Happy New Year everyone! Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which begins the new year in the life of the church. Historically there has been a three-year cycle of readings which we call the Revised Common Lectionary, and they begin and end with Advent – a time of preparation for the celebration of the coming of Christ. Some of that originates in seasons of harvest and connects with the lengthening of days and, yes, the date of December 25 was completely adopted from pagan religions much in the same way that Paul told the Athenians in Acts 17:23 that their statue for an unknown God was actually acknowledging the One true God.
Now that we have all of that out of the way I want to confess that I am not following the Revised Common Lectionary, I am following the Narrative Lectionary, which is a four-year cycle that also begins and ends with Advent. As we ended the year last Sunday with the celebration of the Reign of Christ and the reminder that we are ruled by grace and mercy and love, we begin this year with the hope that we have in the promise of resurrection and restoration.
It may seem a little misplaced to talk about the resurrection before we even get to the manger, but it’s actually just the speed bump that we need as we rush forward into what the world calls the Christmas Season. Those of you who joined me in watching the Christmas Parade on Thanksgiving know that it ended with Santa proclaiming the beginning of the “Christmas Season” which sounded to many like a starter’s pistol for a mad dash to get the best stuff at the best price.
As for me and my family, we did get a tree and began decorating for Christmas. We put on Christmas records from my youth, and later we watched some of the classics: Elf, Rudolf, and Frosty to name a few. As we opened cherished ornaments and shared memories of loved ones, some recently lost to us, others who have been with God for a while, I began to realize how important the idea and the experience of resurrection is to my faith and to the faith we share.
Even some of the most secular of these holiday classics have some concept of sacrifice and loss and hope reborn that is a part of the story, like Yukon Cornelius and Frosty. In the midst of it one of my kids asks me about the initials on an ornament. It was from my grandparents. Suddenly I was made aware of how important the promise of resurrection is to us. Suddenly in my memories of the love I’ve received my grandparents are reborn. Suddenly I’m encouraged by the hope that I’ll be reunited with them in the promise of Jesus.
Let’s talk about that promise a little. When I said hope, it’s because the faith in Christ that we share is something that gives us a reason to expect that what we hope for will indeed come true. What we hope for, what we can expect to come true, is not that we will get what we want. It is that God will come through with what God has promised. In the letter to the Hebrews 6:19, Paul said, “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.” Later in 11:1, he followed that with “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Much like the presents that may show up under our Christmas trees, we can expect that God will deliver us all, eventually, from the burden of this earthly life. While that’s a claim that I feel is supported by scripture, the interesting thing about both of our texts today is that they each deal with a very earthly and very physical resurrection from the dead.
There are those, of course, who have held the belief in the past (and some may still) that the resurrection that we can all expect on the last days when Jesus comes back is very much like the one described in Ezekiel. Graves will open, bodies will be reformed, and the Spirit of God will enter them to give them life. As far as I’m concerned, if God wants to do that then God will. At least that was Ezekiel's reaction when God said, “You think I can do this?”
The thing is, there is no historical record of a Zombie Hoard taking back the state of Israel. There is, instead, a record of God saying first to the land in Ezekiel 36, “I am sorry for the way you have been abused,” and then to the people in 37, “I will restore you.” The people called back, “We are nothing but dried bones,” and God simply said, “I’ve got your back.”
I think we all know how it feels to look around and feel like we have been cut off (37:11) from the life that we have lived before. It happens all the time with the natural phases of life as we grow and we become more of who God created us to be. There are other things that force those changes on us, though, and they can happen in ways that require us to grieve before we can move forward: broken friendships, loss of life, changes in society that feel like freedom to some and make others feel like the world has gone mad.
My point here is not to try to force some feeling of grief or sadness on you, but rather to say, “That’s life, and life can be hard – even when it’s good.” The promise of scripture that we receive today is that God cares. God sees us in our joy and holds us in our sadness, and God always promises more.
In Ezekiel, the bones of the people of Israel say, “We are dried out and cut off from the land.” In John’s Gospel, Mary, the sister of Lazarus asks, “Where were you when we needed you?” In the case of the Israelites, their understanding of gods was tied to the land. When other people from other lands took them, it seemed to prove that other gods were more powerful, yet the promise of their God is that they will be restored, even from a foreign land.
In the same way, Jesus told Mary, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.” Then he asks her, “Do you believe?” Oof. Can you imagine Jesus looking you in the eye and asking, “Do you believe?”
As harsh as that sounds, that is the question that this reading and this day and this time of year asks of us. Do we believe in the resurrection? Do we expect God to come through with what God says that God will do, or do we simply have a moral framework that justifies what we expect to happen?
