BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 27 NOVEMBER 2022 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH
Welcome to the first week of Advent! As our candle lighters said at the beginning of today’s service, this is the week of HOPE. If this is your first experience with an Advent service, please let me take just a moment and explain what we’re up to.
The term “Advent” is derived from the Latin word adventus, which means “coming” or “arrival.” It has been used by Christians for nearly two thousand years now to denote the four weeks leading up to the celebration of Jesus’s birth at Christmas. During this season, followers of Jesus have made a habit of meditating on two central events in the story of our faith: first, the historical (and unpredictable) arrival of Jesus on this earth all those years ago. And second, the Biblical promise of Jesus’s return to complete the work his arrival began, which is to make all things right. We believe that despite its current brokenness and injustice, this world God loves will one day be redeemed and restored. It must be… because God loves it. Now, like the prophets who once waited on Jesus’s birth–and like Mary, who carried the baby Jesus within her!–we do not know when this moment will come. But we know it is coming, and during Advent, we reflect on the challenges of waiting…and on the promises and character of God.
That’s what Advent is. But how is Advent celebrated? The gatherings of the church during this season are marked by two traditions, one of which is common to us at Revolution, and one of which is not. The common tradition is focusing each week on the themes of Advent, which are: hope, love, joy, and peace. The uncommon tradition is teaching these themes through the lectionary, which is a tool the historic church has used to organize its patterns of teaching Scripture. Teaching from the lectionary is a much different task for me because it requires a different way of thinking about the Bible. Typically, here at Revolution, we teach either topically, meaning we take a subject and explore what the Bible says about it, or exegetically, meaning we begin with a text and try to work our way through it. But lectionary teaching asks that we do something different. Each week, the lectionary provides us with 3-4 separate passages from Scripture and asks us to find connections between them. You might think of it this way: if each book of the Bible is a puzzle, and each verse is one of the puzzle pieces, our usual method is laying the pieces out and then fitting them together to see what picture they make. But the lectionary points out that pieces from different puzzles, from different books, can still fit together… which changes the picture we’re looking at altogether. That’s the task for each of these weeks: to see the big picture that the little pictures make. And the hope, this week, is that hope is what we find.
So, what are our puzzle pieces? There are three: a promise, a paradox, and a presence. Three “Ps” walk into a church… what does the “first P” say?
It’s a passage from the prophet Isaiah, who lived in the southern kingdom of Judah during the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, and it concerns a promise about God’s ultimate plans not just for Israel, but for all people:
In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!
Isaiah 2:2-5
Isaiah’s vision here is of something beyond a restored kingdom of Judah. God shows him a new house, His own house, and when it is established, Isaiah writes that all nations shall stream to it. Why? Because there is teaching there that leads to justice: God “shall judge between the nations,” “arbitrate for many peoples,” and because of the effectiveness of His justice, those people “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” God’s kingdom will be a place not of forced peace between people, but of inevitable peace between them, because there is no reason for war anymore.
There’s a pretty beautiful idea here, which is that the cause of grief in the world isn’t some inherent meanness in people but an insecurity in people rooted in fear that they will not be treated fairly in the world. If that is resolved, Isaiah says, not only will fairness permeate Creation, but kindness will, too. No more conflict! No more need for violence, either in aggression or in defense! “O house of Jacob, come let us walk in the light of the LORD!”
So, that’s the first “P,” the promise: the day is coming when God will raise up a Kingdom of fairness, of justice, and of peace. Oh, to wait for that day!
What’s the second puzzle piece? This one is a paradox, and it comes from Matthew’s gospel. In it, Jesus says to his disciples,
“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.
Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
Matthew 24:36-44
What is Jesus talking about here? Well, if we take this puzzle piece on its own, he’s talking to his disciples about himself. By this point in Matthew, Jesus has already identified himself as the Son of Man, and his disciples are following him because they are trusting that he’s going to deliver them from their oppressors and rise up as the king of Israel.
But if we put this piece in conversation with our first piece this morning, we might also recognize that the disciples are familiar with Isaiah, and so they are doing a bit of interpretive work themselves: they are operating under the assumption that the Kingdom of God Isaiah is talking about is also this kingdom, and if Jesus really is the one who is going to usher in God’s plan, that must mean he’s going to topple Caesar. It makes sense for them to feel this way: Rome is the greatest power anyone at that time could imagine. But it’s still a belief that makes an important assumption about the Isaiah passage, which is that the biggest power you can think of must also be the biggest power God can think of. As it turns out, seeing Jesus as the new ruler of Rome is too small for what God has in mind… but the disciples don’t know that yet!
What, then, does Jesus tell them? Well, here’s where we get to that paradox: Jesus tells them something that doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. First, he says that when the new Kingdom comes into being, nobody will see it coming. The angels don’t know; even he doesn’t know. Then, he tells them a story about Noah, which reminds them that all the people who ended up below the waters of the flood also didn’t know what was about to happen to them: it caught them entirely off guard. Then, he tells them a series of stories about people in the future, who will be just as surprised as the people in the past were.
