Advent: Advent Begins in the Dark | Associate Pastor: Matt Armstrong

Amen.

Amen.

Good morning.

Not rhetorical.

Good morning.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Any Geor you guys.

It's like you've never been to church before.

Any Georgia fans here?

Great game.

Great game.

Eight overtimes.

My yellow jackets fought well.

But you guys got the win.

It's fine.

It's fine.

But it it helps my heart to uh get into the season of Advent as we'll see.

As Russ said, this is the first Sunday of Advent, the four Sundays leading up to Christmas.

And every once in a while, or already this season, I've had a couple people ask me for recommendations.

So I just want to throw this out there for this year or in the future.

This is a great book.

It's not a devotional per se, but it's a collection of Advent sermons by Fleming Rutledge, and they're they're brief.

She's an Episcopal priest, and so you know their sermons are shorter than ours.

Very readable.

And I'm gonna quote her probably three times in this sermon, so I wanted to give her credit and uh point you in that direction if you're interested.

A couple weeks ago, driving around Marietta, it was early.

I had um my heart was heavy.

There were a couple things going on.

I was kind of weighed down, I was uh, you might say despondent, just in a bad mood.

And I drove close to the square and I noticed, this is the first time I I think it was pretty recent, there the uh Christmas decorations had gone up over the weekend.

And um I just love I love the way Marietta Square is decorated.

It just screams kind of like you know, small town, you know, um just homey, and and I noticed that my heart just lifted.

I just the decorations of Christmas, it said, ah, Christmas is coming.

I love Christmas, I love Advent, the festivities, the decorations, the time with family.

Um I know Christmas, just like any holiday, can be can be hard for some and and great for others.

I really look forward to this time of year.

Um along with that lifting, I noticed something else.

I think I I've as I've gotten older, I've become a little bit more attuned to my own heart.

And there was a little temptation that immediately emerged as I saw those decorations, and it it whispered to me, just take that heavy heart and let's just put it in this little box.

Just put it away.

Let's just look, let's just let's just jump full throated into kind of a cheap, sentimental uh Christmas.

Let's just forget our cares and look to the hopeful things.

And this question, whether it was my own or the Holy Spirit's, the question came to mind is Christmas really just an escape from real life?

Something I was pondering.

Later that same day, I read our uh sermon passage.

And uh for Advent, I asked Russ, you know, what what text should I preach on?

And he said, just look at the liturgical calendar.

What are the readings for that day?

They have Psalms and Old Testament, New Testament gospel, and he said, You can pick whatever you want, but try to try to do the gospel passage if um if if that works for you.

So I I looked and it's this passage, the one that Russ just read, and I was struck immediately by what's happening in this passage.

This is this is what the liturgical calendar for this year, first Sunday of Advent, what it points us towards.

And what's it talking about?

It's talking about people fainting with fear and foreboding at what is about to come into the world.

Now it does talk about the second coming or the coming of the Son of Man, right, which is an Advent theme, Jesus coming into the world.

But I was struck by this juxtaposition.

The passage takes place near the end of Jesus' ministry.

He's been teaching in the temple, as he was wont to do, and one of his disciples at some point just expresses how beautiful and grand the temple is, which leads Jesus to respond with a prophetic word that not one stone of this temple in a certain period of time will be standing on another.

He prophesied the fall of the Jewish temple.

And really, if you read the whole of chapter 21 in Luke, he's talking about when Rome would, uh, around AD 60 or 70, one of those numbers, come, they surrounded Jerusalem, they laid siege to it, they finally came in and they destroyed the city, they destroyed the temple.

Uh this was the um destruction of the center of the Jewish faith and community.

This is what Jesus is talking about on the first Sunday of Advent.

Why?

Well, then I read, started reading in that Fleming Rutledge book, and she wrote this.

She said, In the church, this is the season of Advent.

It's superficially understood as a time to get ready for Christmas, but in truth, it's a season for contemplating the judgment of God.

Advent is the season that, when properly understood, does not flinch from the darkness that stalks us all in this world.

Advent begins in the dark and it moves toward the light.

But the season should not move too quickly or too glibly, lest we fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness.

Advent teaches us to delay Christmas in order to experience it truly when it finally comes.

Advent is designed to show that the meaning of Christmas is diminished to the vanishing point if we are not willing to take a fearless inventory of the darkness.

Get you in the Christmas spirit?

Absolutely.

Point one, Advent begins in the dark.

As I was mulling over these words, it struck me it's fitting that Advent and daylight savings time kind of come together, right?

It feels like when that this time in the fall comes around, in the snap of a finger, the world just becomes dark, right?

It had been, seemed like recently, light until 9.30.

Now it's pitch black before 6.

Where did all the light go?

On the church calendar, Advent is akin to Lent.

We might be a little bit more familiar with Lent.

Lent is that time of preparation before Easter.

It's a time when we we prepare our hearts and we remember why is Easter so important?

Just like in Advent, we are to ask the question: why was the incarnation necessary?

