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The Promise of Peace
One
of the first commandments that we tried to teach our dog Tanner was
Come! We wanted to be able to be with him in the open countryside
and allow him to run freely off the leash. But in order for this to
happen in an effective manner, he needed to learn to respond without
hesitation to the Come command. Also, come is a useful command even
when you are in a confined area, like our house, because sometimes he
gets into things that he should not and then you want to be able to
call him away. Of course, the most effective way to teach a dog to
obey is to bribe him with treats! So as we taught Tanner the Come
command, we would hold out a doggy treat so he could see what awaited
him upon his arrival at our beck and call. The command to come
quickly morphed into Tanner, come get a treat and over time we began
to get decent results. However, neither Tanner nor we have mastered
the Come command to the fullest extent. At best Tanner comes when
called 80% of the time. When a treat is involved the odds do rise to
90% but if he is hyper focused on another activity, like chewing on a
big stick or rolling in horse dung, he absolutely will not respond to
our call. Sometimes he just stands a few meters away and stares us,
daring us to chase him down. And let me tell you, there are fewer
things more frustrating in life than when your 45 kilo moose of a dog
will not listen to you. I cannot count the times that I have been in
a park, or the woods, or some other open place where the echo of my
voice can surely be heard by all within a 5 kilometer radius.
Because of course, the one living being who is not listening to me is
Tanner. And when he is unwilling to heed to my call, well, there is
little I can
do but just wait it out. He always eventually comes back, but
sometimes not until I am so exasperated that I feel tempted to just
leave him in the woods to figure out life on his own! Waiting for
something to come, especially something you really want, is indeed a
very hard thing to do. And when it doesn't come, you feel frustrated
and disappointed and you wonder why that which you most want never
comes to fruition.
In
many places of our world, one of the most sung hymns for advent is
called O Come O Come Emmanuel. The song has origins that date back
to the 12th century and the English version was translated
in 1918 by British scholar John M. Neale. The
text is based on the biblical prophecy that states that God will give
Israel a sign that will be called Immanuel or "God with us".
The
verses sum up the longing of Advent as they depict the desperate
plight of humanity in need of a Savior, and address Christ with seven
grand titles, pleading with him to come save his people. Part of the
brilliance of the hymn is that it is set in minor key and begins with
a haunting melody that gives rise to the longings that are buried
deep within us for a Savior to come and release us. Listen to the
first verse:
O come, O come
Emmanuel, to free your captive Israel. That mourns in lonely exile
here, until the son of God appear. Do
you ever feel like you are mourning in lonely exile, waiting for the
son of God to appear in
your life? You have cried out to God, come, O come and yet in
some
ways feel that your cry has fallen on deaf ears and you wonder if
your longings will ever be realized in fulfillment? I can assure you
that you are not alone these feelings and today I hope you discover
anew the promise of fulfillment that God extends to each one of us
through his son Jesus Christ.
Our
scripture lessons from Luke are focused on two men, Zechariah and
Simeon, both men of God whose longings were deep and profound. I am
sure both of them struggled with the failure of fulfillment
throughout their lives for both waited an extraordinarily long time
to see what God was doing in their midst. We are reminded that just
because we don't see what God is doing doesn't mean that God is not
at work in profound ways. Walter Wangerin, in his book, waiting for
Jesus, says this: “God is a God of history, weaving its past and
its future together, designing the times by overseeing the intricate
patterns of human events, granting meaning to whole of humankind and
thereby making any single moment incandescent with meaning.” What
we find in Zechariah is God remembering his promises, answering his
prayers but with timing that causes Zechariah to doubt what God is
saying to him. God's message to Zechariah is that he will be given a
son, and the son will prepare the way for the coming Lord, the
messiah...two promises being fulfilled in this one terrifying,
awesome moment...You Zechariah, against all odds, will have a son,
and he, Zechariah will be called John and he will be filled with the
Holy Spirit and he, Zechariah will bring news of another son, the
promised one...the Messiah, the Son of God. And after
waiting for so long to hear these very words Zechariah responds with
doubt. We see in the text that Zechariah says, “How can I be sure
this will happen? There is so much evidence to the contrary.”
