December 11, 2016TRAVELING ADVENT HIGHWAYS 3. The Highway In Between1

Isaiah 7:10-17; Revelation 21:1-7

Sermon I.

  1. Many of us have had to make our peace with unfinished business. Do you know what I’m talking about? Can you think of any broken relationship, or dream, or goal, or journey or hoped-for outcome in your life that is not finished and perhaps never will be?How many stories there are of people wishing they had worked harder when they had the chance to resolve a conflicted or toxicrelationship with a parent or sibling or child or friend before it was too late. Perhaps you’ve had a falling out with someone who was once important to you and you haven’t spoken for years and you don’t even know where they live or if they are still alive. On a radio talk show a woman called in and told the host that she had been sexually abused as a child and youth by an adult relative. She lived in shame for many years, but after intensive counseling eventually felt strong enough and whole enough to confront her abuser. The problem was, he had died a few months earlier and there was now no way for her to face down the man and tell him what his abuse had done to her.

It was a major incompletion in her life.

  1. Sometimes in a marriage you make your peace over some difference or offense that goes really deep, but never gets resolved. After fighting about it so long, a couple simply decides to agree to disagree and move move on. It may be the best they can do, but it leaves both parties with a continual sense of unfulfillment.
  2. Lots of things in life are left incomplete, like putting on hold the pursuit of an education in a certain field or a particular career because of unexpected illness, or a tragic financial crisis, or hooking up with someone you met along the way and your life went in totally different direction.

There are promises we’ve made that remain unkept. We haven’t forgotten them. We just never got around to keeping them.

  1. Besides all this, there are certain “incompletions” in us – resolutions to be more patient or kind, less angry, less critical of others, less argumentative or more generous. We want to change, but these resolutions are left hanging – never quite reached – their potentials unrealized.

Life’s incompletions, unresolved relationships, and unfinished business have a way of haunting us, leaving us with regret and disappointment and longing.

  1. Advent is the season of the church year for those living with life’s ragged edges. In fact, the main narrative of Advent is about unfinished business and today our travels through Advent take us down a highway to Christmas we’ll call the “Highway In Between,” a path which cantake us to a place where we can view life’s incompletions with hope… and even anticipation!

II.

  1. Our reading from the prophet Isaiah this morning reminds us that this Advent highway “in between”is a very long route that started way back in time. Isaiah was among the first of the Hebrew prophets to make waves about a Messiah anointed by God who would arrive and restore Israel to the glory days it had enjoyed under King David. Nearly every Advent we hear some words from Isaiah, such as the passage read to us today, whichwere spoken to a king who was afraid of his northern neighbors that were marching south to do battle with him. Wanting to give King Ahaz of Judah some assurance, Isaiah told him that God would protect them. As a sign of God’s careIsaiah pointed to a young woman about to give birth to a son, saying that he would signify Immanuel, which means “God with us.” He went on to say that this child would grow up to see Judah’s enemies defeated and a king of David’s line still on the throne.
  2. Isaiah was talking about a child born in his time, but later readers would hear in his words the promise of a future Messiah. More than a century later, the prophet Jeremiah picked up on the theme of a Messiah still-to-come, saying that God “will raise up a righteous branch from David’s line who will do what is just and right in the land (Jer. 33:15).

Hundreds of years pass…

  1. Then the first Gospel in the New Testament, Matthew, which draws heavily from the Hebrew scriptures, frames the story of Jesus birthby making a connection between the the prophesy in Isaiah 7and the arrival of Jesus more than 700 years later. In his version of Jesus’ birth, he wrote that Mary’s soon-to-be-born child will be Emmanuel, God with us, and he will be the long-awaited Messiah… the hope that many had lived with for centuries,but had died before it was accomplished. It was incomplete until now.
  2. You can’t read the powerful story of Jesus life and teachings without getting a sense that his time on earth moved God’s kingdom closer to completion. It’s reported in the Gospel of John that one of the last things Jesus said on the cross as he was dying was, “It is finished.” Jesus wasn’t saying his life was done. He was saying that he had completed the mission God had sent him to do. In fact, some Bible translations have Jesus saying from the cross, “It is completed.” Jesus had completed his work of salvation through his life, death and resurrection.

