What Are We Expecting from God?

John Turner's sermon from the First Sunday of Advent, November 28, 2010

Lamentations 3:21-33

These are dark times. They must be. Everyone keeps saying so. But then, there have been many such times in history, and some much worse. Nevertheless, I understand the tendency to bemoan the present times. Judy recently called to my attention an article that claimed the present generation is not interested in anything the church has been doing in the past: Sunday school, worship services, fellowship activities, mission projects, and the like. They are so pressured and busy that they don’t have time for all that. They are only interested in experiences and relationships, especially the kinds of things that can be conveyed on Face Book, Twitter, cell phone texting, and the like. Any content of the faith must be reduced to sound bites. And those sound bites need to be completely non-authoritarian, non-judgmental, non-demanding, never claiming that there is such a thing as absolute truth or absolute morality. How does one convey the content of our faith in a cultural setting like that? Yes, I can get down about that.

Okay, so Jesus and the apostles did not have it easy either. Their culture was not exactly predisposed to accept that there was only one God, one Lord, one Spirit, one faith, one hope, one baptism, one church. But God gave the handful of the first Christians powerful ways to capture people’s attention, to open people’s minds, and to demonstrate alternative ways of living. The first century church grew in leaps and bounds by counter-programing in a dark, hostile environment. God did it. God can do it again.

I am not here to preach a reactionary sermon about how awful our culture is. I am not here to curse the darkness. In the spirit of the Advent season, I am here to light a metaphorical candle.

The time period surrounding Jesus’ birth was a very dark time in the history of Israel. Rome had ruled for nearly sixty years. By the time of Jesus’ birth, Herod the Great, half Idumean (translate hated Edomite), had been for over thirty years the tyrannical, cruel, insanely paranoid, but still shrewd and effective, puppet king, appointed by Rome to govern unruly Israel. To find a time period much darker than that, more lacking in hope, we might go back more than six, nearly seven, centuries to the time when the Babylonians crushed Jerusalem, destroyed its temple, and either killed or carried off into exile the citizens who failed to escape.

It was in that previous dark period that the book of Lamentations was written. The bulk of the book is indeed filled with bitter lament, but right at the structural center of this book of gloom, are these words of hope:

Lamentations 3:21 But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: 22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; 23 they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 24 “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.” 25 The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him (waiting, even waiting quietly does not mean being passive; it means not turning away from the Lord and the Lord’s ways; it means not panicking and grasping after straws). 26 It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. 27 It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. 28 Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him; 29 let him put his mouth in the dust—there may yet be hope; 30 let him give his cheek to the one who strikes, and let him be filled with insults. 31 For the Lord will not cast off forever, 32 but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; 33 for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men.

The Lamentations passage draws its picture of God from the past, from a passage originating shortly after the exodus nearly a millennium before the exile. This too was a dark time. God through Moses had led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to the foot of Mount Sinai. God had called Israel to be a royal priesthood and a holy nation, meaning that they were to represent God’s character to the nations. In exchange, the Israelites had promised to obey God’s covenant laws, including the Ten Commandments. No sooner had Moses gone up the mountain to spend forty days receiving the stone tablets and other laws from god, than Israel at the foot of the mountain made and worshiped a golden calf, with fertility cult practices included. God and Moses were both very angry with the Israelites, but God led Moses to intercede for them, and Moses agreed to lead the Israelites into the Promised Land if God would promise to go with them. Moses also asked God to show him his glory. God agreed to reveal as much of his glory as Moses could stand.

The Exodus passage describes the qualities that God revealed when he hid Moses in the cleft of a rock on Mount Sinai, covered him there with his hand because Moses could not have stood a face-to-face viewing of God’s holiness, and the Lord passed before Moses, proclaiming the meaning of his name, the heart of his identity: “Yahweh, Yahweh (which translates, The Lord, the Lord, or I Am That I Am, I Am That I Am,), a God merciful and gracious (or compassionate), slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness….” Do you hear these words from Exodus echoing in Lamentations? Steadfast love, mercy, faithfulness, compassion… this is who God is; this is what God's name, the Lord, Yahweh, is to convey to us. God may be absolutely, perfectly holy, unable to put up with wrong, and absolutely Sovereign, sufficiently powerful to do whatever he wants, but he will always exercise his holy, sovereign freedom in consistency with his steadfast love, faithfulness, mercy, grace, and compassion.

