In Days to Come

An advertisement

I know, I know.

The last thing we need is more advertisements this time of year.

But as I was writing this sermon, one of my favorite web shops put out an ad, and in 30 seconds I think they did a better job preaching my sermon than I’m about to…

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Life isn’t about finding anything…it’s about creating it.

Which, probably sounds like an odd message to kick off our season of Advent waiting, don’t you think?

So…what is the preacher talking about here?

I’m talking about hope.

Isaiah- In Days to Come

Prophets are interesting people.

They tend to show up at the bottom of a nation’s bell curve, when things are going their absolute worst.

Prophets don’t tend to show up when everything’s going great to tell people they’re doing a great job.

No, prophets in general, and Isaiah in particular, have a job to do.

Isaiah is picturing a future that is not yet here for Judah and Jerusalem.

Judah and Jerusalem are in dire straights at this point, facing down division and exile and war and being beaten up by bigger countries all around them.

And so Isaiah shows up and paints a picture of what their life *could* be like, and in fact what God says it will be like.

Swords into plowshares

No more war.

This is kind of fantastical thinking.

All the people of Isreal and Judah have known for the last handful of generations is war.

They have lived every day under threat of invasion and exploitation and conquest.

If we really wanted to get to the heart of the scandal of this message, imagine a street preachers finds their way over to Ukraine right now and says “Hey…you know you could take all those guns and tanks and missiles and turn them in to a few John Deere tractors right?”

They might appreciate the image, the vision of that statement.

But it just isn’t reflective of their reality on the ground at all.

That’s what Isaiah is talking about with the people of Judah and Jerusalem.

Isaiah is talking about hope.

Hope Defined

I have used this deffinition before, but I like it so much it bears repeating even for myself every now and again.

My friend Marko defines hope as “A Faithful Confidence that God continues to author a story that leads us from vision to action.”

I’ve done whole other sermons on this definition of hope before, so I don’t want to break it all down for you.

I just want to focus in on one important point today:

Hope requires God’s action…and ours.

We believe, and in fact we hope, that God is authoring a great story for us.

We might all have different ideas of what that story is.

The story where I win the lottery.

The story where my political side wins the next election.

The story where I’m reunited with my estranged family.

The story where my life comes to a close in a meaningful and peaceful way.

But those stories pale in comparison to the one that God is authoring for us.

The story of redemption.

The story of reconciliation.

The story of forgiveness.

The story of everlasting life.

But also…that story moves us from vision to action.

It’s not enough for us to have a vision for the kind of story that God is authoring for us.

We are called to move that story along, to be active participants in how it comes to pass.

Like Paul says in our passage from Romans- it’s time to wake up, to live in to the hope that God has called us to in passages like Isaiah.

An Illustration- Bikes

So, I thought of yet another kind of self-serving experiment for us.

Because when it’s this cold outside, every day I have to go through my garage and walk past my bikes.

And I picture them a little like puppy dogs asking me “Do we get to go outside today?”

And I have to say no every time.

So…out of guilt and obligation to these imaginary puppy dogs in my head…

Meet Percy and Honey

Percy is my adventure bike, and the one I ride the most these days.

He was named by Sarah for Percy Jackson, since he is a Poeisdon bike.

He’s got big fat tires so he can soak up the bumps and bruises along the trail.

He’s got extra eyelets, so that I can attach all the bags and stuff that I take with me on bike packing adventures.

He loves to get dirty and muddy, he’s my adventure bike.

This is Honey.

Honey is my road bike.

When I need to just eat up miles, go as fast as I can down hill, and keep my endurance up, Honey is the bike to reach for.

One time, on a perfect hill, I hit 52 miles per hour on Honey!

Yes, I was wearing my helmet.

This bike flies!

Every industry expert on planet earth would author the story such that Honey is the faster bike.

It’s lighter.

It’s more aero

It has thinner tires.

It has better geometry.

Plus, Percy just isn’t built to go fast.

So let’s test that theory…3…2…1…

Both bikes fell down!

Why is that?

Sure, the road bike contributes a lot toward my hope of being fast.

This one was built to be faster.

It was built with speed in mind.

It was built to have the right geometry.

It was intended to help me stay in the saddle for longer.

This bike was authored to be faster than the other one.

And it is…

But I still have to pedal.

I have learned the hard way over the years that I still have to get on this bike and pedal it if it’s going to go where I want it to go.

With the slight exception of this new world of ebikes out there, it’s true for every bike.

If you want these things to do what they were made to do, you have to get on and pedal a little bit.

If you want the world to look the way that God intended it to look, we have to get on and live into our faith a little bit.

What kind of world do you hope for?

One like Isaiah, where instruments of war are turned in to instruments of growth?

Millennium Falcon Guy

Perhaps you’ve heard the many legends of Florida Man…

But here’s the hero we didn’t know we needed in these troubled times.

Everyone knows that the very best lego set that you can get is the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.

And lego especially knows this because the most expensive set of legos you can get is…

But, one courageous man in Florida said “Oh, no no. I’m not paying those ridiculous prices.”

Because, it turns out, that everything can be the Millennium Falcon if you work hard enough at it…

Sheer force of will this guy has…and I’m here for it.

