Advent - Hope - What Has Changed?

Intro:

So, it is once again the Christmastide season. In our liturgical calendar, it begins a new year. This season is filled with warm, cherished memories for many of us. For others, your separation outweighs those memories or perhaps reinterprets them from what was once warm into something painful. One way or another, we are all pursuing something; we have a hope. Our response to that typically manifests in one of two ways: either a wistful longing, a bucket-list sort of thing, or a chastened pursuit, as if with some sort of purpose. There is a third type, I guess; jeep owners all have this stupid bumper sticker, “Not all who wander are lost,” so there are also those people who are—just kind of wandering around. But I think, especially here, with all the sections and agendas, also that it’s not terribly pleasant, which seems to serve as a motivator; I don’t know if we have a lot of those. Either way, I think they can kind of get looped in with the first group.

And you know who they are—they want something, but they’d rather not do any kind of work for it. “I mean, if you’ll do it, I’ll take it, but…” you know the type. I certainly doubt any of them are here for obvious reasons; they’re all out wandering somewhere! But we can be there for a season. Maybe a bubble burst for you, and you just don’t know which way’s up. Maybe this is a lifestyle; a lot of people we don’t usually see in chapel turn out for Christmas and Easter.

Transition:

I love this season for that reason. No matter where you find yourself this time of year, spiritually or mentally, it’s a season of newness, rebirth, rededication, and, with that, anticipation, reinvigoration, revitalization, and rejuvenation. It’s a time to find purpose, to feel like you belong to something, a time to renew your hope.

Illustration:

If you’ve ever been lost, I mean, really lost, picture your first land-nav or kid at a state fair kind of lost; you get two feelings simultaneously. Dread, just the worst—woe is me kind of dread, and fear. I remember this assessment I went to as a young Soldier. I wanted to be high-speed, and after the first 15 minutes of climbing through thick brush in the pitch blackness of the night, things not looking like they should on my map, I began to wonder why I chose this for myself? I’m never going to make time. I don’t even know which direction back is; I could be in a warm bed right now! I don’t even know how to quit! I finally came across a road, took my chem-light in my hand—of course, I didn’t break it, but I was ready to be road-killed anyway… I didn’t know what to do. I was at the point—that point where I was willing to give up, but I had no one to give up to. If you’ve ever been that kind of lost, my hope for you is that this season brings a dawn, a recognizable terrain feature, a known point, that provides you with a direction of travel. Hebrews 11:1 describes this as faith; in the NASB translation, it describes faith as “the certainty of things hoped for, a proof of things not seen.” So, faith is evidence; it provides a testimony.

Transition:

If you’re not lost, if you’re part of that second group, you’re in a chastened pursuit; this season serves as a waypoint, an azimuth check. Because we’re all out here on the course together. Paul reminds us in Romans 8 that 24“hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Whose hope isn’t renewed when you can confirm your pace count or associate a terrain feature? We’re all in need of some hope.

Charles Spurgeon likened hope to “a star—not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, only discovered in the night of adversity.”

Explanation:

It’s not that we can’t have hope in the morning, at that first light; it’s just that when everything’s fine and dandy, we’re not often looking! Many traditions within Evangelicalism have emphasized a necessity of personal conversion through a born-again experience in which the Holy Spirit supernaturally changes a person’s heart. From the 18th century to the present, many evangelical churches have required a personal testimony of conversion as a prerequisite for church membership. Most of the time, this involves a personal experience of divine transformation. I’m not saying they’re right; I’m applying their logic to make a different point, one made by the author of Ecclesiastes; in chapter 7, verse 3, he says, “Grief is better than laughter, for when a face is sad, a heart may be glad.” Disintegration illuminates an unmet need. “Hope is a star—not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, only discovered in the night of adversity.”

Transition:

If you’re unfamiliar with the terminology, the season of Advent is the period of four Sundays and weeks leading up to the celebration of Christmas Day. Adventmeans “coming” in Latin, and these weeks are intended to prepare our hearts, minds, and souls for the arrival of “Emmanuel,” our God with us as that translates from Hebrew; Jesus Christ, born to the virgin Mary two millennia ago. You’re supposed to feel the wait—an anticipated arrival of something you want so badly—and by feeling the wait deeply, you’ll be even more satisfied by the celebration of the arrival on Christmas Day. At least, that’s the hope.

