Advent 1: Our wait begins
Matthew 24:36-44; Isaiah 2:1-5
Watch the video:
...or listen to audio:
...or download a printer-friendly PDF file [click here]
...or read it online here:
I appreciate the thoughtfulness
of those who came up with the title of the Advent resources
for Mennonite Church USA and Canada.
It’s in big block letters on the bulletin cover.
“What are you waiting for?” – you can ask the question in many ways.
A question of longing and lament we ask of God,
as did the psalmists and prophets:
“What are you waiting for,
before you end this suffering or injustice?
How long, O Lord?”
Or maybe, a question God asks of us,
who are being too passive,
not taking responsibility for our end of the covenant:
“What are you waiting for?
You have all that you need to live faithfully.”
Or maybe, it’s a question we ask of each other, in empathy,
as we seek to discover the places of longing,
of desolation, of differing needs in each other’s lives.
“What are you waiting for?
During this season we will ask the question in all those ways,
and maybe more.
But today, our expectant longing for God to act.
Our proclamation of hope in the midst of darkness.
But wait! . . . didn’t we just talk about hope last Sunday?
Of course, we did.
We have ended, and are now beginning the church worship year,
by proclaiming hope.
How fitting.
The Christian community marks time differently than civil society.
In worship we don’t mark time with a calendar
based on movements within our solar system.
We mark time with the pivotal events in God’s story.
So naturally, our year begins with the first Sunday of Advent.
Happy New Year, everybody!
Each year we retell the story of God’s great inbreaking,
the incarnation,
when God took on flesh and dwelled among us.
And our year goes through the stories of Jesus,
and the whole scope of the biblical story,
ending around Thanksgiving
with celebrating the Reign of Christ.
Last Sunday we ended our special series on Creation with Hope,
and today we start a new year with Hope.
I don’t think we’ll be too repetitive,
and even if we were, who would complain?
These days, who would say we suffer from too much hope?
Last week,
in our focus on hope in Creation,
we saw how God’s trajectory,
always moving toward healing and hope,
is woven into the very fabric of creation.
How in the passing of the seasons,
and just in the way Planet Earth works,
life is persistent,
it keeps bubbling up, even in the most inhospitable conditions.
This week,
we see hope in God coming to us in the flesh,
God choosing to be with us in our darkness,
in the promise of Immanuel—God with us—
who came at a moment in history we celebrate at Christmas,
and who still is coming,
and who will yet come again.
_____________________
I want there to be no doubt in anyone’s mind and heart,
that the coming of Christ to be with us—past, present, and future—
is to be welcomed and rejoiced over
and is to fill us with hope and high anticipation.
Now, you might wonder . . .
how do we make sense of today’s Gospel reading?
Did Matthew 24 sound like a declaration of hope and joy?
or like a doomsday warning?
I will say this,
growing up in a church that talked a lot about the rapture,
and showed scary movies, in church, about God’s day of judgment,
Matthew 24 never sounded like reason to rejoice.
It was a warning that the second coming of Jesus
would be as horrible as the terrifying flood in the days of Noah.
That two people would be working side-by-side,
and one would suddenly disappear, swept away, forever.
Or as in lyrics by Christian singer Larry Norman—
in a song I played often on my record player—
“A man and wife asleep in bed,
she hears a noise and turns her head, he’s gone.”
It was kind of like a Christian version of a similar program
developed for juvenile delinquents in the 70s.
That program was called “scared straight.”
They would put troubled teens behind bars for a few days
and let them taste the horrific life that awaited them,
if they didn’t get their act together.
The trouble was, it didn’t actually work—
either to keep juveniles away from crime,
or to form Christian teens into disciples.
So there are some in my generation,
that still have a kind of instinctive gag reflex
when we hear Matthew 24.
We either set it aside as antiquated and irrelevant,
or we pretend it’s not there at all.
Unfortunately . . . for churches who follow a lectionary,
it keeps coming up.
We can’t really get away from it.
But it’s been good for me to wrestle with these texts over time,
and let them speak to me, even when I’m not drawn to them.
And now, I actually appreciate them a great deal.
I’ve gotten to that point,
by not lifting them out of their cultural context,
but reading them in the context of Jesus himself,
his life, his character, his ministry, his way with children.
And I just don’t see Jesus as one who would have approved
of a church that used his words to scare 11 and 12-year-olds
into compliance,
or to paint God as a vengeful God
eager to punish people for their misdeeds.
