12.03.2023 - Advent - Hope

Scripture: Psalm 80:1-7

Psalm 80:1–7 NIV

1 Hear us, Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock. You who sit enthroned between the cherubim, shine forth 2 before Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh. Awaken your might; come and save us. 3 Restore us, O God; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved. 4 How long, Lord God Almighty, will your anger smolder against the prayers of your people? 5 You have fed them with the bread of tears; you have made them drink tears by the bowlful. 6 You have made us an object of derision to our neighbors, and our enemies mock us. 7 Restore us, God Almighty; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved.

Psalm 80:17–19 NIV

17 Let your hand rest on the man at your right hand, the son of man you have raised up for yourself. 18 Then we will not turn away from you; revive us, and we will call on your name. 19 Restore us, Lord God Almighty; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved.

12/3/2023

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Hope

We have a strange relationship with time in the church.

Walking into our church buildings, we often find ourselves surrounded by memories from years or even decades ago. Some of us have been in many different church buildings, and we sometimes see familiar things that bring back memories as we stand in the churches we visit for the first time. The architecture and decorations fill us with memories. This Advent season leading up to Christmas is incredibly nostalgic with our extra decorations and the music that fills the air, both here, in the community, and our homes. We have been born and raised into this small bubble of time we enter each year.

Why is this strange? It is strange because Advent is an overlapping part of the year when we remember the birth of Christ 2000 years ago and anticipate His return. It is a season of anticipation and expectation. The Bible describes it in several places, like expecting a new baby. The sight of expecting couples might bring back memories of your own time raising children, and it can be even more exciting when you welcome new grandchildren into your family. In that case, not only memories come to mind, but new hopes for the future. And here is where it gets a little strange: Jesus was born for us.

What I mean by that is we are not strangers looking into the birth of Jesus. We are not grandparents watching Jesus be born into our family. God calls us into this season of expectation the same way He called Mary and Joseph and wants to be born to us this day. If you don’t hear anything else this month of December, I want you to know that just as Jesus died for you, He was also born to you and wants to transform your life in the powerful way that only children can. He came to claim you as His own and wants You to claim Him as Your own as well.

Shepherd-King

As Mary gave birth to her Lord and Savior, so we invite this Shepherd-King into our lives. He will redefine what it means to lead, guide, serve, and love. He will bring us into a new life, and we will discover that it is the life God has always wanted us to have.

As a pastor, an under-shepherd of Jesus, I've had the same basic job description in every church I have served. Yet, I have had to find new ways to do that in each church. More than that, at my best, I let God lead me each year, shaping and changing my work. More importantly, He is shaping and changing who I am. I don’t want to be the same pastor I was last year, and neither does God.

There is beauty and wonder and goodness and lessons to be learned from our past. We only have a future because Jesus came into our world long ago. But we will only make it to the future if we follow Jesus there today. More than anything else, Jesus is our hope.

Trust

The Psalms are a special kind of scripture. More than life lessons or historical accounts, they are prayers of God’s people passed down to us over generations. Our prayers can be deeply personal, and they can also be shared with many other people all at once. There are many models of prayer, and we can use them all as we grow in our relationship with God.

The primary purpose of prayer is always to communicate with God. We cannot have a close relationship with him without prayer. It is one of the best ways to grow our relationship with God. The Psalms give us many examples of prayer language we can use in our own prayer life to help us grow and connect with God more.

There is a secondary blessing of prayers as well. Not only can we pray them, we can listen to them. We do this often, whether we realize it or not, when we listen to prayers that other people are praying to God. It is like listening to someone talk to a loved one on their phone. When we overhear those conversations, it takes us only a short time to discover what kind of relationship they have.

When others share their prayers with us, they paint a new picture of God for us with their words. When we invite others to pray for us out loud or write in cards, letters, or text messages, we invite them to show us who God is to them. It is a gift from them, a personal witness to encourage us to trust in the same God they love and follow.

As I said, all the Psalms are prayers, many written almost 3,000 years ago. They were written and passed down through many generations, each who found ways to pray them again and rejoice in the image of God they paint for all of us.

Psalm 80 is part of a series of laments and prayers that cry out for help. This psalm is a prayer for restoration in the face of ongoing suffering. The chorus, or repeated phrase, comes back throughout the psalm:

3 Restore us, O God; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved.

We have enjoyed Your blessing. Then we turned away from You and lost so much. Restore us, O God! You are our hope, and we know it takes trust to call out to You for help.

How often have you prayed some version of that prayer?

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Fed by Tears

Notice the psalmist does not get an immediate answer to their prayer. The cry for help is repeated. They remember the past, but not with a happy kind of sentiment. It says that God fed them the bread of tears and that they had to drink tears by the bowlful. That is their recent memories. But even the ones that go further back to happier times bring them pain. They know they had it good, they know they lost it, and they know their responsibility for that loss.

This psalm of lament is the prayer of a grieving heart. For a season of joy and gladness anticipating the birth of a Savior and the love of a God who is so good, it is hard to understand why He allows us to grieve. And here is where we need to get some help interpreting this scripture.

For the past five months, we have been learning scripture from the Gospels, which are like biographies of Jesus. They contain accounts of much of what He said and did, especially within the last three years of His life on earth. Much of the Old Testament is a set of historical books that give accounts in a similar way of how God interacted with His people in the many centuries before Jesus was born. Even the prophets contain words from God given to God’s people.

