Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "Dear Abby and Advent Hope "
Date: December 3, 2006
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Jeremiah 33:14-16

Those who have heard me preach enough over the past 20 years are well aware that I read the advice columnists in the daily newspapers.  Originally written by twin sisters, Dear Abby is now written by her daughter, and Ann Landers’ column has been replaced since her death by Ask Amy.

You may think the myriad of personal problems shared within those columns could not possibly happen to anyone you know, but let me assure you, in 33½ years of ministry, I’ve heard them all.  Teenage pregnancy, decisions about abortion or adoption (and that was just in the first year of ministry, when a mother turned her 16-year-old daughter over to me to help her with her decision).  Estranged families seeking justification for their squabbles, or trying to get back together, families trying to accept a homosexual child, sibling or parent, divorces, pedophiles, alcoholics, drug abusers, homeless persons, con artists, persons my age trying to figure how out to take the car keys away from aging parents or make the best decisions about living arrangements when home alone is not longer an option.  Grieving families with different ideas about the funeral service, brides or grooms having a melt-down too close to the wedding, parents who won’t attend a wedding because their daughter is marrying a person of a different nationality, attempted or actual suicide, decisions about when to end life-support, persons trying to figure how out to make bequests in the most fair and generous manner possible:  I have seen all of those and probably a dozen or more I can’t remember sitting in the offices of the three different churches I’ve served.  Money, social rank, education has nothing to do with them.  All sorts of folks have dealt with those issues.

And they all have a common denominator:  one four-letter word.  The Apostle Paul said, “Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinth. 13:13)  Well, the four-letter word I have in mind isn’t love, although I’m sure that’s part of the equation.  The word is the theme of our first Advent candle today:  HOPE.  Each person is looking for some word of hope that there is a solution to the problem for which they wrote to Dear Abby, or came to see me or some other clergy.

I don’t profess to be a trained marriage and family counselor, but clergy of most all religions and denominations are frequently the first person contacted when some crisis arises.  It isn’t always faith, or even prayer, that they come seeking.  It is hope in the midst of what so often seems a hopeless situation.  They simply want some sane person, removed from the crisis, to hear them out and possibly offer some clear path to follow.

Actually, the hope we long for when we are faced with similar predicaments is not so far removed from today’s lesson, where the prophet Jeremiah announces the advent of a new leader for Israel, one who comes from the line of King David; one who, like David, shall unite Israel and Judah and shall restore the fortunes of God’s oppressed people, just as those who seek pastoral comfort and hope wish to unite their disparate factions.

We think Jeremiah’s words of joyful hope were addressed to people in a most hopeless situation – exile.  This is the gospel move that is repeated again and again in the story of our Judeo-Christian heritage.  When the time is dark and people are in despair, the prophets of God recall and remember the promises of God and joyfully call people to revolutionary hope.  It happened in Jeremiah’s time, around 600 B.C., and it happened in the territory around Judea when Jesus was born some 2000 years ago.

Walter Brueggemann, a renowned United Church of Christ Old Testament scholar, has said that exile is the appropriate metaphor for our current situation.  Here, as we move through Advent toward the nativity, we wait in darkness.  This Sunday’s lesson, in which the darkness is penetrated by a brief burst of joyful light – or one Advent candle – is an invitation to peer a bit longer into the darkness of our present, to name our situation as exile, as estrangement from God, but also to look forward to our redemption by a God who promises to come among us as one who saves.

The amazing thing was that, in a situation of devastating defeat and discouragement, the prophets of Israel, like today’s text from Jeremiah, dared to proclaim with Isaiah, “Your God reigns!”  All of those grand phrases that are so well celebrated in The Messiah – “Comfort, ye, my people,” “And he shall reign forever and ever” – came out of exile.  The “Hallelujah Chorus” is from Revelation, words from a poor, little, persecuted church hanging on by its fingernails on the fringes of the empire.

These are words our congregation needs to be reminded of this year when we have been financially challenged, and our good reputation damned by some in our community.  In the great history of the Christian church, in the course of the 81-year life of Bay Shore Church, God has time and time again offered hope and comfort to those who remain faithful and seek to follow where he leads.

Church at its best is the public processing of pain.  Sometimes you come to church and are surprised to find yourself in tears.  I suspect there is some suppressed grief that each of us, myself included, have hidden from public view, which the Scripture, the music, something here allows us to express.  That’s good.  Israel trusted God so much that it could rage, complain, shake its fist and cry out, “God, why?”

It takes a lot of faith in the triumph of God to ask why.

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah...In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.” (Jer 33:14-16)

The time is coming!

I will restore, regather Israel and Judah, do for you that which you cannot do for yourselves, namely, offer you hope and bring you home.

Are those not the words, the sentiments we wish to experience in this season which lies ahead?  Don’t we want our Advent preparations to be ones of hope:  hope for a more secure faith, hope for a better relationship with all our family members, hope for a more harmonious congregational life, hope for a closer tie to the Christ who is born anew each Christmas?

That is my hope.  I hope you share it.