Hope: What's in a Name?

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The New Revised Standard Version The Righteous Reign of the Coming King

2 The people who walked in darkness

have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness—

on them light has shined.

3 You have multiplied the nation,

you have increased its joy;

they rejoice before you

as with joy at the harvest,

as people exult when dividing plunder.

4 For the yoke of their burden,

and the bar across their shoulders,

the rod of their oppressor,

you have broken as on the day of Midian.

5 For all the boots of the tramping warriors

and all the garments rolled in blood

shall be burned as fuel for the fire.

6 For a child has been born for us,

a son given to us;

authority rests upon his shoulders;

and he is named

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

7 His authority shall grow continually,

and there shall be endless peace

for the throne of David and his kingdom.

He will establish and uphold it

with justice and with righteousness

from this time onward and forevermore.

The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.

Introduction: This is not the Advent we were looking for...

The pastoral search process is not a little bit unlike Match.com.

As a pastoral candidate, I filled out a form called a PIF (we like our abbreviations, don’t we?) with various skills and theological positions I hold on to.

The PNC here at Laboratory did very much the same thing, making down the positions, strengths, and weaknesses of the church.

And then some algorithm matches us up, and says you two might be interested in each other.

So then the interview, unlike a whole lot of job interviews is a two way proposition.

The PNC was grilling me to find out if I’m the right guy for LPC.

And I was grilling the PNC to find out if LPC was the right church for me.

The whole process felt good to me from the very beginning, but I can remember the moment I decided this was the right fit.

It was when the PNC was describing for me the special services around the church.

The way we strip the decorations and paraments on Maundy Thursday.

The way we gather outside for a spell on Easter Sunday.

And of course, the way we celebrate Advent and Christmas.

There was such a sweet intimacy in their description of these rituals, and I knew that I wanted in on that.

That discussion took place on March 7th 2020.

By March 12, the entire country had shut down.

Session’s Decision

Session has spent the entire pandemic closely watching our COVID guidelines and policies.

In the last few weeks, numbers have skyrocketed.

Washington County has in the last month doubled our percent positive rate from 4% to over 8%.

More distressing, our ICU headroom is estimated to be at about 91%, suggesting our health care system is dangerously close to being overwhelmed.

Schools all around the county and indeed the nation have decided to go to virtual learning.

So out of an abundance of caution, the session decided this week to suspend in person worship for the time being, and to engage with these virtual worship services.

I want to be clear, this is a decision roughly zero people are happy about, least of all me.

I wish we were able to be together.

I wish we could fill this sanctuary with the sound of my favorite Christmas carols.

I bet this place looks like magic at night for Christmas eve.

As much as this was a difficult and painful decision, for the health of our church and our community, I believe it is the right decision.

But that doesn’t lessen the hurt.

This is the evidence of the dark season we are walking through as a nation, and indeed as a world.

The people who have walked in darkness? I can get behind that.

Which, hear me out, is a good thing!

We play blame games.

I have heard through this whole pandemic a host of people to blame.

We like to blame our favorite politicians.

We have heard stories about doctors and drug manufacturers who are just out to make a quick buck.

We really like to blame the media, particularly the media that doesn’t represent “our side” or “our interests.”

What I find shocking is that there has been relatively little blame laid at the feet of the virus itself.

We tend not to blame politicians for hurricanes.

We tend not to get mad at our doctors when someone suffers cancer.

The news media is not often to blame when we lose a very near and dear loved one.

This thing is a force of nature, and while surely I don’t love what it’s done to us, I’m under no disillusions as to what has done it.

We’re always walking in darkness.

One of the problems of living in the most prosperous and greatest nations on earth is that we have moments, however fleeting, that we think we’re doing ok.

If the bills are paid, if the kids are in school, if we always cross at the green, and occasionally help an old lady across the street, we feel like we’re doing well in the way of life.

We can convince ourselves that with enough effort, encouragement, and hard work, we can walk in the light of our own accord.

But that’s not the story scripture tells us.

Romans 3:23 All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

1 John 1:8 says that if we try to convince ourselves that we have no sin, we’re just lying to ourselves.

Psalm 14:3 says that there is no one good in this world, not even one.

The beauty of this season is that while it feels like we’ve been thrust in to the darkness, what’s really happened is that the darkness has been exposed in ways we are unused to.

