Uncomfortable Advent 1 - Uncomfortable Hope

Scripture: Luke 21:25-36

Luke 21:25–36 NIV

25 “There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. 26 People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. 27 At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. 28 When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” 29 He told them this parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees. 30 When they sprout leaves, you can see for yourselves and know that summer is near. 31 Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that the kingdom of God is near. 32 “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. 33 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. 34 “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you suddenly like a trap. 35 For it will come on all those who live on the face of the whole earth. 36 Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man.”

12/1/2024

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Communion

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 1: Communion

Opening Prayer:

O God of all the prophets,

you herald the coming of the Son of Man

by wondrous signs in the heavens and on the earth.

Guard our hearts from despair so that we,

in the company of the faithful

and by the power of your Holy Spirit,

may be found ready to raise our heads

at the coming near of our redemption,

the day of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Uncomfortable Hope

Signs of Hope

In his letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul taught that all the gifts of God are temporary except for faith, hope, and love. We use that line on sentimental greeting cards and during wedding ceremonies, but we can learn to be silly with these sacred values if we are not careful. For Paul, they were profound concepts. He was an expert in the Old Testament and knew the laws inside and out. But he was willing to trade all of his Bible knowledge for these three things because he knew when Jesus comes to take us home, we don’t need to take our Bibles with us. We will have Jesus, which is even better.

Faith, hope, and love are the building blocks of relationships. The first Advent season did not last four weeks; it lasted 400 years. God was quiet and did not send prophets to His people during those centuries. Generation after generation began to put their faith in the written word of God because the living word of God had gone silent. Many of His people struggled to love a God who would no longer speak to them. They began to lose faith. They began to lose hope.

About 160 years before Jesus was born, (or two-thirds way through God’s silent years), the Greek empire that ruled the Middle East decided they were done putting up with the Jewish religion. God was not showing up, so they decided to outlaw faith in him and convert all of the Jewish people to the Greek religion. So they went into the temple, looted it, and set up a statue of Zeus in the place of worship. They defiled the holiest place for the Jewish people.

Understandably, the Jewish people were furious. They did not back down without a fight. They rose up against the Greeks, and just a few years later, a priest named Mattathias and his five sons led a revolt against their Greek overlords. His son Judah, “The Hammer,” took over the revolt when his father was killed, and a couple of years later, they expelled the pagan rulers from town, liberating God’s temple. The people had a glimmer of hope again for the first time in almost 300 years. To celebrate, purify, and rededicate the temple, Judah instructed them to light the candles on the altar and keep them burning for eight days as a sign of God’s return to the temple. But when they set up the menorah candles, they discovered that they only had enough oil to last for one night.

God blessed them, and miraculously, the candles did not burn out until the eight days were over. This was a sign of hope that the people of Jerusalem needed to remind them that God was still with them. Judah declared that they should celebrate this miracle of light every year, and the Jews still celebrate it today in the festival of Hanukkah. They will celebrate this year on December 25th as we celebrate a different light of God that came into the world.

According to Paul, love may be God’s greatest gift, but hope comes to us first in the darkness. It stirs us, often making us more uncomfortable than when we sit in the dark, hopeless patches of our lives. Hope stands firm and bright in the darkness, pointing to a miraculous rescue and a transformation that is not yet here. As beautiful as the Hanukkah story is, the people still had to wait 150 more years before their Savior would arrive and God would speak again.

During this uncomfortable Advent season, we also hope in Christ as we wait for Him to move into our lives and come back to rescue us from our fallen world. Hope is never easy, but hope in Christ pulls us away from our comfort zone and begins preparing us for the return of our Lord and Savior.

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The Fig Tree

Jesus says there will be signs of hope, but they may not look like hope to us. For thousands of years, people have looked to the stars and the sky to give them direction when they are lost and hints about what tomorrow may bring. We learn to predict stormy seasons and dry spells by watching the sky and the plants around us. Altogether, nature often has as good or better of an idea of what the future holds than we do, unless we open our ears and eyes and pay attention to what is going on around us.

Jesus says people will be fainting in terror at what they think is to come. They will be confused and frightened by the idea of Jesus returning. Why? Because we (as in most of the people in the world today) have all grown so used to life without Jesus in the flesh with us that we don’t know what we would do if he showed up.

But he tells them that these signs do not deserve our fear. Neither does his return. Instead, he compares it all to the leaves of a fig tree. In the spring, the bare wood begins to sprout small green leaves, and when we look outside and see the green leaves growing back on our trees, we, too, will know that summer is coming. That sounds nice, considering the cold weather we have had recently. Summer is the time to wait for the crops to grow in preparation for the harvest, not a time filled with excessive anxiety. Summer is not the end, either. It is a time of waiting before the harvest when the farmer goes in and gathers the fruit of his labors.

What does this fig tree have to do with Jesus coming back? It is a reminder that the storms of spring are not the end of all things. Nor is the summer when the leaves are out on the trees. There is still a third season, a harvest to come when Jesus returns and gathers the faithful fruit for His Father. Often, when we feel like the end is here, and there is no hope, we are still stuck in the middle of the story, unable to see the bigger picture.

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Promises

However, hope does not always appear as we expect. We mix and match the words wish, want, expect, and hope like laundry on a clothesline. They may not all look identical or be used the same way every time, but they all hang there and dry out in the wind similarly.

We don’t always get what we desire or anticipate. Sometimes, when we receive what we ask for, we find that it isn’t what we thought, and we wish we had requested something different. Occasionally, we can be fickle with our desires, but most of the time, we simply don’t know enough to truly understand what is best.

