"Advent"

A Sermon by the Rev. Amelie M. Sell

Preached at Pleasantville UCC, November 27, 2011

   On this, the first day of Advent, we light the candle of “Hope.”   Today, we begin a four week season of hopefulness.  We prepare for Christmas by remembering times in the history of humanity the people of God were able to sustain their spirits by focusing their hopes on God.  In this season, we remember the hopefulness felt by Mary and Joseph as they anticipated the birth of Jesus.  In this season, we also hope for our world and pray for peace, wholeness, and justice for all people.

   Our scripture from Isaiah was written in the midst of the Assyrian onslaught against the people of Judah.  Isaiah preached that the people were falling victim to the Assyrians because they were not faithful enough to God.  Isaiah reminded his peers that God had historically intervened to restore God’s followers to the right path…God led Moses and the Hebrew slaves out of slavery, across the Red Sea, and through the desert to the promised land….God provided his followers King David when they needed a ‘king’ to stand up to the warring kingdoms who surrounded their land….God had come through for God’s followers time and time again, protecting the people from mighty neighboring armies and restoring their farmlands when droughts and food shortages took hold.  Isaiah remembered the ways God had blessed God’s followers in the past, and Isaiah begged God to do the same in his lifetime.  Isaiah clearly believed a messiah was in order—a messiah would redeem God’s people and transform the world for the good of humanity.

   Seven hundred years or so after Isaiah requested that God send a messiah to restore humanity to wholeness and good, God began the process of complying with Isaiah’s request.  In the first century, God’s followers were living under Roman rule with no hope of independence.  That did not stop brave rebels from tying—there were many Jewish revolts squashed by the Roman rulers.  God’s followers believed a messiah would lead them to overthrow Roman rule and reestablish Israel as a country governed and controlled by Jewish leaders.  God’s ways are not the ways of man—the savior God sent was not a mighty warrior who took on the oppressors in a military campaign.  Instead of having a messiah born to the ruling class or military elite, God chose for Jesus’ earthly parents common laborers from an obscure Galilean village.  Everything we know about Jesus’ birth and Jesus’ family of origin would have told a first century observer that Jesus was not the messiah.  And, that was exactly God’s point—God chose to come to earth as a poor peasant, raised by a young mother and her carpenter husband.  God also chose to overcome the Roman oppressors of the Jewish people through conversion, not rebellion.   Eventually, the Roman world would become part of Christendom with faith in God spreading across Europe, Asia and Africa.  God answered the pleas of the people by sending a messiah to redeem the world in a manner wholly unexpected by first century Jewish followers of God.

   Now, we also hope God will transform our lives and repair our world.  We must remember to look for signs of God in unexpected places.  God listens to our prayers and responds to our needs, but it is often difficult for us to realize our prayers are being answered because God responds to us in ways we would least expect.  In this, the season of Advent, we are called to heighten our awareness of the ways God is reaching into our world and responding to the needs of the people of the earth.

   Advent has traditionally been a season of prayer, fasting, and personal examination of one’s heart. Over the centuries, typical Christmas preparations had nothing to do with shopping lists, baking cookies, and gift wrap.  Instead, Advent has traditionally been a season when we are called to slough off the parts of our lives that distract us from God and distract us from living lives focused on hope for a new world to come.  In this season, we are waiting….waiting for Christ to interrupt our lives and lead us to wholeness and peace.  We are called to watch for signs of God in unfamiliar and unexpected places.  We are called to hope for a world transformed for the better by the goodness and love of our God.

   Despite the 24 windows that are usually opened on an Advent calendar, this year Advent is 28 days long—nearly a month.  Over these twenty-eight days, we can easily get caught up in the frenzy that comes over us when we try to do too many things at once.  This year, I pray we will all remember to slow down….take a breath….look around….and realize, the reason why we do this is not so that we can have exciting presents under the Christmas tree.  Instead, we are preparing ourselves for Christ to enter the world.  We are preparing ourselves to welcome Jesus with open arms.  The gift that is arriving on December 25th is not one that will be under our trees or stuffed into our stockings, but instead will be the joy that comes with knowing God loves us and listens to us, the Holy Spirit is with us right now and all of the time, and that Jesus was born, Jesus rose from the dead, and Jesus will come again.  It will be so.  Amen.