Having said that, I have said before that one of the most common criticisms that I encounter about Christianity in social media and conversations with those who are spiritually seeking but not interested in doctrinal platitudes is the expectation of the metaphysical resurrection of Jesus or anyone else. Can we really say that God’s love, God’s promise of redemption, God’s hope of restoration rests on our capacity to swallow a belief without question?
As for me, I’ll follow Ezekiel's lead on this. It is for me to say that God will do as God will do. It is for me to say that God offers hope and restoration and, yes, resurrection through our faith in Jesus. It is for me to say that it is a very human thing to long for the hope that we know Jesus brings us, and we see it in every sappy commercial and holiday film when people go against their own self-interest because there is something about this time of year that tells them it’s the right thing to do.
Starting Advent with the hope of the resurrection is a way of saying that the one who has gone against their own self-interest on our behalf is the One whom we are waiting for and celebrating. Advent is like that, you know, it is both a time to anticipate and a time to do things while we wait. The word itself even has a double meaning. It means that something is coming and that something has been revealed.
The Advent of Christ means to wait for the one who has been revealed as the very presence of God in our midst to be revealed again. Will Christ be born in our hearts once more? Will the resurrection take place once again when we light candles and join the little bit of light that we bring to create more and more light in the world? In my heart, I believe it will.
It has been said that all the darkness in the universe cannot extinguish the light of one candle. Imagine what can happen when we join ours together! Here’s the beautiful thing about that, though. God did not only put flesh on the bones, God put God’s Spirit, God’s breath, in them, and God has done the same for you and for me. That means that the question for us is not, “How much death can we endure?” it is “how can we prepare to see the restoration and resurrection that God is already working toward in our midst?”
The beautiful thing is that there are some presents that we do not have to wait until Christmas Eve. In fact, we must not. In fact, the presence of God has already been made known. We must only believe that it is for us – all of us, and that includes them...whoever they are.
As we put up our evergreens, even the ones that will outlast us and be handed down for generations to come, let us remember that the promise of God is nothing short of a resurrected life, and that promise is not one that we have to die to experience. It begins with each selfless act, with every small amount of courage we can muster to stand for what we know is right and good and true, but if you really want to see it, look around at one another. Look around and remember that it is not by our actions but only through the actions of God that these dry bones will walk and talk and live to give glory to God.
Do you believe that God will do this? While God will do what God will do, our belief certainly helps us see what God is already doing. So let us light candles through the day and through the night. Not candles of wax and oil, but candles of love and mercy and grace, because we have hope and we will not be disappointed.
I pray it may be so with me and it may be so with you this Advent as we await the coming of Christ. Amen.
Now that we have all of that out of the way I want to confess that I am not following the Revised Common Lectionary, I am following the Narrative Lectionary, which is a four-year cycle that also begins and ends with Advent. As we ended the year last Sunday with the celebration of the Reign of Christ and the reminder that we are ruled by grace and mercy and love, we begin this year with the hope that we have in the promise of resurrection and restoration.
It may seem a little misplaced to talk about the resurrection before we even get to the manger, but it’s actually just the speed bump that we need as we rush forward into what the world calls the Christmas Season. Those of you who joined me in watching the Christmas Parade on Thanksgiving know that it ended with Santa proclaiming the beginning of the “Christmas Season” which sounded to many like a starter’s pistol for a mad dash to get the best stuff at the best price.
As for me and my family, we did get a tree and began decorating for Christmas. We put on Christmas records from my youth, and later we watched some of the classics: Elf, Rudolf, and Frosty to name a few. As we opened cherished ornaments and shared memories of loved ones, some recently lost to us, others who have been with God for a while, I began to realize how important the idea and the experience of resurrection is to my faith and to the faith we share.
Even some of the most secular of these holiday classics have some concept of sacrifice and loss and hope reborn that is a part of the story, like Yukon Cornelius and Frosty. In the midst of it one of my kids asks me about the initials on an ornament. It was from my grandparents. Suddenly I was made aware of how important the promise of resurrection is to us. Suddenly in my memories of the love I’ve received my grandparents are reborn. Suddenly I’m encouraged by the hope that I’ll be reunited with them in the promise of Jesus.
Let’s talk about that promise a little. When I said hope, it’s because the faith in Christ that we share is something that gives us a reason to expect that what we hope for will indeed come true. What we hope for, what we can expect to come true, is not that we will get what we want. It is that God will come through with what God has promised. In the letter to the Hebrews 6:19, Paul said, “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.” Later in 11:1, he followed that with “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Much like the presents that may show up under our Christmas trees, we can expect that God will deliver us all, eventually, from the burden of this earthly life. While that’s a claim that I feel is supported by scripture, the interesting thing about both of our texts today is that they each deal with a very earthly and very physical resurrection from the dead.
