Advent One: Hope

The New Revised Standard Version (The Future House of God)

2 The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.2 In days to comethe mountain of the LORD’s houseshall be established as the highest of the mountains,and shall be raised above the hills;all the nations shall stream to it.3 Many peoples shall come and say,“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,to the house of the God of Jacob;that he may teach us his waysand that we may walk in his paths.”For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.4 He shall judge between the nations,and shall arbitrate for many peoples;they shall beat their swords into plowshares,and their spears into pruning hooks;nation shall not lift up sword against nation,neither shall they learn war any more. 5 O house of Jacob,come, let us walkin the light of the LORD!

Kids to the Knowing Place

The Bible and the Newspaper

One of my favorite theologians, Karl Barth, said that pastors ought to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

And even though I get my news on the iPad, I think I can do that!

So this week, as we enter in to one of my favorite seasons of the church calendar called Advent, and as we’re going to kick things off with a sermon about hope, I decided to peruse the newspapers and see what’s going on in the world these last few weeks.

The following were all lead stories in the New York Times as I sat down to write this sermon:

Ukraine and Russia

The Ukrainian Government is warning it’s citizens about blackouts and other energy related issues because of the war with Russia.

Countless souls have died in this conflict that so many agree never needed to exist in the first place.

Unprecedented Political Division in the US.

Of course, this is present in just about any newspaper that you read in the country.

Most folks say now that what political party you voted for can be a reason to not be friends with someone.

I’m not terribly old, but I remember a time in life where that wasn’t true.

Walmart Shooting

On Tuesday night, an employee of a Walmart in VA walked in to the store and opened fire, killing 6 and wounding 4 more.

Which was proceeded by...

Q Nightclub Shooting

On Sunday night, an assailant in body armor walked in to the Q Nightclub in Colorado Springs and opened fire, killing 5 and wounding 18 more.

Were it not for the quick thinking and heroic actions of a few on the scene, it would have been a lot worse.

But this of course was proceeded by...

UVA Shooting

Last week, three players for the University of Virgina football team were shot and killed by a walk-on player.

A senseless war, a deep seated and difficult to contain hatred for each other in this country for political reasons, and marked increase of mass shootings.

These are the news stories I have to work on to preach a message about hope.

It’s a tough time for hope right now, isn’t it?

Tough Times for Isaiah Too

The Kingdom is Split

Following the reign of the wise King Solomon, the already tiny nation of Isreal actually split into two even tinier nations.

To the north was Isreal, who fell victims to the Assyrians already.

And to the south was Judah and the capital city of Jerusalem.

The Armies are Surrounding Judah

If you were in Judah at the time of Isaiah, you were living in a constant state of fear.

There were already armies and countries that were licking their lips ready to take you over.

And not your neighbor to the north just fell, which means those armies are amassing at the border.

Destruction is pretty sure

If you were someone who said in the nation of Judah at this point in time that the end was near, you wouldn’t be labeled as pessimistic.

You’d be labeled as a realist.

If you were someone who said “Come on guys, let’s have hope!” you’d be labeled as a fool, or naive.

Sometimes the most hopeful dreamers are seen by the rest of the world as naive, aren’t they?

What Do You Lean on in tough times?

So when destruction is very likely, what exactly do you lean on?

What kind of things can you lean on to get you through the tough times.

Isaiah through the rest of the book is warning Judah about what they most wanted to lean on in these difficult moments:

Idols

Idols aren’t something that we in America think about much.

Even though we have a show literally called American Idol...

We assume that Idols are little statues that people used to pray to, and as long as we’re not doing that we’re ok.

But there’s actually a broader definition of an idol.

Something that takes the place of God in our lives.

An idol is something that you have made, and thus something that you can control, and you try to elevate it above God’s power in your life.

Which, when you define it like that, the silliness of the situation becomes apparent.

Something you made you are some how going to give the power of God to?

Unlikely!

And yet, Idols are alive and well in our world today.

What are our Idols?

Money

There are some in our world who have never met a problem that they couldn’t buy their way out of.

We like money because we can count it.

The more you have, the more powerful you are right?