During Lent, we tend to look inside at our own sins and we reflect on why it was necessary for Messiah to come and to die on the cross for my sins.

Rutledge reminds us that Advent is a time when we are called to look into the darkness, the darkness of my own heart, the darkness of the world around me, to remind me why Christmas and Easter are such high and holy days.

Now, again, for 21st century Americans, this may seem strange to us, but when we take a moment just to reflect on Jesus' own life, both his birth and his death did come at dark times.

Prior to Jesus' birth, King Herod got wind of an ancient prophecy that Messiah would be born in the small town of Bethlehem, which was just outside the city of Jerusalem.

And based on the priests and their understanding, they thought that Messiah was coming soon.

And so what did King Herod do, king of the Jews, to prepare the way for Messiah?

He sent his soldiers to the city and commanded that any child under two be put to death.

We call it the death of the innocence.

So forever afterward, Jesus' birth would be connected to a deep grief in the community, a great injustice that the people of Israel would feel for generations.

Similarly, in our passage, as Jesus talks about his second coming, he links it to this horribly destructive moment in the history of God's people when the city of David and the temple of the Lord would be utterly destroyed.

Yet Jesus tells his disciples in this moment, in our sermon passage, that hidden in this tragedy is actually their redemption.

He says this people will be fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming into the world.

For the powers will be shaken, and they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.

Now, when these things begin to take place, straighten up, raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Brings us to point two that Advent as the season helps us to see what is hidden in the darkness.

Now it's easy for us to forget as Christians, those who celebrate Jesus' birth, you know, next to Easter, it's our highest day of the year.

But uh in Jesus' day, his birth was very hidden.

Nobody knew what was happening.

In fact, uh God had to tell a bunch of poor shepherds to go check it out.

And uh the wise men from the East came, uh non-Jewish men who read the stars.

Um was he hidden that because of the census and everybody moving around, by the time the family got to Bethlehem, there was no room at kind of the only place of lodging there.

And so the king of heaven and earth was relegated to a barn, uh, let alone, you know, a palace where we would expect him to be born.

Fleming Rutledge again, she says, it is this hiddenness that gives Advent its special character.

The church's life is hidden with Christ until he comes again, which explains why so much of what we do in this night appears to be failure, just as his life appeared to end in failure.

You ever thought about that?

That uh again, we celebrate Jesus' death on the cross, we celebrate his resurrection as the true victory over sin and death, and yet for the people who were around him, his ministry ended in utter failure.

He had come, he had promised to save Israel from their sins, from, and his disciples and those who heard him thought that that meant that he would overthrow their Roman oppressors and return Israel to its former glory.

And yet he was arrested by the Romans.

He was uh brutalized and he was executed on a Roman cross.

So Jesus' ministry, born in obscurity, uh ending in failure and death.

Now, since uh I've come to Redeemer, I've been here just over a couple years, and since being here and getting to know many of you, I've been gathering, I've been collecting stories of Jesus' beauty and light that has been revealed in dark moments of uh people's lives.

Here are some examples.

There's a couple in our church who have known the darkness of infertility.

But now, years later, they lead an infertility care group in our church that invites those who are experiencing the pain and darkness of infertility now, a safe place to come, to be known, a place to be offered hospitality, a place where people will weep with you, and a place that's safe to ask hard questions.

There's another couple in our church who have experienced the darkness of infidelity.

But now, years later, they they quietly offer to anyone in the church who is currently experiencing the pain of infidelity, rather an individual or a couple, they will meet with them and encourage them through their own experience of the darkness.

Not long ago in uh in the in the lobby out there, I saw two mothers weeping together.

And just because I happen to know what's going on in their lives as a pastor in the church, it was a beautiful moment to just stand back and allow my heart to grieve, but also to rejoice.

Because one mother was comforting another mother in the grief of some family suffering.

And it's only because one of those mothers has gone through this in the past that her words, her presence, and her tears offer a special balm to the mother who is going through it right now.

Uh I know uh people in our church who've experienced the pain and the fear of cancer, who are now walking with uh others in the church who are currently going through treatment.

This repeatedly happens in our men's gathering.

Let me put in a little plug for our men's ministry and our men's gathering.

Um over the last year or two at our men's gathering.

Part of that is having men in our church come and give a talk and share vulnerably about um what God has done in their lives.

And about a little over a year ago, one of the older men in our church, who's a leader in our church, shared boldly and vulnerably about uh mistakes, sins of his past, uh, and how God met him in those places.

And it was a beautiful story of redemption.

After the talk, another younger man in our church came up to me and he said, if I don't make some different choices, my life's gonna look just like that in the dark elements.

Uh he later went up and talked to the guy who had uh given the talk.

Uh they connected, they had lunch, then they had lunch again, they had lunch again, and now, today, the trajectory of that younger man is quite different than where it was uh originally.

Each of the people in these stories embody what Paul talks about in the first chapter of 2 Corinthians.

