A World Made Whole

These are the words, beautifully crafted by Pastor Chris setting the tone for our Advent Season together this year:

“As we step gently and purposefully into Advent this year, the world seems intent on hurtling us forcefully into the holiday season. An Advent season of hopeful waiting and expectant anticipation seems to need to strengthen its defenses against candy cane sugar rushes and saccharine holiday messages that everything is holly and jolly, merry and bright, when our reality so often feels far from that.

In a time when friendships are strained, neighbors are viewed with suspicion, and relationships feel more tattered than ever, we must recapture a vision for the world as God hopes it can be.

A World Made Whole

This Advent we hear prophetic words from Isaiah and challenging good news from the Gospel of Matthew that help us dream this new world into being. As we watch and wait for the Messiah…Emmanuel…God-with-us…to be born in and among us once again, we’ll seek to find the places we can partner with God, to dream with God this new creation God is bringing about within, and around us…a world made whole.”

As we enter Advent with quiet intention while the world rushes toward a glitter-coated December, with parties, pagents, and performances; with shopping, and baking and decorating; with Christmas movies on every channel, and our houses smelling of one kind of evergreen or another since the day we cleaned up the Halloween candy wrappers, the lectionary draws us back to the deeper, older rhythm of hope. The readings for today remind us that God’s vision for a world made whole is not sentimental escapism but a prophetic, urgent summons.

In a time when friendships are strained, neighbors are viewed with suspicion, and relationships feel more tattered than ever, the temptation that we have is to lean into fear. Or run away out of fear. Why do we love to curl up under a blanket (even if it is 80° outside) and turn on any of the ever present Holiday movies and pass the time away in a Christmas themed happy place? Because it’s simple and joyful, and cheesy, and predictable and gives us relief from worry and fear.

There’s all kinds of fear, all kinds of ways live into fear: bills, mortgages, car payments, health, employment, stage fright, friendships, marriages, relationships, tests, grades, teachers, professors, bosses, managers, evaluations, Theological Theses about animals and pastoral care. (that’s the topic of my thesis). Politics. The politics of fear used conveniently, rather than looking to each other from across the isle and doing the hard thing which is to find a way together. All of life’s pressures, when we live in fear, when we start in fear, when we believe in fear, They steal from us the possibilities of Hope. And the most violent, darkest things, the things in the headlines this week, come from us when there is no hope. Hope is the life blood of person, church, society, and world. Without Hope, we wither and crumble. Hope extinguished is toxic and deadly.

Let’s get right down to the very essence of our own personal theology. Where does it come from? From hope? or fear?

In the last few months, many of us watched a sudden “rapture scare” explode across TikTok, YouTube, and other social platforms—a perfect storm of recycled 19th-century theology, anxiety about world events, and the speed of online rumor. The idea of a secret rapture—where believers disappear before catastrophe—doesn’t come from Scripture’s witness or the historic church. It originated in the 1830s with a preacher named John Nelson Darby and spread through pop-culture novels and movies rather than through the Bible. But in an age weighed down by wars, elections, climate fears, and economic stress, that old idea found fresh ground. The outcome, sadly, has been predictable: fear, panic, and the belief that God’s coming is something to dread instead of something to hope for.

Out of a theology of fear you get shame, guilt, and loneliness. How many of us were taught shame by the church? If you grew up as an evangelical like I did, how many of you were petrified into walking down the isle and publicly professing? How many of you at one time or another have looked at your faith and been afraid? How many of you look at your faith as fire insurance? That’s not hope. That’s fear.

Some of the folks caught up in that rapture craze sold all their possessions and gave all their money away! Now what? What do they do?

When the church works from fear, the church hurts. When our faith starts with fear, not the awesome reverent “Fear of the Lord,” the “nora,” I spoke about a couple of weeks ago, but from the terror of mortality, pain, and punishment, we hurt ourselves.

Yet Scripture today offers a very different word—Isaiah’s dream of nations streaming toward peace, Paul’s call to wakefulness rooted in love, and Jesus’ reminder that the timing is unknown, but the One who comes is Emmanuel, God-with-us. Advent is not a season of escape but of expectancy; not fear of the world ending, but trust that God is already making the world whole.

God is ALREADY making the world whole. God is already LOVING THE WORLD INTO WHOLENESS, Loving the world into HOPEFULNESS

And if we are a faithful people, If we are living our Christian charge, we get to play our part in it! Luther reminds us that prayer is never about convincing God to act or bending God toward our will—as if God were reluctant to love us or slow to show mercy. In the Large Catechism, he says we pray not to “inform God of what we need” but so that we may “grasp what God has already promised” and “awaken our hearts” to trust what God is doing. Prayer, for Luther, is God’s invitation for us to join God’s ongoing work: “God gives freely and without our prayer,” he writes, “but we pray so that we may learn to receive.” We pray, then, not to change God but to be changed—so that our desires align with God’s desires, our longings with God’s healing, and our lives with God’s mission to make the world whole.

As to this rapture business, Luther was asked what he would do if he learned the world would end tomorrow. And do you know what he said? He said, “I’d plant an apple tree.” He’d plant an apple tree because for Luther, every day was to participate in the creative, hopeful possibilities of tomorrow.

Isaiah opens this season with a dream that cuts through cynicism: all nations streaming to God’s mountain, weapons reforged into tools that sustain life. In a moment when “friendships are strained,” and “neighbors viewed with suspicion,” Isaiah paints wholeness not as the absence of conflict but as the transformation of it. God imagines a people who actively “learn the ways of peace” and choose reconciliation over rivalry. The prophet invites us to walk in that light—even before we see its fullness.

Paul’s call to “wake from sleep” speaks directly into the tension between Advent’s gentle invitation and the culture’s rush-and-noise. This is the wakefulness that notices the neighbor, that resists the numbing forces of distraction, fear, and resentment.

To seek a world made whole is to refuse the spiritual sleep that convinces us nothing can change.

Paul insists: the dawn is closer than we think.

Jesus’ teaching on watchfulness does not aim to frighten but to reorient. The coming of the Son of humanity interrupts the assumption that history is stuck on repeat. God is already drawing near, already breaking into ordinary days, already moving the world toward newness.

When we seek “the places we can partner with God, to dream with God this new creation,” we echo Matthew’s call. Advent watchfulness is not passive; it is participatory. We stay awake so we can notice where God is already at work mending the world—and join in.

So, friends, as we stand at the threshold of a new church year, Advent does not ask us to run from the world in fear—it calls us to step into the world in faithful courage. Christ is not hiding in the shadows waiting to catch us unprepared. Christ is coming toward us—here, now, in this place—mending what is torn, healing what is wounded, and calling us to join in this holy labor of love. The world may swirl with anxiety, predictions, and panic, but Advent’s first word is not beware—it is awake. Awake to hope. Awake to the neighbor. Awake to the God who refuses to abandon creation. Awake to the possibility that even in a fractured time, God is already making all things new.

So lift up your heads, Church. The dawn is breaking. The Christ who comes is Emmanuel—God with us—and because God is with us, we do not fear the future; we lean toward it. We do not shrink from the world; we love it. We do not wait with dread; we wait with expectation, with open hands and open hearts.

This Advent, let us be a people who choose hope over fear, peace over panic, watchfulness over worry. Let us be a people who plant apple trees even when the world trembles. Let us be a people who step into God’s dream for creation and dare to live as though the world is already being made whole—because, by God’s grace, it is.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Come and make your world whole.

And give us the courage to participate with you

Loving the world into hopefulness.

Loving the world into wholeness.

Amen.