I Hope

What is it you hope for this Christmas? If I ask ten different people that question, I imagine I will get ten different answers. But I think I can boil it down into several categories. Our kids make Christmas lists of things they hope for – sometimes those are more like “demands,” like the ones someone holding hostages might make: I’ll let these innocent people go if you’ll get me the following top nine hot toys from Toys ‘r’ Us:

Despicable Me Talking figure: $59.99-$69.99 (age 4-12)

Sofia the First Royal Talking Vanity $79.99 (age 3-5)

The Ugglys electronic pet $29.99 (age 5 and up)

Doc McStuffins Deluxe Get Better Check Up Center $79.99 (age 3-5)

Ever After High Dolls

LeapFrog LeapPad Ultra $149.99 (ages 4-6) – comes in green or pink

LEGO the Legends of Chima The Lion CHI Temple $98.99 (age 8-14)

Razor Crazy Cart $399.99 (age 9 and up)

Xbox One $499.99 (technically age 6 and up, though games have their own ratings)

Girlfriends and boyfriends are hoping they bought “the right” gift for their significant other. Parents and grandparents are just hoping that they have enough money for all the Christmas gifts they’re buying for their children and grandchildren.

This year during Advent, I co-opted the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. I like to have a certain theme for my Advent sermons, and this year we will focus on preparation. Even our decorations focus this way this year. Throughout this season, we are preparing ourselves for Christmas. What do you do to prepare? Some people have a Christmas account at the bank, where you’ve been putting back money to save up for Christmas. You hope to have enough money saved up to buy the things you want.

We prepare for the visiting with family members – whether they are coming to us or we are going there. There are many who have difficult family situations, so you have to juggle personalities and conflicts in addition to schedules. You hope everyone gets along and maybe even has fun. Or at least that nobody kills anyone!

We prepare meals – who here eats a special Christmas dinner? You hope everything tastes good. You hope you have all the ingredients in your house. You hope everyone helps you clean up – OK, maybe that is more of a wish than a hope.

We prepare for Christmas parties and different Christmas activities. Many times, my wife’s schedule is booked solid all December with different violin gigs. Locally, the Christmas parade is coming up, and we’ve asked you to make cookies and help serve those who will meet Santa at the City Building after the parade. The city is having a Christmas Tree lighting complete with Christmas carols. Our church leadership team will have a dinner instead of our usual monthly meeting. We will have special services, Christmas caroling, the children will present a Christmas program, we will have a Christmas Eve service, and there are all kinds of things that go into preparing for these. You hope you get everywhere you need to go and you have everything ready.

Most of us prepare by putting up a Christmas tree and decorating it, fighting with the light strings, getting out all the ornaments and other decorations. For quite a few years, my mom has threatened to not put up a Christmas tree, but every year she breaks down and puts it up and decorates it. I think a big reason is because her grandkids have made ornaments for her and when else does she get a good chance to display them? And you hope that everything looks nice and that the cat or the toddler doesn’t knock your tree over.

Some of us put up Christmas lights. I remember putting up lights at our parsonage in New Knoxville – we put them up on a Friday night and finally got them up after dusk. We had them lit until about nine, when I turned them off as we went to bed. The next morning there was an event at church, and they were all buzzing about the lights at the parsonage. Information travels fast in a small town… everybody knew about it, and some of them had gone out at night just to see our Christmas lights! It had been a long time since that parsonage had been lit up for Christmas. Of course, there are other people who never take their Christmas lights down. I especially liked the house where they not only left their lights up, but it said “Marry Christmas” on their window… in June…

So, with all this in mind, are you prepared for Christmas? And will Christmas fulfill your hopes?