So let me share this take on Matthew 24.
First of all, what point is being made,
by Jesus comparing his second coming to the days of Noah?
Did Jesus really intend for us to picture some horror-movie scene
with disobedient people fighting for their lives
against the raging flood waters?
Did Jesus intend for his listeners to tremble in fear
at the thought of his coming?
If so, how do we square that with Jesus’ words elsewhere?
“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
And how do we square that with Jesus’ insistence
that the children not be sent away to be silent and compliant,
but invited them to come near to him,
and invited the adults to be like those rambunctious children?
No, I think Jesus was making a different kind of point.
Let’s still be clear.
His call was not to some low-demand, low-expectation Gospel.
The good news is not tolerance for everyone and everything.
Jesus was still calling people to be disciples.
He was still calling them to take up their crosses,
and follow, even when following was costly.
But Jesus brought up the topic of the days of Noah for another reason.
Not to scare them straight.
But to make one particular comparison.
Namely, that his second coming would not conform
to everyone’s expectations.
There would be surprises.
There would be people who thought
they were working on the same project, but were not.
Both his purpose and his timing would be misunderstood.
This is the way rabbis taught in those days.
It’s typical rabbinic Jewish style of teaching.
You point out another event, or another biblical story,
in order to make a single point of comparison,
even if all the details don’t match up as an analogy.
Several times, Jesus quoted scripture in ways that seem odd today.
He took phrases in the psalms and
used them to make a point the psalmist wasn’t making.
He wasn’t being disrespectful of the text.
He was using a teaching tool that his listeners understood.
When Jesus compared his second coming to the days of Noah,
he did not intend to terrify his listeners and give them nightmares.
He was telling them,
“Don’t get lazy about the kingdom of God.”
Stay awake.
It will surprise you.
It will interrupt your reality in ways you weren’t expecting.
Just as in the days of Noah.
In the flood story in Genesis,
all the people thought Noah was out of touch with reality.
They were shocked and surprised to find out otherwise.
So it will be in your day, Jesus said.
Even those who work beside you every day in the field,
or grind meal on the same stone in the courtyard,
even your closest companions will see one thing,
while you see another.
So don’t be deceived.
Don’t get lackadaisical.
Stay awake!
Pay close attention to the signs.
And, take heart!
Because I am coming back.
I will be with you again.
The Kingdom of God will break into your reality.
That is good news.
So rejoice!
Live in hope!
_____________________
The greatest temptation for us human beings is distraction.
Chronic distraction.
We are easily distracted anyway,
and it’s worse now with all the technology
we are tethered to 24 hours a day.
As a culture we are in a chronic state
of inattentiveness to each other,
inattentiveness to the divine,
inattentiveness to small signs of life all around us,
because our attention is always being drawn away
to the latest, biggest, flashiest, most shocking
scandal or catastrophe.
Our collective senses are being dulled
to the work of God all around us.
At this rate, we will utterly fail
to notice God’s reign breaking in.
The reign of God might be taking root
and sprouting through the soil right outside our front door
and we don’t see it.
We stomp on the tender plant as we go rushing out the door . . .
to get to our next big thing.
We’re not awake.
We’re not alert.
We’re not ready for the reign of God.
This is what Jesus was most concerned about,
and what Jesus issued this warning about in Matthew 24.
We think we know what the reign of God looks like.
And we can get pretty proud of ourselves
when we construct something that looks, to us,
like the reign of God.
But so often, we get it wrong.
That’s why two people can be working beside each other
in the same field—in the same row in the same field—
and God’s reality still cuts right between them.
One of them is mistaking the work of their hands,
for the work of God’s hands.
We are constantly tempted to think the reign of God
is the work of our hands.
But the kingdom is not ours
to manufacture, manage, or manipulate.
Did you notice all three of those words begin with “m-a-n”?
That’s not a coincidence.
“Manus” is Latin for “hand.”
To man-ufacture, to man-age, to man-ipulate,
is to use our hands to control, exert force upon, or interfere with.
Hands prepared for the reign of God
are positioned to receive, to accept as a gift,
palms upturned in gratitude.
When our spiritual body posture is open,
our mind and will and spirit are also attentive.
We wait, with expectation,
for what we are about to receive.
Being attentive and thus, hope-filled, is our Christian calling.
It is the life to which God in Christ invites us—
a life of hope and joy and freedom under the reign of God.
