SCRIPTURE:
But you are our Father,
though Abraham does not know us
or Israel acknowledge us;
you, Lord, are our Father,
our Redeemer from of old is your name.
17 Why, Lord,
do you make us wander from your ways
and harden our hearts so we do not
revere you?
Return for the sake of your servants,
the tribes that are your inheritance.
18 For a little
while your people possessed your holy place,
but now our enemies have trampled down your
sanctuary.
19 We are yours
from of old;
but you have not ruled over them,
they have not been called[a] by your name. Isaiah 63:16-19
Opening Illustrations:
1. When I was a child I used to long for
Christmas so much that I promised myself that I’d never run away from home
unless it was right after Christmas.
2. Also it seemed in those days that a
child’s yearning makes the days longer, because it seemed like Christmas came
every three years. But now that I’ve reached the ancient age of seventy six, it
seems like Christmas comes about every other Thursday.
Intro: Advent has always been a happy
time for most people, even in difficult times, because there is something about
Christmas and the coming of the Messiah and the coming of the Lord, and the
realization of all the promises that God has made to His people find their
fulfillment in a stable, a little child, a poor young teenage mother and her
gravely worried husband into whose care God had placed this most precious
twosome.
I think there’s something that stirs great
hope in us. And so Advent is really a time for hope. It’s a time when we put
aside major worries in our life and realize that God is with us.
For a Christian to have hope means to know
that we are definitely loved, and that, whatever happens to us, we are awaited
by love.
It’s written, this section of Isaiah is
written, at the time when the Jewish people were up in Babylon and praying to
God that they would be able to return to their own country and rebuild their
temple and once again be at peace in their own homes.
It was a desperate time because they were
enslaved. It was a time when many felt that God had abandoned them.
And that’s why Isaiah says, “Would that you
would rend the heavens and come down as you did in the olden days with Moses
and the people who were in slavery in Egypt and the wonders that you did.
“Why do you not see us? Yes, we have
sinned, but you are a forgiving God, you care for us. Why do you hide from us?
Is it that you’re angry with us?”
Of course, the thing that makes this a
lovely passage is to know that, in the harshest and most difficult of times,
the prophet is speaking like a man in terrible need of God Himself. Not just to
know that God exists, but to feel His strength, to feel that He is once again
manifesting Himself to His people.
And where do we find this hidden God?
ILL: Well, there’s an old story
about Omar the candle maker.
Omar the candle maker is outside his house
and he’s busy looking through the grass. He’s feverishly looking for something
when his neighbour comes and he says, “Omar, what are you looking for?”
And he says, “I lost my wallet and I’m
trying to find my wallet.”
And his friend says, “Well, where did you
lose it?”
He says, “I lost it in my house, in my
bedroom.”
And he says, “Well, why aren’t you in your
house and bedroom searching for it?”
And he says, “Oh, it’s too dark in there.
It’s much nicer to search out here in the sunshine.”
The meaning of this story is that we’re
always looking for God in the wrong places.
Because, very often and for good reason, we
find God not so much in the happy days of our lives, we find God when we’re
alone and suddenly darkness closes in on our life and we begin to wonder and
have doubts about not only the future but also the present. And then we begin
very simply to pray.
And this is the right thing.
Because you see the Advent candles that we
light up here, there’s four candles — three are violet colored, meaning that
the three prepare us for the coming of Christmas, and the pink one is one of
joy that Christmas is with us.
But a candle only, only, shows its true
nature and its true value in darkness. We don’t put candles around with all the
lights on. It is when we turn the lights off that a candle begins to glow and
give us hope.
And that is why at Christmas time we fill
our homes with candles. But most of all because of the prophecy that says Jesus
is the light of the world and he comes in a very special way at Christmas time.
This is an indication that the problems
that face us and the difficulties that face us, and especially in these present
times — the news of the last few weeks and it seems like not only the world is
full of trepidation and fear because of the onset of perhaps a more bleak
future and a difficult future and a future where there will be lots of pain —
and at this time we begin to shirk and to shrink back from it, for we do not
want anything to disturb perhaps the way we have been going. We wonder what
will happen to us.
