“O Come, O Come Emmanuel”
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
First Sunday of Advent – November 29, 2009
Luke 21: 25-36: Jeremiah 33: 14-16
Can you believe its Advent already? We have barely stepped away from the Thanksgiving table and suddenly it is Advent. We are already preparing for Christmas.
This morning we begin at church with traditions like the lighting of the advent wreath. But outside the Christmas machine is already in full gear. Holiday sales began even before last Friday. The advertisements are flooding the television shows. I began to hear around the clock Christmas Carols on 97.1 two weeks ago.
Before we get Christmas, we have another liturgical season to go through at the church. A wonderful season. The season of Advent. Advent from the Latin means “coming” or “arrival” and it heralds not only the coming of Jesus at Christmas, but the final coming of Christ.
Our denominational lectionary suggests our second lesson for today from Luke’s Gospel. It’s a lesson about the signs of the final coming of Christ and how they are not what we might expect. So we need to stay alert for the surprises of God. Just as our understanding of Jesus’ life makes the most sense when we look backwards from an understanding that God will defeat death at Easter, so too our understanding of Jesus’ birth at Christmas becomes more clear when have an understanding from our scripture and tradition of the signs of Christ’s eventual return. For that says a lot about how we should prepare for Christmas during Advent. Reading now from God’s holy word.
Advent is a season that not only looks backwards to Jesus’ birth 2000 years ago, but also looks forward to Christ’s return. This parallels the forward-looking nature of the Israelites who for hundreds of years looked forward to the coming of a Messiah to transform and redeem them. Bill read beautifully a famous passage from Jeremiah 33. Jeremiah looked to the “coming days” when the messiah would fulfill God’s promise that “Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.”
Centuries before the birth of Jesus, God’s people were looking for salvation. The Babylonians had defeated their country, devastated their holy city, Jerusalem, destroyed their temple, and driven them through the desert to live in Babylonian captivity. They longed to return home. As the Psalmist put it, “By the rivers of Babylon —we sat down and we wept when we remembered Zion. “
The prophet Isaiah wrote that God would rescue “captive Israel” from their Babylonian captivity. The prophet inspired the Advent song we will shortly sing, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here.”
But the Israelites had to wait to return home. They had to wait centuries for the coming of their Messiah. Advent underscores that we to have to wait for the promised return of God’s kingdom.
We practice our waiting each year at Advent. Many of us put wrapped presents under trimmed trees, but we have to wait these weeks in order to open them. We hear the words of the prophets about the restoration of God’s people, and yet we put off reflecting on the parts of our lives that need to be reviewed, renewed and restored. We hear the words of the coming messiah and we are tempted to fast forward our lives to focus on the coming of someone else at Christmas who brings presents on his sleigh. But we aren’t there yet. We have to wait. Most of us don’t like to wait. We like to be people of action.
But good things come to those who wait. Waiting breeds discipline, character and self control. And so we celebrate the Advent discipline of waiting. Some of the greatest joys in life come when we least expect them. So perhaps learning to wait pays off.
Because the joys often come when we do not expect them we must be alert and watchful. My family was in Cape Cod for Thanksgiving this week and I read in the local newspaper about a Massachusetts woman who was holding a fundraiser to raise $2600 so that her pet turkey could have cataract surgery. The woman was very concerned that her pet was unable to watch his food, watch for predators, or watch for other turkeys. Interesting idea, though it seems to me that Thanksgiving week is not the right time to try and raise funds for surgery to save your pet turkey.
The point in Luke’s Gospel is the value of watching and paying attention. In Luke, Jesus implores the people to pay attention to the signs from God. If we don’t pay attention we might miss the signs of God’s return. The reason Jesus tells his followers to be alert for the signs is that the Israelites missed the signs of Christ’s first coming. As we hear in the Old Testament, Israel had waited for centuries for its messiah to come, defeat their enemies, and restore their monarchy. And yet the reign that Jesus offered was something different. It was a more powerful, yet a quieter, more humble vision than what was expected. It came in the birth of a baby, not a conqueror in a chariot. Many people at the time missed the coming of the messiah because they were looking for something different. Israel was looking for a particular type of savior. The messiah who met each of their criterion and all of their expectations. But then God came as a baby in a common stable.