It is the life Isaiah described in our Old Testament reading today,
“Come, come, let’s go up to the Lord’s mountain.”
It’s a life where people laugh
as they beat their swords into plowshares,
and put away their war manuals.
It’s a life where people walk in the light of the Lord,
with a lightness in their step.
That’s the life of hope and joy Matthew 24 calls us to.
I think Jesus is deeply saddened when scripture gets twisted
to where young people (or adults) lie awake at night
trembling in fear about something intended to give them hope.
Matthew 24 is a serious call to a deeper life,
from a God who embodies both love and judgment, to be sure.
But it’s not the rapture we should worry about.
It’s living in the surprising reign of God
that should capture our attention.
This Gospel word is an invitation
to a life of freedom and joy and attentiveness in Christ,
where the kingdom of God shows up at unexpected times
and in unexpected places.
It is a call to expect the unexpected.
As we heard in last Sunday’s text hope that is seen is not hope at all.
No, we live in hope
because we trust God to show up,
because we give God the freedom not to meet our expectations,
but to show up when and where and how God sees fit.
Let’s call out to God in prayer, and in song,
as we turn to Sing the Journey 54, and pray together,
Christ, be our light! Shine in our hearts.
Shine through the darkness.
Christ, be our light!
Shine in your church gathered today.
—Phil Kniss, December 1, 2019
[To leave a comment, click on "comments" link below]
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Sunday, November 24, 2019
Phil Kniss: Yet we hope
God's Good Earth: Hope and Healing
Psalm 85:7-13; Isaiah 58:6-7, 10-12; Romans 8:18-25; Luke 2:27-33
Watch the video:
...or listen to audio:
...or download a printer-friendly PDF file [click here]
...or read it online here:
We are called to hope.
Our primary Christian call is
to live in hope,
to proclaim hope,
to invite others to hope.
Wow! Wow.
In this world . . . in these days . . . that’s a big ask.
How can we hope, and still be honest?
Throughout this worship series we have tried our best to be honest.
We called it “God’s Good Earth” on purpose, because it is good.
It is beautiful.
It is diverse.
It has renewal and regeneration built into it.
It has so much going for it.
But we didn’t pull any punches describing the trouble we’re in.
We are unfortunately fighting against this good earth.
And often winning the fight.
Our destructive actions are incredibly powerful.
They are eliminating species, destroying ecosystems,
and changing climates.
The point of no return is right around the corner,
and we don’t seem to have the will to change.
And that’s just talking about the natural world.
What if we throw politics into the mix?
Entire societies are in a chaotic and violent meltdown,
and no one knows how to stop it.
Hong Kong, Syria, Bolivia, Israel-Palestine,
Afghanistan, and on and on.
Whole nations are blowing up.
And we might even wonder if ours is next in line.
So, let’s talk about our reasons for hope.
Let’s get happy, what do you say?
_____________________
No, really. Let me repeat my opening lines.
We are called to hope.
Our primary Christian call is
to live in hope,
to proclaim hope,
to invite others to hope.
If we can’t do it now, then,
have we ever been able to do it?
Because this is not really the worst of times, historically.
In terms of loss of human life,
World War II was the worst conflict ever.
In a six-year period, nearly 80 million people died.
Can we even imagine that scale of loss of life today?
The Chinese famine of the late 1950s killed over 20 million.
If we want to feel overwhelmed,
there are endless lists of historic human catastrophes.
Look them up.
Boggle your mind.
They make our times look blissful in comparison.
But in all those situations we Christians
had something positive to say and do.
We people of faith and goodwill did not stop hoping then.
We made sacrifices, we got to work
to relieve human suffering
to rebuild lives and societies.
Some of those humanitarian projects live on today,
because our acts of hope flourished and grew.
And vibrant churches still exist in many of those places,
because some of our proclamations of hope resonated,
took root in those cultures, and bore lasting fruit.
But here we are today, again, in dire straits,
and feeling hopeless.
Why?
Have we forgotten our reason for hope?
Well . . . come to think of it . . . what is it?
Why should we hope?
On what basis can we hope?
And by hope, I don’t mean wish.
We all wish things were different.
No, hope.
A confident sense of grounding.
Trust in a good that is larger than ourselves.
A good that will triumph someday.
Let me head right into this topic that is a spiritual minefield.
We can so easily step onto something we shouldn’t.
Maybe it’s our fear of these spiritual mines
that keeps us from even trying sometimes.