Background:

Spirituality, or sacramentalism, as I called it last week, makes what is invisible visible; religion is the rituals, rhythms, and practices we form to connect to that visibility. St. Augustin, the 5th-century church father, wrote a work called “The City of God.” It was formatted as a response to Plato’s masterpiece, “The Republic,” in which he describes a utopian city-state ruled by a class of philosopher-kings. Augustin simply gives it a name; he says it exists. It’s heaven! What’s important to Christian thought, especially as it takes root in becoming a cornerstone in society, marrying it to doctrines such as justice, receiving and withstanding new criticisms such as science, developing a systematic theology where we can draw conclusions based on things we can know… Just like John the evangelist begins his Gospel in a familiar format, recalling the creation story of Genesis, Augustin forces a temporal correlation with philosophy, the bedrock of the culture, with a real pipe-hitter—Plato!

Stay with me here; I’m just trying to briefly explain religion in terms of its practice, what it is we’re doing in terms of connecting what is visible to the invisible—spiritual.

In Plato’s 4th century BCE work, he talks about the immortality of the soul. He theorizes another world or dimension through what he calls, at the time, the “theory of forms.” In what he calls “The Allegory of the Cave,” he tells this story where there are these prisoners chained in a dark cave. They see only shadows from a fire behind them, and they mistake the shadows for reality. How can they know any better, he ponders. To them, this is reality; they are real. He’s suggesting, however, that there is a more ‘real’–reality. So, later, the prisoners break free, discovering reality’s light. The people casting the shadows and the fire is the ‘form.’ Augustin uses this to describe sacraments, that, the Ephesians 6:12 reference, the reason Paul speaks about “The whole armor of God,” is because “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” The spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Not that evil is in heaven, but in the sense of Colossians 1:16 that there are things both visible and invisible. In this sense, religion is the orthodoxy through which we practice and connect to the unseen. This is spirituality—our lived hope.

Transition:

I say all this not to splain or bedazzle you, although many of you are understandably bored, but to answer the question, what has changed? So, we were under an Old Covenant; that was a dark time. Jesus came, then he died and rose again, and he’s given us a New Covenant. And now, no different from the time between Malachi and Matthew, from Revelation to now, no one’s heard a “new word,” save for the Latter-Day Saints… I kid… but really, in 2,000 years. So, what’s different?

The author of Ecclesiastes refers to life as that which occurs “under the sun.” He is thinking only about what we can see now, the physical world. He makes no concession for the afterlife or the heavenly realms—both, to us, are vastly more important. From this limited perspective, he makes observations like “there’s nothing new” or “there’s nothing to be gained” and that “it’s all meaningless.” Hutz Hertzberg calls Ecclesiastes “the most staggering messianic prophecy to appear in the Old Testament.” Think about that. It’s really bleak. That’s also the prophecy! Without God, this is what we’re left with—that’s our reality. That’s the darkness of the world we step into 2,000 years ago. A lost, hopeless world with little more than the author’s conclusion from v18, “for with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”

So, what’s changed?

Proposition:

I’ve spent a significant part of my chaplaincy, unfortunately, around death. I’ve conducted funerals, memorial ceremonies, and graveside services. I’ve delivered notifications and attended to families at the hospital bedside of their dying loved ones, as well as to those who are fully lucid but terminally ill, fully knowing that they will never leave their bed, only days away from their fate.

I have been with grieving families saying goodbye to their loved ones, ridden with disease, and with young mothers gripped with pain at the loss of a new life. It’s never pretty. Death is always awful. My experience is that when someone dies, it’s often submissive but never entirely peaceful either because there is a fight that frequently occurs between living and dying, between this life and the next. It’s the final wrestling match that occurs on this side of eternity.

