Bible Text: Matthew 24:36-44, Isaiah 2:1-5 | Preacher: Pastor Dorry Newcomer | Series: Advent 2020 | Happy new year!  No, it’s not 2021 yet.  But it is the start of a new liturgical year.  Every new church year starts with the season of Advent.  The word advent means, arrival, or coming.  Today we begin a season of preparation, to prepare for the Christ child who has already arrived, roughly 2000 years ago in a little town called Bethlehem; and to prepare for the Christ King who will come someday in the future.

Our scripture lessons today are standard selections for the first Sunday in Advent, although I must confess that I have never preached on this Matthew text before.  Two men working in a field, and all of a sudden one goes missing?  Two women working at a mill, and all of a sudden one of them gets taken away?  Growing up my church held a movie night where we watched a film about the Rapture, and it showed a husband and wife getting ready for bed, all tucked in side by side and going to sleep together…but come morning, one of them was gone.  I was really disturbed at the thought that I might wake up one day to find one of my parents still here, and the other raptured away!

Even for grown-ups, this is an unsettling text!  But if we can look beyond the particulars and dig down into the main point of the story, I think what Jesus was trying to say is, “Expect the unexpected!”  This life–what we see, our daily routines, the work that sustains us—that’s not all there is!  There is also God who is always at work for good.  Jesus wants us to go through life expecting the unexpected—with an alertness, and awareness that one day Christ will come again and all things will be put right and made new.  Until that great day, we can have confidence that God is at work in seen and unseen ways.  The best thing for us to do is, as the prophet Isaiah wrote, “walk in the light which the Lord gives us.”

Our two scripture lessons, which can be summed up with, “expect the unexpected”, and “walk in the light which the Lord gives us” mesh beautifully with our key verse for this week.  Psalm 130 verse 6 says, “My soul waits for the Lord, more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.”  Advent is about waiting with our SOULS:  expecting the unexpected and walking in the light which the Lord gives us.  Someday Christ will come again, and we will see the whole picture.  But until then, we put energy into waiting with our souls.  We wait in expectation, and we wait in faithfulness.  We wait trusting that God is at work for good.

I wish I could tell you that waiting gets easier as we get older.  I don’t think I’ve become much better at waiting, I think I might just be better at distracting myself!  But I know for sure I have gotten older.  This week I thought, ooh, it might be fun to hold up that book, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” as a sermon illustration.  We are all expecting, right?  Baby Jesus is coming, and we need to prepare.  When I was pregnant many years ago, the book, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” was a great resource, but I gave my copy away a long time ago.  This week I reached out to a clergy colleague who recently had a baby to see if I could borrow her copy of the book, which I am sure has been updated many times in twenty-six years!  But guess what she said?  “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that book.  But I don’t have a copy.  I just used the ap!”  That goes to show you how old I am.  That a beloved, useful book might now be an ap for your phone—that’s an update I never expected!

Even though I haven’t needed a book on pregnancy in a long time, I still remember what the cover looked like.  It featured a picture of a woman, obviously expecting, sitting in a rocking chair.  She looked so peaceful!  She made waiting look easy, comfortable even.  The newer versions of the book no longer have that same cover.  Maybe because they got in trouble for false advertising!  Ask any woman who has been pregnant and she will tell you, it’s not all that comfortable!  It’s exciting, it’s extraordinary even, but it’s not all that comfortable.

Which is why I think most of us have never really learned to wait with our souls, because it is not comfortable.  For me growing up, Jesus’ story of the two workers in the field and one goes missing, the two women grinding at the mill and one disappears, this story scared me.  It was like being threatened with abandonment.  But I think the reason Jesus told this story is not because GOD will ever abandon any of us.  Jesus told this story because WE are so good at abandoning God.  We look around at the chaos and suffering in the world and think, “Where is God?”, and instead of waiting with our souls, expecting the unexpected and walking in the light which God gives us, we stop fanning the flames of our faith.

Lucky for us, it’s Advent, and Advent is all fanning the flames!  Or at least, it’s about lighting the flames…Even if you don’t know anything else about Advent, you probably know about the Advent wreath:  four candles, one for each week of Advent, and each week we light an additional candle.  Lima Church happens to have a very fancy Advent wreath, and everyone enjoys seeing the candles progressively get lit until on Christmas Eve, when all four colored candles are lit along with the big Christ candle in the center.  As we approach the darkest days of the year, the advent wreath says, Not so fast!  Darkness can’t overtake us!  The Advent wreath is like an unexpected burst of light during what we expect to be a very dark time.

Advent has historically been a season of repentance, signified by the color purple.  You may remember seeing purple fabrics in the sanctuary for Lent, and until fairly recently those purple fabrics were also used for Advent.  That’s why most of the home Advent wreath sets you see are like this one:  three purple candles for repentance, and one pink candle for joy.

