#12 - Hope Advent 1 {Reflections}

What is up everybody?

My name is Ryan Braley and I'm the pastor here at Central and this is my rubber band, instagram.

Can you hear it?

Hey, hold that thought I'm going to come back to that.

Hey, welcome to our Reflections podcast, our weekly podcast.

Mike is in the house, I'm in the house and we are talking about Advent.

This is week one of Advent and I love the Advent season.

It's this time leading up to Christmas, and who doesn't love Christmas?

I think we all love it.

Now, advent is this like four week period going up to Christmas, and Advent is traditionally this time of waiting and expectation, and literally the word Advent means the coming or the arrival, and so Advent is this time we wait expectantly for the arrival or the coming Really have two things.

First, we look back and reflect on the time when Jesus was born and we wait again for the Christ child to be kind of born in the manger.

We tell that story every Christmas year.

You know when Jesus is born and God slips into the world almost unnoticed.

Now today we celebrate with huge parties and gifts and singing and worship, but back then, when he was born, he was born like in the shadows of Bethlehem and nobody even noticed.

So we tell that story again at Advent and Christmas time and we wait for him to be born again.

But also the second thing we wait for during Advent season is the full reign and rule of God to come here on Earth.

We wait for the day when God's will is fully done on Earth as it is in heaven, and that one's a little tougher because we're still waiting for that, with this tense expectant waiting and longing in our hearts for God to put things back to right Now.

Traditionally in Advent there are four themes.

The themes usually are hope, joy, peace and love, and so what I want to do is each week unpack just quickly for everybody each one of those themes, and this week is the week of hope.

Now, hope is the feeling of expectation or desire for a certain thing to happen, and so Advent, of course, is filled with hope For the story of Jesus to be told again, and we also hope for God to make things right fully, once and for all.

And as a little boy I knew this one really well deep in my bones.

I had hope, especially around Christmas time, because every year I'd wait, and I would hope expectantly, for some gift under the tree, and the one I remember the most, mike, is when I was a little boy.

I must have been like, I don't know, 11 or 12.

And I desperately wanted this old school Nintendo video game.

I'm talking the OG Nintendo, the original Nintendo, the greatest console in all of human history.

And the game I was waiting for, that I hoped for, was Tecmo Super Bowl.

It was an awesome video game, had John L Way and the Denver Broncos in there, like the heyday of the Broncos.

And anyway, I was hoping and longing desperately for my mom to get me this gift, and that was hope.

I was hoping for this game.

And of course, I got the game on Christmas day and my hope was fulfilled.

Now in the Old Testament there are two prominent words for hope.

The first is the word Yachal in the Hebrew.

So if you're following along at home, say Yachal, all right, well done for those of you that tried.

And in Genesis 8 it says that Noah had to Yachal for weeks for the floodwaters to reside.

He had to wait for the waters to go away, to go down, so he had to wait.

The other word for hope in the Old Testament is the word Kava.

If you're following along at home, say Kava, wonderful.

Now, kava is this idea.

The word Kava means cord, and when you pull a Kava tight, I actually got a cord.

It's a rubber band, and when you pull it tight you produce a state of tension which sounds like this if you strum it yeah, that's my homemade musical instrument using this idea of kava.

Now, when you pull it tight, that's kava.

It's this idea of tension waiting for release.

And so in the biblical Hebrew, the word for hope is this idea of waiting, or tension, for release to happen, and you wait with expectation.

And so, before Jesus shows up, the people of Israel are waiting, longing, hoping in their souls for something to happen.

There's this tension.

They're waiting for a release and they're waiting for God.

They're waiting for God to save them, for restoration, for renewal, for rebuilding, for healing and, of course, for forgiveness.

When you read the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures, this is what they're waiting for.

They're waiting for Messiah to come and rescue them and to save them.

This was their hope.

So the Psalmist in Psalm 130 says I wait for the Lord.

My whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope, I wait for the Lord.

He goes on to say Israel, put your hope in the Lord.

For the Lord there is unfailing love and with him there is full redemption.

So they wait, and we wait for these very same things at Advent.

During this time we wait for God to put things back to rights, for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

We wait for God to heal our violence, to restore our broken relationships, to repair our bodies, which are ailing and aging and dying.

We wait for God to resurrect the dead, to vanquish evil and to make all things right once again.

But here's the deal the invitation is to wait, not passively, but to wait actively, and here's what I mean.

I have some friends who were missionaries in Bosnia and Sarajevo actually years ago, and they got there after the war had kind of ravaged this part of Bosnia and so downtown in Sarajevo there were still buildings that were standing that had bullet holes and mortar like holes blown into these buildings from mortar shells and from bullets.

It was like a war scene.

But they had not repaired any of these buildings.

And when they got there, my friends told me that the kids there were many kids who were living in Sarajevo at the time and their parents had died.

They'd been victims of the war and the violence that had ravaged this whole city and these kids would, literally they'd walk around with like just like this sense of hopelessness in their eyes.

And my friend said it was the most devastating thing, because these kids really had no hope.

And so the question was like, how do you help in this situation?

How do you come and try to speak hope into the lives of these young kids who had seen the worst that war had to offer?

Their parents and loved ones had been killed.

And here's what they did they waited on the Lord and they waited with hope, but they wanted to give them, like in an active sense, a glimmer of hope, like here's what hope looks like.

And they realized that a lot of the playgrounds in this area had also been devastated from war, also had just fallen in the disrepair and they were like unsafe to play with.

So these kids had nowhere to play.

So my friend's like let's just go around the city and rebuild the playgrounds.

And that's what they did.

That was their missionary goal for like years was to get new playgrounds built in Sarajevo, and I love it.

It's the most like the most easy, it seemingly mundane thing to do, but in doing so they were telling the kids hey, you can have hope, there's a hope for that tomorrow will be better than today and we want to show it to you by rebuilding these playgrounds.

So in the meantime, as we hope, the invitation is this as we wait on God to do all these things he promises, we work towards these things as well.

So you and I work to restore peace as we wait for God's fullness of peace to come.

We work towards having healthy relationships.

So we work to forgive others and ask for forgiveness.

We go to counseling and get therapy and all these kinds of things.

We help others when they're sick or ailing.

We help people whose bodies have fallen in to disrepair and we try to mend them and be good to them and pray for them, and we work to push back against evil and we live as salt and light in a dying world that's full of darkness.

So this advent, may you have hope, may you experience this hope of God that tomorrow can be better and that we do wait, expectantly, even though there's tension.

We wait for the release when God's will is finally done in fullness here on earth.

And we don't wait passively, we wait actively and we work to build and establish the kingdom of God as best we can in our little corners of the world, by mending fences, by taking care of the sick and by loving each other, by being salt and light.

So this advent may you have hope and may be salt and light.

Peace, love you guys.

Talk to you later.

Hey, if you enjoy this show, I'd love to have you share it with some friends.

And don't forget, you are always welcome to join us in person at Central in Elk River at 830, which is our liturgical gathering, or at 10 o'clock, our modern gathering.

Or you can check us out online at clclcriverorg.

Peace.