In the name and character of this God is hope even for the darkest time. Lamentations, written in bitterly dark times, amongst the slain corpses of Jerusalem and the ruins of its temple, finds one brightly shining ray of hope. The one hope, even in dark times, is that the character of God has not changed, that the light of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness, mercy, grace, and compassion, is steady, reliable, and available. Please hear: this is the one hope. There is no other.

If we are to avail ourselves of the one hope, then we must set our hearts and minds on that hope and no other. What must we do to claim this one hope? We must make sure that our expectations in life, the solutions we pursue in life, are God-given, God-shaped, and God-sized.

The Hope That Is God-Given The hope of which I speak is a firm expectation based on revealed truth that has been proven by the tests of many centuries. The revealed truth in which we hope runs from Genesis through Revelation and is centered in Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate, Immanuel, God with us in human flesh.

The name Jesus, Joshua, Yeshua, Yehoshua, However you want to say it, says this, “The Lord saves,” or, “The Lord delivers.” Jesus is the one who puts God’s holiness, steadfast love, faithfulness, grace, mercy, and compassion most tangibly before us. This God appears throughout the Bible, but when we want to bring our vision of God into the sharpest possible focus, we look to Jesus. Specifically, we look toward what Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were divinely inspired to tell us about Jesus.

Mark, writing first, tells us that Jesus is the Royal Son of God who came to demonstrate God’s reigning love and power, that he is the Suffering Servant who came to give his life as a ransom for our sins, and that he is the Divine Son of Man who will prevail in the end.

Matthew adds that Jesus is the fulfillment of the entirety of the Old Testament and that he is the ultimate teacher who clarifies for us God’s perfect will for all his children, Jews and Gentiles alike. Jesus instructs, purifies, and empowers his followers so that they can carry his message to the whole world, baptizing new believers into Jesus and teaching them to obey his commandments.

Luke adds that Jesus is a new Adam founding a new creation, lifting up the lowly and bringing down those who think they are really something, transforming and empowering his followers with the Holy Spirit so that they can live in ways that overturn how the world runs and instead make it run by God’s redeeming love.

John adds that Jesus is the Divine Word made flesh, tabernacling amongst us, at last going away so that he can send his Spirit to live in us, enabling us to do the kinds of things he did, and greater things yet. John especially wants us to understand that Jesus is fully human, subject to all the limitations of a human body (exhaustion, hunger, thirst, tears, pain, getting dirty), willing to assume the humble duties of practically caring for the physical needs of his fellow human beings, and that, at the same time, Jesus is fully divine, able to convey to all who believe in him the power to become freed, delivered, reborn children of God.

Put the four Gospels together and you get a fully orbed picture of the Creator of the universe and of his saving love. In Jesus, God has fully revealed himself. Our hope is in the God so revealed. Our hope is God-given.

The Hope That Is God-Shaped If God is fully holy and fully loving, then he must be moving his creation toward a perfection that is characterized by God’s kind of love, a self-giving, redeeming, reconciling love, a love focused on new life. God wants to reshape us in his image. If we want to find hope in a dark world, then we must be opening ourselves as fully as possible to God’s reshaping work in our lives. We must let his reshaping work set our goals in life and direct our energies and resources in life. Yes, we will always in this life fall short, but what counts is the divine source, direction, and motivation of our progress, bringing us degree by degree along to the next stage in our development. A hope that is not God-shaped is fool’s gold. It will disappoint us in the end. If our hope is focused on money, fame, power, sex or romance, and the like, we will end up disappointed, ultimately miserable. But if our goal is to love more and more in accord with the truth of Jesus, and we are letting the Holy Spirit moves us in that direction, our hope will not disappoint us. A God-shaped hope may go through some dark valleys, but never disappoints in the end.

The Hope That Is God-Sized There is a bit of a mystery in how our hope can be God-sized. If our hopes are grandiose, God may force us to refocus on smaller size hopes until we master those. If our hopes are so small as not to match God’s purposes for our lives, then God may force us far beyond our comfort zones into bigger fields of endeavor. How does one know what size our hopes should be in order to be God-sized? The key is that if our hope is focused on what we can do by our own strength and resources, then our hope is the wrong size, either too big or too small. God-sized hopes do not leave us in control, but call us beyond ourselves to be agents of God. In the end, what we have to say is that a God-sized hope, whether big or little, is one that only God can do. That is the kind of hope that God wants to accomplish through us. If we don’t open ourselves to something that only God can do, we may never see beyond the darkness.

What are we expecting from God? Is it God-given, revealed in the Bible and especially through Jesus Christ? Is it God-shaped, aimed at God’s purposes for his creation and for our lives? Is it God-sized, something that only God can do? If so, we will not be disappointed in the end.