This sermon will be presented, and Communion celebrated, at Forest Park Methodist Church only. China Methodist Church will have a Hanging of the Greens service.
Isaiah 64:1-9
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
you came down; the mountains quaked at your presence.
From ages past no one has heard,
no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right,
those who remember you in your ways.
But you were angry, and we sinned;
because you hid yourself we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name
or attempts to take hold of you,
for you have hidden your face from us
and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,
and do not remember iniquity forever.
Now consider, we are all your people.
Comments (2)
Comments are closed.
There’s a term I’ve heard a lot in recent years: “Level up.”
The idea behind it is that if you have more than one thing–let’s say two to make it easy–that are on different levels, and you want them to be at the same level, you can do it several ways.
One way is to lower the top thing to the level of the lower thing. That would be leveling down.
Another way is to move the lower thing up a little, and the upper thing down a little, until they are at the same level.
The other way to do it is to raise the thing that’s lower until it is all the way up to the level of the thing at the top–to level up.
It’s easy to see how this term applies in education. When different students attain learning objectives at different levels, you don’t want to close the gap by reducing the performance of the students at the top. You want to do it by improving the performance of the students at the bottom.
As we get into Advent, we enter into the biblical account of how God reconciles with is people.
Since we see the reconciliation from our perspective, it’s easy to look at it as God descending to our level. Think of the song, “Love Came Down at Christmas.” Or we talk of God coming down to earth in the form of a baby.
It is more a situation, though, that God lifts us up to him.
Just as Advent requires us to look at the depth of darkness to understand the marvel of the light, we also look at the difference between our sin and weakness and God’s righteousness to undertand the magnitude of what he is doing for us.
“A biblical theology of hope addresses the corporate dimension of human suffering and thus incorporates individual suffering into a final solidarity of all humankind.”*
When things are going well, to speak of hope is simply to wish for a slight improvement–for things to be a bit better. It’s like having a warm, delicious apply cobbler in front of you and hoping there’s ice cream to top it off with. It’s a hope for something better, but it doesn’t have the urgency that hope has when the situation is desperate.
This is why Advent begins with a reminder of how bad things are, have been, and will be. To truly understand the value of the light, we need to understand the depth of the darkness.
In her book, Rutledge emphasizes that evil is an active force in the world. Many of the bad things we se around us are simply things not being as good as they could, but are actual efforts to undermine and degrade God’s creation.
One of the ways I see evil at work in the world today is the constant effort to divide us from each other.
We see this in entertainment, which is increasingly based on one person in front of an electronic device at the expense of recreation involving groups of actual people physically with one another.
We see it in efforts to subdivide the population into smaller and smaller slivers and convince us that our differences outweigh our shared humanity.
We see it in efforts to convince us that anyone who doesn’t agree with us completely in every opinion is the enemy.
I read this line about suffering a couple of times before I recognized that it reveals another evil way we are often separated.
The idea that the universal experience of suffering is itself a means of affirming the solidarity among all people is contrasted with the frequently promoted belief that no one can understand MY pain unless they have experienced exactly the same thing I have.
While it’s true that our losses are different, our experiences are different, and our individual situations are different, I have to believe that everyone I meet has shared very similar feelings to what I’ve experienced: shock, grief, loss, loneliness, fear, isolation and hopelessness.
We should be able to relate to one another in times of grief without falling prey to the evil lie that we have to experience it on our own, without the support of anyone else, just because their loss or their experience wasn’t exactly identical to our own.
*Quotation attributed to J. Christian Baker. Page 50 of “Advent: The Once & Future Coming of Jesus Christ,” by Fleming Rutledge.