ADVENT SERMON SERIES:

Longing for More …

We Are Weary

Isaiah 40:27-31

Pastor Robyn Hogue December 9, 2011 Skyline Presbyterian Church

This is the second Sunday of Advent; the season of anticipation. Waiting, wanting and hoping. These words of Isaiah to God’s people were the words of a prophet knowing what God’s people were waiting for, knowing that God’s people needed the word of hope. They were in exile from their homeland, suffering in captivity, homeless, homesick, heartsick. They were guilt stricken because they knew their exile was a result of their sin. To them it appeared impossible that God would set them free, much less forgive and restore them to their homeland. So they cried out to God, “Come thou long expected Savior, come and set Thy people free.” They knew who they were waiting for. They were waiting for a deliverer, someone to ransom them from weary captivity. Who are we waiting for? Our weariness may be different from theirs. Our exile may not be geographical, but we need a deliverer, someone to ransom us, don’t we?

Last year at Christmas time, my friend Kathryn received one of those printed letters that have become so common during the Christmas season, the kind of letters that people send to all their friends and family to catch them up on what you’ve been doing all year long. It was a kind of running account of the family’s involvements and of course their many achievements—Bragging rights with a Christmas wreathe border. But with the printed Christmas letter for public consumption, the sender enclosed a personal handwritten word to Kathryn, in which she confessed, and I quote her, “I wish I had the guts to write a Christmas letter that told it like it is. My daughter, Jessica, experimented with drugs. My son, Tim, gave the finger to a motorist and got his glasses broken. I had an affair and the result is that my second husband, John, is so upset that he keeps threatening to rent an apartment. We had a fight with our neighbors over mid-block lighting, and the plumbing backed up from the septic tank one day after the guarantee expired.”

If you told it like it was this morning, what would you tell? What is the other situation in your personal life, in your family, in that configuration that makes up your daily living? If God could do for you exactly what you need, if God could come to you at the precise point of your weary disappointment or grief or sin or failure or loneliness, where would that point be?

I’m going to ask your participation in the sermon at this point. Would you please take an honest couple of moments, and using the place for notes in our bulletin, complete the following sentences for your own reflection. Be specific in your reflection:

I need strength in the following area of my life ............ What would you write in that blank? Are you enslaved by a habit, a weakness, a sin from which you need to be delivered? Think about it and be specific.

I need deliverance from ............ What is it from which you need deliverance? Are you caring a burden of guilt? Is there something in your life for which you need forgiveness and cleansing? It helps to name it.

I’m guilt stricken over ............ and I need forgiveness. If you can be honest in your mind in completing these statements and filling in the blanks, it will help you know who you’re waiting for. It may help you rescue this hectic advent season from shallowness and superficial celebration and preparation and make it the most significant event of your life.

Listen again to the prophet speaking to the longing, despairing exiles of Israel. (Isaiah 40:27-31) “Why do you say, O People of God, and complain, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God.’ Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and His understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” This is an Advent shout!

God in Christ comes as comfort for our aloneness; as light for our darkness; as strength for our weary, fainting hearts and buckling knees; as forgiveness for our sins. I don’t know what’s going on in the depth of your soul today. I don’t know how you filled in those blanks in your mind a few moments ago. I don’t know the point of your weariness, but I know this, Christmas is the intersection where God is going to come to you.

A despised tax collector was up a tree escaping from the crowd, a crowd that could never accept him. He wanted to see Jesus, but he had no hope of Jesus seeing him but, Jesus has a better idea - Jesus saw him and called him down to new life. A woman estranged from her community, an outcast really, went to the well in the heat of the day to fetch water, but she forgot what she went for. God has a lot to give. Jesus gave her the water of eternal life. A man all torn up inside, possessed by demons, moved to the cemetery to live among the dead. He thought there was no peace for him among the living. But God works miracles. Jesus came to the man, cast out the demons, set his soul free and at ease and the scripture tells us this man went back to his family clothed in his right mind. A woman’s life was stained by affair after affair; caught in sexual sin she was brought to Jesus. The penalty for her sin was death by stoning, but God gets the stains out. “Neither do I condemn thee,” said Jesus, “go your way and sin no more.”

We could go on with multiple accounts of God coming to us in Jesus. And lest you think it ended with biblical times, come with me in your mind for a moment. We get used to the depression or unhappiness of a spouse or child. We grow accustomed to the life-denying routines of our culture. We resign ourselves to work that feels purposeless. Ordinary misery is just what it sounds like—misery that is ordinary.

A woman sits in a chair across from me and pours out her fear. In a few days, she will go to the hospital for surgery, it may be a malignancy. As we talk, we discover that something else is there. Devastating fear is present and there is guilt. There is the confession of estrangement from God, she opens her life to that fact, and receives God’s love and forgiveness as I lay my hands upon her head, pray for her and my office is transformed into holy ground where God’s presence and power is worked all over again.

A man, long retired from an active vocation, is home from the hospital, and the diagnosis is not clear. He’s not sure what surgery will be called for next. He wants and needs patience in his discomfort and uncertainty. In his living room, we talk and pray together, and that ancient word of Isaiah comes alive. “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” The man is in the “walking stage” of life. But God is coming alive to him; he’s walking and not fainting. Spiritually, he is even growing through all of this and it is a privilege for me to be able to see God at work.

A young man has violated the trust of his family; used them for his own selfish satisfaction. He can’t stand the guilt any longer, he pours out his confession in a penitential kind of way, hears the word of forgiveness that I have to offer, and goes his way to try to live responsibly and earn back the trust and respect of his parents.

Because while we’ve grown accustomed to misery and disappointment and weariness being ordinary, often we look for God somewhere “out there,” distant or apart from our daily lives. As if God only shows up for the truly holy people, or only appears on a mountain top, or only at church, or only on Sunday. And I think Isaiah wants to help us see that every ordinary moment is infused with God’s extraordinary love and presence and that God desires to meet us exactly where we are, amid the weary, routine, even ordinary elements of our life.

This is the meaning of Christmas. God comes to us in our weary hearts. God intersects our lives with His loving presence in Jesus Christ. That’s for whom we are waiting which is maybe why Jesus is called “Emmanuel”—God is with us.