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Advent
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
I want to start by expressing my appreciation to our community here for making me and my family, my wife, Donnelly, I, our three kids, making us feel welcome as we've joined this community. We've enjoyed meeting so many of you. We're slowly learning the names and we're discovering just how many of you love and enjoy serving in this community. I've also thoroughly enjoyed joining the non bearded team on our staff. Great great team of people to work collaborative with collaboratively with and celebrate all that God's doing in our community.
Speaker 1:By way of update, just quickly, we've just spent the last month having a series of dinners for those who are interested in joining what will be our new parish plant next year. Great times together. We invite all of the church to be praying with us as our core team begins to take shape, begins to work together in the coming months. We're so excited about beginning this journey. We're so excited to take this conversation we're having to new parts of our city, and so we're happy that so many of you are joining us in that.
Speaker 1:Today, we continue our Advent series. Last week, as many of you remember, Jeremy led us through a conversation about waiting. He highlighted that one of the byproducts of this season is that we often have the opportunity to consider all of the ways in which we wait. We wait for newness, we wait for a new year, we wait for breakthrough, in some cases, we're just waiting for some small change in our lives. And he did a great job of emphasizing that waiting can be more than just a laborious test of our endurance, that we can in fact wait actively.
Speaker 1:Actively. And this might mean that we just intentionally prepare some new space in our life or maybe we shift some of our priorities, maybe we'll develop a new rhythm in order to foster the thing that we're hoping and longing for. In his talk, our ears were tuned to the prophet poet Isaiah and how Mark's gospel actually recalls the ancient Hebrew words of expectation where he says, prepare the way of the Lord. And we look briefly at how Mark starts his story of Jesus' life by highlighting John the Baptist's attempt to do just that, to prepare the way. And of course, we know that it didn't go all that well for John, did it?
Speaker 1:And the reality is just like for John, sometimes our waiting and our longing just doesn't resolve in brilliant celebratory light. Sometimes the good thing that we're waiting for, it just never comes. And Advent acknowledges that. And it calls us into the ancient practice of continuing to cultivate fragile hope. Now why would we do that?
Speaker 1:Well, I submit to you that it's important to do that because this discipline is the stiffest challenge that we have for the cynicism and the bitterness that plague our daily experience. And we belong to a tradition that's always contended that. While the divine might exude and bring brightness to our lives in some ways, yes, it does, It does so out of and in spite of the shifting and blanketing fogs that we often find ourselves in. And so, as a community of faith that tries to put Jesus at the center of everything that we do, we trust that you will be able to sense the warmth of his presence while we gather today. And if you can't, perhaps the notion of the divine is a long forgotten hearth in your heart, or maybe this is just a tough season.
Speaker 1:We we pray that the small light that comes and emanates from these ancient promises that we're looking at, we pray that it'll give you some small measure of hope today. So let's pray together, and then we're gonna move from darkness to waiting into mystery. God our father, we celebrate your goodness today in all the ways it comes. We give you thanks for your sustained faithfulness to us. And we pause now, and we ask that you would help us to hear you, that our eyes would be open to your activity in our lives.
Speaker 1:If we need comfort this morning, Lord, be near. And if we need peace, be near. We pray this in the name of Christ and by the spirit. Amen. So there really are a lot of questions to be asked about this story that's so familiar, and we tell it every year at this time.
Speaker 1:I mean, sometimes I think that all the lights and the ugly sweaters and the work parties and the cheap chocolate and the school Christmas concerts, God help us, the Christmas concerts, these things, they distract us. And for the record, I'm not saying I hate Christmas concerts. I'm just saying that I have a low tolerance for bad sound and poorly planned programming. And so what that means is that I agree that your kids are cute elves or sheep or whatever it is they're pretending to be. I agree.
Speaker 1:I just think they'd be cuter if it was only thirty five minutes of my time I was losing instead of two hours. And I realize that makes you think that I'm just bitter and disgruntled, but anyways, I digress. The point is is that there are some crazy parts to this story. Right? There's babies recognizing other babies while they're in the womb.
