"Crying Out" Sermon from Advent 1, 2014
Sermon:
Text:
Grace and Peace to you from God our Father
and our Lord Jesus Christ who hears our cries.
Advent
is the season of preparing. It’s preparing ourselves, our church, and the
world for the coming of Christ. But, when we look at preparing as our work, it
loses some meaning. I want to take this advent to relook at what it means to
prepare, and what it means for Christ to come to us. We are going to look at
why the people of God cried out for a savior, the people of God in the Old
Testament, the people of God throughout history, and the people of God here
today. We will look at how God responds to that cry by bringing comfort to us.
We will see that God provides that comfort by coming to us, and finally, that
coming takes its form in love, and how that love changes the world.
Last week we were
talking about the church year. But, the church year did not just spring up, it
grew gradually, and Advent is one of the first seasons of the church year to
take its form. Not in the way we normally associated it, preparing for
Christmas. Advent comes from the Latin Adventus, meaning coming, but
specifically the coming of Christ. Now it’s use is with the
coming of Christ at Christmas, but it’s first use is in
the years directly after Christ’s death and resurrection and refers to Christ’s
second coming. The people of that time thought that Christ would come again
within their life time. They underwent suffering and persecution with the hope
that soon Christ would return, but as the decades went on, and they began to
understand the nature of Christ saying we will not know the time or the place,
they realized that the important coming of Christ was the one that had already
taken place. Their cries for Christ to come become cries for the already
happened coming of Christ to be realized.
Cries
for the coming of a savior did not initiate with them of course. Our old
testament text for today comes from the Third Section of Isaiah. While First
Isaiah deals with the people leading up to the exile, and Second Isaiah is to
the people in the midst of exile in Babylon, Third Isaiah is for the people
coming out of exile. They are filled with the hopes and dreams of people
essentially freed from slavery. As they return home they repeat in their head
the dreams of a rebuilt temple, and a restored people of God. And after
returning and settling down again, all that they find is conflict and ruin.
Those in who were in exile return and find that those who had not been taken
into exile have recovered as much as they could, but now conflict between who
is in control begins. The temple and it’s grounds are not
just building themselves. They expected everything to pretty much pop back to
how it was before, but here that’s not. And it’s
in that moment that they cry to God for help.
Oh,
that you would tear apart the heavens and come down.
We may be freed
from exile, but what we truly need is not freedom by ourselves, but we need
freedom in your presence. We cannot do this on our own, we need you, God. Come
down to us.
Remember
us now in the moment of our iniquity, come to us, mold us as a potter molds
clay.
That
is the people of Israel’s cry to God for a messiah.
And that cry for
God’s presence is not contained to the Old testament or to those
awaiting Christ’s anticipated soon second coming.
Our Hymn of the Day today is an
African American Spiritual, My Lord, What a Morning. Most Spirituals were
written in the years and decades of slavery. And while seemingly work songs,
things that help pass the days, they contained messages of hope and freedom.
The Spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot” referring to the
chariot of fire that takes Elijah up to heaven, calls for that same chariot to
lift them up out of Slavery. Our Spiritual today draws it’s
saving image from our Gospel text. “My Lord, what a morning, when the stars begin to fall.” From Mark verse
24 and 25, “But in those
days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not
give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven.”
This section of Mark is called the
little apocalypse, it moves us back towards that first group we were talking
about, those looking towards the second coming of Christ. The people singing
this spiritual see this image of Christ’s coming and see
in it the same hope and dreams that the people of Isaiah see. They see no where
else to turn to overcome the slavery they are under and so they cry out to God.
Our only chance for salvation is through you coming and upending everything.
For the stars to fall, the powers shaken, the sun darkened, the moon not
reflecting light. They sing and cry, we need you to come, and upend the world.
Each group says, We are here waiting in the
midst of persecution, in the midst of exile, in the midst of conflict, in the
midst of slavery, and our only hope lies in crying out to you to come to us.
That is what we see this first
Sunday of Advent, we look around us at all that is happening in the world, and
pretty much all we can see to do is cry out to God. I see Isis in Iraq and
Syria, I see Ebola in Africa, I see economic difficulties in Europe, and I
especially this week see the race relation issues in the US being brought to
the fore in all that is happening in Ferguson, Missouri.
If we truly see Advent as this
season of preparation, anticipation, and waiting for the coming of Christ, the
first step is to admit that we again need Christ to come. That when we look
around we see that we cannot accomplish this on our own, that we need Christ to
come.
And so this first week of Advent, we
cry out to God to help us. Next week, we will begin to see God’s
response.
Let us pray,
God of salvation,
we thank you for coming to us, as we prepare for you to do so again, we ask you
to help us see and know that we need you. Help us to know that it is in your
presence that we can work to overcome all that faces us. Amen.
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