Oh,
friends have you ever been there? You pray for something, your pour
out your heart, you ache with longing and you wonder why God does not
hear your prayer and in some cases God moves in your life in a way
that perhaps fulfills the desire or perhaps shifts the longing and
it's scary to think about this new thing that God is doing in your
life and so you respond by saying, “Really God, how can I be sure?”
Or, in other cases, you carry those longings with you and nothing
seems to be happening at all and we respond by saying “Really God,
must you be so silent?” In any case, when we respond with Really
God?, what we are actually saying is that we aren't fully confident
that we can really trust God. So one of the most important questions
of Advent is whether or not we really do believe that God will make
good on his promises. If we don't have a fundamental belief that God
can be trusted to be faithful then the peace that is offered us
through Christ will forever escape us. For the peace of Christ which
passes all understanding is rooted in an ability to trust that God is
working and moving in our lives even when we see no evidence of such
from our point of view.
The
text from Isaiah reminds us that peace comes when we keep our
thoughts fixed on God. It reminds us as well that we can trust in
the Lord for the Lord God is the eternal Rock. The first six verses
of Chapter 26 are offered as thanks to God for his deliverance. It's
clear that the first verse isn't necessarily pointing to a
geographical city but rather a state of mind...Instead of living in
fear, they are confident that they are surrounded by God's salvation.
This is why they can trust God...they do believe that he is their
eternal rock. They believe that God can do what they cannot do.
What we see revealed in these short verses from Isaiah is that trust
must become a way of life. It is not a fleeting notion that we turn
to now and again but rather the perfect peace that is promised to us
comes through enduring trust. Trusting God involves a waiting
component that becomes so poignantly real during advent. One Old
Testament scholar sums it up so beautifully by saying that “Waiting
is not doing nothing however. Rather waiting is doing what you know
is right while refusing to run ahead of God to try to solve your
problems yourself.” In other words, to wait on God is to trust God
while allowing him to reveal things to you in his time and in his
way. Peace will come if in the midst of our waiting, in the center
of our longings we can trust that God is active and alive and will
reveal the fulness of his promises to us when the time is right. One
of the more challenging aspects of our faith is trusting and
believing that God is capable of doing that which we are not. We
have to remember that the prophets had been prophesying for years and
years and years before the incarnation of Jesus Christ actually
occurred. All the revelation necessary to prepare for the coming of
Christ was concluded with Malachi's prophesy, the final book of the
Old Testament. Do you know how many years and years and years passed
between the time the prophets ended prophesying about the coming
Christ and his birth? 400 years! Can you imagine that? A period of
400 years ensued
before all the circumstances were right for Christ's incarnation.
During most of that time, the Jews had little control over their
political destiny, being ruled by one great power and then another.
The glowing promises of the prophets for the time after the Exile had
not come true. God was questioned even in the book of Malachi: Mal
2:17 says, “Where is the God of justice?”, and in Mal 3:14 the
people proclaim that, “It is futile to serve God”. Each
generation has its naysayers, and yet, what we see over and over
again in scripture is God making good on his promises, delivering his
people from the peril that they thought would swallow them up.
During times when we feel that God is doing nothing, believers need
to be encouraged by the evidence of God's faithful activity in the
past and that his promise that he will never leave us or forsake us
is valid today as well.
That
is why encountering Simeon is also very important to us. Simeon is
also a great man to encounter during advent because he spent his
entire life waiting expectantly to see the Messiah. Our text tells
us that Simeon was righteous and devout and was eagerly waiting for
the Messiah to come and rescue Israel. The Holy Spirit was with him
as well. When Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple, Simeon
encountered them and knew that his expectations were finally coming
to fulfillment. And his gives witness to God's faithfulness with
this prayer: Now let your servant die in peace as you have promised,
I have seen your salvation which you have prepared for all people.
And then he affirms the purpose for Christ's coming into the world,
that he is a light to reveal God to the
nations,
he is the glory of your people Israel. Simeon is a testament to
someone who never lost faith that God would deliver on his promise to
him, even as he grew older, even as the years went by without
fulfillment.
