, overcast, gray, and gloomy. Then ‘dull’ like boring, uninteresting,
tedious, and unexciting. The third entry
was dark, dim, faded, which I think is how I would describe a dull heart. Then came dull as in not smart, slow on the
uptake, and dense. The last entry for
‘dull,’ however, stopped me short. It
was the only verb in the list, rather than an adjective. “Take care that your hearts aren’t dulled”
uses ‘dull’ as a verb and the first synonymous verb listed is ‘deaden.’ Be careful that your hearts aren’t deadened. It sounds a bit more ominous, doesn’t
it? The other verbs listed are dampen,
blunt, blur, reduce. Yes, certainly take
care that your heart isn’t reduced,
although to be sure, it would be seasonally appropriate in a Grinchy type of
way. Your heart can be reduced, like the
Grinch, your heart can be deadened, your heart can be muted in color and
brightness when you let yourself get caught up in and overwhelmed by everyday
life.
This
is a season where there is a lot going on.
This is a place and a time when life moves faster. If we’re not careful, we will lose the
excitement and the enthusiasm of God fulfilling his promise to send us a
Messiah. We will miss God’s kingdom
drawing near. Our response will be,
“Uh-oh, another mouth to feed,” rather than the excitement and wonder of a new
baby at Christmastime, the excitement and wonder of God among us. You see, despair doesn’t come only when
tragedy strikes, it can also come in mundane everyday life. Despair is when we cannot imagine God’s
promised alternative future.[5] Despair is when what is going on right now
has such a hold on us, that we cannot imagine life any other way. It’s when we can’t see the light at the end
of the tunnel. It’s when we can’t see
life getting better. And it doesn’t have
to be a disease like depression or a tragedy like anything in the news today to
cause it. Sometimes it’s just the
regular ordinary things, because this time of year, there is more to daily life
than the rest of the year. There’s
parties and cookie exchanges and caroling and Christmas presents and Christmas
trees and decorating and family get-togethers.
And these are all good things. It’s just that a lot more happens on a
routine basis than happens other times of the year. And we get stuck when we can’t see any way
out. We got stuck when we start to dread
Christmas and view baby Jesus as just another mouth to feed.
Up until about two days before it, I dreaded my sixteenth
birthday. That’s one of those milestone
birthdays, sweet sixteen, in North Carolina at the time, you could get your
full driver’s license. It’s supposed to
be this fantastic birthday, right? But
my family had plans to move two days later, and I was not excited about moving,
and so I wasn’t excited about my upcoming birthday, either, even if it was
sweet sixteen. Finally, the weekend
before, I decided that it was silly to dread your birthday, to not want it to
come. All my life I’d always been
excited about my birthday, why should I let a move overshadow it? Being excited about my birthday made the move
go a little smoother, too, because that excitement carried over to my last
couple days at my old high school.
Today we start the season of Advent. In the church, it’s not actually the
Christmas season yet, it’s Advent. We
have four Sundays to go until it’s Christmas.
I read a Christian blog post this past week that claimed there isn’t a
war on Christmas, retailers don’t care what we do on December 25th;
there is a war, though, in this
author’s opinion, on Advent.[6] She wrote, “Historically Christians have
spent the days of Advent preparing themselves for Christ's coming, both as a
baby in a manger and for His second coming at the end of time. Parties, gorging
on fudge, sappy movies, and shopping are not actually longstanding Christian
customs. On the contrary, to prepare for the coming of Christ, Christians
traditionally spent the days before Christmas in somber reflection and prayer.” Almost makes you want to laugh, doesn’t
it? Somber reflection and prayer? How are we going to fit that in to the
holiday schedule? And yet that’s what
Advent is about. It’s the anticipation
and preparation and getting ready for Christmas, it’s not Christmas
itself. The problem is we, in general,
as a society, want instant gratification so much and don’t want to wait until
Christmas that we want Christmas now! We
have year-round Christmas stores, we have Christmas sales that start in
October, we have people boasting how early they put up their Christmas
tree. We don’t want to wait. But when we don’t put the preparation and
expectation into getting ready for Christmas, and just skip straight to
Christmas, then we’re not ready for baby Jesus.
He does become just another mouth to feed. We can’t skip Advent.
One response I’ve seen from the church is to extend the
season of Advent so that it starts the Sunday after All Saints’ Sunday, the
second Sunday in November.[7] And I think that’s an interesting idea; I’d
actually like to discuss it with our worship teams for next year. Apparently before the 11th
century, Advent was seven weeks’ long, not just the four like it is now. The goal of extending Advent back to seven
weeks is so Advent isn’t overrun by Christmas and we can keep each season
well. It gives churches a little more
time to get ready before the rush and onslaught that has become the month of
December. It’s so that our hearts don’t
get dulled by all the activities and we can keep watch better for Jesus’
birth.
However, we didn’t do that this year, and so where are we
now? Well, we have a beautiful prayer in
our psalm. “To you, O Lord, I lift up my
soul. O my God, in you I trust, let me
not be put to shame.”[8] Let me not be overwhelmed. “Let none that wait for you be put to shame.”[9] We are those who are waiting. In Isaiah, God promises that those who wait
for him “shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like
eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”[10] Wait for the Lord, and he will sharpen and
brighten your heart that was dulled by the drudgery of everyday life. We also have a prayer in our 1 Thessalonians
reading for our hearts to be strengthened.
“May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and
for all… May the love cause your hearts to be strengthened.”[11]
If your heart has gotten dulled by the anxieties of
day-to-day life, if you are not excited about Christmas coming, if you have
found yourself trying to skip over Advent and rush straight for Christmas, take
a moment, take a deep breath, and relax.
Spend the next four weeks waiting for the Lord, rather than rushing his
coming. He’ll come in his own time. I think we all know that God does things on
his own timing, and you can’t rush him, or you’ll ruin the sunset. I pray that instead of a life that is too full,
you may instead find that your cup overflows, and that goodness and mercy may
follow you all the days of your life, and you may dwell in the house of the
Lord forever. Amen.
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