Is it really possible that Advent is here again so soon? I remember last year at this time; I had just been ordained and probably not preached more than 5 or 6 sermons in my life. What a way to start ministry! Preaching was my biggest challenge, especially those beginning remarks which are recommended to be humorous when and if appropriate. I believe I have grown a lot in this past year in many areas but I’m still not very funny. So I thought I would start off trying to do my best to be humorous. Let me tell you a few reasons why Jesus is better than Santa Claus: Santa lives in the North Pole; Jesus is everywhere. Santa rides in a sleigh; Jesus rides on the wind and walks on water. You have to wait in line to see Santa; Jesus is as close as the mention of his name. Santa has a belly like a heart full of jelly; Jesus has a heart full of love. All that Santa can offer is HO, HO, HO; Jesus offers, health, help, and hope. Okay, I know these aren’t fall down and laugh humorous. Let me try one last time: Bonnie, an 8 year old girl, went to sit on Santa’s lap. Santa said, hello little girl, what do you want for Christmas? Bonnie looked absolutely horrified as she yelled out, Don’t tell me you didn’t get my email!

Oh well, the title of my sermon today is Wait, watch and hope. If you wait, watch, and hope for another year, I may reveal to you a funnier me. All kidding aside, I feel so blessed that this congregation has embraced me with all my strengths and weaknesses. I am humbled and honored as I start another Advent season. Let us pray. Dear God thank you for this beautiful Advent season. Help us be fully awake as we anticipate and hope for your coming into our hearts and homes. May this time together be meaningful for us all. Amen.

Advent means waiting. It’s the kind of waiting that has a sense of expectation to it. It’s not clear when Advent originally started. For that matter we are not even sure what year or what month Jesus was born. It was not until the mid 300’s that Constantine the Great built the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and declared Jesus’ birthday a national holiday; and Julius, the bishop of Rome set the date as December 25th. Originally, Advent was a season preparing for Epiphany, January 6—which commemorates not Jesus’ birth, but his adoration by the Wise men for the Western church or his baptism in Jordan River for the Eastern church. It was a time of fasting and self-reflection. It was the mid-400’s before the majority of Christians accepted this Christmas date.

In today’s Hebrew Bible reading there are two very important things about Isaiah’s vision: one is the call to God’s holy mountain is inclusive—all nations will stream to God’s house, not just the people of Israel. The second important thing is Isaiah’s prophecy that people will learn to walk in the light of God and that violence will turn to peace just as the weapons will be transformed into pruning hooks and ploughshares, and they shall learn war no more. In both of the NT readings we are told to be alert, stay awake so that we shall be ready. What are we suppose to be watching for? In the gospel lesson Jesus talks about “that day” and seems to refer to the end of time, the eschaton when the Son of Man, signifying the resurrected Christ, will come on the clouds and bring the saved to be with him in glory. In the next chapter, Mt. 25, our Gospel reading from last week Jesus talks about dividing folks according to those who treated well the hungry, the sick, the prisoner and so on and those who did not. The point seems to be that no one will know when this time comes; there will be no signs. Not the angels, not even the Son knows. His comments about two being in the field or grinding meal and one will be taken and the other left seems to indicate separation into two groups: the wise and the foolish or the good and the evil for example. Paul in his letters to the Romans seems less emphatic about the imminent “Day of the Lord”, the end times than in the letters he wrote earlier. There is a sense that he may be beginning to think that those who believe in and follow Christ already live in the new Age, the new Creation. In any case he tells us to wake from sleep; the night is far gone; the day is near. It’s time for us to be prepared, be alert.

So if we look around and are attentive to what we observe during this watching, what will we see in this Advent season? We will see lots of lights, lots of shoppers, lots of gifts under the tree. Macrina Wiederkehr as a poem on Christmas shopping where she says: O shoppers, dear shoppers put your carts away. Please put your carts away and search deep down within your hearts for gifts that will not rust or fade for where your treasure is there is your heart. O look into your God-splashed, gospelled hearts and see! See Christmas standing there waiting to be, not bought but given free.” In a later line she says “…hang lights in your hearts instead of on your trees. For the One we’ve hung our hopes on has come and now we’re free but only if we see.”*

According to economists Christmas spending drives our retail economy. We can watch and see people charge on their credit cards and put themselves deeply in debt to buy presents that often are not useful or even wanted. We can watch as holiday parties announce good times. Social workers, clergy and other helping professionals watch as dysfunctions in families rise, as individuals manifest more and more depression; as loneliness and suicidal tendencies increase; as family violence (maybe because of increased alcohol/drug consumption) becomes more frequent. This year as well as in many previous years we see so many wars, so much violence. It is particularly real to us these last couple of years because of our country’s involvement in wars, our own countrymen and women killing and being killed. As we watch we yearn for that time of peace when even the lion will lie down with the lamb and we will see war no more.

