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Sermon for Sunday, November 30, 2008
Pastor Sara Kay Olson-Smith
First Sunday in Advent
Texts: Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Matthew 13: 24-37
Grace to you and peace from God, our Creator, who hears our cries and from Christ Jesus who comes to save us.
Here we are, again, in Advent. It is the beginning of our church year, a time when we start again telling the story of our salvation, of the work and love of God made known in Jesus. Our church year begins in Advent, this time of waiting, of hoping, of eager anticipation for Jesus to come again, to be born in us anew.
This year, for Advent, in these next four Sundays, as we enter into this new year, as we sing a new liturgy in this season, I am also going to do something a bit new during my sermon time. As some of you may know, as a spiritual practice and hobby, I do art - drawing, painting, collaging. As I continue to encourage each of us to share our gifts and talents for the purpose of God’s mission, I thought this would be a change to take a little risk and share this. I also believe that we receive information and gain understanding through more than just words. Through music and art we might gain new insight into something familiar.
So, while I preach my sermons during the season of Advent this year, I am also going to create a picture, which will help tell the story, and which will lift up some of the images and ideas that are made known in the text. In the coming weeks, we’ll create a picture that will be completed on Christmas Eve.... watching and waiting as we watch and wait for that day we celebrate Christ’s birth.
We start with a blank piece of paper. There is something hopeful about a blank piece of paper, isn’t there. It is like the anticipation and hope of possibilities that a brand new notebook at the start of a school year holds. A blank book or paper holds the promise of what will come. There is a sense of trust that those pages will be filled. It is that sense of hope and anticipation that we carry as we begin Advent, hoping, waiting, looking, trusting that God is coming, to fill our emptyness, to bring color and joy into our sometimes gray lives, to create something new within us. We enter Advent as a blank canvas, ready, open, hoping, waiting.
We wait with an eager longing. We wait, knowing that in some ways the canvas so quickly gets covered by our own hopes and dreams, angers and fears. We wait, knowing that so often our sinful ways keep us from being open, ready for God to work within us. We wait, knowing that so often we are turned in on ourselves, unable to see or experience God’s work around us. Or else we we wait, our eyes open and awake. As we pay attention, we notice that this world is not what God longs for. We wait, alert, attentive, awake, looking out into our world that is full of such beauty, and hope, and promise, but also full of such pain, such sorrow, such brokenness. We do not have to look far to see the ways that this world, and we as God’s people have come so far from what God would have us. We see food pantries that sit with empty shelves, hundreds dead in terrorist attacks in India, people cold and lonely. We see the sick and the suffering around us, people we love and strangers as well. We don’t have to have to look far to see the chaos and pain of the world.... or in our own lives.
So, like the prophet Isaiah, we cry out to God, “Get down here, God, and make things right!” We shout to God, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil - to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!”
We, who know the sorrow and grief of losing beloved ones, we who are anxious about our beloved friends near and far who are not well, we who listen and worry about the hungry, the homeless, the lost, the imprisoned, we cry out, angry and impatient. We cry out, with Isaiah and the psalmist, “Restore us, O God of hosts, let your face shine upon us.” We who long for something new, we who are tired and weary, we cry out, “Come down!” We know how much we have messed up, but we long for God to come down and make it right again, for us and for all this world. “Come down!” we cry out, not just quiet and in our polite, inside voice, but sometimes in our angry and tired voice, when life has just been too much. So we cry out for something new.
The promise that we can look for in the midst of this, the promise that we can depend on, is that God hears these cries, not just the polite ones, but the angry ones, the tired ones, the exhausted ones. God heard the cries of God’s people, tore through the heavens like a mother rushing out in response to the screams of her child in the yard. God tore through the heavens and came down to this world as Jesus!
In Jesus, God burst through the heavens and came into the world to save us, that God’s face might shine upon us, that the powers of sin and death, of injustice and all that haunts us, that these things will not have power over us. God burst through the heavens to bring us home, to speak a word of warning and a word of hope. God came into our world as Jesus to make it right again. In Jesus, we are given forgiveness, and we are given a way of living, and a word of challenge, to stay awake, to pay attention, to live with faithfulness and compassion and love. In Jesus, we see the face of God, the face of challenge, of promise and of hope. In Jesus, God tore open the heavens and came down!
Jesus has come and continues to come, in the Word proclaimed, present in community, known in bread and wine, tasted and seen. We know this promise in the midst of all we know. We get glimpses of the promise in the midst of our lives now. While we still wait and hope, the words of Isaiah, and Jesus in our gospel reading today, remind us how much we need Jesus, and how salvation for us and for all this world is still being drawn. The beautiful and complete picture of God’s saving act for us and all creation is still yet to be completed.
So we are called to the hard and life-giving Advent journey of waiting and watching, seeing the colors of hope and promise painted around us, seeing the ways that we ignore and hide from the light that God gives. This Advent time is one where we are called to confess how much we need a savior. It is a time to shine a light on our doubt and failures and the ways we have ignored the cries of the hungry and hurting and broken around us. It means turning to God in prayer and in song and in silence, in images and sometimes even in shouts, crying out to God, bringing all of ourselves before God. Our God has heard our cries. God has torn open the heavens and is coming down, so that our cries of anger and shouts for justice, and all of our tears will be turned into songs of joy, into laughter and praise. Our God is coming, God has torn open the heavens and is coming down!
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
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