I grew up in the ‘90s in an evangelical church. Does anyone else here remember the song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”? It was written in 1969 by Larry Norman, but it resurfaced in my childhood as a cover by the band dcTalk. That song dramatized these moments here by connecting them to the belief in the Rapture, or this moment when some Christians believe the faithful will disappear in an instant prior to the coming of Jesus’s Kingdom: “two men walking up a hill / one disappears, and one’s left standing still / I wish we’d all been ready.” I’m not here to comment on that eschatology, but I do want to stay with Jesus’s point, which seems to be that the truth is no one is ready for what’s coming: it will come like a thief in the night.
Which, of course, gets us to the problem here: Jesus says plainly to his disciples, “Keep awake!” But in the very next breath, he tells a story where the owner of a house doesn’t keep awake… because a thief comes just like Jesus says this Kingdom will come. If he’d known, he would have been ready… but he didn’t know, and neither will you! So, what is Jesus talking about? Is it possible to be ready if you are also going to be caught off guard? Which is it? What can we do?
The paradox of our second puzzle piece is that we need to be ready, but the truth is that we won’t know when what we’re supposed to be ready for will happen. So, what can we do? Perhaps our third puzzle piece can offer an answer. It’s from Paul’s letter to the Romans:
Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
Romans 13:11-14
What does Paul say in answer to our riddle? He says that whenever the Kingdom will come, now is the time to wake up. Now is the time to be watchful for it… by beginning now to live in it.
The trouble with Jesus’s paradox is that the Kingdom is framed as something to catch in the act, like a thief. This trouble is, in my view, made worse by imagining things exclusively in the way that song imagines them, as an instantaneous event we can never actually anticipate or be ready for. But what Paul says is that if instead of imagining the Kingdom as a thief in the night, we imagine the Kingdom as the light of the day, we come closer to knowing how to actually live. “The night is far gone,” he says, and “the day is near… Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably, as in the day.” How do we prepare for God’s Kingdom? Not by trying to put on our best act when God shows up to judge us! By simply choosing to live all the time in the light of His promises.
This is what is so meaningful about Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. As we talked about in our series on Mark, if death can’t hold God down, there is nothing left on this earth to fear. And fear, as we saw in the Isaiah passage, is actually what causes all the meanness and brokenness in the world!
If we put our puzzle pieces together, this is what we find: in light of Jesus’s life, the Kingdom that is still coming can get started now. We can live in it, in anticipation of its full arrival sometime in the future. What it requires from us–to tie all these threads together–is hope. Hope is what rises up in us when we hold the mystery of God up against the faithfulness of God in our story. It’s what we feel when we say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen today, but I still know the ending.” Our God is always bigger than our theories or our plans or our predictions. The prophets know that! But He is also nearer than we could ever expect Him to be: that’s the heart of what Jesus’s life means.
When we talk about hope during the Advent season, we are giving ourselves a chance to sit down, listen, and remember that it’s going to be okay. The worries and troubles of this life are real, and the truth is that they weigh us down. We become burdened by just the fact of living in a world where we experience injustice and grief and hardship. But that’s not the only world we are living in: at the same time, we have also been given this window into a new world, one which is even now beginning to rumble and stir beneath our feet. The beginning of that world was Jesus’s birth, his incarnation, when God came intimately and personally to dwell among us. And when that happened, the thief stole into the kingdom: although Fear and Death seem to reign here, as they slept in their beds of arrogance and confidence and power, a lowly husband and wife in the small town of Bethlehem took up humble residence for the night and to them, a Savior was born. To us, a Savior was born. And the erosion of this world of Fear and Death began underneath their feet.
For two thousand years now, we have tried to live in the light of this miracle. We’ve seen it beginning to work its wonders. Certainly, despite the best efforts of Fear and Death, they could do nothing to stop the life of Jesus himself. And in the lives of his followers, they have been just as impotent: even when we have every apparent reason to despair, we have pushed on. When we suffer and grieve, when we experience pain and loss, we can feel our feelings boldly and fully, knowing they cannot destroy us forever. When we gather together, as we are doing today, we are choosing to give up the currency of their world–which is our seemingly-limited time here–in order to feel again the stirring of light and life among us. The nights may seem to be getting darker, but that cannot stop dawn from breaking.
I’m drifting into poetry again. What I want to say is this: hope isn’t something we’re waiting for, hope is here. Hope is living in the light of God’s power instead of the darkness of fear. Hope is choosing community instead of isolation. Hope is living generously instead of living fearfully. Hope is declaring our allegiance to the Kingdom that is breaking into the world. With the lighting of the first candle this week, we are taking our stand as people of hope in this city. And in a few moments, when you all head back out of here and return to your daily lives, you have the choice to take this spirit of hope, this spirit of possibility and wonder and trust, with you. That doesn’t mean pretending things are okay when they aren’t. It doesn’t mean being happy all the time, even when you feel sad. What it means is holding space within you for the miracle of God’s love, even if you feel confused by it, and trusting that God is still who He has always claimed to be.
One last bit of poetry: this makes all of us a kind of “Mary,” doesn’t it? Holding space within us for the miracle of God’s love, even when we are confused by it, and trusting that God is still who He has always claimed to be. We may not know when His Kingdom will be “born”…but the world is pregnant with it even now, and the church’s job is to “nest”; to usher in God’s Kingdom by living in anticipation of it. By living in hope.
Revolution Words 