Sermon – Advent II – Peace in the Storm – December 9, 2018
Have you seen those Facebook relationship settings. You can say you’re: In a relationship, single, divorced, or it’s complicated.
It’s interesting how social media has become a relationship tool. You may have seen things like this: (screenshots from actual Facebook posts) Robert breaks up with Sally by changing his relationship status from “in a relationship“ to “Single”. Sally is sad.
Molly changes her relationship status from “it’s complicated“ to “single“. Billy says “What?“. Molly says “Sorry dude!“.
But the truth is, no matter what your relationship status is, you are complicated. I am complicated.
Humans are complex creatures, aren’t we? Those we love we tend to hurt. We love God and yet we sin against God. We have goals and aspirations that are noble and strong, and yet we can get tripped up by our own weakness along the way to fulfilling our goals.
Today in our second celebration of Advent, we are encouraged to consider a big and bold and challenging and encouraging idea that’s wrapped up in a five-letter word: Peace.
We’re going to look at both of today’s passages, both to understand what they meant to the first hearers of them, and then to understand how it relates to us.
One way to think of the Isaiah 40 passage is to understand that Valleys are places of humiliation, from which the humbled will be lifted.
Mountains, the high places where the proud who exult in themselves, will be leveled off.
Isaiah was speaking to the people of Israel in exile. They lived in hardship. They suffered under the rule of foreign powers.
They had been brought low because of their disobedience to God, because of their tendency to forsake God and follow false gods.
They had been warned very clearly much earlier in their history that if they did that, they would experience such suffering, such humiliation and hardship as a consequence of turning from God
And it came to pass, although never near as severely as they had been warned. But it was rough. Very rough.
But God had not forsaken them. He had never bailed on them or withdrawn His love. But He also did not want them to live in bondage to false gods, to foreign oppressors.
The purpose of their exile had been to refine them, to cause them to understand what living without God really means.
And so they needed to learn that. They needed to learn that God is the source of life, the source of every good thing, every blessing.
The only true freedom is living in relationship with God, learning to follow His way and His will. That it the way of peace, the way of experiencing the shalom of God.
And so, in this profoundly hopeful passage, God says:
Isaiah 40:3 A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4 Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. 5 And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
So something is coming. Something GREAT is coming. This present darkness that we are experiencing is not the final word. God has the final word, and God’s Word is a good word!
Now our Luke 1:26-38 passage (Show, don’t reread)
This is a very comforting passage, I find. I also find it disturbing that this is a comforting passage, because however familiar it is it really proclaims something shocking. Very shocking.
Now most of us in this room believe in God.
If you’re like me you were raised to not believe in God, only to discover along the way that you were raised with a delusion, a theory that could not be proven and which closes the door on the best explanation for the mysteries of life.
Mysteries like love.
Like self-sacrifice. Like the “coincidences” that occur constantly in our lives that, when our eyes open, point artfully to a Divine reality.
So we may believe in God and in Christ and truly trusting in Him may well be part of who we are, part of our identity.
And yet, we should consider, are we really expecting God to break into our lives, our reality?
I think that often we don’t expect God, and I think that’s part of the human condition.
For sure the people alive around the time of the Incarnation, the time that Jesus was born, they weren’t expecting God to break in to their lives.
That’s not completely accurate.
Some of them were expecting Messiah. Some had in mind that God would break into history by sending a mighty warrior who would vanquish the enemies of the Jews.
That was their hope after being an oppressed people for many, many generations.
But it was still God at arm’s length. God sending someone else to do His work. To take care of His business.
We can accept that God’s presence may come to us in someone who visits us in the hospital, in the priest or pastor who brings us Eucharist.
But even that is arm's length. It’s still God with someone between Him and us. It still keeps the Almighty at a safe distance.
So what’s so shocking about this passage? [Highlight the bolded text below on Powerpoint]
Luke 1:31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32 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, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end." 34 "How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?" 35 The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.
What’s so shocking? This passage says that God is breaking into to human reality. The Everlasting One is personally breaking in to the human situation.
The Creator is coming. Wrapped in human flesh. No more arm’s length safety.
No more human theories about God. No more missing the point of what God is saying.