What we don’t want is an excuse not to act.
What we don’t want is denial.
What we don’t want is spiritual escapism.
I get it.
We’ve all seen that, and we rightly reject it.
The topic of our relationship to creation
is that kind of spiritual minefield.
Some Christians expect the kind of heaven
that’s meant to get us off this evil physical planet earth,
and into some glorious other-world . . .
and they expect this heavenly rescue soon,
when Christ will come and whisk us away,
and the evil earth will burn up,
getting what it deserves for its sin.
So . . . there are some Christians who think that
caring about our planet is misdirected,
that it takes our attention away from heaven.
In the same way,
when we speak of hope in the midst of catastrophic human suffering,
we are tempted by escapist thinking.
The road to salvation must take us out of this place altogether,
to “the sweet by and by,”
“where all the saints of God are gathered home . . .”
because “this world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through”
“and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.”
There is truth embedded in those words.
But . . . are these our only options?
Must we either
put our hope in a spiritual escape
orchestrated by a God who removes us from earth to heaven,
or
put our hope entirely in the human potential for goodness,
so that if we all try harder and change our behavior,
the world will be healed.
Is there another path toward hope and healing?
_____________________
Yes, there is.
It is God and human beings acting in concert with each other.
It is divine and human collaboration . . . co-laboring . . .
working together.
Here is our theology of hope.
Let me first point it out in scripture.
Then spell it out for our times.
Isaiah the prophet assured God’s people
that their actions and God’s actions were intertwined.
We heard from Isaiah 58 today.
When we loose the bonds of injustice,
let the oppressed go free,
share our bread with the hungry,
bring the poor into our house,
and clothe the naked like we clothe ourselves . . .
then the light of God will shine,
Yahweh will make us like a well-watered garden,
and the ruins will be rebuilt.
The psalm writer exults in Psalm 85,
that “steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.”
This sounds like God and humanity reconciling,
in a cosmic divine-human kiss.
It says, “Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.”
This is the image of divine and human collaboration.
Yes, and according to Paul and to writer of the Gospel of Luke,
it is perfectly good and right to look to the future for our hope.
Looking to the future for hope does not avoid the present.
It does not lead to inaction.
It is a simple trust in God and God’s work.
It is confidence that as we do our part, God will do God’s.
It is to anticipate, with expectation,
the psalmist’s vision of the divine-human kiss,
when reconciliation happens,
when our brokenness is redeemed,
when, as apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8,
creation itself is freed from its bondage to decay,
when it no longer groans in unfulfilled longing.
In the Gospel of Luke today we saw old man Simeon find true hope.
He found it in a future he knew he would never see.
As he held the 8-day-old infant Jesus in his arms,
he was filled with the hope he had longed for.
He said to God, “I can die in peace now.
For you have let me see your salvation.”
Yes, it was in seed form.
It was a helpless human infant,
soon to be a refugee to Egypt.
But in that baby Simeon saw God’s salvation.
And he could die in peace,
knowing this divine-human kiss would happen.
_____________________
So let’s bring it to our day now.
With the earth on fire, metaphorically, and in some places, literally.
With creation and human society in a deeply broken state,
where is our hope?
Well, again, here is our foundational theological assumption.
Believe it . . . or not.
This is our confession as God’s people.
Things are badly broken in creation
because we abused our power and broke things.
The fall of humanity brought us here.
And God’s primary purpose is to
repair, redeem, reconcile, and restore the shalom
that God intended all along at creation.
And God’s purpose is ultimately unstoppable.
And despite our failures,
we humans are still God’s first choice as partners in healing.
It is a partnership that is happening now,
poking up here and there,
surprising us like an early spring crocus.
It’s not fully there yet,
but it will ultimately culminate in the divine-human reunion,
a cosmic kiss of reconciliation.
So we live in hope for that day,
and practice for it now.
Yes, we have another option.
It seems kind of anemic in comparison.
Since things are going badly as a result of humans behaving badly,
we can put our hope in better behavior by human persons
and having the economic and political systems of the world
repent and turn toward virtue.
So we appeal to our innate human goodness as our salvation.
If that doesn’t work, well, then, we’re doomed. And creation, too.
And it doesn’t seem to be working.
Despite the best of intentions,
and the best expectations of each other,
we don’t seem to be moving toward our own salvation.
So . . . where is our hope?