He says, This blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

This is what Advent is all about, beloved.

Advent teaches us that we can become these channels of God's comfort.

We can become light in the darkness, but only if we are willing, as Fleming Rutledge encourages us, to take a fearless inventory of the darkness in our own lives.

You see, when I experience failure, when I experience something hard, my instinct is to run away, to turn away, to ignore it.

But what Advent teaches us is that when we will take that fearless inventory, when we will look into the dark, when we will face the heaviness in us and around us, that that's exactly where Jesus meets us.

And that as he meets us and offers us his healing comfort, then we can become channels of that healing comfort to others.

That brings us to point three that Advent teaches us how to be light in a dark world.

Uh we had some friends over recently, maybe a month or so ago, and um after we'd been hanging out for a little while, having maybe a drink or two, um, this other couple started sharing passionately about something going on in the news.

Uh, you know, recently we've had a lot of things in the news uh that people can be passionate about.

And um I was quiet, and uh my wife, my beautiful, lovely, wonderful wife, who's here in this service, she said, you know, I really appreciate your perspective because I've only heard about this news event from Matthew, and he has a different perspective than you.

And I thought, wow, you know, politics and religion, this is what we're not supposed to talk about, but my wife is like, you know, no small talk, let's get into it.

So uh so we started discussing, I started to share, you know, oh, this this is these are my facts, these are this is my perspective, this is what I know about the situation, and we went back and forth, and it was very cordial.

Um But at the end of the conversation, a couple of things became clear to me.

First, that in this particular situation, but in in many, there are plenty of historical grievances to go around, and that neither of us arguing this out were going to solve anything, right?

Like us sitting in this little house in Marietta were not going to you know save the world.

And neither of us was going to win the argument.

There was just too much there.

Second, after arguing and making our points, after that was over, the conflict would remain.

And that you know, the darkness of human sinfulness will you know proliferate and create more conflicts to come.

And it became clear to me that it particularly in this situation, all we can do is cry out, how long, O Lord, and come quickly, Lord Jesus.

But as I reflected on this, working on this Advent sermon, again I see how Advent helps us by calling us to fight against both cynicism and despair.

Where our hearts easily go.

You see, there are no easy answers to the real darkness.

You know, we just finished uh a political season in our country.

And, you know, if you're if you're listening, what it sounds like is, well, yeah, we have all these problems in the world, but if you vote for the right candidates, we've got the answers, we'll take care of it.

Um, but if you pay attention for five more minutes, or the four years in between, you realize that that's just not the case.

That for the things, the real darkness in this world and in our own hearts, there are no easy answers.

But Jesus speaks to us here, even in our passage.

He says, But watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap.

Now, Jesus is talking about, as we said, the destruction of the temple, and the day when, in the lifetime of his hearers, the Roman army would come and destroy Jerusalem.

But I believe his words can speak to the weighed down nature of our own hearts.

How many of us can relate to this warning?

Watch yourself, lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation, drunkenness, and the cares of this life.

Amen.

Anyone else's heart been weighed down?

You see, though we're tempted to despair, right, when our hearts become so heavy we feel like we can't carry them anymore, or we're tempted to cynicism when we want to just turn off our hearts so we can stop feeling anything at all.

Jesus reminds us that God keeps his promises.

That's what he was saying to his disciples then, and that's what he says to us now.

That though we don't know how these conflicts will be resolved, Jesus' disciples had no idea how the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple was connected to their redemption, which it was through Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, so that the temple was no longer necessary or even appropriate.

So we look to the promises of God when He will come again at His second Advent and every tear will be wiped away.

And in the midst of our own darkness, the darkness in us and in the world, it's Jesus' first Advent, together with all the fulfilled promises of the scriptures that remind us that his second Advent is sure.

Even as we are currently tempted to cynicism and despair.

And you see, when we when we take hold of the promises of Advent, that we don't have to look away and we also don't have to be overly burdened.

We can enter the darkness with Jesus at our side.

Did you ever notice that Jesus did not defeat the darkness from outside?

The word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Jesus defeated the darkness by entering into it.

And so now those of us who have experienced the light of Jesus' enduring presence, now we, through faith, can become those channels of light for others.

We don't give in to cynicism, we don't give in to despair, we hold on to hope.

And there we can enter into the darkness of others.

Now, I'm not against the joy and celebration of Christmas.

Again, this is one of my favorite times of life, but I would argue that it's those who truly take the fearless inventory of the darkness who are actually able to celebrate best.

Who truly experience the joy of Christmas and what it means that the word became flesh, that God was in a manger, and that he is our savior.

If there's anything in the sermon that is particularly resonated with you, any questions that it has, or if you need prayer, I'll be down here afterwards.

Let's pray.

Our Father and our God, Lord, thank you for the truth that the gospel allows us, Christmas and Advent allow us to look at real life.

We don't have to shy away, we don't have to make excuses, nor do we have to be overly burdened by it.

Lord, let us be light in the darkness as you are for us.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.