Time with the children of God—Advent wreath first Sunday
Today we begin the church season of Advent. “Advent” means “arrival” or “coming,” and during Advent we count down the weeks and days until Christmas when we celebrate Jesus’ birth.
Jesus was born to be the Saviour of the world to take away everybody’s sins so that we can live with God in heaven forever.
A tradition in Advent is to have an Advent wreath, like the lovely one we have here. This is an old tradition which began in Germany in 1839. A pastor used the wheel of a cart. He put twenty small red candles and four large white candles around the ring of the wheel. The red candles were lit on weekdays, and the four white candles were lit on Sundays. It helped people count down to Christmas Day to celebrate Jesus’ birth.
We just have four candles these days, one for each Sunday of Advent. Each candle shows what Jesus brought to earth when he was born: hope, peace, joy, and love.
The First Candle which we light today represents hope. It reminds us to look forward in hope to Jesus’ coming back to earth to take us home to heaven.
Dear Jesus, help us always to put our hope and trust in you, so that when you return we may be with you in heaven forever. Amen.
SERMON
Hope has been defined as “To cherish a desire with anticipation” or “to want something to happen or be true”. When we get our hopes up, it means that we are expecting something good to happen. Throughout life we all hope for different things, and how much we get our hopes up for them often corresponds to what level of control we have in the situation.
The idea of hope in the Bible, though, is different to what our minds tend to picture with the word “hope.” Biblical hope isn’t hoping for better circumstances: it’s waiting for God himself to show up and expecting him to do what he has promised.
The Old Testament readings in today’s Advent service tell of the people’s hope for God to show up. They were waiting, watching, looking out for God to send their Saviour ever since he promise in the Garden of Eden: “he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Genesis 3:15b).
Abraham hoped in this promise of a Saviour—the Saviour from his own descendants, even though he was 99 when God visited him and said: “Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.” (Genesis 18:14). Yet Abram hoped in what God had said. In Romans 4, Paul gives this summary:
“Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised” (Romans 4:18-21).
Abraham’s hope was far more than a wish that things would turn out alright. Paul qualifies what Christian hope means: “fully persuaded that God has power to do what he has promised.” Abraham was certain that God would bring about this miraculous birth.
In our final reading today (Luke 1:26-38) we also hear of hope for a miraculous birth: In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you.”
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favour with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
The angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”
Like Sarah thousands of years before her, Mary would receive God’s favour, and against everything humanly possible, miraculously conceive. She would bear her Son Jesus, but for the condition of the sinful nature to not be passed on from parents to child in the normal way, the conception of the Son of God in human flesh had to be miraculous by the Holy Spirit.
That all sounds good in hindsight, but what about Mary? What if that were you—a young unmarried mother in times where there was great social stigma and exclusion, and even the death penalty for unfaithfulness (Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22)? That’s why Joseph would later have in mind to divorce Mary quietly, because he loved her. And probably, any of us would too! Imagine the turmoil trying to work out how to tell Joseph: “No I haven’t been unfaithful Joseph! I haven’t been sleeping around! The angel Gabriel told me that the baby was conceived by the Holy Spirit”. Imagine Joseph, heartbroken, angry, hurt: “Yeah right Mary! What a story! I trusted you!”
Just imagine if that were you! What was God doing, putting her in a position where she was faced with being cut off, destitute and even put to death. What a lonely road for Mary!
Except it wasn’t lonely. The angel Gabriel greeted her with the words: “Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you.”
So Mary responded: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” As we enter another Advent season, it’s important to focus on what God did—the fulfilment of what he first promised in the Garden of Eden, the fulfilment of what he promised to Abraham, the fulfilment of what he promised through the prophets over hundreds of years—the birth of Jesus; the arrival of God in the world as a baby, in the Person of Christ, our Saviour.
And it’s important to focus and be prepared, watching and waiting for what he still promises—that he will come again to judge the living and the dead and take his faithful people to our homeland in heaven. That time isn’t far off —not in proportion to eternity. When Gabriel announced the Good News to Mary, it was just 9 months before the long-awaited arrival of the Saviour. Mary was left to ponder what would soon take place. So too, we are called to wait, and watch and ponder as the arrival of the Lord is near.