No more wondering why God allows human suffering from His place of comfort and majesty. No more asking, as though there could never be answer, no more asking: “Who is God? What does He think?
How does He feel? Why does He leave me here bleeding and haemorrhaging and suffering all alone?
Or maybe our questions is, “What would He look like if we could dare to look at Him? What would He do if He was to break into my reality and my pain”?
“The holy One to be born will be called the Son of God”. Divinity has beaten a path into the human dilemma, looked humanity straight in the eyes and called us….[Pause]…. brother, sister, friend”.
And so today we really do need to consider PEACE. What does this season call us to?
What does God say to us in this season of light, especially when we may be so aware of the darkness around us and inside us.
When our experience of life is presently, perhaps, the opposite of peace.
This season of Advent is an invitation to something that transcends my pain. To something that makes me look beyond myself to the needs of others.
But it is also a call to commit or recommit myself to the truths of this season.
A call to truth is a call to making a decision that others don’t necessarily want me to make.
What truths does this season of joy call me to? Simple. The gospel is real. The incarnation of Christ…God manifested, come to us in the flesh. This is not a fiction.
It is rather the most important truth there is.
And this truth calls to me to commit my whole life to this Christ child that we celebrate this season. See, it’s more than a call to believe.
It is a call to expect God. To expect that God DOES reach into human history… that means, by the way, into your story…the life journey you are now on. And He reaches into our lives in order to shape us.
In order to make us like his own beloved Son. And it starts by the Holy Spirit of God birthing something in you, as it birthed something in Mary.
That’s where peace comes from.
If we’ve never known the Son, if we’ve never known Jesus as Lord and Saviour, if we’ve never received Him, the Holy Spirit comes and births faith in us. He gives us the capacity to understand the gospel.
Have you ever wondered why some people understand the gospel and others just don’t see the point?
I have a relative who says: “I’ve heard the gospel and it hits me cold. It just doesn’t mean a thing”.
If that is you, and if that has been you for some time, perhaps it’s time to have a different response. Perhaps it’s time to take a step of faith and invite God to show Himself true.
That God would both give evidence that He is real and that your eyes would be open to seeing that evidence.
When the Holy Spirit comes and He is welcomed, He takes up residence in you. And He calls you to Jesus. This is an incredible gift.
So if your heart is stirred, be sure to receive the gift. This is how can we as a community make a step closer to Jesus during this season?
That’s one thing…The Holy Spirit brings faith. Saving faith. The other thing the Holy Spirit does is renew faith.
We may have been pulverized by this past week. Hopes and dreams have been bloodied and we’ve lost track of why any of it matters.
The Holy Spirit calls us to reclaim what we have believed, to return if we need to, to a place of surrender to God’s will.
To allow Him to bind up our wounds. To allow Him to take up the broken pieces of our lives.
You know, He wants to do that. He cares when we get hurt. He cares when life smacks us around.
He cares when we stumble and fall. And He does way more than care.
He calls us to lift our eyes from the muck and mire around us…to look upon Him, even as He comes to us…as an infant. What an absolutely amazing thing.
To be called upon to gaze upon the wonder of the baby in the manger, and to try to grasp once again what deep and profound love exists in that manger.
That the Christ of God would leave His comfort at the right hand of the Father in order to come to me, in order to come to you, in the manger.
Think of the energy. Think of the effort. Think of the love bound up in this act of Incarnation.
There is joy in such thoughts. There is hope in such an understanding.
I would hope and pray that the peace of God that calls out to us this season would fall upon ears that can hear.
I would hope and pray that this deep, divine peace that beckons our souls does indeed break out in us this Advent season.
We are complex creatures. But our Creator knows.
And our Redeemer, the One whose arrival we anticipate afresh this Advent, knows and loves and reaches out to you and to me in order to say: “Come, follow me”. (Pause)
Nothing touches the importance of the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord.
A close second for me is that Jesus Christ is my Lord…that He personally rules my life, that I live in the light of His loving grace. No matter the chaos inside me or in the world around me
Brothers and Sisters. Bad things will happen in the world around us, and maybe even to us. If we deny that reality, if we think that belonging to Jesus insulates us entirely, our faith will not mature enough to deal with tough things that will happen.
