First Sunday in Advent

The Season of Advent starts today, November 24, 2011, the fourth Sunday before Christmas. This is the season, before the Season of Christmas, when we deliberately think about God coming to earth as a human being, fully God, fully human in the person of Jesus. The promises of God to redeem all creation, which includes everything – every human, every living thing, every creature, every plant and fruit-bearing tree (everything), God’s revelation of Himself in Christ, the Word becoming flesh, making his dwelling among us and all this because God so LOVED the world. These are why we are waiting.

Seeing God’s glory, majesty and splendor might seem to be hard and perhaps implausible in our current world. We live in a world where this is much darkness and destruction. Nations are fighting nations, rejoicing when others are destroyed, we see only what is directly in front of us. After seeing picture after picture of poverty and destitution, bleakness and despair we turn our heads back to our dinner tables because the problems are so enormous that it is easier to turn our backs and be oblivious to that which is outside of our comprehension and instead we concentrate on our own troubles. And yet, God has promised that he is with us and that there is hope that this is not for what we were born.

Listen to how the Old Testament the prophet, Isaiah writes:

In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations stream to it.

Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us to up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.”

The law will go out from Zion, the world of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for way anymore.

Come, house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord” (Isaiah 2:2-5)

“…They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks…” There will be a day when nations will no longer rise up and fight other nations, or each other and we will walk in the light of the Lord. That day is coming; God has promised through his prophets.

So we wait, in hope and expectation, for God to reveal himself again to the world. Every morning, the news headlines tell us of another war, another faction, another nation rising up against another nation, another argument, another lie, another crisis…will there really be a time when we will all lay our weapons of war aside and indeed fashion them into tools for other use? That’s why we celebrate this time; this season of advent, of coming, of expectation that God is still working, is still moving and is still speaking to his people. My hope for this season is that it will not be just one more year that concludes with Christmas and a buying, tiring, stress-filled frenzy, but it will be a time to eagerly wait for God to enter our world and put on flesh and walk with each one of us.

“O come, o come Emmanuel…”