But the color purple and the practice of repentance don’t fully capture the purpose of Advent.  Since Advent anticipates the coming of Christ, it should more than anything be a hopeful season, as opposed to the somber tone of Lent.  That’s why many churches now use the color blue for Advent.  Can you see the blue fabric behind me?  It’s absolutely gorgeous.  It’s close to purple—but it’s more cheerful.  It’s dark enough to evoke feelings of repentance and help us clean up our lives and sanitize our souls for the baby Jesus who wants to make his home in our hearts, but it’s bright enough to help us stay focused on the hope and healing we have in Christ.

Part challenge, part comfort:  that is the formula for a faithful Advent. But most years, I admit, I have been so busy during Advent that I have not been able to open myself up very much to either the challenge or the comfort of Advent.  It has been a struggle to carve out time to let myself really sink down deep into Advent.  I have counted down the days until December 25th, but I can’t say that my soul waited for the Lord.  But this year, well this year it feels like Advent is calling me!  This year I want to learn how to wait with my soul.  So in addition to working through our Advent devotional, this book called Simply Wait by Pamela Hawkins, I am setting up an Advent wreath in my house.

I hope you will figure out a way to have an Advent wreath at home, too.  Maybe you just use four small candles and set them in the center of your table, or in the four corners of your living room.  Maybe you’d like to make one out of foam or clay.  It you can’t find purple or blue and pink candles, you can use Sharpie markers to color little tea lights!    However you do it, even if you’ve never used an Advent wreath before, I hope you will give yourself the gift this tradition.  Give your soul—and the world—the gift of a little extra light telling the darkness, “Not so fast!”

Speaking of gifts, November is my birthday month, and recently I received a really special gift from my family:  a new set of dishes!  They are exactly what I wanted, sturdy and cheerful.  They are so cheerful, they are called Fiesta!  Fiesta dinnerware is made by the Homer Laughlin China Company in West Virginia.  During the Great Depression, they weren’t selling much china to restaurants because people were eating at home, and even home cooked meals were not as rich and varied as before.  The owner of the company told his designers, “People need to brighten up their table.  People need something to be happy about.  Color is what’s going to be good for the Depression.”  With that, Fiesta was created and launched in 1936.

The creatives minds at the Homer Laughlin China Company were right.  Color was good for the depression.  Fiesta dishes were an instant hit and remain so popular, they are now the most collected dinnerware in the world.  Turns out, color is good all the time!  And perhaps, color especially is especially good this Advent.  The purple reminds us of repentance, and how great the need is in our world for justice, and how deeply sin has affected every aspect of creation.  The blue reminds us of the hope we have in Christ, that all sin, including our own, is forgiven, and that all things will be made new.  The pink reminds us to always have joy, to celebrate and delight in the God who redeems us.  And the white reminds us of to keep expecting the unexpected.  That the Savior of the world could be born to ordinary people like Mary and Joseph in a manger in Bethlehem reminds us that Christ can be born in other unlikely places, too—even in the hearts of ordinary people like you and me.

What a gamechanger these Advent colors are!  I know this is a hard time for many of us, but I want to urge you, “Never get off the train while you’re in a tunnel!”  Even if the world seems heavy and depressing, there is light.  There is color.  There is joy!  The Advent wreath reminds us that, even if we have to quarantine and social distance these days, we never wait alone.  We are joined with the whole human family in waiting and hoping.  Hundreds of years before Jesus, Isaiah wrote of a time in the future when nations will no longer be in conflict with each other.  The Lord will hammer their swords into plows and their spears into pruning knives. All the implements we know how to use to harm each other, God is going to transform into tools for peace and new life.  We cannot imagine HOW God is going to do that.  We cannot imagine WHAT that is going to entail.  We don’t know WHEN this will come to pass.

But we do know WHO will accomplish this, and that is the Lord.  And we know WHY God will do this work:  because God is love.  At first glance, it is hard to reconcile a God who is love with the story Jesus told in our gospel lesson today.  We look at this text and fear God might judge us and abandon us or, in my childhood imagination, fear God might take someone important away from us.  But God sent Jesus because God loves us!  Jesus is proof that God has not abandoned us.  But we are pretty good at abandoning God, and that was why Jesus told this story.  Stay awake!  Be alert!  Instead of letting our fears and frustrations get the best of us, Jesus invites us instead to live expectantly.

And I don’t just mean living expectantly, as in waiting for a vaccine against corona virus!  Jesus wants us to expect the unexpected as in, expect to see God at work in unexpected ways!  Our opening prayer for today asks God to draw us to the edge of Advent possibility.  That is so much more eloquent than saying, “expect the unexpected!”  I love that image, of being drawn to the edge of Advent possibility.  But my favorite part of the prayer is at the end, “Come, settle into our living for a while and do not let us settle for too little.”  It’s taken a pandemic to show me that, until now, I have always allowed myself to settle for way too little during Advent. I am hoping that rituals like the Advent wreath can help make this year different for me.

Advent is part comfort, part challenge.  Part, “walking in the light which God gives us”, and part “expecting the unexpected”.  Part embracing the oncoming winter season, and part lighting our candles to ward off darkness.  Part accepting the world as it is, and part hoping and trusting for the world to change.  This year, may God draw us to the edge of Advent possibility, settle into our lives, and not let us settle for too little.  More than those who watch for the morning, may our souls wait for the Lord this Advent season. Amen.