What shall we cry?
ADVENT 1
Jeremiah 33:10-18; Mark 8:27-29
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This year, in Advent worship,
there will be lots of crying.
Good crying.
We as a community of worship, every Sunday,
will cry out news the world needs to hear—
the news we need to hear.
You know,
before live news alerts lit up our phones 20 times a day,
before cable news channels talked at us 24/7,
even before newspapers,
a crier would stand in the middle of the town square,
and cry out the latest news people should know.
This happened across many cultures.
Typically, it was a single crier,
holding a bell, or maybe a drum or trumpet,
to first catch people’s attention.
And once some people gathered to listen,
they would cry the news.
I’d like to suggest that Advent is a season
when we are called to be listeners and criers.
It’s a paying-attention time,
a straining-to-hear time,
and then a time to do the work of angels,
to cry out what we hear.
Yes, do the work of angels.
Somewhere along the line,
angels became a symbol of innocence and beauty—
Like, “Well aren’t you just the little angel?”
That’s not what angels are about.
Angels are criers.
They are news-bearers, messengers.
The word angel literally means messenger.
The most accurate rendition of an angel,
is when they hold a trumpet.
In the biblical narrative,
angels perform an essential task on behalf of heaven.
They connect earth and heaven.
They keep the divine and the human in touch.
They proclaim news of God’s activity on earth.
Jesus said to his disciples, just before he left for heaven,
to go and bear witness to his work and words,
in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth—
So I think it’s abundantly clear
that our work, and the work of angels,
are very much parallel to each other.
Even, hard to tell apart.
Hence, our Advent theme, “What shall we cry?”
We will cry HOPE! and cry PEACE! and cry JOY! and cry LOVE!
This is good work we are called to do. Let’s embrace it.
Keep in mind our cries are not just aimed
out into a big dark world beyond us.
No, we also cry hope, peace, joy, and love,
to each other, and to ourselves.
And we cry them stubbornly and persistently,
because we ourselves often have trouble believing them.
_____________________
Take hope, for example.
It is our Christian vocation
to live in hope,
to proclaim hope,
to invite others to hope.
Despair is not our vocation. Hope is.
Always has been.
As bad as things are now in the world,
this is not really the worst of times, historically.
In terms of loss of human life,
World War II killed 80 million people in six years,
including 50 million civilians.
The Chinese famine of the 1950s killed over 20 million.
We are a divided country now,
but 150 years ago, our own Civil War took the lives
of maybe 3/4 of a million people.
In percentage of the population,
that’s like losing 8 million people today.
In all these historic tragedies,
domestically and globally,
persons of faith, like us, did not stop hoping.
We made sacrifices, we got to work
to relieve human suffering
to rebuild lives and societies.
We formed global relief organizations that still thrive today,
like MCC, and MDS.
Other groups mobilized as well.
The human spirit, enlivened by the Spirit of God,
did not retreat or walk away.
It engaged.
It cried, “Hope!”
Now, today, again, we are in dire straits,
and many followers of Jesus express a sense of hopelessness.
Why?
Have we forgotten our reason for hope?
Well, then . . . what is it?
Why should we hope?
On what basis can we hope?
Where is there solid ground to stand on?
How can we trust in a good that is larger than ourselves,
a good that will triumph over evil one day?
Do we actually possess such a hope?
Or better, does such a hope possess us?
It should, because we have a sturdy theology of hope.
Words of hope abound in scripture.
Gloria read some from Isaiah 40 at the opening,
words we’ll look at in more depth next Sunday.
And in today’s text,
the scene is that of devastation, all around,
the land not fit for human or animal.
And yet . . . and yet!
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord . . .
when once more will be heard
the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness,
the voice of the bridegroom and the bride,
the voices of those who sing as they bring thank offerings
to the house of the Lord.”
And what will cause this turning around
of the fortunes of the earth and its people?
God and human beings acting in concert with each other.
It will be divine and human collaboration . . . co-laboring . . .
working together.
That is the way God set up this universe, my friends.
God does not fix this world by waving a magic wand,
or wielding a light saber.
No, God saves the world in a grand act of collaboration.
God needs us!
Because God is a collaborating Savior.
In another passage from Isaiah, we hear these words:
When we loose the bonds of injustice,
let the oppressed go free,
share our bread with the hungry,
bring the poor into our house,
and clothe the naked like we clothe ourselves . . .
then the light of God will shine,
Yahweh will make us like a well-watered garden,
and the ruins will be rebuilt.
In other words,
we do the work of obeying God’s demand
for justice and compassion,
and God does the work of healing the land.
Both God and we have our work cut out for us,
but it’s collaboration.
Now . . . have we always been good collaborators?
By no means.
In fact, sometimes people of faith
have added to the world’s injustices,
instead of collaborating with God
in the work of undoing injustice.
But hear this:
Despite our failures,
we humans are still God’s first choice
as partners in healing the world.
We see utter devastation now being wrought on this earth—
Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, South Sudan, and more.
But the collaborating Savior is not giving up on the project.
God still invites us to cry and live, “Hope!”
So what does crying hope look like?
What does hope in action look like?
Pastor and author Scott Hoezee (José),
answers this when he wrote,
“Hope is what got Mother Theresa
to bathe the putrid flesh of lepers in Calcutta.
Hope is what made Martin Luther King and others
walk across the bridge in Selma.
Hope is what got Nelson Mandela
out of his prison bed every morning.
Hope is what moves volunteers in a soup kitchen
to ladle out chicken and rice . . .
It is not the hopeless who
establish hospices and Ebola clinics in Africa,
or who stand in the breach when rival drug gangs
threaten to shoot up neighborhoods,
or who boldly stand up to power.
It is the hope-FULL who do all that.
Believing in a God who makes things right,
does not lead us toward inaction or withdrawal.
Rather, believing in a saving God who saves through collaboration,
sends us out into the world with purpose and hope,
no matter how dire or dangerous it becomes.
Not suggesting we all walk away from our present lives,
and walk into war zones—although some are called to do that.
Sometimes our acts of collaboration are local, even next-door.
They may look pretty small, even insignificant.
But in collaboration with God’s Spirit,
they become acts of grace and salvation.
_____________________
So today, as a sign of our commitment to collaborate with God,
in God’s saving and reconciling and redeeming work,
we are going to say yes to the invitation
to join with Christ and with others
at the table spread with love.
We call it the communion table.
We could also call it, this morning, the collaboration table.
Because we are invited to share in and partake of
these symbols of saving grace:
the broken bread, and shared cup.
—Phil Kniss, December 3, 2023
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