Shane Claiborne

But maybe you’re just a little bit like the Florida Man Millennium Falcon guy…

Maybe you’re a pastor in Philadelphia, and you’ve read this line about turning swords into plowshares a whole bunch.

And maybe you are faced with a rising gun violence problem in your own neighborhood, one that needs a creative solution.

So you find a blacksmith in your church, because of course your church has one.

And you say to the Lego Millennium Falcon guy “Watch this…”

All of these guns were donated.

This pastor saw the story that God was authoring, and decided he wanted a piece of that.

So he climbed on, and started pedaling.

One like Paul, where we walk in light instead of darkness?

Paul’s vision of hope in Romans is a bit less concrete than what Isaiah’s working on.

He talks about our salvation being at hand, and so it’s time to live more in the light than it is to live in the nighttime.

As I was just informed on a recent owl prowl that Sarah and I went on, the only way we are able to see anything at all is that our eyes are able to react to the light around us.

If we don’t have light, we can’t see anything.

Be My Eyes.

I’ve known about this service for a little while, and I even think a few folks around here participate in this.

I just signed up for it this week.

The way it works is that a person who is blind has an app on their phone.

As the creator of the app said, maybe they’re cooking a recipe that calls for a can of coconut milk, and they have three cans in their cupboard, and they don’t feel like gambling.

So they open the app, which connects them on a video call to one of the millions of volunteers on the app, who look at the video and help them figure out which can is the right can.

When I wrote this part of the sermon on Wednesday, I thought I’d better put my money where my mouth is…

So I signed up for Be My Eyes.

On Thursday, I got my first call.

A visually impaired man was staying in an AirBNB for Thanksgiving, and the thermostat was touch screen, so he couldn’t figure out how to make the room warmer.

He held his phone up to the thermostat, and I guided his fingers, and we got his room toasty warm.

It is like, a 2-3 minute volunteer experience for the regularly sighted person.

But…aren’t they bringing a good bit of light into the darkness when they’re doing that?

Aren’t they living into the story that God has authored, one where sight is restored to the blind?

Aren’t they pedaling their way through hope too?

Or maybe one like Jesus, where the least of these have their needs met by a loving church as the body of Christ?

There’s a story in Luke’s gospel that’s particularly interesting to me:

John the Baptist is starting to get cold feet about Jesus being the Messiah.

So, side note, if you ever find yourself struggling with doubt, you are in very good company.

So John sends disciples to Jesus to say “Look, dude, are you the real deal?”

And Jesus responds:

Luke 7:22–23 “And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight; the lame walk; those with a skin disease are cleansed; the deaf hear; the dead are raised; the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.””

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in this moment tells John’s disciples his own vision of hope for the world.

The blind can see.

The lame are walking.

Those who have a skin disease are cleansed

Which in Jesus’ day was a fancy way for saying that those who were kicked out of society would be welcomed back into it with open arms…but that’s maybe another sermon…

The deaf hear.

The dead are raised.

And the poor have good news brought to them.

That’s the story that God is authoring.

Straight from the author’s mouth himself.

So the question for us today is, what does it look like to let that story move us from vision to action?

Maybe after all of this you’re inspired to put the “be my eyes” app on your phone like I was. And in that way, you lean into the hope Jesus had for the blind to see.

Maybe you want to volunteer to visit our homebound folks, because even if their legs can’t get them here, we can bring church to them. We can help the lame to walk…in creative ways.

Maybe there’s a particular people group that you want to advocate for, someone who our society has kicked to the curb as if they have some kind of skin disease.

This one’s tricky, because sometimes people will use this as motivation to protest or advocate for a cause or lobby for legislation.

All of which is good, but…

Maybe a better first step is just reaching out to one of those ostracized members of our society and offering to be a friend.

I worry a little bit that we the church don’t do enough of that these days.

Maybe you want to see people in dead places find their lives again, so you volunteer to help in addiction recovery services.

Maybe you want to make sure that the poor receive the good news, and so you join together with us and our mission and outreach efforts this fall by making an extra donation.

God is authoring that story for us.

God has set forth what he wants things to look like in the days to come.

Whatever world we hope for, we lean in to two realities:

God is already at work bringing our hopes to life.

He is a God of peace

God wants to author that story of an end to war, conflict, displacement, and terror.

He is a God of light

God wants us to walk in that light, rather than stumbling around in the dark unable to see what’s really going on in our lives.

He is a God of Abundance

There’s more than enough in God’s kingdom to go around, so that the poor can have the good news proclaimed to them every bit as much as those of us with resources.

The first part of hope is that God is at work.

But we also need to remember…

We’re being invited to participate in hope too.

We can be people of peace.

Whatever conflict in your world that you are responsible for, what does it look like to end it this week?

We can be a people of light.

Can you be the light to someone in need this week? Can you help somewhere see where there is otherwise blindness?

We can meet the needs of our neighbors around us.

Where are our neighbors hurting? Do we even know the answer to that question?

Maybe that’s a good place to start…

Yes…we are engaged in the season of waiting.

Yes, we are preparing ourselves to hear that old old story God authored, the one about redemption and salvation at the hands of a sweet baby boy in Bethlehem.

And yes, while we engage in this season of waiting, we can allow that story to move us from vision to action.

We can get in the game.

In short…oh come on you saw this coming a while ago…