Speaker 1:That's nuts. There's magicians and astrologers showing up from the other side of the world, just a tad creepy. And then we got the elephant in the room. There's this thing, the virgin birth. What's going on with that?
Speaker 1:That's a huge elephant actually, as is the persistent appearance of angels to announce and to celebrate and to protect the infant Christ, while not a single one can be found to keep Herod's murderous threat to kill every baby in an entire town from coming true? Truth be told, our focus on mystery today isn't so much attempt to answer those questions, but to ponder instead with the ancients and with many of the people that we live with day in and day out just how mystifying our claims about Jesus actually are. And wrapped up in this mystery are all of our questions about how such a meek and insignificant person could possibly have been the historical reflection of God's redemptive power in our world. His his birth was obscure. He had a humble existence.
Speaker 1:Yes, he had a profound call to love, but he died an untimely and a grisly death. And he reappeared and then subsequently disappeared. Really? God is here? He's with us?
Speaker 1:I think if we're honest about how we feel about the divine sometimes, especially when we look at our world and our experiences, many of us have some nagging questions. And it's with those questions in mind we turn to our text. A central component of our Advent series this year has been our intentional engagement with the text of Isaiah, looking at how this particular body of writings shaped the Hebrew and Jewish understanding of the divine and looking at how it shaped their identity as God's people, a people grappling with the realities of their exile and their refugee status, their displacement. And we're looking also at how early Christian writers mined Isaiah for references that helped them to understand the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. So today, we turn to Isaiah 53, and here are the first four verses.
Speaker 1:Who has believed our message, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot and like a root out of dry ground. He had no majesty or beauty to attract us to him, nothing in in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces, he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Speaker 1:Surely, he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. Now just a couple of things here, other than the fact that this is a really dark text. This text is part of a broader theme in the last part of Isaiah in which the ancient writers began to discuss the life and career of a singular individual, a person who is believed to be the touch point for how God was finally going to redeem his people from their exile in foreign land and culture. And around the same time, an idea began to emerge, and we see it in the text that this person would restore the nearness of the divine to his people that they had lost and neglected through just their propensity to greed and selfishness and violence. In other words, this person was going to come and address their social situation, yes, But he was also going to address their spiritual malaise.
Speaker 1:It's important to note that this particular passage, it's not served well by the biblical translators because we've actually been dropped smack into the middle of a poem that started in the previous chapter. And in the poem, God is speaking to the Hebrew people about a mysterious character he calls my servant, a character who's going to address the nations that have been oppressing God's people. There's something wrong with this character though. Because in the preceding verses, the poem talks to us about how he was disfigured, and his appearance appears to have been marred. And it's as if the perceived audience is listening to this and saying, okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. Ugly works as long as he does his job. I mean, ugly heroes are allowed. We just need them to do what we need them to do. And that's where we come into the story.
Speaker 1:That's where the narrator says this. He says, who has believed this kind of message about this kind of messenger? Who can see that this servant is in fact the arm of the lord? What shouldn't be lost on us in in this passage is is the obvious reference to the narrative of the Exodus and Yahweh's glorious intervention by the side of the Red Sea, delivering his people from their slave lords and from the Egyptian war machine. That story gets told again and again in Torah with references to how God delivered Israel with, quote, a strong hand and an outstretched arm.
Speaker 1:So can you see it here that the narrator is making a bold historical reference? He's saying, just like Yahweh intervened in that story, he's doing it again. Can't you see it? And that claim flows directly into another historical reference in the second verse where he says that this servant would be like a tender shoot, like a root in dry ground. And here, the author is evoking the image of a tree that's been hacked down at the base, And that's describing the ancient dynasty in Israel under king David.
Speaker 1:And what the author's saying is that this servant of God, he's ugly, yes, but he's also like an insignificant green shoot sprouting from this long forgotten and dried up source of God's redemption. Then he describes the servant. He's despised. He's rejected. He's familiar with pain.
Speaker 1:He's got some pain issues. He's afflicted. It's a terrible resume. The Hebrew terminology here is speaking of the messenger in a way that says that he is easily overlooked. He's common.
