The Reformed Church of Locust Valley
Advent II December 8, 2002
Is. 40:1-11, 2 Peter 3:8-15a
“Hold On!”
“But do not ignore this one fact, beloved,
that with the Lord
one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness,
but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that nay should perish, but that all should reach repentance.…”
- II Peter 3:8,9
I don’t know how I feel about the Christmas Lexus commercials. Have you seen them? In a series of vignettes, a key to a new Lexus is given to a very surprised and very pleased wife or husband. IN one instance, the husband has the family dog take the ribbon holding the keys to his wife. In another, the husband and wife are decorating the tree, with the man handing his wife the ornaments who then hangs them on the tree. After handing her ornament after ornament, he hands her keys to a new Lexus. I don’t know how I feel about these commercials. To be honest, I love the expressions of delight and glee and surprise on the faces of the women. But part of me says, “Isn’t there something more to the Christmas spirit than tens of thousands of dollars of automobile?
I would much rather see the look of surprise on the face of a gangly adolescent opening a gift from our church through the Christmas angel project. It seems to me that something more of value in that than another expensive gift to another home that already has way more than they need. It seems to me that that is somehow closer to what Christmas is all about.
We need a better sense that we are temporary.
You know what it’s like to be somewhere temporary. Have you ever sat in a waiting room at the auto repair shop? The nicest ones in the nicest dealerships still have a faint scent of oil. And no matter how hard those guys try, they just can’t seem to get the bathrooms clean enough and to keep the coffee area just right. When you are there, waiting for some project to be completed on your car, vaguely worried over what it will cost, you know you are somewhere temporary. You have to be here right now, but you won’t be here forever, though it can seem like forever!
How about in the hospital? Once you get admitted to the hospital, what is your primary goal? Getting out of the hospital! Being poked, prodded, having the last vestige of human dignity stripped from you, the incessant noise, even at three in the morning. The being woken up for an IV flush and then being told to get some rest. You are there, and know it’s temporary and say, “Thank God!”
We are here temporarily too.
If somehow, we could go back in time and be in this church 75 years ago, you would know no one here. This feels like your church right now, but there was a time when people worshiped here before you and there will be a time when we will be gone, and a whole group of people unknown to us, perhaps unborn will worship here.
But we forget that.
Maybe we forget that because we are afraid of it. We are mortal. This past week the whole east coast was lashed with a snowstorm. It claimed at least 26 lives. We can’t be sure about tomorrow. Something might snatch our health, or our wealth or our very lives.
There are no guarantees.
What does the future hold?
How should we move into the future? Afraid, or with confidence?
Waiting is not all always bad. While no healthy person wants to be waiting for a car repair or to get out of the hospital, some waiting is good. In fact, some is exquisite.
Last week’s Newsweek magazine hailed the trend among young people to wait to have sex. I think everyone will agree it’s worth waiting for! The Biblical view of sex is the total union of two human beings. So intimate is the sexual relationship in the Bible that the euphemism, the word used for it is “to know.” More young people are saving that closest, most intimate of all human relationships until the moment when it can be shared in the bonds of marriage. That is a good waiting.
The student working hard to achieve success in school knows what good waiting is. Step by step, week by week, learning more and more to arrive at mastery of the subject.
A young family, denying themselves immediate pleasures to put a decent amount of money aside each payday to save for the down payment for a house of their own to raise a family. That is a good waiting.
Well, everyone in this church is waiting for the Day of the Lord. We are waiting for the day when Christ will return and claim his church, gathering his people from around the world to enter the kingdom of God never to leave it again. That is a “good” waiting.
You needn’t look far to see that the world is not what it should be, what it can be. The latest economic downturn is raising a new crop of bankruptcies. Racial tensions still plague and divide our nation. Fearing weapons of mass destruction, we contemplate war against Iraq, even while we recognize that many other nations would like to have and use against their enemies those same demonic weapons. Hotels are blown up and lives snuffed out by suicide terrorist bombers. AIDS races across Africa and other parts of the world. The specter of starvation once again rises for tens of millions of people.