So we wait. The beginning of the church year does not start with an event that has already happened such as Jesus birth. Instead it starts with a strange emptiness, a strange expectation. So we wait and we wonder. The Rev. Charles Hoffacker says “We wait and wonder. Unless we do this, we will find no real reason for celebration. Waiting and wondering are signs of a heart that lives, a heart that remains open to God.” He asks who are the people in this world that wait, pointing out that it is mostly powerless people who wait. If you have power and can use your connections there’s much less waiting—even in a traffic jam the police sound their sirens and the cars pull over to let the important person drive by. If you are poor, there is endless waiting: at the food bank, at the welfare office, at the soup kitchen, at the shelter. But for those of us who have made it, it is harder to wait—we are too busy. We don’t take the time to wonder—we are too busy. It use to be that children had plenty of time to wait and wonder, to lie in the field looking up at the sky and watch the clouds go by. Now with all the homework and after school activities, and for many not even a whole summer off, there is not as much time to wonder, to reflect. We are still waiting for peace; the hopes found in the Psalms and in Isaiah have so far failed to materialized. The collective resurrection both Paul and Jesus and his disciples talked about certainly has never materialized. Do we just keep waiting or do we start to reframe the expectation? Is it possible that our waiting needs to be a more active following of Jesus? As we share the Gospel with others, share our time, talent and treasures, love our neighbors as ourselves, pray for those that persecute us, is it then possible that Jesus the Christ does appear, appear in our individual lives and in the life of our church?

In all of this watching and waiting it is easy to be cynical and disappointed; I suggest that in this Advent season we dare to hope for a better world. John Cobb, one of the founders of Process Theology at my first seminary in Claremont, CA, says, “…the hope that keeps us going is far deeper and more fundamental to our faith than any particular formulation of its contents. Hope has survived repeated disappointments in the past. It will survive many more in the future. It will do so as long as we believe in the biblical God.”** For him the biblical God is concerned with history and works in history for peace and for justice; however, God’s working does not displace the working of human beings. “We believe that God’s hopes, also, are repeatedly frustrated. God works in hope for peace and justice, but the world turns to violence and oppression. Still God’s work is not futile. Here and here it succeeds… that success depends on our reponse to God’s invitation to share in the achievement of God’s purposes. And our hope depends on the assurance that God does not give up on us.” He points out how important hope is for those who are disappointed in the present election. For those who view such matters from a secular, political matter there is danger of despair, but for Christians, despair is not an option. He goes on to suggest how God’s work breaks through in the most unexpected places. His conclusion is that our hope lies in the fact that God is far wiser than we are and can bring about new good in those situations that we see as hopeless. A final quote from Cobb, “Our calling is to remain faithful in hope, even if the progress of God’s purposes is costly to us individually.”

So my sisters and brothers, let us start this advent season focusing on Hope. There are many kinds of hope; I wish for you the hope that is based on Isaiah’s prophecy of peace and Jesus’ promise of salvation. It is up to us to choose whether we get caught up in the frenzy of activity, buying expensive gifts, and doing things we really don’t want to do or if we spend our time and money serving and loving others and not forgetting to be kind and loving to ourselves. Only the hope we have in our living Lord, Jesus the Messiah can make the celebration of Christmas something more than a brief, frantic time of feasting, and drinking, and overspending. So we stay awake, we watch, we wait, and we hope. If any of you are interested in help with specifics, come see me. I have in my office the Heifer gift catalog that shows how to buy gifts of cows, pigs, goats, etc …that will bring health and hope to people in need in honor of people on your gift list. I have ideas for a Christ-Centered Christmas, a simpler, alternative way to celebrate outside of the commercialized world. I have a great booklet called “Whose Birthday is It Anyway?” In this booklet is a list of 10 free, fun things for your family to do. Another free and fun thing I hope you will all plan to do is join us for the Caroling on December 17th, the details are in the bulletin. We all have the wonderful potential of making this Christmas a most holy and fun filled time. I look forward to sharing it with you. Happy Advent.