Mesage 1: Hope, Family Christmas

Intro to series

Advent Themes

Hope, Joy, Peace, Faith

The intent of Advent is to mark the season and focus on Christ’s first and second arrival on the earth.

Christmas becomes a time for us to focus on the arrival of Christ.

Jesus showing up on earth wasn’t a second thought or wasn’t half-hearted. We see that the arrival of Christ is truly the representation of God’s plan in the world

We will be looking at the 4 Themes of Advent: Hope, Joy, Faith, and peace.

Intro to Message: Hope

And we see it shine through the thread of the OT. We enter the NT through the Gospel of Matt but the witness tells us that it is truly through the OT that we understand the hope of the Advent.

In Romans 8 we see Hope applied as eager expectation. There is expectation based on what will happen. That expectation draws out into patience because we don’t know when it will happen we just know that it will happen and that is enough. Hope is not an idea. Hope is not ethereal. Hope has it’s place rooted in the daily reality of our lives.

The only issue that defines what kind of hope we have or where our hope is placed, we have to simply ask, what are we waiting for?

What we are waiting for will determine where our hope is.

So what are you waiting for?

This idea is really fleshed out in James KA Smiths’ book, You are What you love. Smith states that the flourishing life of the human is found simply in what we love. So if you want to know what you are hoping in you simply have to find out what it is you love mostly.

What you love mostly you will wait for most patiently.

We will look at this idea: Hope is not contingent upon our history but rather God’s reality.

Intro to Passage: Genealogy

Geneologies appear all over the Bible. We see the Advent Narratives in Luke and Matthew. The issue for genealogy is to establish family and in this case royal lines.

It may just look like a list of names but there is a lot of information that Matthew is giving in the first 17 verses.

Play Andrew Peterson’s Begats.

Genealogies gives us a picture of beginnings, of where people, in this case Jesus, has come from. The passage this morning is about beginnings.

This beginning creates hope.

Even though we will see that we are carried in from history, hope still generates new beginnings. Hope is a beginning.

That is what we celebrate this year. A beginning.

Hope Has

Matthew 1:1

Matthew 1:1 ESV

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

We see the first verse linking Jesus to David and Abraham.

Jesus’s lineage goes back. Way back to Genesis.

Abraham was the Father, the beginning of the nation of Israel. He was the originator of God’s promise and covenant. Jesus is tied directly to him through history

And Jesus is tied to David. The King of Israel. Both of these men we called and set aside for the pursposes of God.

We are directly told that Jesus is at the origin of Israel and carries a royal lineage.

Hope doesn’t just show up in the present. Hope has. Hope has been. Hope was being built and developed from well before our own existence.

To live in expectation of something greater, we don’t just find it one morning on the way to work. Hope has been moving and building for a long time, and our role is not to find hope but to step into the current of hope.

Hope is already here. It has been. God has already been working and we just have to step in.

Hope Is

English Standard Version Matthew 1:17

17 So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to tthe Christ fourteen generations.

- Jesus is being placed into time. He is being properly incarnated. He did not come out of nowhere. He has come from a place.

- 14 and 14 generations. Preparation to come at a specific point.

Matthew sets up the Genealogy for us to understand that Christ came at a specific point for a specific reason. Hope was and built expectation but hope also is and arrives at the appropriate time.

Tim Keller states that the biggest issue facing believers in their discipleship is simply that the issue of our timing often doesn’t align with God’s timing.

We believe that if things don’t happen on our timetable then that equals failure. Or that if we don’t get what we want within the timeframe that we want it, then God is not real or does not love us, etc. How often have you actually gotten exactly what you want at the exact time you want it? That is a very small target. Not that God doesn’t care for us in those ways. He knows the number of the hairs on our head. He loves and knows us but again we have assigned value to the wrong places. We have assumed that value is assigned when and only when we get what we want when we want.

But when we live like this we miss the massive target of God’s timing in using all of history to incarnate Jesus.

When we were moving out here we stopped at the Grand Canyon. I don’t know if you know this or not but you have to pay to see the GC and it is about a 45 minute drive from the main highway. So we got there and parked. Then we had to walk to the rim. We got to the rim and started seeing the canyon and it was as amazing as you would expect. The entire thing looks like a painting in real life actually. Like the Truman show or something. But while we were looking at the canyon my kids found a squirrel that was quite friendly. And their attention turned from the canyon to a squirrel. SO much so that when we got here to mass we were reflecting on our favorite moment during our 2 week trip and to a t every kid said that dumb squirrel.

Sometimes we are so focused on what God may not exactly be doing in our exact moment that we miss the incredible action of God in His timing. We are focused on the squirrel and not the grand canyon.

Hope exists because God incarnated Christ in the world, exactly at the right time. His sense of time is much better than ours, even when it doesn’t seem like it.

Hope Can

English Standard Version (Matthew 1:6)

And David was the father of Solomon

David was solomons dad. Bathsheeba was solomons mom.

This is a crazy genealogical line.

I’ll retell this story briefly

In 2 Samuel David who is married, met Bathsheeba, who was married. They slept together and Bathsheeba became pregnant. David tried to cover it up and ended up killing Bathsheeba’s husband.

SO this relationship began in sin and stayed in sin. David repented and from this relatinonship SOlomon was born. Solomon carried the royal lineage from David closer to JEsus.

This is quite the mess

- But Hope comes not through perfection. Hope is actually perfected within broken and less than situations.

- This was not a good time in Israel’s history or in the life of David. God does make good from less than good.

- We always want things to add up in our lives but things only often add up when we try and make the numbers work.

But we find that God can make better and create hope even in the midst of messy situations.

Enough so that the Gospels do not hide away this darker instances of history.

English Standard Version Matthew 1:11

Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon.

- The deportation of babylon is mentioned three times. It is not erased from history.

This is the time during Judah’s history where they were taken into captivity by an enemy country, Babylon.

This could have been quietly removed. There are bigger things to talk about, more important things to talk about. But it is included. Israel is not quick to forget the difficult things because these are the places where God shows up. It is often when things are dire that we really see God for who He is.

And these sufferings aren’t removed because they do something. They create hope in our lives.

Our struggles and suffering create and produce something. Hope is created and developed within these struggles.

Romans 5:3-5

Romans 5:3–5 ESV

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Hope is not absent when things are darker. Hope is being built.

Again hope is built over time. Hope is the expectation that something is coming that is better than things are.

That is why we can rejoice in our sufferings

That is why we can see this wierdly imperfect genealogy filled with some messy situation.

Hope comes from something else, somewhere else. It is formed and given by God. And that does not disappoint.

So even in our own histories there is hope. Even in our own imperfect geneaology there is hope.

Hope is not contingent upon our history but rather God’s reality.

No matter where you have come from, whether this is your 100th Christmas or 1st real Christmas, hope is available.

No matter the direction, hope can be found.

Maybe this morning you need a little hope. Look to JEsus who showed up perfectly in an imperfect world. And shows up perfectly in your imperfect situaiton.

Hope is available.