Sermons
December 3, 2023 (First Sunday of Advent)
“I know he can save me.”
Matthew 9:18-26
You may or may not agree with me on this: I am not dreaming of a white Christmas.
Frankly, given all the traveling, all the special stuff going on, the extra church services, and so on, I find snow at Christmas time to be a complete nuisance. (We won’t even get into the question of ice storms on Christmas; I’ve been through that, too, and it takes “nuisance” to a whole new level.) So I hope we don’t have a white Christmas.
A few weeks ago I ordered a poster frame from Amazon.com. It was a little ten-dollar thing, no big deal, but I don’t have the wherewithal to make one for myself and wasn’t sure I could get a suitable one locally. As you do when you order from Amazon, I immediately got an order confirmation, followed only a few hours later by the notice that it had shipped.
Well, I already had the poster, so I hoped it would arrive quickly so I could get the poster in it and hang it up. I eagerly watched the tracking information.
It set out one day from a distribution center in Lenexa. From there it went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota! And then it vanished.
I rarely have that kind of result when I order something from Amazon, but this time I did. What I hoped for didn’t materialize.
(To be fair to Amazon, they had advised me as soon as they knew it was going to be delayed, and told me on what day I could report it missing and get a replacement, and when I did that the replacement arrived at my house in two days.)
This past week, after the new smartphone I ordered, and hoped to be able to get set up quickly and easily, as has nearly always been the case when I’ve gotten a new phone, turned out to be defective, I ordered another one from Amazon. They told me I could expect it on December 2—yesterday—and I hoped I wouldn’t run into the same problem I had with the poster frame—which, of course, cost me a tenth of what the new phone did. I hoped it would arrive on time, because since Saturday is my day off, I would have plenty of time to get it activated and set up and ready to go.
But as of Friday afternoon, Amazon was showing that it had yet to get to the post office, instead having bounced from Lenexa to Kansas City, Kansas, and then back to Lenexa. It wasn’t looking good for the phone getting to me by yesterday as I hoped.
As it turned out, no matter what the post office’s tracking website said, it actually arrived Friday afternoon. Mike went outside for something and found the package leaning against the door. So I was able to set it up yesterday, just like I had hoped.
When you were a kid—or if you’re a kid now—what did (or do) you hope Santa would bring you for Christmas?
When I was little, Sears and JCPenney’s both put out Christmas catalogs with extensive toy sections. Carrie and I would go through those catalogs (I think we only got the Penney’s one, and the Sears Wish Book was at Grandma’s house), and we would turn down pages and write our names next to things we wanted. Naturally we wanted a whole lot more than it was reasonable for us to get, but we hoped Santa, and our parents and grandparents because not all of our gifts came from Santa, would know which ones we really, really wanted, and proceed accordingly.
One year I wanted a Polaroid camera. I spent a lot of time looking over the packages under the tree, hoping one of them contained that camera—and if it wasn’t in one of them, hoping that Santa would bring it on Christmas eve.
As it turns out, I did get that Polaroid camera, but not for Christmas that year as I hoped. I got it for my birthday, a year or two later.
What are you hoping for this Christmas? Is there a specific gift you hope to receive? Do you hope someone will like a gift you’re putting a lot of thought and effort into getting for them? Or do you simply hope you can get together with loved ones to celebrate?
In some cases, we might find ourselves hoping that, when we do get together with our loved ones, the gathering will be free of arguments and drama. I’m very thankful that isn’t typically part of my family gatherings. It hasn’t been since I was a fifteen-year-old know-it-all that we’ve even had much static at all over political things, for instance. (We’re not better people than others who do have that kind of static; we just mostly all have the same political beliefs.)
Four years ago, before I fell and broke my arm, I was hoping to make some special things for our family Christmas gathering. My cousin had at that point just gotten married to a woman from Turkmenistan. We all like her very much, and as a way to welcome her as a part of our family, that year we decided to make foods that might have been familiar to her in her native country.
Turns out if you Google traditional foods from Turkmenistan, you don’t get a whole lot of guidance, other than that things familiar in the cuisines of Iran or Turkey or other countries in that area might be similarly familiar there. So I had picked a couple things I wanted to try to make, and started looking for recipes and testing them.
Then I broke my arm, and all that went out of the window. What I hoped for wasn’t possible.
Hope is the theme for the First Sunday of Advent,[1] but the definition of hope that’s common in the world outside the church is not the same as how Christians are meant to understand hope.