Our hope is tied to promises, where faith connects to hope. We do not place our hope in people or things that have proven unfaithful to us. We struggle to place our hope with strangers when trust is not established. We don’t take or make promises with strangers. If we can avoid it, we don’t take or make promises to anyone because we don’t want our hopes to fail and fall. So why do we, like the first disciples, feel so drawn to put our hopes in Jesus, the one who defies all our expectations, promises more than we can believe, and often feels out of reach?

We sing with David Crowder and Tauren Wells:

“All my hope is in Jesus. Thank God that yesterday's gone. And all my sins are forgiven. And I've been washed by the blood."

That might be more of an Easter song than an Advent song, but maybe not, depending on where we stand. When the world is on fire, our lives are a wreck, no one has control over anything, and the people closest to the steering wheel are not the ones we trust to drive anything, what do we care about our sins at that moment? When Jesus says that the whole world, heaven, and earth will pass away, what will remain? His Word? What does that even mean?

Is that some extreme metaphor suggesting that even if everything else in creation fails, His promise would stand? Because it sounds as if He is serious. It seems that Jesus tells us that everything else will fail and pass away, leaving only Him and His Word. That’s a dilemma for me because heaven and earth are what I’m made of. They are the places I hope to reside, and if you remove them, what is left? Here, at the start of Advent, perhaps I’m realizing that my hopes are placed more on heaven and earth being fixed than in trusting in Jesus Himself. Maybe I need to figure out how to be made less out of the stuff of heaven and earth and more out of His Word, the one thing He says will endure.

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Keep Your Head Up

Are you feeling lost? It’s okay if you are. I think the first lesson of Advent might be that we don’t know what to expect. We may think we know what we want or don’t want, but we probably don’t know what we need. For today, we could figure it out. With some time to think and pray, we could come up with what we need for next year. But for eternity? For forever? We don’t even know where to start.

Jesus knows how little we know, and He doesn’t ask us to figure it out. Instead, He says to us,

“Keep your head up, be careful, and be watching. Don’t let your fears and anxieties overwhelm you because you haven’t seen anything yet."

Today, this first Sunday of Advent, we remember again what it means to wait uncomfortably in silence, awaiting our Savior, Jesus, to come and make things right. We know we are supposed to hope but don’t know what to hope for. I don’t have to tell you to find the place where you are uncomfortable. I know that even talking about hope takes you there already, and the deeper we dive into hope, the more we leave our place of comfort. So let me tell you where the deepest, most uncomfortable hope is—the hope Jesus has for you.

Jesus hopes that you and I, people who have been let down by others and by ourselves, who a crooked world has hardened, and who have lost faith in people across our country, within our churches, perhaps even in our own family... Jesus hopes that you and I can love God with all we are and all we have, and love each other the way He loves us. He knows we have not yet reached that level of love with God or with each other, but He thinks we can get there. He has faith that we can love that much and that well, somehow washing the broken world out of us so we can be remade from His Pure Word. As God breathed life into the dirt to create the first man, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to blow the dirt out of us so that only God’s breath of life is left in Who We Are.

He hopes in us enough that He has dedicated His entire life to this plan. He knows our weaknesses, but He asks us to promise to love God and each other. He does this anyway, trusting and hoping that Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit, will get us to that point, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. He has more hope in us than we do in ourselves because He sees what He can do in and through us and builds us together as His People, His Family, and His Church.

Brothers and Sisters, we gathered last week to make some holy promises to God about our giving for the coming year. Today, Jesus calls us to come together around His table and make promises to God and each other about our living that stretch us further than we can go on our own. But Jesus has paid our way and sent His Holy Spirit to empower and enable us to do with Him what we could never hope to do on our own. Today, we can remember that He gives us the strength to live, love, give, and hope, even when we cannot see the light or hear the voice of God yet. We can put our hope in Him because we know He will keep His promises and has given us everything we need to help us keep our promises.

Closing Prayer

Lord, all our hope is in You. When we cannot see through the darkness or hear through the silence, You are the light that we wait for and the voice that guides our way. Though it makes us terribly uncomfortable at times, we will sit and wait for you as we let you do that miraculous work in us, remaking us in Your image and teaching us to live, love, and give like You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING FOR ADVENT

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, and a good and joyful thing,

always and everywhere to give thanks to you,

Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

You formed us in your image and breathed into us the breath of life.

When we turned away, and our love failed, your love remained steadfast.

You delivered us from captivity, made covenant to be our sovereign God,

and spoke to us through your prophets, who looked for that day

when justice shall roll down like waters

and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,

when nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war anymore.

And so, with your people on earth and all the company of heaven,

we praise your name and join their unending hymn:

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.

Holy are you, and blessed is your Son Jesus Christ,

whom you sent in the fullness of time to be a light to the nations.

You scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts

and have mercy on those who fear you from generation to generation.

You put down the mighty from their thrones and exalt those of low degree.

You fill the hungry with good things, and the rich you send empty away.

Your own Son came among us as a servant, to be Emmanuel, your presence with us.

He humbled himself in obedience to your will and freely accepted death on a cross.

By the baptism of his suffering, death, and resurrection

you gave birth to your Church,

delivered us from slavery to sin and death,

and made with us a new covenant by water and the Spirit.

On the night in which he gave himself up for us, he took bread,

gave thanks to you, broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said:

"Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me."

When the supper was over he took the cup,

gave thanks to you, gave it to his disciples, and said:

"Drink from this, all of you; this is my blood of the new covenant,

poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me."

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 on us gathered here,

and on these gifts of bread and wine.

Make them be for us the body and blood of Christ,

that we may be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood.

By your Spirit make us one with Christ,

one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world,

until Christ comes in final victory, and we feast at his heavenly banquet.

Through your Son Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in your holy Church,

all honor and glory is yours, almighty Father (God), now and for ever.

Amen.

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