Speaker 1:He's mundane. He's marginalized. He's easy to take for granted. Now if you're like me, these verses are puzzling. Because in the verses that actually follow our reading, they those those verses are actually very familiar to us because this servant is depicted as redeeming and saving God's people through his suffering, and Christian thinkers and theologians have, not surprisingly, used these verses to try and explain what Jesus was up to.
Speaker 1:We as Christians read the latter versions of the poem as a nuanced reference to the work of Jesus, which is totally appropriate. But then why is this an advent reading? I thought this was about baby Jesus. Well, the truth is is that we can't skip down to what Jesus accomplishes without acknowledging that in this ancient predicted deliverer that he is both unexpected and mysterious because he contrasts so significantly with the expectations of those who are hoping for him. As commenter John Oswald puts it, who could have believed that when the arm of God was bared to deliver people that it would look like this.
Speaker 1:Now perhaps you hear this and you're able to think of a time in your life where it was only when you looked back at it that you were able to see the arm of God on your at work on your behalf. At the time, the divine was nowhere to be seen. In fact, you were convinced that God had checked out of the office, and you got his out of office email. Maybe there is pain in that experience or maybe it's just a season of dryness that you can recall. But the memory of that has become, in the end, beautiful because you can look back on it and you can see how he was present then, how he sustained you.
Speaker 1:Others of us here may have a different take. We may have sensed a connection to the divine at some point in our life, blessing, light, fulfillment, only to have those things dissolve as our circumstances changed, or our weaknesses began to appear in sickness perhaps, or in failure. Or maybe we experienced harm or disappointment or pain at the hands of another person, and in those moments, the promises of a grandiose divine help, They ring a little hollow, don't they? We find ourselves reading a text like this and promises of his deliverance, and we say, I'm not really sure I get this image of the divine. And right there is the summation of the mystery that we think about and acknowledge in this season.
Speaker 1:That god's ultimate purpose would become visible through smallness, through loss, through obscurity, through insignificance, and even death. That is a mystery. And already in the prophetic texts of the exiled Hebrew people, we see the people of God beginning to hear God speak to them, speak to them about how their redemption might not result in the kind of king or the kind of kingdom or the kind of significance that they had expected. And so it would probably be right for us to talk about what it means for us to be faithful in the face of such questions. But for that, I wanna take us to a gospel text, to a story right at the end of Christ's infancy narrative, and I wanna see what perspective we can glean there.
Speaker 1:It's the story of the boy Jesus in the temple from Luke chapter two. This is one of two stories that we have about Jesus as a young person. The other is in Matthew when the kings come with treasure from the East. That's recorded in Matthew. The text tells us that Jesus and his parents had traveled to Jerusalem as part of their practice of the Passover festival.
Speaker 1:Just think our Leviticus series. Joel talked about this. They had attended the festivities there, and then they set out for home. And the scriptures say this. They call him the boy Jesus, and they say that he stayed in Jerusalem without his parents knowing, and that they traveled for a day thinking that he was with them in one of the many pilgrim groups that would have collected together for safety and security as they traveled north to where they lived.
Speaker 1:And we pick up the story in Luke chapter two verse 44. I'm gonna read it to you. It says that then Jesus' parents began looking for him among their friends and relatives. And when they didn't find him, they went back to Jerusalem, obviously, to look for him. And after three days, they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them, and answering or and asking them questions.
Speaker 1:And everyone was amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother marched up to him, that's what I should say, and he said, son, why are you treating us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you. And like a typical 12 year old, he says, why are you searching for me?
Speaker 1:Didn't you know that I had to be in my father's house? Verse 50 says this, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. Since then that he went down to Nazareth with them, was obedient to them, but his mother treasured all these things in her heart. Okay. So there's a few things to notice here other than the fact that child and family services should have been called immediately.
Speaker 1:It's important to read a whole lot of panic into this seemingly benign text. Even if we take the conservative scholarly estimates here, this is two nights spent knowing that your child is lost somewhere in Jerusalem. No amber alerts, no street lights. My wife Darlene could tell you a story of one time when our son lost himself in a Walmart. Now personally, I'd rather be lost in Jerusalem than any Walmart at any time.