It is in the future God already created,
where human beings and God collaborate in mutual love—
We look forward to God’s ultimate salvation and restoration,
and we practice for it now.
We do not put our hope in escaping from God’s good earth.
Nor do we hope in the potential of humanity to heal itself.
We hope in God,
who is at work now to save and redeem the broken creation,
and who created us to collaborate in this work.
_____________________
That is our theological frame of mind
as today we issue a call to praise and Thanksgiving
for God’s abundance in the harvest,
and as we issue a call to stewardship,
as we prepare to offer the first-fruits of our harvest.
Every year on this Sunday,
we do a collective act of thanksgiving and hope.
We bring our regular offerings and offer them in worship to God.
And we bring our First-Fruit Faith Promises,
a statement of trust in God’s provisions,
and a statement of hope in God’s future.
You know,
our annual congregational spending plan is not just some
institutional exercise of financial management and budgeting.
Sure, call it that if you want. That’s not untrue.
But theologically speaking, it is much more than that.
It is placing our hope in God’s future.
It is being strategic about collaborating with God.
Part of God’s healing work, as we heard in Isaiah,
is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked,
bringing the homeless into our house for shelter,
and giving freedom to the oppressed.
We actually plan for these acts of collaboration in our budget.
Each of our gifts is a way to join together and join with God.
And that is not just putting a spin on it, to make it sound good.
Look carefully at our spending plan.
Ask questions about it.
Not just the parts of it we send away,
and we send a lot away in mission, locally and globally.
But ask questions about our spending on this building.
How are we using this building?
Is it really for ourselves?
Or in service of our divine-human collaboration?
Who is coming in and going out of it, and why?
In the course of a season,
you will see many in our community
being blessed by this building,
thanks be to God.
And ask questions about our grants for education
and faith formation,
and find out whose lives are being impacted, and how.
And ask questions about our spending on staff.
Find out how your three pastors and office staff
and other staff,
are touching the lives of our neighbors,
and those living on the margins,
or our own members who struggle with life.
Everywhere I look around PVMC,
I see us practicing now,
for God’s ultimate healing and reconciling work.
And I thank God for that.
If giving to the work and ministry of Park View Mennonite
is not an investment in this divine-human collaboration,
then I have no idea what is.
I hope that we all together can
live in hope,
proclaim hope,
and invite others to hope.
Just as God has called us to do.
—Phil Kniss, November 24, 2019
[To leave a comment, click on "comments" link below]
Psalm 85:7-13; Isaiah 58:6-7, 10-12; Romans 8:18-25; Luke 2:27-33
Watch the video:
...or listen to audio:
...or download a printer-friendly PDF file [click here]
...or read it online here:
We are called to hope.
Our primary Christian call is
to live in hope,
to proclaim hope,
to invite others to hope.
Wow! Wow.
In this world . . . in these days . . . that’s a big ask.
How can we hope, and still be honest?
Throughout this worship series we have tried our best to be honest.
We called it “God’s Good Earth” on purpose, because it is good.
It is beautiful.
It is diverse.
It has renewal and regeneration built into it.
It has so much going for it.
But we didn’t pull any punches describing the trouble we’re in.
We are unfortunately fighting against this good earth.
And often winning the fight.
Our destructive actions are incredibly powerful.
They are eliminating species, destroying ecosystems,
and changing climates.
The point of no return is right around the corner,
and we don’t seem to have the will to change.
And that’s just talking about the natural world.
What if we throw politics into the mix?
Entire societies are in a chaotic and violent meltdown,
and no one knows how to stop it.
Hong Kong, Syria, Bolivia, Israel-Palestine,
Afghanistan, and on and on.
Whole nations are blowing up.
And we might even wonder if ours is next in line.
So, let’s talk about our reasons for hope.
Let’s get happy, what do you say?
_____________________
No, really. Let me repeat my opening lines.
We are called to hope.
Our primary Christian call is
to live in hope,
to proclaim hope,
to invite others to hope.
If we can’t do it now, then,
have we ever been able to do it?
Because this is not really the worst of times, historically.
In terms of loss of human life,
World War II was the worst conflict ever.
In a six-year period, nearly 80 million people died.
Can we even imagine that scale of loss of life today?
The Chinese famine of the late 1950s killed over 20 million.
If we want to feel overwhelmed,
there are endless lists of historic human catastrophes.
Look them up.
Boggle your mind.
They make our times look blissful in comparison.
But in all those situations we Christians
had something positive to say and do.