The examples I just gave illustrate how the rest of the world understands hope. “I hope it doesn’t snow and make getting around difficult at Christmas”—but experience teaches us that, well, sometimes it does. “I hope there’s a Polaroid camera for me under the Christmas tree”—but Santa, and my parents and grandparents, may well have something else in mind, as it turned out they did that Christmas. (Kids and youth who are here this morning might have to ask your parents what a Polaroid camera is; they’re not real common these days.) “I hope our family can get together and everyone behaves themselves”—but it’s not always possible, is it? “I hope I can make something for Christmas dinner that Olga will enjoy”—but a person can’t really make manti and baklava with their arm in an immobilizer.[2]
You might as well replace the word hope with the word wish in those examples, because that’s about all that kind of hope amounts to.
When I was a little kid, maybe seven or eight, I read a silly story that said if a person finds a penny with their birth year on it on New Year’s Day, they could make a wish on that penny and it would come true. I just happened to have a 1968 penny, so I put it where I could arrange to “find” it on New Year’s Day.
What did I wish for?
I wanted to be able to fly! It would have been so cool to have flown through the air above all my friends when we went back to school after Christmas break, and then landed softly at the door in front of them.
So I “found” my 1968 penny and made my wish. Then, to see if it worked, I got up on my bed, which was an antique one that sat quite a ways up from the floor, and I jumped off, hoping I would defy gravity and just glide down the hallway from my bedroom to the living room, then go out the front door and continue the flight.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how it turned out.
In here, on the first Sunday of Advent, hope means something else entirely.
A great many churches begin Advent with a passage from Isaiah. Maybe we hear from chapter 11, “A shoot will spring up from the stump of Jesse…” Or maybe it’s chapter 7, “Look, a woman is with child, and she will bear a son, and she will call him Immanuel.” Or it might be chapter 9, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light…for unto us a child is born.” Or perhaps we go to chapter 40, where a different prophet lets mournful exiles know God is about to make a way for them to go home.
That’s not what we’ve done today. Instead, Carol described to us how a woman who had been ill, and as a result ritually unclean and isolated from everyone, for twelve years with what is euphemistically referred to at my house as “girl stuff,” went to Jesus hoping to be healed. And in the parallel passage Lyssa read us, we hear about how that woman’s encounter with Jesus interrupts his journey to the synagogue leader’s house, where he had been asked to go because the leader hoped Jesus could raise his daughter from the dead.
But these people were not just tossing a coin in a fountain, or watching for the first star of the evening, and making a wish.
When Jesus notices the woman’s having touched the tzitzit—fringes observant Jews wore to remind them of the covenant between God and their people—of his garment, he turns and speaks kindly to her. “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”
It turns out that faith and hope are very closely intertwined. This woman didn’t come to Jesus to wish she might get well—incidentally, the Greek word translated “made well” here is often rendered “saved.” She came because she believed, she knew, he could save her.
The same goes for the synagogue leader. He didn’t just wish his daughter hadn’t died; he believed, he knew, that Jesus had the ability to save her even from the cold grip of death itself.
Inside the church, and for us who come to church, wherever else we might go, hope is a whole lot more powerful than simply making a wish.
If somebody says, “I hope our church will keep ministering in this community and helping people to know God’s love and compassion,” they’re not saying, “I sure wish God would make that possible.” They are saying, “I know God can and will use us to be Christ’s hands and feet and heart alive in this world.”
When, at a funeral, I commit someone into God’s hands in the hope of resurrection through Jesus Christ, I am not saying, “I sure wish God would give them eternal life.” I am saying, “I believe, I know, I am certain, that Jesus will raise them to everlasting life in his presence.”
Christian hope is not wishful thinking. It is assurance. It is certainty.
There’s not a whole lot of certainty available in the world around us. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. We don’t know whether it will snow on Christmas; even the best meteorologists can’t give us 100% accurate predictions of that. We can’t count on the price of gas, or eggs, or whatever, being the same today as it was yesterday, for better or for worse.
But Christians have certainty about one thing, probably the most important thing: God loves us, and has given Christ the power to transform even situations we would consider hopeless.
So what are you hoping for this Christmas?
[1] The Advent themes are folklore, so they’re not always the same from year to year or from church to church; they are usually hope, peace, joy, and love, but aren’t always in that order—although generally joy is the theme for the third Sunday, when we light the pink Advent candle.
[2] Baklava turns out to be a whole lot easier to make than we’ve been led to believe, but you do need two hands.