We read in the Bible that God created the world and saw that it was good. But it has strayed from God. It should be a Garden of Eden, but it is not. And it seems out of our control to make everything right.
The Bible says God will not leave it this way, but will restore the world to the right way. But not yet. When? Soon. But not yet.
And the good news is that the Day of the Lord is coming. Christians face the future with confidence because God will rule. God will cast out evil and make everything right forever.
Senator John McCain of Arizona was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict. He was shot down and held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi for 5 ½ years, 1967-1973, spending much of it in solitary confinement.John McCain said this, “When I was being mistreated by the North Vietnamese, many times I found myself asking to live just one more minute rather than one more hour or one more day. And I know I was able to hang on longer as a prisoner of war because of the spiritual help that I received through prayer.”“At Christmas, I was the room chaplain, not because of my excessive virtue, but because I knew all the prayers that went with a church service, since I had been in a boarding school and was an Episcopalian. We asked for a Bible, and the Vietnamese said they didn’t have any. Later we learned that thousands of Bibles had been sent to us.”“Four days before Christmas, I was told that I could copy prayers and stories from the only Bible the Vietnamese had available…Our service consisted of a biblical passage read by me, followed by an appropriate song by the choir. I talked about the birth of Christ and the choir sang, ‘Silent Night.’”“I looked around the room and there were tears in those men’s eyes. They weren’t tears of anger or fright or sorrow or bitterness or even longing for home. They were tears of joy that, for the first time in seven years for some of them there was a celebration of Christmas together as Americans.” (Homiletics mag. 14:6)There is good waiting and there is bad waiting. Note please that it isn’t so much the circumstances of the waiting, as what is being waited for. The goal.Thus, those soldiers, in miserable circumstances hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year, maybe losing hope of seeing their families again, of being alive at Christmas next year, even in those circumstances could know supreme joy. Because Jesus was their rock. And God was going to call them home someday and make things right. It matters.I wonder if we’re not more afraid when things are going very well. As a nation, we are not a particularly happy people. We are forever suing each other, forever going after more and more thrills and bigger and bigger toys and things, but the happiness quotient is going down instead of up. Do you know why?You do know why, and when I say it you will know you knew it. The American people are not especially happy people because we as a nation are seeking fulfillment in things and goals that are less than God. Only God can give joy. And when people are feverishly searching for it everywhere else they will never find it, no many how many Lexus keys the family dog brings to you. We were created for communion with God, and we are unhappy when we seek God anywhere else than where God is – in Jesus Christ.So it is you see, that we can come out of our homes, and drive our nice cars, and be well fed and have good insurance and still be unhappy. Because God and God alone can give us joy. So it is, you see, that John McCain and his comrades, in a dirty, squalid prison in Hanoi, beaten, hungry, with seemingly no future, can actually cry for joy, when they hear the Bible read, because they “got nothing else BUT God.”So the good news is this, we are waiting for Christ’s return. We are waiting for the answer to our prayer in the Lord’s Prayer, “…thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”There is no guarantee the road will be smooth, but there is this guarantee, the road runs to God, and we’ll make it there.Your life is in the hand of God. God will receive you. And then Peter tells us what difference that makes. “Therefore, beloved, since you wait for these, be zealous to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. And count the forbearance of our Lord as salvation (II Pet. 3:14,15a).”Why hasn’t the end come any sooner? Because God wants all to be saved. We must be patient.But it makes al the difference in the world what we do while we wait.God’s people are to live as if the end has already come. As if the kingdom of peace, love and justice has already been established. There is so much need. So much suffering. We are to minister to other. The church is to witness to as many as we can, showing them Jesus Christ, and to help in every spiritual and material way, those who are hurting.And when we do that, we come alongside God. We feel God’s presence, pleasure and power. When we work with Christ, we are truly alive. And when we work with Christ, then we will find joy. Joy no matter what. For the victory belongs to the Lord, and we are the Lord’s and so the victory is ours!Thanks be to God!
Fred D. Mueller
