This year’s Advent theme this year is “Grace-Filled Beginnings” (a resource from the ELCA’s Western North Dakota Synod based on John Stevens’ Advent devotional book Grace-Filled Beginnings)and over these next four weeks, we’ll be exploring the significance of God’s grace in our lives as we prepare for the birth of Jesus, who is love and grace incarnate.
This week, our focus is “God’s Grace is for Us.” In the busyness of the holiday season, it’s easy to forget what it is we’re getting ready to celebrate. The miracle of Christmas—and thus, the point of Advent—is that God chooses to come and live among God’s people. When the days seem short and the nights long, when life feels disjointed and chaotic, we hold on to the hope of Advent: Christ is coming.
Today’s Scripture readings are Jeremiah 33:14-16, Psalm 25:1-10, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, and Luke 21:25-36, and significant portions of this message come from my 2021 Advent 1C sermon Hope Draws Near, for which I found helpful Audrey West’s commentary at Working Preacher.
Here’s the worship livestream from Christ the King and the sermon podcast audio.
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Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and our coming king, Jesus Christ. Amen
Happy new year, dear church! Many of you were here last week when we squeezed the entire church year into an hour, so you got a quick preview of Advent. I gave my little spiel about how Advent blue represents the twilight, the moment before the light dawns. And then we moved on through the rest of the year.
Well, today we’re officially in the season of Advent—it’s a new church year—but we’re actually continuing the story from two weeks ago. In Mark 13, we heard about Jesus teaching by the temple, warning his disciples to not put too high of a value on anything in this world, like big temple buildings or nations or any earthly institutions, because they’ll eventually be wiped away. Nothing in the world will last, other than God’s word.
Today, we switch Gospels and pick up the story in Luke. (Did you know we read mostly from one Gospel each year? Welcome to the year of Luke, my personal favorite gospel.)
In Luke 21, we hear Jesus warning there will be signs in the heavens, distress among confused nations. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. The end is near!
Again, this all sounds like terrible, apocalyptic, sci-fi movie stuff, and our instinct is to be afraid, to withdraw and hide. But Jesus says, “Now when all these things begin to take place,”—what are we supposed to do?—“stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
Jesus’ arrival is a good thing. We want Jesus to show up!
The wars and famines and all that sort of thing are not Jesus trying to punish us or cleanse the world or something before he comes; we don’t need to blame God; we do just fine on our own at messing up the world.
We don’t have to look very hard to see the brokenness around us. Some of it’s natural disasters, but so much is the result of human sin, human greed, human apathy. The planet is harmed, people are turned into commodities. Our neighbors starve in a world where there is enough food for everyone.
As soon as you raise your head, pay attention and look around, it’s pretty obvious that we need help, because the ways we’ve been living aren’t working. So these apocalyptic warnings are promises of hope. Our rescuer is on the way; Jesus our redeemer is coming.
Jeremiah says, “The days are surely coming…when I will fulfill the promise I made.” God promises to bring justice and righteousness, to save God’s people. In Advent, we are waiting for God to show up for our redemption. We’re praying for Jesus to come quickly, because we’re in trouble! As we just sang, “Your people pray: come quickly, King of kings.”
The challenge, of course, is that we’ve been waiting for a long time. We don’t know how long we’ll need to keep waiting. And as we go through this season year after year, it’s easy to get distracted, to forget what we’re waiting for, even to lose hope. After all, it’s been two thousand years, and the end hasn’t come yet.
We know how the story ends. “Heaven and earth will pass away,” Jesus says, “but my words will not pass away.” God kingdom endures. But we’re still stuck here in the in-between. So what do we do as we wait?
One of the fascinating things about how our tradition marks Advent is that our Gospel readings for the next four weeks move backwards through the story. This week, we have the adult Jesus in the week before he’ll be killed talking about the end of the world. Then we’ll hear about John the baptist, prophesying in the wilderness, preparing the way for the adult Jesus. And finally, we’ll move back about thirty years and hear Mary’s song, in preparation for the story of Jesus’ birth at Christmas.
This season plays with time. We focus on endings and beginnings, all to illuminate how we are to live in the middle.
Our focus in this particular Advent season is on “grace-filled beginnings” and today we are invited to remember God’s grace is for us. Or maybe that’s not something we “remember” so much as dare to trust. We dare to trust that our waiting is not in vain.
There’s a great line in the Lutheran ordination service that says, “And be of good courage, for God has called you, and your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” I appreciate that line as a pastor, and Bishop Erickson likes to remind us of it at synod gatherings, but it’s not just for pastors and deacons. As people of God, we have the audacity to claim that what we do for God is not done in vain, that God uses what we have to offer.
God’s grace is for you. God’s grace is for us. And from that foundation of grace, choosing us by grace, God uses us to make a difference in the world, to help and bless our neighbors.
Even as we wait for the end, God is still present. God is still working. In the chaos of this world, in the chaos of Christmas preparations, and wars and ceasefires, and political transitions and cabinet appointments and holiday travel and fundraisers and budgets and to-do lists, God promises to show up. Because God’s grace is for us. And God does not leave us alone.
The paradox of Advent is that in this season, we are called to wait, to be patient, to trust God is going to act, and at the same time, we are called to be restless, on guard, keeping alert for what God is doing.
Advent is about being unsettled, discontented with the world the way it is, and yet trusting in God’s presence with us even as our world lurches from one crisis to another. God is with us in the waiting, and in the arrival, in the night and in the day.
Our call is to rely on God, to anticipate that God will act. As our Psalm says, we lift up our souls to God. We’re depending on God to bring about the future God has promised.
Our hope is in God, not in anything of this world’s temporary promises. We ask God to lead us and teach us, to forget our sins, to follow the paths of the Lord, which are steadfast love and faithfulness.
We wait with the people in the first-century church in Thessalonica, abounding in love for one another, trusting in God to strengthen our hearts in holiness, to make us ready for our Savior’s arrival. We seek to love our neighbors, to encourage one another with hope in the waiting.
This year, one of the ways we’re living that out is by raising money for ELCA World Hunger. You’ll hear more about this over the next three weeks, but this is the 50th anniversary of Lutheran world hunger appeals, and as a congregation, we’ve set a goal of raising $500 in donations in this season, as part of our synod’s goal of raising an extra $50,000.
The world is not as it should be, and we can make a difference. We can pay attention, both to the needs around us and to what God is doing. We can pray. With the Holy Spirit’s help, we can trust.
Jesus says the way to know the end is near—and remember, the end is a good thing, the hope of redemption, not destruction. Well, destruction of the temporary things of this world, not the end of what matters—the way to know the end is near is to look at the experience of the fig tree. When the buds appear on the trees, you know spring is near. You know life is coming, winter is ending.
When night falls, you don’t panic that it’s never going to be light again, right? Why? Because you’ve experienced that the daylight comes back. We know winter ends, because we’ve experienced spring.
Sickness doesn’t last forever, wealth doesn’t last forever, nothing but God’s kingdom lasts forever. Our waiting will come to an end.
We wait with hope, because we’ve seen God be faithful before. One of my favorite descriptions of Advent is from a commentary on this Gospel reading by Audrey West.
She says, “The season of Advent is a sticky-note reminder to the church: God is doing a new thing. Again.” The end is near, and so is the beginning.
We wait with hope, because we’ve waited before. We trust in God’s future, because God has been faithful before. We wait with hope, because God has already secured our future. God’s grace is for us.
Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. The dawn is near. Welcome to Advent.