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Last updated on
March 28, 2005
God's Peace is at Hand
Delivered First Sunday of Advent, November 28, 2004
by Pastor Werner De Jong
Text: Isaiah 2:1-5 (also Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14, Mt. 24:36-44)
Main Idea: The season of Advent reminds us of God's promised peace. In the midst of a world full of despair and violence, God's promise reassures us that our reality will change.
Purpose: To encourage the listeners that God will transform situations of despair into those of peace. To challenge the listeners to walk in the light of God's promised peace.
Introduction: to Advent Series: Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which means it is also the first Sunday of the new Christian year. As we enter into this new year, our theme for Advent is an invitation: "Come! Walk in the Light of Day!" Every year Advent reminds us of the long-awaited light that came into the world with the birth of the baby Jesus, and of the promised light that is still to come when Christ returns. This year our Advent material invites us in faith to embrace the light. It confronts us with the honest recognition of the fact that we go through times of darkness in our personal lives and in our church communities, whether it is the darkness of sin, distress, suffering, despair or broken relationships. The theme also recognizes that there continues to be darkness in our world, like the darkness of oppression, injustice and war.
But above all the theme focuses on the promise of day and of glorious light yet to come. In the darkness of our night times, the Advent Scriptures remind us that God is going to change our reality. They offer us the sure hope that God sees our darkness and that God cares and is acting on our behalf. Even though we may not be able to see in the dark, which can cause difficult circumstances to feel very hopeless, the Scriptures declare the truth that God is there, God is merciful, and God is acting. The night will pass, the first rays of dawn are already shining, and the full brightness of day will soon be here (This year's Advent display will be a visual reminder of this truth...Explain the display).
The promised coming of day is a tremendous encouragement. We regularly need to hear the good news that help is on the way. But it also provides us with a wonderful challenge, the challenge to walk in the light of day, in the light of hope. In Jesus Christ the goodness of God has broken into our world, and it is transforming it, and one day it will fully transform it. We are called to walk in the light of that goodness. The challenge is a call to action, a call to align ourselves with God's purposes, a call to live lives of peace, justice and right relationships. These are the themes we will consider during Advent.
First Sunday of Advent: Peace is on the Way: Our primary text for this first Sunday of Advent is the first five verses of Isaiah 2. Most of it was read earlier in the service as part of the call to worship. The message of the text is a very hopeful one–in it God promises that peace is on the way: "In days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains...all the nations shall stream to it...for out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations...they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks...neither shall they learn war anymore" (Is. 5:2-4).
This text promises the sweet relief of God's peace to the world, to all those who know what it is to go through a night time of despair. The promise is for peace on a global scale: It is for Iraqis, it is for Ukrainians, it is for Colombians, it is for Canadians. God will act, and God will bring peace. God will make wars cease, God will reconcile nations to one another, God will bring about a world without fear, and God will give his people rest. This prophecy may address the nations, but nations are made up of people. Not only are the affairs of the nations important to God; the difficult times each of us go through are also important to God. Other promises in the Bible speak of peace on a more personal level. Therefore we hear Jesus say, "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls" (Mt. 11:28-29). Peace is on the way, because God loves us, and God is working to bring an end to the darkness.
As wonderful as such promises are, they also present us with a paradox. In today's world of increasing violence it almost seems absurd to speak about a promise for global peace. We may wonder if the Bible isn't simply presenting us with an impossible vision of Utopia? When we go through dark times in our personal lives we may feel the same way, that promises of rest and peace, and the announcement that help is on the way, as wonderful as they sound, are mere wishful thinking. Are they? Or is there any substance to the promises?
Faith in the Promise: When we ask such questions, we begin to see that the Advent season ultimately calls us to renew our faith. For none of us can see the future; all the Bible provides regarding the future are oft-repeated promises. We are asked to put our faith in those promises, sight unseen. Nowhere is this promise put more beautifully than at the end of the Bible, where we see a vision of the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, together with this wonderful announcement: "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God, they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new'" (Rev. 21:3-5). Nothing expresses the heart of God more than this text. God is working to bring an end to the darkness; this includes tenderly wiping away our tears, and eliminating death itself. The good news of Advent is its reminder that peace is on the way, for God has promised to make all things new.
As followers of Jesus, we are called to embrace this good news in faith. We are still waiting for its fulfilment, but that shouldn't dampen our faith. The time of waiting actually provides us with the opportunity to exercise faith. If we had scientific proof that God's promises would come to pass, there would be no room for faith. It would be irrelevant. But God wants us to learn to trust him, even in difficult circumstances. Faith by very definition is "the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen" (Heb. 11:1, NLT). In his book, "Reaching for the Invisible God," Philip Yancey summarizes a scene from Nelson Mandela's autobiography in which Mandela had his hope for the future renewed. It happened when Mandela first laid eyes on his granddaughter. "At the time," writes Yancey, "he was working at hard labour on Robben Island in almost unbearable conditions, cutting lime in a quarry under a sun so bright it nearly blinded him. Only one thing kept the prisoners from despair: they sang together as they worked. The songs reminded them of family and home and tribe and the world outside they might otherwise forget. During the fourteenth year of his imprisonment Mandela gained permission from a visit from his daughter....he had not held her since she was a young girl...it was dizzying to hug this fully grown woman, his child. Then she handed over her own newborn baby, Nelson's granddaughter, into his callused, rough, leathery hands." Mandela wrote: "To hold a newborn baby, so vulnerable and soft in my rough hands, hands that for too long had held only picks and shovels, was a profound joy. I don't think a man was ever happier to hold a baby than I was." Mandela's tribal culture had a tradition of letting the grandfather choose a baby's name. After some contemplation he settled on Zaziwe, which means Hope: "The name," he wrote, "had special meaning for me, for during all my years in prison hope never left me–and now it never would. I was convinced that this child would be a part of a new generation of South Africans for whom apartheid would be a distant memory–that was my dream." As it turned out , Mandela had served barely half his sentence and would not gain freedom for thirteen more years. The vision of hope, however, of Zaziwe, sustained him (pp.78-79). History now tells us that Mandela's hope was not in vain, for South Africa's long decades of apartheid have come to an end.