This is a season of honesty.

Advent is a season of recognizing the darkness that we all walk in, yes, because to recognize the darkness is to find out how beautiful the light can be.

The Light is Coming

Isaiah is careful in this familiar text to make sure that we don’t chase after the wrong lights.

He names the light.

In fact, he gives the light four names, each of which is worthy of taking a closer look at.

Wonderful Counselor

A few years ago, Sarah and I took a trip to Niagara Falls.

We were long overdue for our actual honeymoon, and I found a deal online.

We walked along the Canadian side of the falls, trying to take in the magnitude of the sight in front of us.

There is a spot, right next to the falls, where there is this questionably constructed little railing.

It’s the only thing separating you from sure and certain death if you were to fall in to the water.

But it was so close to the falls themselves, that I could feel the concrete underneath my feet shaking.

There was something about that moment.

The power of the waterfall.

The beauty of the landscape all around.

The moment of sheer focus on what was around me.

That was a moment of wonder.

In Hebrew, the phrase Isaiah is using here is pele yoes.

Counselor, to be sure, is like a political advisor.

Someone who can point out the big picture to someone else who is focused in on the work.

But this word wonderful is not so much an adjective meaning someone awesome, but more in line with wonders themselves, miracles, and a sense of wonderful things.

The first thing the Light is going to do is to help us to see the wonders all around us, even and especially the ones that are hard to find.

We breathe in and out approximately 22,000 times a day, depending on how seriously we are taking that quarantine workout routine. Each one is a gift.

Your heart beats about 100,000 times a day, and you have absolutely zero control over that. It’s a sheer gift.

If you’re watching this, my assumption is that you have a roof over your head, food at your tables, and loved ones in your proximity.

If any of that isn’t true, please call the church office and we’ll get to work on that!

All of that is a merciful gift from God himself.

One of the first things that a lifetime of walking in darkness can do to us is make it hard to see the wonder in our lives.

We get naturally robbed of our ability to see wonder.

We eventually place fewer and fewer hopes in miracles.

We lose sight of the gifts of God that show up for us each and every single day.

What Jesus hopes to do for us is to point us in the direction of wonder.

Mighty God

A little while ago, the boys started taking vitamins.

They each got to choose what they would take.

Julian choose the classic Flintstones vitamins, his favorite being a little bit too on the nose for comparison Bam-Bam.

Joshua went the route of The Avengers.

After taking his first vitamin, Joshy boldly proclaimed “Now I’m as strong as Thor!”

As the guy who frequently wrestles with Joshua and Julian both, he’s not wrong!

Strength is something we all look for in the times of darkness.

We want a hero that will work hard on our behalf to make things better.

We want someone who can carry our burdens.

We celebrate the person who pushes through the dark times, who overcomes tremendous adversity and challenges with grit and determination.

I think there are two sources of strength that we can find in this present season, neither immediately self-evident as pictures of strength:

Nurses.

By and large these are people who work tremendous hours, in increasingly difficult conditions, with remarkably little pay.

And that’s before the pandemic!

The truth is that during this pandemic, these folks are being asked to go far above and beyond the call of duty.

Some are working the best they can with limited resources and access to protective gear.

Some are working longer hours than humanly imaginable.

And some are tasked with being the only point of contact that some patients are allowed to have at the end of their lives.

This is a lot to ask of these brave women and men, but I have yet to encounter one who thinks it’s a good time to quit.

I have yet to encounter a nurse or frontline worker who has had it up to here and is ready to lay it all aside.

Instead, there’s that quiet strength and determination to do whatever is necessary to get us out of the darkness.

Teachers and educators.

Again, a group that was asked to do more than their paychecks reflected before the pandemic.

This has been a season of doubt, questions, confusion, chaos, and limitations for our educators.

Overnight in March, this group of professionals had to take everything that they knew about the craft and throw it in a blender, learning to be virtual creatures in a profession that thrived on face to face interaction.

And yet, like the frontline workers, I haven’t seen anyone ready to lay down their arms in this fight.

In fact, being here at Laboratory I have had the privilege of meeting more teachers and educators than I think any call I’ve had previous.

They live up to the hype.

The point of someone who has strength is not how much they can bench press, but the fact that no matter how hard things get, these are people who will not give up. Ever.

We serve a Mighty God.

No matter how dark things get.