But there is a third importance in Advent: what is the hope we have for today, and for tomorrow and our days left on this earth, however many there may be? What is the Christian’s hope?
The Lord is with you.
That’s what we say in our worship orders—slightly altered to: “The Lord be with you.” That is not a loose desire or a casual wish—but Christian hope—certainty, assurance. It is a blessing, a declaration we say before we pray and hear the bible readings—the Lord be with you in your praying and hearing of God’s word. And the congregation responds: “And also with you”, saying that Christ is with pastor and people as our chief Shepherd ministering to us as we pray and hear God speak together.
This same exchange takes place as we prepare to receive Holy Communion. “The Lord be you”/“And also with you”—a blessing and declaration that the Lord is with his people, preparing our hearts to trust his invitation and promise, and come to him at his table and receive from him his holy food. And he is with the pastor, as through him Jesus, our unseen host, sets apart ordinary bread and wine, and by his powerful words makes them his holy and precious body and blood, to eat and drink in faith that we might receive all the benefits of his life, death and resurrection.
God is with us always, but comes to us in these particular ways; in holy word and holy meal to do for us what he does nowhere else—to forgive, enlighten, bless and give guidance and food for you, body and soul.
Advent, then, is so much more than carols and candles and Christmas trees. It is more than the busy time we make it to be, rushing through shopping centre crowds and frenzied drivers looking for the same one vacant car park space. It is more than frantically sorting our Christmas shopping, racing the clock to get all our greeting cards written and posted in time, planning the Christmas meal, preparing and cooking it, stressing about how to catch up with all the family, so that by December 25th we are exhausted, before hitting the boxing day sales where hot cross buns greet us on the shelf.
It is being still—watching and waiting quietly as we wait in full assurance of that which we hope for—our Lord to come again. It is to listen and wait and watch for him in his word, recline with him at his table. It is to reflect and ponder—how might he be at work in our life? What is his will for us? Are our plans aligned to his? And should we discover, like Abraham, and like Mary, that the picture that God has for our life is so completely different than what we imagined, would we be willing to say yes, even if where his leading of our life seems impossible to us?
So, here at the beginning of another Advent season, we don’t just look for God who came back there in the distant past. Nor do we only look for God out there who is coming some time in the future. The hope of Advent is how the arrival of Jesus into the world means he can arrive into anything in our life as well. Brothers and sisters, it is time to get your hopes up—for the Lord is with you, now—today and everyday,
To live by Christian hope is to live fully persuaded that God is with us in Christ and will do as he has said, even though the circumstances haven’t come to pass yet and seem impossible to human sight and logic. This was the hope that Abraham and Mary had. Abraham believed God, and this faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. Mary believed the word of the Lord and his will for her life. She said: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
That is Christian hope. That is Christian faith. And through this faith in God’s promise you too are among those who are highly favoured by God.
No matter what you are going through, and no matter what is happening in the world around us, Jesus’ Kingdom will never end but reigns forever, and no human plans can disrupt him. God is actively working to bring his plan for the world to its triumphant fulfilment, working all things for good for those who love him. God is working towards his will being done, until the time when his kingdom will come in all its fullness and his rule will be acknowledged by every creature.
God has chosen you to be key players in this! So what do we do? It means that we do not spend our time in fear, anxiously wondering and calculating when Jesus might return. Nor does it mean being idle and complacent, thinking that God would never return in our lifetime, building our life according to our will being done.
But it means being still, being quiet. Listening and waiting, fixing our eyes on Jesus; fixing our ears on his word, stepping back from our plans for our lives and being open to his. It means stepping back from our busyness in working towards what we think should happen in our lives, and instead staying focused on Jesus, and his will being done. It means listening and praying, and standing in hope—in confidence and assurance that our redemption is drawing near.
And until it does, the Lord is with you. Amen.