Happen because of sin, because of the broken world we live in, because of how complicated we are as humans.
God wants us to have peace in the midst of this broken world because He wants us to be near Him.
The alternative…to live in fear, to be freaked out when anything goes wrong, causes us to live very self-involved lives;
consumed with and distracted by our own situations instead of being focused, as God intends us to be, on the well-being of others.
I want to suggest that having peace is rooted in a deep commitment to Jesus Christ. God wants us to have peace…that’s another way of saying God wants us to know Jesus.
I know of no effective “how-to” method of having peace. Peace is in a person, Jesus Christ, and the way to have peace is to commit our whole lives to Jesus, and then to live in the Way Jesus calls us to live.
Now, without hope, without faith…despair is an understandable response to the vulnerability that we feel. But is that necessary?
By no means! What is the alternative to placing our faith in the systems of the world around us that sooner or later, we are told, will crumble? Is there an alternative, or are we stuck?
What is the solution? The solution is a Person. The solution is a powerful Person.
The solution is a powerful Person who comes to us, knowing that the power and authority and majesty He possesses is too much for us to grasp initially, too much for us to not recoil in fear from.
A person of peace, of grace, of
A Person of grace and love and compassion who comes to us this season as He came to us that first Christmas, to a world of chaos and despair.
Jesus, who entered the world as infant. Lowly, needy. Vulnerable, at risk. A little bundle of need.
Dependant entirely on His mother and step-father. We feel shakey and unsure of our ability to cope sometimes.
A human infant is the most vulnerable being on the planet. And yet God, the Maker of heaven and earth, the Creator of all the galaxies out there that we’ve just begun to map;
the Alpha and Omega, became a human child. Why? Well, in part to become for us the warmest, the safest, and most tangible of expression of the character of God
I’ve been aware of the Incarnation for a lot of years, but it remains a jolting thing to me, a marvelous mystery.
How could all that power and authority get squeezed into a human? What would all that power and authority and love look like in a human being.
Well, the answer is given to us in the life of Jesus.
The fully human, fully God person who would reveal to us the thoughts of God, the heart of God.
Who would walk the streets of Jerusalem, who would talk with the people and walk with the people and heal the people.
Who would be tried before Pilate and unjustly condemned.
The Christ child grows up to be the one who suffers for our sakes on the cross; motivated and spurred on and incarnating the mighty love of God, Jesus dies on the cross.
And He defeats death and triumphs over the grave. And all our hope and purpose and love are somehow bound up in His whole magnificent life.
Born in abject poverty, in a vile, stinking stable. Humble. Weak. Yet so incredibly powerful and world-changing in his passionate love for humankind, for you, for me.
I found a poem by Judy Booth that is based on Psalm 23 and that brings into focus why it is that we need the Prince of Peace whose first coming we celebrate this advent season.
As we close today, let’s consider this poem as an offering that perhaps expresses the desire of our heart.
"The Lord is my peace. I shall not live in anxiety. He puts me under his wing of comfort and calms my spirit within me. He takes all my anxieties on Himself and helps me to focus on Him. Yes, though I walk through a time of grave uncertainties and fierce anxieties, I will not fret-for You are my peace. Your Word and Your presence calm me now. You hold my uncertainties in the palm of Your hand. You soothe my anxious mind-You smooth my wrinkled brow. Surely serenity and trust in You shall fill me all the days of my life. And I shall keep my mind stayed on You forever".
In this world we will, as Jesus told us, have trouble, and yet Jesus has overcome the world and He is the Rock of our lives.
We confess in our hearts that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father; can we do that outloud as we have done before, church?
Can we say boldly this one critical, beautiful, unchangeable fact that God means us to anchor our lives on…that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father!?
May we say ‘yes’ in our hearts to the Christ Child who comes to us this Christmas with God’s invitation to draw near, to freshly put our trust wholly and completely in Christ who died for us.
Let’s pray. God, you know all things. You invite us this season into Your peace. Grant us faith, O Lord, that we may each take a step closer to You this season, that we might receive all Your promises and that we might live in Your peace.
In the matchless name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
The God of peace be with you all. Amen.