Many pastors build their sermon schedules around the Revised Common Lectionary, which is a listing of scriptures, four for almost every Sunday, which rotates over a three-year schedule. It includes an Old Testament reading, a Psalm, a Gospel reading and another New Testament reading. The idea is that if you use all four readings, over three years, you will cover most of the Bible. Anyway, today’s Gospel reading comes from Matthew 24:36-44. If you look back to the beginning of this chapter, you’ll find Jesus walking by the Temple with his disciples. He tells them that the Temple will be destroyed.  The disciples asked him, “when will this happen?” So Jesus answers, telling them about some signs and warning them against false prophets. And then we get to today’s passage.

“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. This is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.

“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.

Our hopes for Christmas range from the shallow – I hope I get the right gift – to the deep – I hope for peace this year. As children the hope that it will finally be Christmas is a hope that most of us, as adults, have forgotten, because we know the nature of the calendar – it will be here soon enough. The question is, are we prepared?

In the years before Jesus’ birth, there was hope. The Jews had the hope for their coming Messiah. They were prepared, or so they thought. It became clear that they were not prepared for who Jesus really was. In fact, immediately after Jesus’ resurrection, two men were walking along the road to Emmaus and Jesus showed up and walked with them and talked with them, but they didn’t recognize him. They explained their disappointment – they had expected for Jesus to be the one to redeem Israel. But he had died and with that death, their hope died as well. Until they recognized him when he broke bread with them.

As we prepare for Christmas, do we get so caught up in our mundane preparations that we lose sight of what we ought to be preparing for? Do we still prepare for Jesus’ return? I remember a couple of years back when some guy named Harold Camping got his fifteen minutes of fame by predicting that Jesus would return on May 21, 2011.

I remember when a friend of my family went and sold everything to live up in some compound in the mountains to wait for Jesus’ return. Yeah, that didn’t work out very well either. But it seems that there are always people who hold out that hope, a hope so strong that for some reason they think it should supersede what Jesus said, that not even the angels nor the Son know the date or time; only God knows.

But the problem is, we’ve been waiting for two thousand years and we’ve gotten complacent. We go about our daily business, and we think, “I’ve got time for this. I can focus on Jesus-stuff later. I’ve got my whole life in front of me.” But the truth is, none of us is promised tomorrow.

Listen to what Paul says in Romans 13:11-14: And do this, understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of the darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissention and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.

One of the problems in our society is that it is so easy to be a Christian. You can pretty much do whatever you want whenever you want. And come to church on Sunday. If you want to. Nobody is checking to see if you read your Bible. Nobody is clocking in and clocking out on a prayer clock. We don’t monitor your conversations to see if you are sharing the Gospel. Most of us could be described as spiritual sleepers. Paul is saying that we need to wake up from spiritual slumber! We need to prepare with a sense of urgency.

When I was in elementary school, I rode my bike all the time. That was what elementary school boys would do – I’d ask my mom, “Can I go ride bikes with Darrell or Jeremy?” and off I’d go. Once Jeremy and I were riding around the high school parking lot, and Jeremy headed out right in front of a car. I grabbed him, he fell off his bike, and the car missed him. I can remember him looking at me wide-eyed, saying, “You just saved my life!”

What would have happened if I’d thought it over and come to the conclusion, “well, Jeremy has the freedom to choose if and when he wants to ride out into a parking lot. Who am I to interfere with his choice?” No, I did what I needed to do to stop him. The problem is that we often don’t see spiritual matters with the same kind of urgency. Are we prepared for Jesus’ return?

Now, I was tempted to stop and camp out a while on Paul’s description of what he called the deeds of the night, understanding that any time a news story starts with the time being after midnight, it’s never going to be a good story. I was tempted, because it’s easy to take potshots at sin. But I also remember last week’s message about judging others while sinning, and I will allow the Holy Spirit to do the judging. A good way to think about it is: if you wouldn’t want Jesus watching over your shoulder or listening in, it’s probably not a good thing to be doing. And it doesn’t help prepare you for Jesus’ return.

But hope does. When our hope is in Jesus, everything else is put into perspective. I like Paul’s admonition: wake up from spiritual slumber and clothe yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ.