Speaker 1:Right? But more to the point, she couldn't find him for about ten minutes, and those were some of the longest ten minutes of her life. It's a crazy story. So it's it's important for us when we read a story like this to just allow our heart rate to bump up a little bit, especially if we're a parent. Now part of what makes this also a a curious story is the fact that the gospel writers chose to write so little about Jesus as a child.
Speaker 1:And to be honest, it's probably because his childhood was like yours. It was largely unremarkable. It's not like Jesus was a secret child prodigy table maker like Mel Gibson wants you to believe in his film, or that he is he was a gifted student. This reference to him being among the teachers. This isn't another way of saying he was teaching the scholars of the law.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. He was sitting with what would have been a group of pupils asking questions, and learning the intricacies of Torah. And the language that Luke uses in verse 47 to say that everybody was amazed, this is actually a literary device that Luke uses all the time in his literature to point to the power of Jesus' presence in a scene.
Speaker 1:It's it's only that, not a comment on his intelligence or his skill. Now what's interesting is that later generations of writers didn't lack nor spare their imagination in the accounts of the child Christ. Perhaps they were just curious about what he would have been like as a kid. And he's genuinely or generally portrayed as a troublemaker. His miracle working prowess is a mess of untethered power and immature mischief.
Speaker 1:He literally is just striking kids dead on the playground when they bump into them and working miracles that don't really make any sense. It's entertaining. It's good reading if you're interested, but the church hasn't traditionally recognized these stories as being valid because quite frankly, they're over the top. And that's not the image of the messiah that we get from the scriptures. The assumption is not that he's exceptional, but that he's unexpected.
Speaker 1:So this text isn't a reveal. It's not a big reveal at all. Christ's ministry is still to be revealed in the coming chapters. Instead, this is a story of how perplexing the divine was for those who should have been able to see it, his parents. Let me go back to the story.
Speaker 1:His parents find him, and they're astonished. They confront him. They berate him publicly. Most twelve year olds don't like that. More on this in a second.
Speaker 1:Let's just take a note though for a minute that these are Christ's first recorded words, and he's telling off his parents. Not sure what that means, but we'll go with it. The boy Jesus seems surprised that they didn't even know where and what he'd be doing, and his language is actually mildly corrective if you look at the Greek. What is he saying? Well, it's it's ambiguous.
Speaker 1:The Greek actually says, didn't you know that I had to be in my blank or in my the blank of my father? Now, scholars sort of argue about what that blank's about. They think that it means one of three things. It either means in my father's house or involved in my father's things or with those belonging to my father. Okay?
Speaker 1:The first of these, the reference to a house, which the NIV chooses, and that's what I read for you today. It's probably the best in light of the evidence that we have, but some scholars, including a guy named David Garland, they acknowledge that, quote, there is an opening for a more subtle interpretation here, end quote. One such interpretive angle is offered by a man named George MacDonald, a Scottish author and minister who's widely regarded as having shaped the lives of C. S. Lewis and G.
Speaker 1:K. Chesterton. MacDonald looks at this ambiguous Greek phrase, and he came to the conclusion that Jesus was doing more than just telling off his parents. Jesus is clarifying the primary location of God's work in the world. I'm quoting McDonald here when he says, all of Christ's life, he was among his father's things, either in heaven or in the world.
Speaker 1:Not then only when they found him in the temple in Jerusalem. He is still among his father's things everywhere in the world, everywhere throughout the wide universe. Now MacDonald adopted this perspective because he claimed when Jesus starts becoming a public teacher, Jesus doesn't use the language or symbols of the temple cult to point to God as father. No, says MacDonald. He found the symbols and representation he needed, quote, in the world and its lovely lowly facts.
Speaker 1:I love that phrase. On the road, in the field, in the vineyard, in the garden, and in the house, in the family, and the commonest of its affairs, the lighting of a lamp, the leavening of a meal, the neighbors borrowing something, the losing of a coin, the straying of some sheep. So whether we wanna sign off with the majority of scholars on what the word should be in our text, I'm with MacDonald on in that some of what's going on here is that we see an image of the obscure and insignificant boy Christ showing us that the kingdom that God imagines for his people and ultimately the whole world, it's demonstrably normal. It's ordinary, and it's easy to miss. And that kingdom, that easy to pass over wonder, that, Jesus said to his parents, is where they should have expected to find him.