Death is no more evident than in the book of Leviticus. Leviticus was revealed by God through Moses as an instructional guide for the tribe of Levi—the tribe designated by the Lord to serve as the priests for the nation of Israel. The beginning of Leviticus gives gruesome pictures of death. The various animal offerings in Leviticus 1–7 are certainly foreign to most of us today. This sacrificial system is born of the requirement for blood appeasements between humanity and its creator. God used it as a teaching tool. It reveals a picture of bloody hope. Why? Because Israel’s sacrificial system reveals 2 truths about God.

Observation 1:

First, God is holy. We hear the term, “cleanliness is next to Godliness,” it’s a term coined, actually by John Wesley, co-founder of Methodism. His point was somewhat different; nevertheless, when we think of ritual washing, or absolution as it is usually accompanied in the Old Testament, you might recall the cleansing of lepers or women’s rituals to return to their husbands after their monthly visit from their aunt. But blood appeasement…

It took on quite a different approach. For Passover alone, over 250,000—over a quarter-million lambs were sacrificed. I don’t know if any of you have ever field-dressed wild game… but it’s messy. There had to be a whole cleaning crew alone; could you imagine the stench? The alter may well have been a slip-and-slide!

And while the judgment of death was carried out on the animal, its application to the sinner was temporary. More sacrifices always were needed under the Levitical system. I can’t think of a better comparison than that scene, a blood-filled temple courtyard, to illustrate our separation from God. Because He’s clean! There’s a line in Monty Python and The Holy Grail where some characters come to a similar conclusion about King Arthur, that he must be royalty simply because he hasn’t got poo all over him.

Anyway, since God is sinless, He is perfect; all that He is, says and does is right. His actions are righteous, pure, and devoid of wrong. In Him, there are no blemishes or faults. And He can’t tolerate sin. Because God’s holiness demands the penalty of death for sin, it is an affront to his holiness. God decreed that disobedience to him would result in death in Genesis 2:17.

Observation 2:

Secondly, through grace, He institutes a system where final judgment will be delayed until a perfect sacrifice is presented. He’s willing to accept a temporary death, a sacrifice, in substitution for the sinner. So, what happens is, this transference occurs when the penitent person places his hands on the head of the sacrificial animal. The animal’s life symbolically is substituted in place of the sinner. In regard to the one presenting the sacrifice, “It [is] accepted on [their] behalf to make atonement.” (Lev 1:4). This is what we must do to even be temporarily worthy of remaining His people.

So, what’s different is, since we know, “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins,” Paul tells us this in Hebrews 10:4. That God’s grace allows final judgment to be delayed until a perfect sacrifice is presented. So, not only is He holy, He would be holy with or without us. It has nothing to do with His regard for us, but because He makes the concessions for us, His flawed creation, He’s also good.

I know it’s not often we think of Christmas devotions from Leviticus! However, we see Jesus what he came to do, especially in Leviticus. The book provides us a most vivid foreshadowing of Christ’s work for us on earth. Understanding the sacrificial system of the Torah leads to understanding Christ’s own sacrifice for us. You see, the bloody system under the law of Moses exposed humanity’s sinfulness. Yet God’s grace put forth a model that would accept something other than our death for our sin.

Claim:

So, what is different? What has changed? What could be worth hopefulness at the coming of the Messiah joining us in our pit of despair?

He comes to address our condemnation. He was born to die. And on this side of eternity, it all started in a manger in Bethlehem.

Counter point:

There have been conflicts, famines, tragedies, and hardships throughout history. But in our present reality, because of the worldwide communication networks that constantly bombard us with the specifics of every horrible event, our current reality feels incredibly confusing and disparaging. The endless, tiring, and contentious political struggles. Images of terrorist attacks and countless senseless violence inflicting carnage upon the innocent. The deluge of sensationalized content that primarily fearmongers us...

When December finally arrives, the carefully planned and curated aesthetics of pleasant-smelling stables, cozy angels, Anglo-Saxon wise men, and peppermint lattés simply don’t make sense in the face of this overwhelming tsunami of darkness. In our world on the verge of catastrophe, much less in a society where frightened despair is the norm, this sanitized message of hope is as intelligible as Charlie Brown’s parents in this world on the brink of fearful despair.

