Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday of the new Church Year. It is the first Sunday of our annual journey through Jesus’s life, from his birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension, on to Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down upon the Apostles and then sent them, and us, as the Body of Christ out into the world to be Christ’s loving hands and heart.
We go through this journey of the first part of Jesus’s life so we can pattern our own lives on his and better be the Body of Christ. The first steps of this journey more properly belong on Christmas, when we celebrate his birth. That is when his life began, after all. So what are we doing in Advent? Why is this the start of the new Church Year?
This short four-Sunday season of Advent, which is three and a half weeks this year, is a season of preparation for the journey. It is always wise to prepare for any journey. We need to get our tickets, line up our lodging, pack our bags, throw in a couple of changes of clothes and any medication, find a good book to read, and anything else we might need for a successful trip. Whether this journey is a hike or a car ride, a train trip or airplane flight, or a boat voyage, we also need to throw in our pack some good snacks to keep us well nourished.
Of course, our liturgical journey, our journey with Christ through his life, is not literal. It is a spiritual journey, and Advent is a time to prepare spiritually. While the preparations we do in Advent are things like getting the Christmas tree up and trimmed, hanging the lights, baking the cookies, wrapping the presents and so forth, Advent is also, and I would suggest more importantly, a time for us to fill our spiritual baggage with all that we need for this journey through Jesus’s life, to prepare our souls to grow with Christ this year.
One of the items that Advent gives us to throw into our pack for the journey is some rich and meaningful Scripture readings. There are certainly some great Psalms, Epistles, and Gospels, like we heard today, but I encourage you to pay extra close attention this season to the first reading from Isaiah every week. We will hear from Isaiah every week of Advent this year. Make sure that you pack those readings into your luggage.
Isaiah lived in a time of great despair, and a time of great hope. These two things are not opposites. They are related to each other. I recently read a book on hope by a Korean-German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, in which he argues that despair and hope go hand in hand like a mountain and a valley. They need each other, they create each other. The deeper the despair, the higher the hope we can have.
Isaiah lived in a time in which everything that he and his people thought about the world, their identity as a people, and their relationship to God had been uprooted. The temple, the center of their faith, was destroyed, and the people were sent to live in exile. This was the time the Psalmist would say we hung up our harps and wept. Into this time, God sent Isaiah for two purposes: to explain what happened and why they were living in this great despair, and to offer them hope. The explanation that Isaiah and almost all of the prophets gave for why they were in this situation, is pretty straightforward. They failed in the twin commandments to love God and love neighbor. These two commands are linked in creation, for where does the image of God reside but in your neighbor. As Genesis teaches us, every single person is made in God’s image. They had failed to worship God, and equally failed to honor the image of God in others. Their failures were especially acute around those who were suffering, the poor, the widow, the orphan, and many more.
And yet, Isaiah was also sent to offer hope. Out of the deepest despair can come the highest hope. They need each other, they create each other. And boy, did Isaiah have some lofty hopes that he shared in the depths of this despair. Like in today’s reading where Isaiah shows us God’s dream of peace in which the swords are turned into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks. War doesn’t just end in this vision, but the weapons of war are transformed into tools of agriculture. That which once took life now gives life. The heights of these hopes can reveal the depths of the despair, and throughout the weeks ahead we will see how deep the despair was when we hear some of the wild visions of hope that Isaiah had. We will hear of God’s dream of vegetarian lions, and Isaiah will share about the predator and the prey resting peacefully in each other’s presence. It is a radical transformation of this world’s order.
We will hear of the miraculous healing of people, and the transformation of barren landscapes from death into life. And we will hear of leaders who are not strong and mighty, but gentle and lowly like children. In fact, we will hear of one Child in particular whom we have come to understand and to know as the one humbly born in a stable and placed in a manger among the straw and the animals. Born to more than lead us, he was born to nourish us with his very body in a holy and divine life.
While this dream, this vision, this hope is partially realized in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, it does not take much looking around to realize that it has not been fully realized. We still live far from the dream. But the thing about hope is that it is like dawn, the period every morning when the sun hasn’t yet risen, but the light is beginning to peek up over the horizon. Hope looks to the horizon and sees the light that precedes the sun’s rise.
I used to run a lot, but I’m out of the habit, although Ryan is working hard to get me back into it. But back in the day when I used to run a lot, my favorite time to run was early in the morning, starting while it was still dark before dawn, then running through dawn until the sun rose. Often a line from Psalm 57 was repeating in my head like a mantra, “wake up my spirit, awake, lute and harp. I myself will waken the dawn.” Dawn is a beautiful anticipatory moment of what could be when the day isn’t quite here, and it holds all of the day’s potential. For me, running at dawn was a great moment of hope, a moment of what a full, complete, and thriving life could be.
How much more is Isaiah’s great vision? A dawn not of the daily return of the light radiating from our solar system’s star, the sun, but the dawn from the light of Christ, and the peaceable Kingdom that it illuminates. Isaiah offers hope to us by sharing God’s dream of what this world could be like. He shares his hope out of the depths of his people’s deepest despair, and continues to share that hope with the depths of our despair today. Even if it feels like the entire world has been turned upside down, our identity destroyed, and our relationship and understanding of God has been shaken, there is still hope. And hope opens the imagination to see new possibilities.
So get ready for Advent. Get ready for this Advent, my friends. Prepare yourself for the journey. Pack your bags, and don’t forget to throw in Isaiah’s vision of God’s dream into your pack. You will want to read, learn, mark, and inwardly digest it as we go on this journey with Christ. As you more fully pattern your life on His this year, you can help waken the dawn and move one step closer to that moment of the realization of the hope of God’s dream.
AMEN.
