On this first Sunday of Advent, I want endearing stories helping us to get ready for the arrival of God’s son. But instead, we have this passage about nations flowing to mountains and spears turned into pruning hooks. We love the idea that “they shall learn war no more,” but how does that work? Isaiah’s prophecy is about Judah, a small subset of Israel, and it’s capital Jerusalem. War and oppression reigned as the Assyrian army defeated “all the smaller kingdoms in what is modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel… Assyria defeated almost every city it besieged, (but) Jerusalem escaped this fate because of a civil war in Assyria’s capital that required the return of the army. The people of Jerusalem saw this as a miracle: Their God had saved them, due in part to Isaiah’s intercession on their behalf” (Working Preacher, Corrine Carvalho). In their relief and joy, we have a declaration of hope! “They shall beat swords into plowshares… and nation shall not lift up sword against nation” (4). “‘Imagine what we could do,’ the prophet seems to say, ‘if we lived in a world where there were no more wars. If we lived among people with shared values and a shared humility.’ I think about that a lot these days. What could we do with all the money and resources, natural and human, that we spend on active and anticipatory wars?’” (Working Preacher, Corrine Carvalho). Yet Isaiah proclaims an enduring hope, a world without war.
Turning to the gospel lesson, we hear a passage often cited in defense of the rapture, of Jesus coming and taking the elect and leaving the others, those left behind. But that is incorrect. Being taken here means being deported to be slave labor, not to be taken up to heaven for some celebration. Yes, many are taken, but that is to illustrate that we do not know when the Son of Man will come. READ Matthew 24:36-44.
In 25 days, Christmas will come. We will gather with family, we will share a good meal and we will open presents. Yes, that means you only have 25 days left to shop. We will spend a good deal of effort preparing for this day, shopping, planning, wrapping and decorating. We all know when Christmas will be. But the Season of Advent helps us prepare on a different level for Christmas. We get the word “Advent” from the Latin word, “arrival.” We are all waiting and watching for the arrival of baby Jesus. During these four weeks in addition to all the festivities, we get to focus on spiritual preparation, the promise of salvation and the coming of Christ.
Matthew just shared an eschatological account of the Christ’s second coming. The promise that Jesus will return to earth and be with us. Three times Jesus speaks of “the coming of the Son of Man” (37,39,44). Yet the story around those assurances of Jesus coming, is kind of scary. I don’t like thinking about the suddenness of a flood or my home being broken into, or one being taken and the other one left. Each one of those accounts illustrate one thing, we do not know the hour when Jesus will return. We know when Christmas is on the calendar, but we do not know, and cannot know, when the Son of Man will come again.
Why is that important? Yes, we know that Christ is coming. Yes, we know God has fulfilled the promised to save us through Jesus. But we cannot know when that will be. When Jesus will return. The ‘not knowing” helps us with our spiritual preparation. As humans we go through life, knowing everything, or at least trying to. For centuries we gathered information in an Almanac, which gathers seasonal, climate, and star charts all to help people know what is coming. When to plant their crops, when the weather will turn bad, statistics about what has happened with predictions for the future. Now we are getting close to knowing everything with the internet at our fingertips. Think of Google and YouTube. Remember when we had to go to the library to look something up. Yet, the more we know, the less we depend on God. Knowledge becomes our God and we can hide behind our intellect rather than our devotion to our Creator. But Jesus said, “Only the Father knows” when the day and hour will be. Surrendering our need to know aligns us more closely with God. It widens the path of faith and hope.
“At the university there was a piano teacher that was simply and affectionately known as ‘Herman.’ One night at a university concert, a distinguished piano player suddenly became ill while performing an extremely difficult piece. No sooner had the artist retired from the stage when Herman rose from his seat in the audience, walked on stage, sat down at the piano and with great mastery completed the performance. Later that evening, at a party, one of the students asked Herman how he was able to perform such a demanding piece so beautifully without notice and with no rehearsal. He replied, ‘In 1939, when I was a budding young concert pianist, I was arrested and placed in a Nazi concentration camp. Putting it mildly, the future looked bleak. But I knew that in order to keep the flicker of hope alive that I might someday play again, I needed to practice every day. I began by fingering a piece from my repertoire on my bare board bed late one night. The next night I added a second piece and soon I was running through my entire repertoire. I did this every night for five years. It so happens that the piece I played tonight at the concert hall was part of that repertoire. That constant practice is what kept my hope alive. Everyday I renewed my hope that I would one day be able to play my music again on a real piano, and in freedom’” (Sermons.com).
Isaiah speaks of hope in the learning war no more, in the promise of living in peace. This hope is manifested in turning weapons of war into tools to plant and grow food- the substance of life. Jesus speaks of the Son of Man coming but surrounds that with fearful things like floods, being taken, and a thief in the night. Now we are living in a time when we have wars,wars we pray for each week to end, people not having enough food to eat because their SNAP benefits were cut, people being taken to detention centers or worse. And we have a leader who seems hellbent on stealing our democracy. We need hope. Hope in the coming of Jesus, hope in God’s promise of salvation and hope in a God who has got this even when it feels like things are falling apart.
“In the novel and movie The Shawshank Redemption, a lifelong convict nicknamed Red, keeps telling his fellow prisoner, Andy, to stop talking about hope since in prison, hope is a dangerous thing. It’s better to live without hope than to have a hope that will torment you by virtue of it’s not being fulfilled. But then at one point in the story Andy barricades himself in the warden’s office, flips on the Shawshank prison P.A. system, and plays a portion of a Mozart opera, bringing the entire prison to a standstill as each prisoner listens to the aria. And even Red, the one who resisted all talk of hopes or dreams, could not resist this spot of beauty. And so Red muses, “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singin’ about. I like to think they were singin’ about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. For the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank was free” (Sermons.com, Scott Hoezee).
Advent hope sets us free. Free to wonder at beauty, free to practice even when we have been taken, free to hope in the reality of God coming to earth in the form of a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Because our hope is not only in the newness of birth, but also in the promise of resurrection. Jesus dying on the cross so that we might live the promise and hope of eternal life.
We might not know when Jesus is coming again, but we deeply know that God’s promise of salvation is real. And we must stay awake, be alert, as we await Jesus being born, Emmanuel, God with us!