There are those, of course, who have held the belief in the past (and some may still) that the resurrection that we can all expect on the last days when Jesus comes back is very much like the one described in Ezekiel. Graves will open, bodies will be reformed, and the Spirit of God will enter them to give them life. As far as I’m concerned, if God wants to do that then God will. At least that was Ezekiel's reaction when God said, “You think I can do this?”
The thing is, there is no historical record of a Zombie Hoard taking back the state of Israel. There is, instead, a record of God saying first to the land in Ezekiel 36, “I am sorry for the way you have been abused,” and then to the people in 37, “I will restore you.” The people called back, “We are nothing but dried bones,” and God simply said, “I’ve got your back.”
I think we all know how it feels to look around and feel like we have been cut off (37:11) from the life that we have lived before. It happens all the time with the natural phases of life as we grow and we become more of who God created us to be. There are other things that force those changes on us, though, and they can happen in ways that require us to grieve before we can move forward: broken friendships, loss of life, changes in society that feel like freedom to some and make others feel like the world has gone mad.
My point here is not to try to force some feeling of grief or sadness on you, but rather to say, “That’s life, and life can be hard – even when it’s good.” The promise of scripture that we receive today is that God cares. God sees us in our joy and holds us in our sadness, and God always promises more.
In Ezekiel, the bones of the people of Israel say, “We are dried out and cut off from the land.” In John’s Gospel, Mary, the sister of Lazarus asks, “Where were you when we needed you?” In the case of the Israelites, their understanding of gods was tied to the land. When other people from other lands took them, it seemed to prove that other gods were more powerful, yet the promise of their God is that they will be restored, even from a foreign land.
In the same way, Jesus told Mary, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.” Then he asks her, “Do you believe?” Oof. Can you imagine Jesus looking you in the eye and asking, “Do you believe?”
As harsh as that sounds, that is the question that this reading and this day and this time of year asks of us. Do we believe in the resurrection? Do we expect God to come through with what God says that God will do, or do we simply have a moral framework that justifies what we expect to happen?
Having said that, I have said before that one of the most common criticisms that I encounter about Christianity in social media and conversations with those who are spiritually seeking but not interested in doctrinal platitudes is the expectation of the metaphysical resurrection of Jesus or anyone else. Can we really say that God’s love, God’s promise of redemption, God’s hope of restoration rests on our capacity to swallow a belief without question?
As for me, I’ll follow Ezekiel's lead on this. It is for me to say that God will do as God will do. It is for me to say that God offers hope and restoration and, yes, resurrection through our faith in Jesus. It is for me to say that it is a very human thing to long for the hope that we know Jesus brings us, and we see it in every sappy commercial and holiday film when people go against their own self-interest because there is something about this time of year that tells them it’s the right thing to do.
Starting Advent with the hope of the resurrection is a way of saying that the one who has gone against their own self-interest on our behalf is the One whom we are waiting for and celebrating. Advent is like that, you know, it is both a time to anticipate and a time to do things while we wait. The word itself even has a double meaning. It means that something is coming and that something has been revealed.
The Advent of Christ means to wait for the one who has been revealed as the very presence of God in our midst to be revealed again. Will Christ be born in our hearts once more? Will the resurrection take place once again when we light candles and join the little bit of light that we bring to create more and more light in the world? In my heart, I believe it will.
It has been said that all the darkness in the universe cannot extinguish the light of one candle. Imagine what can happen when we join ours together! Here’s the beautiful thing about that, though. God did not only put flesh on the bones, God put God’s Spirit, God’s breath, in them, and God has done the same for you and for me. That means that the question for us is not, “How much death can we endure?” it is “how can we prepare to see the restoration and resurrection that God is already working toward in our midst?”
The beautiful thing is that there are some presents that we do not have to wait until Christmas Eve. In fact, we must not. In fact, the presence of God has already been made known. We must only believe that it is for us – all of us, and that includes them...whoever they are.
As we put up our evergreens, even the ones that will outlast us and be handed down for generations to come, let us remember that the promise of God is nothing short of a resurrected life, and that promise is not one that we have to die to experience. It begins with each selfless act, with every small amount of courage we can muster to stand for what we know is right and good and true, but if you really want to see it, look around at one another. Look around and remember that it is not by our actions but only through the actions of God that these dry bones will walk and talk and live to give glory to God.
Do you believe that God will do this? While God will do what God will do, our belief certainly helps us see what God is already doing. So let us light candles through the day and through the night. Not candles of wax and oil, but candles of love and mercy and grace, because we have hope and we will not be disappointed.
I pray it may be so with me and it may be so with you this Advent as we await the coming of Christ. Amen.
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