No matter how tough our outlook is.

No matter how many Zoom calls we have to endure.

No matter how many times we think about throwing in the towel.

No matter how bleak this Christmas season feels.

God. Does. Not. Give. Up. On. Us.

Everlasting Father

When I first started getting in to cycling, I didn’t quite understand what I was doing.

Almost every race and event I would do, I would start out as fast as I could, in a dead sprint right from the starting line.

Predictably just a few miles later, I’d be a wreck, just completely out of gas.

It took a while to learn the lesson that there is strength, and then there is staying power. And those are two very different things.

According to Isaiah, Jesus comes with both.

Jesus is the Everlasting Father in addition to being the Mighty God.

While God will never give up on us, the never in that idea is a lot longer than we can imagine.

It certainly feels like this pandemic has been going on forever!

But this is just a blip in the radar of the Kingdom of God.

There is no amount of darkness in our world that can outlast God’s care for us.

There is no financial crisis that has any kind of staying power in God’s economy.

There is no shut down that can keep the hearts of God’s worshipers at bay.

There is no pandemic that can last longer than God’s love for us.

Prince of Peace

When the first shut down happened, I noticed a strange pattern in my life.

Every night, and I mean every night, I would wake up in the middle of the night, roll over and look at my clock, and see a blinking 2:30.

Most nights I was able to just close my eyes and get back to bed.

But every once and a while, I was just up, and couldn’t get myself back to sleep.

Asking around a little bit, I realized that I wasn’t alone in that.

My friends and co-workers were waking up, usually around the same time, and having the same struggles with sleep.

Doctors have actually noticed that insomnia is on the rise across the United States, and it’s centered around anxiety.

How long will this last?

How will this affect my family?

Will I have a job to go back to?

When will we ever get back to normal?

Apparently these anxieties can burry themselves so deep in our psyches that while we’re not aware of them, they can literally disrupt our sleep.

And again, a pandemic may have highlighted and amplified our anxieties, but they’ve always been there.

Darkness traffics in anxiety, and we live in a world of darkness.

Jesus is the light that serves us a steady does of peace.

Jesus reminds us that we’re doing ok.

Jesus reminds us that we are loved, regardless of how lovable we might feel.

Jesus reminds us that no matter how unstable our situation may seem, we always stand on the firm ground of his Kingdom.

Jesus takes the love we seem to carry for the darkness and replaces it with our love for the light.

What is required is a fair amount of boldness to trade in the darkness of anxiety and lay it at the feet of Jesus Christ, our Prince of Peace.

Already, but not yet

Advent has always struck me as an odd season.

We are planning for the coming of Jesus Christ.

We are trying to imagine what a world with Jesus in it could look like.

We are looking forward to the day when we will be able to walk not in darkness, but in the light.

But Jesus is already here!

We can’t deny the fact that the light has come in to the world.

We can’t deny the fact that the Counselor has pointed us toward wonder, no matter how hard we try to ignore it.

We can’t forget that God was so strong he decided to come here in the flesh and do what we could not do for ourselves.

We pin our hopes to the idea of an everlasting kingdom, a world without end.

We already know the Prince of Peace resides in our all to anxious hearts.

Advent is a season of already, but not yet.

Advent reminds us that we already have what we hope for, no matter how hard it is to see it.

Advent reminds us that Jesus Christ interacts with us, no matter how often we try to pretend he doesn’t.

Advent reminds us that while our relationship with God is set right, we still long for it’s completion.

Advent it turns out, is all about hope.

We know in this season that we do not have to walk in the darkness, no matter how much it must be pressing in on us.

We know in this season that we have a choice in where we lay our hope, not in our own making but in the God that always has, and always will, love us.

No matter how trying our past has been, God’s future always lays in front of us. We can always have light shine on us.

Spread the light

Who in our neighborhood is going to struggle a little bit harder with lonleness and isolation this time around?

Who is sick, and needs tending to?

Who is hungry, and needs a meal?

Who is thirsty, and could use a drink?

Who is overwhelmed by the darkness?

We can, and we should, spread the light.

We may have to be a little more creative this time around...

But I am convinced that no matter how dark it gets out there, no matter how much the darkness feels like it’s closing in on us, we do not walk in darkness.

We have seen a great light, and on us a light has shined.

We live in the kingdom of the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace.

Let’s shine the light.