Welcome to Knox on this first Sunday of Advent. Advent is a magical time of the year. We arrive at church to see last week’s decorating completed, the greens are up and the ribbons hung, and we begin worship knowing that soon we’ll get to sing our favorite Christmas song. A family we may know well lights the first candle on the wreath; the reader opens the Bible to the Book of Isaiah, and we are surrounded by news of hope that the Savior of the World is on the way.
And yet those of us who are being honest know that there is another thought lurking in the background—in the midst of that promise of hope and salvation. Next year on the first Sunday of Advent, we will come again, and many things will be very much the same. The world will still be broken, and salvation will remain incomplete. This year the world news is mostly of Israel and Palestine, last Advent it was all about Ukraine. Locally, every Christmas season brings with it the return of drives for food and coats and gifts because children and families are still hungry and cold and struggling with poverty. And year after year, we come and proclaim that salvation is near. Why do we do it?
Wholeness is a popular idea, you can find it anywhere. It’s the foundational principle of so much advertising, every self-help strategy, and plenty of churches. The idea is that there is something wrong with you, and there is a way to fix it. Some product you can buy, some book you can read, some class you can attend, some life skill you can adopt that will make your life as perfect as it is supposed to be. You can be whole—that’s the idea. Advent is about something else, something much different than the illusion of wholeness; Advent is about hope.
Hope, according to author Craig Barnes, “hope arises out of the hard truth of how things are. Committed Christians will always live carrying in one hand the promises of how it will be and in the other the hard reality of how it is. To deny either is to hold only half the truth of the gospel.” (Barnes, Yearning, 16). So here we are, the first Sunday of Advent, to build up and encourage one another as we seek to live in hope. Living in this tension that can make us a little crazy: we know it’s a broken, mixed up, cruel world, but it’s a beautiful one as well, and we, as followers of the long-expected Jesus, are committed to hope. We come back each year, because in this world that can threaten us with despair, someone must insist that salvation is on the way—and it might as well be us.
This morning’s Scripture lessons share ancient wisdom about the struggle to hope. The first reading came from the Book of Isaiah. Isaiah is a book full of real world problems. The first 39 chapters of Isaiah comes from a time we believe the Israelites were under siege from invading Assyrians; by chapters 40-55, the Babylonians became the threatening outside force, conquer Jerusalem, and send the Israelites into exile. Life and survival itself was unsure and many would have thought the future grim. Throughout this time, the role of prophets, like Isaiah, was to encourage the people to hold fast to their faith in God, and hope for the future. So the people are feeling low, but Isaiah is the faithful voice that seeks to lift them up. No, do not despair. “Get you up to a high mountain and lift up your voice as a herald of good tidings. Isaiah offers a vision of the Savior’s way of ruling the earth: “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”
Prophets are still around in the modern world, and they still have the task of proclaiming hope in the face of hopelessness. Any preacher will tell you that on some Sundays its hard to talk about hope, but it’s the real pros who have shown us what hope really looks like. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial and preached about a dream—a dream that is still unrealized today. His words were beautiful, and are even more incredible when you consider the context out of which he preached them. King had experienced first hand some of the worst brutality that the world had to offer, from beatings at the hands of devout white supremacists and some law enforcement officials as well, to hypocrisy at the hands of not only politicians, but comfortable white pastors like me who said they were on his side, and betrayed him. King’s family was threatened and his home bombed, and in the end they would kill him for his words. And what did he say: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” (King, “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963) You know the speech. At one point he quotes the same chapter of Isaiah we read from this morning: “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together…” (Isaiah 40:4-5) Words of hope; words of Advent; words spoken in the midst of a real world. Dr. King preached about the future of his children because he understood the need for hope, in the real world. The last sermon King ever preached was based on the story of Moses, and how on the day of his death, Moses stood on a mountaintop looked over and saw the Promised Land…but never got the chance to go in. That is not a story of wholeness; it is a story of hope.
Another vision of hope is found in today’s New Testament story. Zechariah was an uncle to Jesus, a priest in the Temple, a man of God…who had lost hope. Before I tell you his story, I want to be quick to remind you that the Bible is not a good resource for everything, all the time. And when it comes to modern day struggles with fertility, this story is not where I would look. But in ancient times, the birth of a child to parents who have not been able to conceive is a frequent metaphor for new life and hope—and that is the guiding metaphor of this story.
So in the story of Zechariah, he and his wife Elizabeth have been unable to conceive. God sends an angel to them in their old age, offering him a promise of a child and hope for the future, but Zechariah does not believe it, and as a result of his loss of hope, he also loses his ability to speak. Then God delivers. In the days while Zechariah is unable to speak, God keeps the promise, Elizabeth conceives, a child is born to Zechariah—the boy will grow up to be John the Baptist, whose ministry will be to announce the coming of Jesus Christ. And when Zechariah is finally humbled by the knowledge that God has done exactly what God promised to do, Zechariah’s voice returns, and he joyfully declares the good news of God in the same way Isaiah had done. Zechariah says beautiful, poetic, hopeful words of his son John: “You child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
To guide our feet in to the way of peace. It is what Jesus came to do, and what John the Baptist was born to announce, and yet this is a real world story, for John would end his ministry beheaded by Herod and Jesus was Crucified by Rome—so it’s clear that neither of these stories is about wholeness—they are stories of hope. And hope is the stuff of life lived in the real world, where things are still broken.
As we hope together for the birth of Jesus a month from now, today we come to this Table and take together the meal that Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before he died. I wonder if you’ve thought about it: when Jesus stands before them and declares ‘this is my body, broken for you,” he is making a statement, not of wholeness but of hope—hope for a broken world. He is giving all that he can—his whole self, in hope for the future of a world; it is a world in which much is not as it should be, and Jesus gives anyway. Not because he is naïve, but because he knows that this world is, and has always been, a world in need of hope.
There is always a hunger for good news when times are tough. Ted Lasso, one of my favorite shows, premiered in the summer of 2020. The pandemic was months old with no vaccine in sight, and things were about as dark as most of us can remember. And while we were locked down, more than any other show, people began to watch this silly comedy drama about a soccer coach who knew nothing about soccer and a lot about hope. Through his own wonderful candor and vulnerability and brokenness, Ted Lasso gave people a little hope for themselves. David Brooks, who also loves the show, notes that at one point in the series, Ted “describes his goals as a soccer coach, and he could mention the championships he hopes to win or some other conventional metric of success, but [instead] he says, ‘For me, success is not about the wins and the losses. It’s about helping these young fells be the best versions of themselves, on and off the field.’” (Quoted in Brooks, The Atlantic, September 2023)
Advent, and hope for that matter, is not about conventional measures of success. It’s not about whether or not the world will be saved between now and next year’s first Sunday of Advent; it’s not about whether we can solve all of the problems out there. It’s not about our church being successful, whether our giving or our worship attendance goes up this year, and its not about you being whole—and arriving on Christmas Eve with the perfect Christmas prepared and your personal problems all fixed and your prayer life at its best. Advent is about hope in a broken world, and the need for us to speak the good news to one another and to all we meet. To do the best we can each day, and speak hope into a world where hope is so needed. Advent means that in spite of all the reasons to doubt, we will keep on saying those same old, hopeful words: ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’ Bring salvation to the world, for we need it. Feed your flock like a shepherd. Gather us, your lambs, into the arms of your mercy. Give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and guide our feet into the way of peace. Amen.