Critique:

A hopeful birth narrative is the antithesis of a polished, well-branded one. Our hope is in the messy and scandalous participation of human imperfection, not in an idealized vision that is so far detached from our reality. Everything about the All-Powerful God taking on human form through the act of becoming mortal, that is—to experience death—challenges every notion we have of triumphing over the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

The sanitized brand we’ve created to celebrate Christmas aesthetically suggests we can only experience God with Us by cleaning up all of life’s messy details. When everything is perfect, we’ll get that Christmas tingle. But what we see through the details of the birthing process is that the Christ story is actually about a God who brings salvation into the world through all those messy details.

The labored breathing, groaning, and shouting of a mother. The powerlessness of a writhing, crying newborn. The fear of not having a sanitized place to give birth.

Synthesis:

Our sanitized version of Christmas we’ve embraced indicates that the only way we can experience God-with-Us is through tidying up all of life’s messy details. In the same way, it’s not summer until you have our ball-park frank; when everything is perfect, when Mariah Carey sings “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” that’s when we’ll get that Christmas tingle.

What we actually see through the details of the Christ story is about a God who delivers salvation into the world through all those messy aspects, those messy details of struggle, the tension between submission and homecoming. A family’s groaning, shouting in grief. The helplessness of a crying, writhing baby. The complexities of being physically separated from God.

Point:

What’s different is His grace! From the Levitical illustration, we saw that He is holy and that He is good. But what is new comes in his outpouring of grace; he brings forth a model that would accept something other than our death for our sin.

So, in your walk, wherever you find yourself, whether it’s a wistful longing or a chastened pursuit, I hope this serves as a breath of fresh air, the low glow of the rising sun, a reminder of hope. Because we’re not in “meaningless times,” but that is where we are without His incarnation. That simultaneous dread—that woe is me kind of dread and fear. He is coming, we are thankful, and we celebrate it throughout the year with our spirituality reflected in how we practice our rituals of faith, these visible things that reflect invisible impartations of grace.

Transition:

And we hope. As Paul reminds us in Romans 8, though Jesus has come, he is coming again because “hope that is seen is no hope at all.” We wait for it patiently for what we do not yet have, with our faith, which is the substance of things hoped for.

It’s easy to lose our sense of awe and wonder in something that seems so sensational; that’s hallmarks’ fault… But in the same way, on the night in which Jesus was born, did not a multitude of heavenly hosts appear, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest?” In our effort to capture that and re-sensationalize it, we oversaturate ourselves, almost normalize it, and make it repetitive, seemingly derivative, and it loses its luster.

Summary:

Let us remember, in the shortness of the days of this time of year, the longness and bitterness of our nights, the culture they lived in was layered with centuries of prophecy and expectation regarding who the Messiah was supposed to be and what it was all supposed to look like. Yet, here they were, confronted with the real truth of that prophecy—that the hope of restoration had moved from Word to presence. It wasn’t just ideas.

Isn’t that what we’re hoping for? That’s what we’re looking for when we ask, “What’s changed?” The breaking down of the wall between ideology and incarnation, from words to real!

Unfortunately, we don’t get the mangerexperience. But each year, we’re offered the image of it. Because that image points us to the universal truth of restoration: that the invitation is to move from words to presence.

Application:

Maybe it’s our presence that needs to be broken open this Advent. Instead of adding more of our words to the centuries of expectations of what this is all supposed to do and be, maybe we need to reach out and hold what needs to be restored in our hands, like people, or broken hearts, or systems, or perspectives, or beliefs, or policies, or our dashed hopes for a brighter tomorrow.

Close:

At least that’s the invitation in our lives today: to witness that same arrival of Emmanuel—God with us—in all the expected and unexpected realities of our human lives. An Advent that leads to a real hope, one that saves us from two unholy polarities—the empty positivity and blind optimism that masquerades as hope but is never honest about the realities of pain and death or the surrender to despair and hopelessness. Real hope is birthed in the midst of the messy headlines of today’s news. It invites us to consider every situation, no matter how disparaging, as something we don’t have to walk through alone but as the very birthplace of grace.