In Advent, we can become so caught up in getting ready for Christmas. In the wrapping and the baking and the notes and the organizing life to get out of the way all the things we have to do in order to focus on the joy of Christ’s birth, that we never get around to enjoying the magic of Christ’s birth or the joys of Advent itself. God comes in different ways, at different times, to people in different circumstances. If we are willing to wait for God and not rush through our seasons, if we are open to watching for God’s signs, then we may discover a significant presence of God where we least expect it.
Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, What the Dog Saw, contains a series of his best New Yorker essays from the past decade. In his book, Gladwell tries to answer the question people constantly ask him, “Where do you get your ideas?” His solution is to be watchful. To look around him. Gladwell writes, “Our instinct as humans is to assume that most things around us are not interesting. We flip through the channels on the television and reject ten before we settle on one. We go to a bookstore and look at twenty novels before we pick the one we want. We flip through and rank and judge. We have to. There is just so much out there. But to observe and understand, we have to fight that instinct. We have to find the interesting in the everyday.” We have to watch what is going on around us.
Theological Frederick Buechner suggests that we watch what is going on inside ourselves as well. He writes, "Listen to what's happening in your own life-the experiences that somehow, even if you can't say how, seem either to illumine, or to be illumined by, religious truth. Pay special attention to those times when you find tears in your eyes, even if you don't know why the tears are there. Listen to your life."
We do not really get ready for Christmas unless we notice what is going on around and within ourselves. During Advent we don’t just wait for Christmas by passively ignoring our own feelings and what is going on inside us. Being watchful is about coming to terms with what is going on inside ourselves. Because what is going on in your life might help you realize that what you are looking for is found in your relationship with God. The message of Advent is that when you wait and look and watch, you may find God in a way you don’t expect.
But we don’t take the time to wait and watch for God unless we recognize and acknowledge our own need for someone to help us. As many of you know, I typically spend the weekend before Thanksgiving with good college friends in New England. Six friends fly from as far as Europe and Japan to be there for 72 hours of ritual and catching up. I caught only the tail end of it this year, but it was still a special experience. We raised glasses and threw footballs as we have each year since college. But we did something this year we haven’t done as much of over the years. We asked for help. As we all are reaching 40, I notice a new willingness among the guys in sharing real problems and ask for help. Whether it’s one friend seeking marriage support, another who has come back recently from serving in Iraq and Afghanistan seeking attention for some challenges still being faced, another who has young children and the weight of underemployment and the pressure of making ends meet is placing pressure that I haven’t seen on him since college. And there, “the guys,” a group much more accustomed to quoting movie lines and eating pizza late at night, spent a few days talking about individual and collective problems. And asking each other for help.
During the next four weeks, as we prepare for Christmas, we must get our heads around that idea that we need help.
If we are A-ok, then Christmas is a holiday about our giving our presents to people. If we are open to our need for help, then Christmas is about our receiving God’s present to us. God’s presence with us.
Someone called me the other day to ask why we need to have a prayer of confession in our order of worship each Sunday. We have a prayer of confession because we need help. It’s a reminder each week that we are not God. That we confess our shortcomings as an act of worship. It’s our saying, “God, I am not perfect and cannot do it all myself. I need you.”
In a few moments, we will join with faithful people from centuries past in reciting the Apostle’s Creed. This is one of the eleven confessions in our Book of Confessions. We recite these confessions because our Reformed tradition is rooted in confessing. We confess because we are not perfect. We are not whole in ourselves.
We will be reading a confession each Advent Sunday as we prepare for Christmas. We all may not agree with every line of every Confession we read. Yet they are important. They teach us what Christians at different points in history thought about God and the relationship between Christ and the world. And they can inspire us to think about our own relationships with God and what it is that we believe. I hope that as we approach Christmas we will begin to reflect more and more on our own confession of faith.
Each week, when we pray our prayer of confession or when we state a confession of faith, we confess our trust in God. We trust that God will come again because what happened in a manager 2000 years ago showed that God keeps God’s promises. God came to be with us. As the prophet Isaiah said, the messiah will come and will be called “Emmanuel, God with us.”
So God came and God was with us. And now we look expectantly for that holy one to return. We wait, we watch and we worship.
For God is coming to be with us again. Christ is coming in a new and fresh way this year. To you and to me. So come, oh come Emmanuel. Thanks be to God. Amen.