Speaker 1:Which brings us back to their comments for a second. Why are they so mad? What are they bothered about? Obviously, we talked about the fact that they would have been frightened. Now Mary addresses Jesus, and the verb that she uses is actually a really strong one, and it indicates that Jesus has caused her pain.
Speaker 1:He's caused her to feel confusion and perhaps rejection. Now why would she have been feeling that? As a child, Jesus has drawn in this moment, he's drawn a distinction between being their obedient son and living in the into the divine mandate that he has. In some way, what he's saying to them, I'm not yours in the way that you thought I was. I'm not what you expected.
Speaker 1:And the truth is that this story does seem to be asserting the identity and the mission of Jesus, yes. But the underlying implication is that those closest to Jesus did not and could not perceive that identity. Now if we're honest, how could they have? Just imagine your son or your brother or your nephew, some little boy you know, that's the Messiah. That scrawny, disrespectful child.
Speaker 1:That kid who needs your protection, that kid that needs its diaper changed, he's the Messiah? It's insane. And now that kid's lecturing on you about the fact that you don't get it. Now here's the truth. The divine, in whatever way it comes, is hard to grasp.
Speaker 1:If you've ever found yourself questioning the veracity and the potency of God's work in the world because there's still so much evil and there's so much rampant injustice, then I hope you can find solidarity with those who have asked questions like that. Or perhaps, you're like Mary today, and your encounter with the divine has actually caused you some pain because you've tried to make sense of things when they didn't turn out the way you wanted them, or when your expectations of how and when god would show up, they appear to have been misguided. And yet, this is what god has looked like, how he's been embedded in the story since all the way back in the imagination of Isaiah. God's goodness starts small, and it's often fragile, and it's probably not coming from where you expect it. But like the boy Jesus in the story, it's going to live, and it's going to grow, and ultimately, it's going to transform and heal you.
Speaker 1:Until one day, you can look back and see and notice how beautiful and powerful it is. I find myself drawn to those last few words in the Lucan text where it says that Mary took these things. All the disorientation, all of the fear about her son, all of the hurt born of finding that God's purpose was in fact an enigma, she takes those things and she treasures them in her heart. And I'm wondering if that isn't the best posture for us in this season of darkness, waiting, and mystery. Advent is not a season of naive sentimentality at all.
Speaker 1:It's not fueled by tepid commercialism. No. It's fueled by a trust in these ancient promises that the divine is drawn near to us in some mysterious way and that he can do it in the humblest settings of our lives. And you know what? The more time we spend with this story, the more likely we are to follow god's vulnerable example.
Speaker 1:We lose our need to project strength and perfection to protect ourselves from those around us. The more we treasure the truth that god risked smallness and weakness and rejection to spark redemption, the more we're able to invite others into the faulty, broken, imperfect parts of our lives. And that place, that place of mutual weakness, after all, is where the mystery of God's work, his powerful work in us, takes place. And so may you find a time and a space today to treasure the fragile hope that these stories have for us. May that hope give you courage to work for good in the world even when nothing seems to be changing.
Speaker 1:May the example of God's vulnerable reaching for us inspire inspire you you to reach out to someone close to you. And may your eyes be open to the small insignificant ways that god's great power is appearing all around you. Let's pray, and then I wanna invite you to the table. God our father, in this series of darkness waiting in mystery, we turn our hearts toward you. And in this space, we acknowledge that there are times when your work and your presence in our lives, it leaves us lost.
Speaker 1:Perhaps you have not come as we expected. Perhaps we are becoming aware of the small and insignificant ways in which you have already come despite the sense of distance that we feel from you. Today, we ask that you would give us grace to sense your nearness. Give us grace to hold the mystery of your coming in our hearts, fragile as those hopes might be. Give us grace to discover your powerful work in our vulnerability.
Speaker 1:We pray this in the name of Christ and by the spirit. Amen.