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Hope
This year as we prepare for the celebration of the arrival of our Lord and Savior we are going to take a different approach than we are used to.
This year we are going to walk through the season of advent together with those people who, almost two thousand years ago, were waiting on the arrival of the one who was promised to save them.
As they sat in those four hundred years of silence waiting to hear from the Lord there were four emotions they experienced.
Sometimes separately and sometimes all at once.
As they were waiting for the Lord they were relying on hope, hope to lift them out of the darkness of their bondage.
They desired peace, a greater peace than the nation of Israel had ever known.
A peace they had been promised at Mount Sinai, but they had never experienced because of their disobedience.
They expected joy.
They were not expecting a temporary joy that passes as with the laugh of a child, or the feel of giving a gift to another person, or the joy that experienced when you worship the Lord in festival.
But they were expecting a surpassing Joy that would fill their lives.
A joy that would never end, and eternal joy.
And they were preparing for a heavenly love.
Love that is so complete, so radical, so overwhelming that it flows from the instigator, through the recipient, and into the rest of the world.
A perfect, agape, love.
This is what the people of Israel were waiting for and expecting as they sat in silence and waited on God.
As they spent four hundred years waiting for God.
Today we are walk with the ancient Hebrew people as they relied on their hope.
People of Hope
The sun was low on the horizon as you stepped out of the door in of your four-room house that you shared with your spouse, your four children, your donkey, and a host of other animals.
Because in your small village of Bethlehem that was the way families lived.
They all lived together, in one room.
It had been a long week, a week of hard labor.
You and your family had been planting the field for the landlord.
But today is the sabbath.
Today is the Lord’s Day so no work will be done.
You untie your donkey from the manger and lead it down to the stream to fetch water.
It may be the sabbath, but the animals still need to be fed and watered.
As you walk down to the stream you think about the last words that God had spoken to your people through the prophet Malachi almost four hundred years ago Malachi 4
You wonder if or when God will ever speak to you and your people again?
Perhaps it will be in your lifetime, but people have been hoping for that for the last four hundred years.
You may not have heard from God, but you still have hope.
The people in first century Israel were a people of hope.
They had not heard from God in almost four hundred years.
The last words they had heard came from the prophet Malachi.
It was a promise that one day God would again send Elijah to turn the hearts of all people.
For those people there was nothing but hope.
The people of Israel had never had complete control of the land that God had promised them.
They had disobeyed God from the very beginning.
Those men that lead them out of Egypt, in fact the entire generation that were rescued from slavery would never live to enter the Promised Land.
Because of their disobedience they were left to wander the desert for 40 years.
Once they did enter the Promised Land they were supposed to live in total peace with God as their Lord.
But from the time they marched in they had begun to disobey God.
They made a treaty with the Gibeonites, who they were supposed to expel from the land.
But instead of forcing them out of the land they let the Gibeonites stay and thus were infected by their pagan practices.
God desired to lead the Hebrew people and speak to them through Judges.
He was to be their Lord and King, but they could not keep his commandments.
They spent generations where they would forget about God, then they would be taken by foreign powers.
It was only after they were conquered that they would cry out to God for help.
Then He would send a Judge to rescue them from the clutches of the people who oppressed them.
This vicious cycle lasted for generation after generation.
Then, after God had expelled the last of the foreign invaders from their land, they looked at all their neighbors and saw that they were ruled by kings.
Kings were humans whose job it was to protect the land, to protect the inhabitants, and to protect the religion of the people.
The Hebrews had cried out to God to demand a king just like their neighbors had.
They wanted someone to protect them, to protect their land, and to guide their religion.
The problem was this could only be perfect if God was the one leading them.
But God gave into the people and gave them a king.
They now had a renewed hope in their kings.
But for the Hebrew people their kings turned out not to be the answer they were looking for.
Their first king, Saul, was more concerned with his own power than he was with leading the people to God.
Their second king, David, was a man after God’s own heart.
Though he made mistakes he always turned back to God.
Then there was Solomon.
A king who only asked God for one thing, wisdom to lead his people.
But wisdom was fleeting, and Solomon allowed his wives to lead him to worship their pagan God’s.
His son, Rehoboam, was no better.
He intended to lay hard taxes on the people, taxes that were even more severe than his father.
Because of this the leader of the army Jeroboam lead a rebellion and split the country in two.
From this point on the kings lead the people down a path of rebellion from God, worshiping the gods of their neighbors.
They were no longer God’s people; they had lost the blessings of God.
But there were a few kings in the south who led the people back to God, Joash, Hezekiah, and Uzziah to name a few.
But most of the kings of Judah did evil in the eyes of the Lord.
So, the people could still only be a people of Hope.
Then after years of disobedience the one true God took action.
First, he destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel.
He sent invading armies to conquer it, to take the people into exile, and it would never exist again.
Then God would send the Babylonians to take the people of the southern kingdom of Judah into exile, where they would wait for seventy years.
They had nothing but hope.
Finally, after waiting those seventy years the Hebrew people were allowed to return to their homeland.
They were allowed to rebuild the city walls and they were allowed to rebuild their temple.
Then within sixteen years God fell silent.
He no longer spoke to the people, He no longer spoke through prophets, God was completely silent.
Then, all the people had was hope.
Your ancestors were people of hope.
Hope of the Prophets
Now as you were returning from watering the donkey, probably your most prized possession, you look up and see your family preparing to head to the synagogue for the Sabbath celebration.
You realize the temple is still where you should be worshiping, but you have been there before and know you will be heading there soon for the Passover celebration.
Oh, how you loath the temple.
The sacrifice you prepare always seems to be wrong.
You spend all year raising and caring for a lamb that you are sure in perfect.
You feed it the best you can, you keep it out of danger, it becomes very special to you, all for God.
But the priests always seem to find something wrong with it, some blemish or imperfection.
So instead of offering the sacrifice you bring you know you will have to buy one approved by the priest, instead of the precious lamb you have been raising.
You also never quite know what the exchange rate is going to be at the money changer’s booth.
You know you must pay the temple tax with shekels so you would have to exchange your denarii.
But it seems like the few denarii you are able to save for the temple tax are never enough.
And every year it seems like it cost you more Roman denarii to equal the shekels that you will need.
Even though you know you are supposed to make the five-mile pilgrimage to the temple you are not excited.
But today you get to head to the synagogue to worship God.
To hear the Rabbi in town read the holy scrolls and teach about God.
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