You can use money to buy your way out of a problem.

You can use money to suck up more and more resources when times get tough.

You can use money to make sure you’re way up here while everyone else stays down here.

To be very very clear, this will be the case for just about every idol, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with money.

Money is a tool that can be used to advance the Kingdom of God in tremendous and powerful ways.

But if we’re using our money to take the place of our God, if we assume that money has more power than our God does, if we would rather lean on our money than we would lean on the truth of Christ, then it has become and idol and it’s no good to us.

Guns/Weapons

Some numbers that I still find fairly surprising.

America accounts for approximately 5% of the world’s population.

And yet, while it’s a little tricky to get an exact number on this, most researchers agree we own somewhere in the neighborhood of 42% of the world’s privately held weapons.

Not our military. Not our planes or our tanks or our bombs.

Our 5% piece of the pie owns 42% of the individual weapons in the world.

And again, in their proper context guns are fine.

They make a great tool for hunting and for sport and as a hobby, that’s all wonderful.

But if we’re using our weapons to take the place of our God, if we assume that the only power that is effective for causing change in the world is the weaponry we hold, then we’ve made an idol of our weapons, and they’re a hinderance to our faith.

Cynicism

Some folks just believe in the power of themselves.

Admittedly, I have watched me try to make a regular habit out of waking up early in the morning and working out and fall victim to the cunning villain known as the snooze button, so I don’t really understand trusting in the power of yourself the way that some people do...

But really, a fair number of us have just decided that things are always going to be the way they’re going to be, and the only way to do anything about that is to look out for number one.

Most folks call this cynicism.

Not to sound like a broken record, but there’s nothing inherently wrong in believing in yourself, in having some self confidence, in trusting your abilities.

But when you trust yourself above all else, when you assume that you are the only one who can solve your own problems, you’ve actually turned your cynical view of the world into an idol.

And God does not call us to lean on idols, no matter how we form them.

What is God Calling Us to Lean On?

Hope

Defined

I used this definition in my candidacy sermon here, but it bares repeating:

Hope is the faithful confidence that God continues to author a story that moves us from vision to action.

There are a few parts of this def

Active

This passage in Isaiah is dripping with hope.

But it’s dripping with the kind of hope that invites us to participate.

To be sure, God will judge between the nations.

God will establish his house on the mountain of the Lord.

God will light the path for us.

But God is inviting us to participate too!

We will be the ones who beat our swords into plowshares and our spears in to pruning hooks, turning instruments meant to take life into instruments meant to sustain life.

We will be the ones who climb the mountain of God to offer our praise.

We will be the ones to walk in the light that God is providing.

“Hope is a verb”

Every week we gather as a staff to study the scripture for the week, and I promise them I’m going to steal shamelessly.

This week, let me say, I’ve stolen quite a lot!

But someone on staff correctly noted that Hope, as we have defined it here, is a verb.

It’s something you do.

It’s something you participate in.

You can’t wait back for hope to show up.

You use what God has given you, and you participate in hope all around you.

Which isn’t to say that hope ignores what’s happening.

Aware

There is a kind of Christian whose response to the news stories of the day is to just ignore it all.

“I don’t watch the news, it’s just too depressing.”

But hope and ignorance should not be confused.

Nowhere in our passage in Isaiah are God’s people encouraged to ignore what’s going on around them.

Nowhere are they told happy tales to distract them from what’s going on.

They are not asked to ignore the present for the sake of a brighter future.

They’re asked to embrace the present to know how it will make way for the future.

“Hope is not there to erase the darkness.”

In my years of ministry, I have seen countless well meaning people say really dumb things to people who are suffering.

When someone has lost a loved one, saying that “God must have needed another angel” is not only theologically inaccurate, it’s not particularly helpful in that moment either.

The same can be said of the phrase “God never gives us more than we can handle!” You won’t find that in the pages of the Bible.

I even once heard a church member say to someone who had just recently experienced a miscarriage “I know how you feel (never a great way to start), I just had to put my dog to sleep a month ago...”

What these sayings all have in common is their blatant attempt to use hope to look past the darkness.