Friends,
we have received the same promise that Simeon has, that we shall see
the Messiah before we die. Have you ever stopped to consider how God
has been at work in your life to reveal to you Jesus Christ his son?
Isn't it amazing that through all of the twists and turns that each
one of our lives have taken that in God's great vision for his
church, he has landed us all here in Stockholm, Sweden where he wants
to continue to reveal the glory of his son Jesus Christ in our midst?
That it is God's deep and abiding will that we know his son, that we
enter into his presence, that we too come to understand that Christ
is the messiah who came as a light to the nations. You see, perhaps
as you think about your own longings and the ways in which God is NOT
fulfilling them, maybe it is useful to recall what HAS been promised
to us. We have been promised salvation through Jesus Christ. We
have been given unconditional abiding love from the God of heaven and
earth. We have been given a church community, the body of Christ so
that together we can pursue the mission that God has set forth for
us. God's promises are alive and well in our midst. The struggle
that we face is that in our private individual lives some of our
longings go unmet and in those personal, private moments of sadness
and malcontentedness we wonder where God is and why he is not
answering our beck and call. But we must admit that God never
promised that he'd be at our beck and call. Instead, he promised us
a way to enjoy an abiding relationship with him through his Son Jesus
Christ and through Christ would provide for us the strength, hope and
courage to face the road of life, that at times may be a quite rough
for some of us, and yet still be able to trust that God is at work,
even when we ourselves don't fully understand it or feel it.
Evangelist Ravi Zacharias once said that “Faith
is confidence in the person of Jesus Christ and in his power, so that
even when his power does not serve my end, my confidence in him
remains because of who he is.” Friends, we are invited to cry out
to God to come, come and be in our midst Emmanuel...be the God with
us, but that is a very different cry than come and do what I want you
to in my life. Part of the waiting and expectation of Advent is
allowing God to reveal himself in his ways and in his time. A lack
of trust only leads to greater frustration and propels us to take
matters into our own hands seeking to fulfill our longings through
our own efforts, which most of the time will also leave us wanting.
In Zechariah's case, his doubt led to silence. He was robbed of the
gift of speech from the time it was revealed that Elizabeth was
pregnant with John the Baptist until he was born. Months. As I
reflected on this I could not help but think that sometimes silence
is our greatest need. Perhaps the angel Gabriel saw that what
Zechariah needed most was to be quiet so that he could better hear
God's voice and thus understand in a greater way what God was busy
doing in his midst, even though initially Zechariah could not believe
it was true. Maybe this is a good life lesson for us that when our
longings are raging, or peace escapes us, instead of clamoring about
trying to sate our desires, we need to silence ourselves and take
time to listen, to feel, to watch expectantly for the work of the
Holy Spirit that is actively moving around us, but at any given
moment may not have our own self at the center of the activity.
Trusting that God is at work even if we don't see it is one of the
primary ways to experience the deep peace that the coming Christ
promises us. But it requires letting go of our own agenda for how
life should unfold and it means that we need to yield our personal
longings to the will of God and trust that in God's grand scheme, he
has not forgotten about us but is perhaps up to something that we
cannot imagine.
Maybe
that's part of why the waiting during advent is hard for us. For in
waiting for Christ, we take a risk because we never really know when
or how Christ will be born into our lives this year and sometimes
that can be very frightening.
But
there are lots of frightening moments laced throughout the Christmas
story. Zechariah was afraid, but was given the most repeated command
in scripture...do not be afraid. I suppose that many of here today
are frightened, unsure of what lies ahead, mired in longing, or
sadness or uncertainty. We too can hear that oft repeated command,
Do not be afraid. So in the words of a daily devotional that I am
reading, let us continue our Advent
journey, bravely getting up and joining the adventure, even when we
don’t know where it will take us. Boldly claiming the Good News
that we know will come. Waiting with joy as we reach out with the
grace of God that is so much more than amazing. Trusting that
God is
busy at work, readying the world for the incarnation of Jesus Christ,
busy making all things new. For in doing so, you will find that the
peace of Christ calms your fears, soothes your longings and fills you
with joy and salvation. Amen.
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