But it wasn’t finished!

  1. The risen Christ appeared to his disciples and made it very clear that there was still much to be done – that there was a lot that was not yet completed. “Go make disciples” he told them. “Baptize them… teach them to obey everything I’ve commanded you. And I’ll be with you until the end of this present age. (Matt. 28:19-20)

Everything was not yet finished, and still isn’t!

  1. “I’ll be with you to the end of the present age.” That was spoken over 2,000 years ago and we have yet to reach the “end of the present age.” When that time finally comes, it won’t be doom and gloom for us, but – according to the Revelation to John – the arrival of “a new heaven and a new earth... where there will be no mourning, crying, or pain.” (Rev 21:1 & 4). In other words, the kingdom of God launched by Jesus will arrive in all its fullness.
  2. Our lives are spent on the highway in between the inauguration of God’s kingdom and its completion. We live, move, and have our being in an era of “unfinished business.”

2000 years after Jesus’ birth we still pray the Lord’s Prayer every week, saying, “thy kingdom come.” We sing Charles’ Wesley’s hymn “Love Divine All Loves Excelling,” including its plea, “Finish, then, thy new creation.”

  1. We live with the Jesus who got things started and we wait for the Jesus who will finish what he began. We Christians may be all over the board in our beliefs about Jesus’ second coming, some taking the doctrine quite literally, while others seeing it as a metaphor – a way of speaking about the gift of the Holy Spirit and the life-changing hope we find when we accept Christ as the Lord of our lives. But no matter how we anticipate Jesus’ return, here’s what this season of Advent makes clear about our journey down the Highway In Between: Whatever agonies and hard times the world may endure, however frustrated we may get by the incomplete and unfinished things in our lives, in the kingdom that’s coming, God’s plan is finally fulfilled and it includes, at least, everyone who is faithful to God.

III.

  1. So what does it mean for us as we travel down this corridor between the Jesus who has already come and the Jesus who is still to come? What does it mean for those who will stand before us today to be baptized into this way and truth and life? And for those who will take vows to travel by our side as fellow pilgrims on the Highway In Between?
  2. In Luke 17:20-21, Jesus said: “God’s kingdom isn’t coming with signs that are easily noticed. Nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is!’ and ‘There it is!’ Don’t you see? God’s kingdom is already among you.” But he also talked about the kingdom coming in the future after he returned. The Book of Revelation describes the “new heaven and new earth” – all still to come – as that kingdom. It is both already here and yet to come. The kingdom has begun and is present in the hearts of Jesus followers. But it isn’t here in its fullness yet.

Its business is unfinished.

  1. I suppose we could think of the incomplete kingdom as God’s gift to us, given so we won’t spend our life just waiting on the sidelines, thinking that Jesus’ work is all done and there is nothing we cando in building God’s kingdom.
  2. But the most important thing we can do is to take to God all that’s unfinished in us and in our lives and ask God to help us know the right thing choices to make about them… should I give up, keep trying, hand them off to someone else, be patient and bide my time, learn to live with them?

We can learn from our friends in the 12-step programs who frequently lean on the Serenity Prayer…

God, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

In fact, this would be a wonderful Advent prayer this year to pray daily as we travel the Highway In Between.

  1. But it shouldn’t be the final prayer of the season. Because ultimately, Advent is not about aiming our focus only on all that is unfinished in or around us, buton the promised resolution. Advent points to a day when God’s kingdom comes in fullness and God says, “Look! I am making all things new.” We may live with unresolved business right now, but, by God’s grace, unfinished business is not the story of our lives. Rather, that phrase,“all things new,” which is found toward the end of the New Testament,provides the opening words to our new life with God.

And that helps us deal with all the unfinished business we face along the way. We can walk with confidence that the Risen Lord walks with us on this Highway In Between, even to the end of the present age.

1 Credit to Stan Purdum’s book, Travel the Highways of Advent for material used in this sermon.