And so we sound like Isaiah in the First
Reading, the beginning when Isaiah is saying, “You must show your face. Why
haven’t you come down and delivered us? We are in very difficult times.”
And what Isaiah gives them is the word of
God.
And the word of God is, “I have never left
you. I am with you.
“I am more bright as a candle that shines
in the darkness in your life now than perhaps I was when you were following
other lights and other ways, when you thought that, perhaps, that life was a
matter of controlling it, instead of forgetting that you do not control
anything important in life, that you are vulnerable and needy.
“Because only when you realize that you are
not in control of things and you recognize your own vulnerability and your own
need, is love possible.”
And what kind of life is worthwhile without
love, true love, the love that Jesus comes — poor, rejected, alone, but the
light for the whole world to understand that God comes to share the darkness
and share the pain that we might have new life and new strength to it.
Many people are slightly in tears in the
last few days and they say, “What happened? How can God do this to us?”
God isn’t what brought on this crisis. God
is the solution, the response to this crisis, when no matter what happens we
must remember, as the Pope says, to have hope is to know that we are definitely
loved and cherished and cared for — definitely loved and cherished and cared
for — and that whatever happens to us, whatever path we are asked to walk to
another part of our lives, what awaits us is God and His love. And with this we
make each other strong.
The second thing about difficult times is
perhaps a realization that maybe we have been preoccupied by a lot of false
gods around us. Maybe we have invested our hope in success, our hope in riches,
our hope in never seeing pain.
Maybe these are the gods that have to come
crashing down before we once again realize that we are here to share love,
compassion, perfection.
We are here to make a new world. Each
generation must build a new world so that we come closer and closer to the
final coming of the Lord.
And that is the Second Coming, the coming
at the end of time.
But the one that comes at the end of time
must be brought to us by our own good selves.
Jewish mothers, praying for the Messiah,
used to say to their children, “Every good deed that you do, brings the Messiah
one step closer.”
And that, perhaps, is the challenge of
difficulty.
Two things can happen.
Number one is we shirk and fear and
each day we worry more and more about what is going to happen — and we live in the
future. And those who live in the future, die in the present.
Or perhaps we have so many
regrets of what brought this on or what brought that on — and we live in the
past. And the past is already gone and we’ll always be chasing shadows that
breed only guilt.
What Advent is saying is we must live now with
faith. We must live now with love. And what drives you
on to live with faith and to share love is hope. Hope is the great virtue.
Closing: I’d like to read to you a
poem by Charles Péguy. He wrote a poem. I’m told that it is seventy-six pages
long. And it’s probably the greatest masterpiece of any poet in the 20th
century. He died in the First World War on the battlefield, but he left this
beautiful poem. And I will just read you one small bit.
“I am, says God, master of the
three virtues: Faith, Charity and Hope.
Faith is like a faithful wife.
Charity is the ardent mother.
But Hope is a little girl.
I am, says God, the master of
virtues.
Faith is she who remains steadfast through centuries and centuries.
Love is she who gives herself during centuries and centuries.
But my little Hope is she who rises every morning.
I am, says God, the Lord of
virtues.
Faith is she who remains firm and strong.
Charity is she who unbends during centuries and centuries.
But my little Hope is she who every morning wishes me good day.”
It is true that the most important of all
things that hold us close to God is not faith — men can live without faith. It
is not love — men can live without love. But no-one can live without hope.
And so difficult times make us aware that
of these three virtues, the least known, the least talked about, the one that
we always feel is like a little child, is the one who feeds Faith, and the one
who gives joy to Love.
And so it is the little girl that we ask
God to grace us with — the humble little girl who says every morning is a new
day. She calls Faith good morning and calls Love to the morning.
And this is what it means to prepare for Christmas:
To help each other as we go through these
difficult times, but with hope in our hearts. A hope that feeds the deep faith
that we must recommit ourselves to our friends and to people and to the world
in which God is.
And, also, that we commit ourselves to
reaching out in love and caring and compassion.
And, most of all, with a joyful, light
heart, because Hope is a little girl who gets up every morning and wishes us
good day.
NEXT SUNDAY WE BEGIN AN ADVENT SERIES ENTITLED:
Carols: A Christmas Devotional
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