What might our hope look like if we did this? Wake up with the blessing from Psalm 146:5: Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God. Know that the God’s blessing is life, abundant, full life. Not just in heaven, but now. While you prepare for Jesus’ return, you can live a life of true meaning.

Our culture prepares for Christmas by buying things that will break, toys our kids will outgrow and forget, electronics that will suck your time and soon will need ungraded to a newer model, and clothes that we will outgrow, that will go out of style, that we’ll wear out (just as a sidenote, if your closet is full of clothes that you don’t wear, donate them before they’re horribly out of style so that someone else can enjoy them – My Brother’s Place is a good place to donate, as that donation also ensures that someone will have food).

We as Christians prepare for Christmas and for Jesus’ return in a different way:  Listen to Micah 7:7: But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me.

In the scripture I read earlier from Matthew 24, Jesus talked about it in the negative – if you knew when the thief would come, wouldn’t you take precautions? Wouldn’t you lock your doors, dial 9 and 1 and have your finger poised over the final 1? Or have your finger waiting patiently by the trigger, for those a little differently armed? Micah puts it in the positive – watch in hope for the Lord.

So here’s the practical: how do we watch in hope for the Lord? You might think I’m a broken record (for those who don’t know what that means, ask someone my age or older…), but there is one first step that will impact anything else you do: ongoing engagement with God’s Word. Read the Bible. Every day. Let it soak in. Some of you need to engage in a regular Bible reading plan – a few years ago, I read that some teenagers decided to read through the entire Bible on their Christmas break. Don’t you think that was transformational? When I heard they had done that, I led some others in a journey of reading the whole Bible during Lent. I also routinely read through the while Bible in a year. You don’t have to do that kind of reading plan, but make a plan to read the Bible.

Some of you are deep in a Bible reading plan, but you’re reading for quantity instead of quality. You read so much that none of it soaks in. If that’s you, then try reading less and engaging more. Focus on the paragraphs, phrases, even words. Let them soak in and transform you.

In seminary Bible courses, our first assignment was to read the book. Aloud. Three times. That’s why I took Mark as my introductory course instead of Matthew (16 chapters versus 28). Our first assignment would focus on a book-level view, then subsequent studies would narrow the focus to the point where we would be looking at a phrase. When this was explained to me on the first day, that we were expected to put approximately nine hours into each assignment, I wondered how I could possibly spend that much time on one lesson. For the second to last question on each assignment, we were responsible to tell our professor how much time we’d spent on the lesson. The last question asked, “If you’d had more time, what would you have liked to have investigated?” Guess what – I would end up spending 12-14 hours on the lesson and still had unanswered questions. Scripture is often so simple that our children can understand but so deep that scholars have spent years trying to correctly interpret the nuances.

So no matter if you are aiming to cover large sections of the Word or to focus on short passages, begin your reading by asking the Holy Spirit to speak to you as you read.

Another way to be prepared is to find some way to focus your hope on Christ. Psalm 147:10-11 says: His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of the warrior; the Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.

A modern paraphrase might say: God’s strength and provision doesn’t require money or armies. Those things don’t please God. But God finds his delight in those who fear him, those who revere him, take him at his word and obey him. It pleases God when we put our hope in his unfailing love. If your hope is in something else, it will fail you. This is why fasting is such an important spiritual discipline; it helps train us to put our hope in God and in nothing else. And if our goal is to please God and to enjoy his presence, then we will be prepared, not only for Christmas, but also for Christ’s return.

I want to close with a thought from Isaiah 40:30-31: Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

Understand that some are struggling. Maybe you feel like the youths Isaiah described: tired and weary, stumbling and falling. But hoping in the Lord is the recipe for renewing your strength. It is not just a recipe for “feeling better” or “getting by.” Hope in the Lord will transform you, lifting you on wings like eagles. I love what Jesus says in Matthew 11:29-30. Listen to the way Eugene Peterson paraphrases it in The Message: “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

So prepare yourself for Christmas and for Christ’s return by coming to Jesus and walking with him. That’s the only way.