Take heart! God is coming to make things right

Written by Marv Thiessen

Pastor Marv Thiessen

Calgary First Mennonite Church

November 29, 2009

 

TAKE HEART! GOD IS COMING TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT

Advent 1

 

 

I expect that you heard several ideas present as we sang our theme song for this Advent series for you, Brian Moyer Suderman’s composition, "I will trust in you." I expect you heard the sense that life in our times is challenging and that it’s easy to live in some fear as we see our world in turmoil. I expect you also heard a word of hope as communicated in the title of the song. We capture those two perspectives in the following statement. While we may be inclined toward fear as we look at events in our world, we observe the work of God and say that we will trust in him because God is trustworthy.

The overall theme for our Advent series is "Bursting in and breaking out" and the title refers to God’s work in our world. It reminds us that God bursts into the world in which we live and then breaks out in our experience and in the world. This morning, we focus our thoughts on how that brings us hope when we find our experiences promoting fear and discouragement.

I was conversing with a mature Christian person last week who expressed some concern to me about the way many Christians close their eyes to the threat to Christian freedom that exists within the radical Islamic world. To my understanding, this person would say that we should be realistically fearful of what might happen to us as Christians if a power opposed to Christianity gains a strong foothold on the world scene or takes control in our country. To take such a threat seriously is one way in which Christians might live fearfully in our world.

In the news in this past week, we heard about another upcoming climate change conference. We heard that Stephen Harper will attend the conference. That’s neither here nor there in the scope of this sermon but it’s a current event that reminds us that people live in our world with a sense of dread and fear. They fear that the Earth’s climate is changing in such a way as to make life for humans much more difficult. Some would say that climate change is responsible for the current significant drought in parts of Africa. It’s easy and sensible to become fearful if we agree with the conclusion that drastic weather patterns are inevitable because of the global climate change that is occurring.

Others see our world as an increasingly violent place and live with fear that the violence of this world will catch up to them. Others find reason to live fearfully as they consider the number of people they know whose employment is in jeopardy or has been lost. A tenuous financial outlook for many people brings fear to them. We might say that we live in a time of loss as people lose economic confidence and security. Eric Olfert offered us an African perspective on that point a few weeks ago when he commented that Africans said to him that we North Americans are scared of being poor. I certainly affirm the validity of that statement. I am afraid of being poor.

Many of us can find in these various factors that inspire fear in some people reasons for which we too experience some fear. Do we find a message in the Bible that helps us to grapple with and respond to that fear?

Of course, I think we can and I believe that our two Advent texts for this morning lead us in a direction of hope when we find ourselves fearful. Hope comes to us as we believe that God bursts into our world with his "making things right" mentality.

Let’s think briefly about the people who received the words of these texts and what the words said to them and then about what the texts mean for us today. Think about the people who heard Jesus tell them about signs in the sun, moon and stars and about gut-wrenching fear in the face of Jesus coming to the earth in power and glory. They were God-fearing people who struggled with fear of what the oppressive Roman empire might do to them. They wondered how they would endure the fall of Jerusalem that Jesus had just predicted in the words prior to our text today. Jesus had told them to get out of the city and flee to the mountains when things got really bad. Don’t you imagine that these people heard the words of Jesus with a sense of fear?

This was certainly not the first time that people in Israel contemplated despair and fear. We remember the context of the other text we read, the text from Jeremiah that offered a hopeful word to the people of Judah. Those hopeful words followed substantial fear-inducing prophecy from Jeremiah about the people of Judah being taken into captivity by a conquering nation. They came after the people surely had been brought to the edge of panic by Jeremiah’s prediction of loss. They were words spoken to a context of fear.

Into both of those contexts of fear, the message of tenacious hope came. Jesus and Jeremiah told those fearful people that there is reason to trust God. Fear could fade as a faithful God was considered.

What was the hope raised and offered in the texts we have read? Let’s begin with the Jeremiah text. In verse 15, Jeremiah offered this promise. "In those days and at that time I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line; he will do what is just and right in the land." It seems most natural to understand this as a prediction of the coming of Jesus who was a descendant of David. If so, then God was telling the people of Judah that righteousness and justice would come to them and make a great difference in their lives. If we look at the life of Jesus, we would agree that he brought a profound sense of righteousness and justice to that land. The people of the time of Jeremiah and those who followed were able to maintain some sense of hope in times of fear because they held on to this promise that God would send someone to make things right in their land, and we understand that as having been fulfilled in Jesus.

The Luke text also contains a substantial hope. As I studied that text this week, I wondered if we have read it as a fearful text when we should read it as more of a hopeful text. I suggest that we have usually read this text as a description of how things will be when Jesus comes to earth again. We have heard the words about the anguish, terror and perplexity on the earth and thought that there will be great fear when Jesus returns. There may be reason to question whether this is the correct reading. The most obvious reason for us to reconsider our understanding is verse 32 where Jesus says that the generation to whom he speaks will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Just before that, he told them the parable of the fig tree in order to advise them that they should be able to tell when this earth-shaking stuff would occur. Again, the obvious assumption is that the people Jesus was speaking to would be alive to observe the events to which Jesus referred.

That should cause us to question whether the words about earth-shaking events are future only words. The other point that came to my attention this week and which caused me to reconsider my understanding of this text is the word that Luke uses when he speaks of the world in verse 26. Luke records Jesus as saying that men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world. We have normally understood "world" in this verse as referring to the universe or the cosmos. Various Christian teachers tell us that cataclysmic events in the world will accompany the coming of Jesus and will cause great fear. What is very interesting is that the word for "world" here is not the Greek word, kosmos, which we readily identify as the word relating to the universe. The word used rather refers to "the more specific sense of the political and economic realm and sometimes signifies the Roman Empire." (David Lose on textweek.com) Whatever it is that is coming on the world, then, is not something cosmic but rather something that threatens the powers that be. It is geo-political rather than natural. That is going to happen when Jesus comes.

Now, this may still be future in orientation, but I suspect we should also understand that Jesus is saying that this has already occurred with his coming to earth. God has already come to make things right on the earth and that causes the powers that be to tremble because they thrive on injustice and oppression. I think we see in these words of Jesus both a present and a future reality. God has already come to the earth in Jesus to make things right. Jesus will come again to make things right. We live in the in-between time when God’s making things right is partially evident and when we participate in God’s work to make things right.

Perhaps you say, "so what?" to that understanding. Here’s why I think this matters. We talked in the introduction about the ways that fear is significant in the lives of many humans. The theological understanding we have been working at from our hopeful texts this morning leads us in the direction of overcoming that fear. We observe that Jesus’ coming to earth demonstrated that God is at work in the world. We observe that Jesus calls us to continually be aware of how God is making things right in our world.

Our texts, then, challenge us in two significant ways. One is referred to in this quote I read and appreciated this week. "We wait for God to break into our world before we change . . . we need to change so that we can perceive the God that is already there." Sometimes we wonder where God is in the face of our great difficulties. This quote reminds us of the reality that God has already broken in and is working at making things right. Sometimes it is our own failure that we don’t see it. If we take seriously the idea that God is at work in the world, demonstrated both in coming to the world as Jesus and in his ongoing work, then we are also challenged in the following way. We will choose not to be so afraid in this life that we miss the signs of God’s work and end up unprepared for what God is doing. We will choose also to be ready for the return of Jesus that we await.

And so we hear the encouragement of God in the title for this first Sunday of Advent, "Take heart, God is coming to make things right."