They can’t handle the suffering in their friend’s lives, so they need to point to hope to ignore the darkness.

Hope is not there to erase the darkness.

It’s there to help us make sense of it.

And if you’re looking carefully, you can see little pictures of hope in each of the news stories of this week.

Examples of Hope

Banksy

Another of our very talented staff pointed me in the direction this week of some beautiful artwork in Ukraine right now.

Banksy is an unnamed street artist who travels the world to paint graffiti.

Honestly he’s one of my favorite artists, but I hadn’t seen what he’s been up to in Ukraine until this week.

Each of these pictures doesn’t ignore the darkness all around them.

In fact, some of them use the darkness to make the art itself, don’t they?

They just point to a better future.

A future where everyone will walk in the light.

A future where everyone can live in peace together.

A future where nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Banksy is pointing toward hope, isn’t he?

The Nightclub Hero

Then of course there is the example of Richard M. Fierro.

Mr. Fierro served our country for 15 years in the military.

He was at the Q nightclub on Saturday night with his wife and daughter, when the gunman walked in and started shooting.

Mr. Fierro said in one interview I heard this week “I sized him up. I’m a big dude. He was bigger. But someone had to do something.”

Mr. Fierro, knowing that the risk was great and that he was at a great disadvantage, decided he had to act regardless.

Authorities are having a hard time nailing down exactly how many lives Mr. Fierro saved, but are all unanimous in their assessment that he saved quite a few.

The compulsion to acts was too strong to ignore.

For him, hope was a verb.

It had to move.

Shane Claiborne

Or what if you took the picture of hope that Isaiah paints quite literally?

Shane Claiborne is an author and speaker and pastor from Philadelphia.

Their community was being over run with gun violence, and so Shane decided to do something about it.

His church had a blacksmith attending

(PS: This is how I will know we have succeeded in our evangelistic efforts, when we have a blacksmith in our community. I have some ideas.)

And so they offered to buy back guns from anyone who would be willing to contribute to a safer community, and they turned them in to garden tools.

Literally, their swords are being beaten in to plowshares and their spears to pruning hooks.

So much of the debate around guns and violence and murder in our country centers around what we can’t do.

Shane Claiborne and his community decided to focus their efforts instead on what they can do.

I wonder what would happen if we did?

Join us!

The truth is, if we have eyes open to see it, we can find hope just about everywhere we look.

And that’s an idea we want to put to the test.

If you find an image of hope this week, I invite you to either message us on your favorite social media platform, or e-mail us, or just stop by.

Share a story, give us a photo, help us to see hope in our midst.

We’ll share them through the church and on our social media, if only to remind ourselves and those around us that hope still lives in this community, doesn’t it?

The Power of Invitation

When I became a real cyclist

A few years ago when I was first getting in to cycling, I really thought I was the stuff.

I was biking exactly 1.5 miles to work, and 1.5 miles home.

And it was a huge struggle!

But that didn’t stope me from bragging about it to anyone who would listen.

I’m a cyclist. I’m a cyclist. I’m a cyclist.

Until one night my friend Travis and I were having dinner, and I told him that I was a cyclist.

And he gently invited me to participate in a 150 mile ride he was doing later that year.

The theological word for this moment in a person’s life is “Busted!”

But still, what Travis did was masterful!

He didn’t call me out as a phony.

He didn’t insist I prove my cycling aqumen.

He just invited me to have fun with him.

And after a lot of training, a lot of cursing, and a better bike, I did have fun with him.

He didn’t invite me to a single cycling event, he invited me to a new way of life that I’m still living today.

God will never command us into hope

God will never demand we be optimistic.

God will never force us to act.

God will never bludgeon us to see the world as He sees it.

Instead, God will always patiently stand back, and invite.

Come along…let’s walk in the light of the Lord.

Walking in the light does not deny the darkness.

Walking is a verb, there are some actions behind this for us.

And maybe this is the first invitation to hope you’ve had in a while.

But still…let’s go for a walk shall we?

Let’s be dreamers of a dream.

Swords can be plowshares.

Mountains can be full of hopeful people.

And we can keep walking toward the light.