ADVENT - HOPE

Stafford Greer, Lead Site Pastor

With the proliferation of online shopping, parcel tracking has become the norm; our hearts flutter with an email notification that our item has been shipped. With haste, we click “track package” only to be saddened that in reality, it was only the shipping label that has been created and we’ll have to wait a bit longer to track our package.

While the word, Advent, literally means, ‘arrival, the season of Advent is meant to remind us of our waiting. It is actually in the waiting that we sit with our longings. The waiting shapes and forms our souls; it teaches, instructs, rebukes, and corrects us. And with the invention of same-day shipping, apps that will track your parcels, and even Amazon’s live tracking of the delivery truck, we often don’t have to wait very long… at least not for our packages.

But if you’ve ever really been in a season of waiting, you know how dark that season of waiting for the arrival can actually be: waiting on a diagnosis, an employment opportunity, or the word on the safety of a relative or friend.

The traditional themes of Advent have changed and morphed throughout the years. What we contemporarily celebrate with the Advent season - Hope, Peace, Joy and Love - along with decorations, Christmas carols, and upbeat spirits, is not the traditional themes leading up to Christmas.

Traditionally, the Advent season has been known as “the four last things” which are Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell.

“Oh,” you might say, “that doesn’t feel very Christmas-y!” And you’d be right. That’s because Advent is not Christmas; it is the waiting, the yearning, the longing, for Christmas. Advent traditionally doesn’t have any of the festivities that we’ve assigned to Christmas (lights, decorations, celebrations, carols, etc.), because, as priest and author Fleming Rutledge would say, “Advent begins in the dark.” It is only after Christmas day that the decorations would be brought out and the celebration of the first advent (arrival) of the Messiah takes place.

In fact, in the church calendar (thinking in the ‘universal church’ sense… not RockPointe calendar), there are twelve days of Christmas to celebrate the arrival of the Messiah. (And you thought The Twelve Days of Christmas was just a weird, annoying song!)

I’ve actually longed to do an Advent sermon series that embodies the darker themes of “the last four things.” Don’t worry - we’re not doing that this year! We are, in fact, going to embrace the themes of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love and examine the advent of the Messiah through the lens of the prophet Isaiah.

This Sunday is the theme of Hope.

Hope is vital in waiting and I think can thematically fit with the “Advent begins in the dark” messaging of the last four things. For Israel, they were longing for when their promised messiah would come and rescue them; the fulfillment of the covenant with King David, that there would be someone from David’s lineage that would reign forever on the throne (cf. 2 Samuel 7). Yet, the story of Israel and Judah was one marked by failure to keep the covenant, oppression from enemies, and struggle to remain pure and clean from idols. They needed a saviour to rescue them. From their position of failure and oppression, hope in the faithfulness of Yahweh remained.

They needed God to come down to their level; to meet them in their need, to rescue them from their enemies, and to give them peace. The prophet Isaiah calls out to Yahweh in Isaiah 64:1-3, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down… come down to make your name known…you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down and the mountains trembled.”

This advent, you might find yourself ‘in the darkness’ and needing hope, needing a saviour, needing God to come down. While Jesus came down to us in the first advent, we also look forward to his second coming, where he will come down again and make all things new.

The temptation might be to rush through a season of darkness and waiting, but the Advent season invites us to live there and to let the challenges of life shape us and our faith; to shape our prayers, and to wait on the Lord. May the Lord meet you in this season of waiting and be the hope that you are longing for.