The Psalms, however, are prayers. That means that instead of God’s words given to us, His people, they are the words of God’s people, given back to Him. The communication is flipped. Does that mean it is not God’s Word? No. Long before Christ, the Jews considered the Psalms part of God's inspired Word. But if we try to interpret them as if God were saying them to us, it will sound like God talking to Himself, and we will be confused.

Instead, we can interpret and appreciate them as inspired prayers by people close to God. That means just as Matthew painted a picture of Jesus in his gospel, David and Asaph paint pictures of who God is in the prayers passed down to us in the Psalms.

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So, even though this Psalm says that God gave the writer tears to eat and drink, it does not mean that God wants us to go through suffering. It does not tell us that whenever we are grieving, it is because we have sinned. It means that the writer felt this way. We can instead read this as a prayer and identify with the psalmist because we have all been there.

We have prayed for peace and comfort when no peace or comfort is in sight. We can pray to be restored while we wonder if there are things that we have done that have caused us to experience this pain. We can bring all those thoughts and feelings to God and pour them out, knowing that God may not answer us right now. We know we are not alone when we feel this way because someone felt this way 3,000 years ago, and that prayer was inspired enough to be prayed by every generation after them. More than that, the Holy Spirit carried it to us today so we would know that God understands and responds to that kind of prayer.

I believe this prayer of grief crying out for restoration is the perfect place to begin Advent together. If we do not address our grief and loss, those wounds will never heal. If we never stir up those stagnant places, they will fester and rot in us while we try to keep our smiles painted in place. We won't truly seek Him if we don’t admit our need for God. If we cannot confess our sins, we cannot accept Jesus as our Savior. And if we do not grieve and lament our loss, we will never genuinely cry out to God for restoration.

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Restoration

Psalm 80:3 NIV

3 Restore us, O God; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved.

We say we need God because it is the popular thing to do. We tell others we are not perfect but don’t want to put ourselves in the same boat as those we consider “sinners.” Then we open the Psalms and read a few lines like this, and our hearts leap up within us and say, “Yes. Me too, Lord. Me too.”

Psalm 119:105 says:

Psalm 119:105 NIV

105 Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.

God's words signal the dawn: one small flickering candle of hope set against the darkness. It cannot stand on its own. We cannot stand on our own. Yet we stand in hope of what comes next. The True Word of God that came into the world so long ago is coming back again. When He does, this ongoing prayer for restoration, passed from generation to generation, will finally and fully be answered. The scripture, infused with the Holy Spirit, gives us just enough light to get us to Jesus, the True Light of the World.

We will journey through several Psalms and prayers from scripture this Advent season as we journey toward the manger of Bethlehem. As we do, I encourage you to open up your Bible this week to the Psalms and read through several of them until you find one that resonates in your heart and soul enough to begin praying it daily. You can change it mid-season, or you may find a different one each day. Let the Spirit guide your reading as you allow the prayers of God’s people, in God’s Word, to become Your own.

God will stir things up in you that may not be comfortable, which is ok. Healing does not come until we admit and address our wounds. We have Advent Prayer Stations next Saturday that you can use to help you draw near to God in this endeavor, and we will have a special service focused on prayer and healing on December 21st.

Don’t wait until then. Start today. Give your heart and your prayers over to God today so that Christmas can be a culmination of the work God is doing in you and you can truly experience the birth of Christ as the gift of God He has always been and always will be: the Light of the world and your One True Hope.

Great Prayer of Thanksgiving

for the First Sunday of Advent, Year B

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts.

We lift them up to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give our thanks and praise.

It is right that we give You our thanks and praise, O God, creator of all things, visible and invisible. You revealed Your glory in the wonders of Your creation and in the way You lovingly formed people - male and female - in Your image and entrusted them with the ongoing task of revealing Your glory in the world.

When they failed and turned from your ways, You did not abandon them but spoke to them through the prophets such as Isaiah. You spoke through those prophets, inviting the crushed and broken of the world to shelter close to your heart and be comforted, like lambs by a shepherd, and setting the oppressed free from their bondage to sin.

You gave us a glimpse of a light penetrating every nook and cranny of the world until no more darkness was left. A light that shaped itself into a star. A light that startled shepherds and led the wise men to a child lying in the straw of a manger. The child in whom the light of your glory is eternally revealed.

And so, with all the company of heaven and earth, we praise your holy name saying:

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,

heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed are you, O God, and forever blessed are the people of this world since you chose to break into our history in the person of Jesus Christ. He made your extravagant love so visible in and through all he said and did, especially on the night when he washed his disciples' feet and sat down at a table to share the meal with them.

On that night of his betrayal, he took a loaf of bread, and when he gave thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me."

In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, "This is my blood of the new covenant, poured out for you and for everyone. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

And so, in remembrance of these your mighty acts in Jesus Christ,

we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving

as a holy and living sacrifice, in union with Christ's offering for us,

as we proclaim the mystery of faith.

Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

Pour out your Holy Spirit upon us, O God, and upon these gifts of bread and wine, that they may be for us the life of Christ and that we may make that life visible through serving as he served, comforting as he comforted, and loving as he loved. This we pray in his name.

Amen.