Mandela's tenacity of hope is the same hope which God calls us to exercise in his promises. God deliberately gives these promises to sustain us when we walk through dark times. Sometimes we have to sustain this hope over many, many years. The Bible tells a story of another old man who held a baby in his arms, and if anything his joy in doing so was even greater than Mandela's. His name was Simeon, and the Holy Spirit had promised him that he would not die before he saw the Lord's Messiah. Many long years he had waited, until one day Mary and Joseph arrived at the temple, and placed the baby Jesus in Simeon's arms. He cradled him and praised God, saying, "Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the gentiles and for glory to your people Israel" (Luke 2:28-32). That same baby is our basis for hope; his birth is the reason we can renew our confidence in the future. He is the light of the world. His light shines through the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it. One day he will forever banish all darkness. As the Bible's final vision of the New Jerusalem puts it, "the city has no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb is its light. The nations of the earth will walk in its light, and the rulers of the world will come and bring their glory to it" (Rev. 21:23-24). That same light is also able to pierce through our despair even in the present. It is able to bring peace to all who are willing to wait on the Lord, to trust him, to rest on his promises. The promises of Advent remind us that the life of faith is a life of patience and hope.
The life of faith is well illustrated by Jurgen Moltmann, who was one of the great theologians of the 20th century. Philip Yancey writes how, as a young German during World War II, he was drafted into the army, and sent to the battlefront, where he was soon captured by British forces. He spent the next three years in various prison camps. As Hitler's empire collapsed, Moltmann saw fellow Germans all around him become disillusioned. Many lost all hope, and some even became sick and died of despair. Moltmann writes that the same thing almost happened to him, until he had a rebirth to new life. Moltmann was not a Christian, and as a soldier he had only brought two books with him into battle–Goethe's poems and the complete works of Nietzsche. As he read them in prison camp, neither of them gave him any hope. But one day an army chaplain gave him the New Testament and the book of Psalms. He began to read: "If I make my bed in hell, behold thou are there." That really started him thinking–could God be present in that dark night? As he continued to read the Psalms, he found words that expressed his own feelings of desolation. The honesty of the psalmists in expressing their own times of despair deeply moved him, especially as they also went on to write about hope. He found despair and hope spoken of side by side. And he began to believe that light truly was more powerful than darkness. He became convinced that God "was present even behind the barbed wire–no, most of all behind the barbed wire." He would take walks inside the perimeter of the barbed wire fence at night for exercise. In doing so he continually circled a small hill in the centre of the camp on which stood a chapel. "For him the hut became a symbol of God's presence radiating in the midst of suffering, and out of that symbol grew hope." When he was released from prison, he started a movement known as "a theology of hope." He wrote honestly about life's contradictions as we live between the cross and the resurrection. In this in-between time, as we wait for the fulfilment of God's promises, we hope for peace and for the world to be restored. "We have no proof that it can ever be attained, only a sign in history, the ‘foreglow' of the raising of Christ from the dead" (pp. 77-78, Reaching for the Invisible God). It is not yet Easter, but Easter provides the sure basis of our Advent hope. God is at work in our world, God sees global suffering, God sees our despair, and God cares. Peace is God's will, and nothing can stop the will of God from coming to pass. For the God we serve is even able to bring life from death. Believe the good news, for the one who has promised is true!
Walk in the Light of Day: Finally, in response to God's promised peace, we are called to walk in the light of day. In our biblical reading we have heard that call already this morning. Immediately following Isaiah's prophecy of swords being transformed into plowshares, Isaiah writes: "O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!"
What will such a walk look like? Above all, it will mean this: choosing by faith to believe that God is light, and that the light is stronger than the darkness. It will mean choosing to believe that God loves us and is actively at work in our world. It will therefore mean choosing hope over despair. And this hope will lead us by faith to align our lives with God's promises. Choosing hope will mean choosing to shine as lights in dark places. It will mean speaking words of hope to those who don't know Jesus, and inviting them to embrace him. It will mean seeking reconciliation and offering forgiveness to those who hurt us. If we have hurt others, it will mean asking for forgiveness. It will mean offering food to the hungry, justice to the oppressed, and hospitality to the lonely. In short it will mean doing anything and everything we can to live as peacemakers, to be signs to others that God's peace is on the way. Just like Jesus did. He recognized that the road to peace was the road of self-sacrifice. His faith journey led him to Jerusalem and the cross. We are called to join him on this pilgrimage. Walking in the light of the Lord means walking in the ways of our Lord.
That is a tremendous challenge, one which requires courageous action on our part. That courage will be supplied by our faith. For faith is not mere intellectual assent to a set of facts. Faith means striking out in obedience to God's word, even if God is invisible and we can't see any scientific proof that his promises will be fulfilled. We take that step anyway, because we believe that the one who called us is true, and we believe that in the birth of Jesus his peace has come, and is coming, and will one day prevail over all.
Conclusion: In conclusion, even though we sometimes walk through times of darkness, let us remember that God is present with us. Whether we are experiencing family strife, job pressures, financial stress, or global concerns, God is there, God is merciful, and God is at work to bring peace. In the midst of a world full of despair and violence, God's promise reassures us that in his good timing our reality will change. The night is passing, and the glorious light of God's peace will soon be here. Dare to believe it, and dare to walk in the light of day, for the One who has promised is true.