We people of faith and goodwill did not stop hoping then.
We made sacrifices, we got to work
to relieve human suffering
to rebuild lives and societies.
Some of those humanitarian projects live on today,
because our acts of hope flourished and grew.
And vibrant churches still exist in many of those places,
because some of our proclamations of hope resonated,
took root in those cultures, and bore lasting fruit.
But here we are today, again, in dire straits,
and feeling hopeless.
Why?
Have we forgotten our reason for hope?
Well . . . come to think of it . . . what is it?
Why should we hope?
On what basis can we hope?
And by hope, I don’t mean wish.
We all wish things were different.
No, hope.
A confident sense of grounding.
Trust in a good that is larger than ourselves.
A good that will triumph someday.
Let me head right into this topic that is a spiritual minefield.
We can so easily step onto something we shouldn’t.
Maybe it’s our fear of these spiritual mines
that keeps us from even trying sometimes.
What we don’t want is an excuse not to act.
What we don’t want is denial.
What we don’t want is spiritual escapism.
I get it.
We’ve all seen that, and we rightly reject it.
The topic of our relationship to creation
is that kind of spiritual minefield.
Some Christians expect the kind of heaven
that’s meant to get us off this evil physical planet earth,
and into some glorious other-world . . .
and they expect this heavenly rescue soon,
when Christ will come and whisk us away,
and the evil earth will burn up,
getting what it deserves for its sin.
So . . . there are some Christians who think that
caring about our planet is misdirected,
that it takes our attention away from heaven.
In the same way,
when we speak of hope in the midst of catastrophic human suffering,
we are tempted by escapist thinking.
The road to salvation must take us out of this place altogether,
to “the sweet by and by,”
“where all the saints of God are gathered home . . .”
because “this world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through”
“and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.”
There is truth embedded in those words.
But . . . are these our only options?
Must we either
put our hope in a spiritual escape
orchestrated by a God who removes us from earth to heaven,
or
put our hope entirely in the human potential for goodness,
so that if we all try harder and change our behavior,
the world will be healed.
Is there another path toward hope and healing?
_____________________
Yes, there is.
It is God and human beings acting in concert with each other.
It is divine and human collaboration . . . co-laboring . . .
working together.
Here is our theology of hope.
Let me first point it out in scripture.
Then spell it out for our times.
Isaiah the prophet assured God’s people
that their actions and God’s actions were intertwined.
We heard from Isaiah 58 today.
When we loose the bonds of injustice,
let the oppressed go free,
share our bread with the hungry,
bring the poor into our house,
and clothe the naked like we clothe ourselves . . .
then the light of God will shine,
Yahweh will make us like a well-watered garden,
and the ruins will be rebuilt.
The psalm writer exults in Psalm 85,
that “steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.”
This sounds like God and humanity reconciling,
in a cosmic divine-human kiss.
It says, “Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.”
This is the image of divine and human collaboration.
Yes, and according to Paul and to writer of the Gospel of Luke,
it is perfectly good and right to look to the future for our hope.
Looking to the future for hope does not avoid the present.
It does not lead to inaction.
It is a simple trust in God and God’s work.
It is confidence that as we do our part, God will do God’s.
It is to anticipate, with expectation,
the psalmist’s vision of the divine-human kiss,
when reconciliation happens,
when our brokenness is redeemed,
when, as apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8,
creation itself is freed from its bondage to decay,
when it no longer groans in unfulfilled longing.
In the Gospel of Luke today we saw old man Simeon find true hope.
He found it in a future he knew he would never see.
As he held the 8-day-old infant Jesus in his arms,
he was filled with the hope he had longed for.
He said to God, “I can die in peace now.
For you have let me see your salvation.”
Yes, it was in seed form.
It was a helpless human infant,
soon to be a refugee to Egypt.
But in that baby Simeon saw God’s salvation.
And he could die in peace,
knowing this divine-human kiss would happen.
_____________________
So let’s bring it to our day now.
With the earth on fire, metaphorically, and in some places, literally.
With creation and human society in a deeply broken state,
where is our hope?
Well, again, here is our foundational theological assumption.
Believe it . . . or not.
This is our confession as God’s people.
Things are badly broken in creation
because we abused our power and broke things.
The fall of humanity brought us here.
And God’s primary purpose is to
repair, redeem, reconcile, and restore the shalom
that God intended all along at creation.
And God’s purpose is ultimately unstoppable.
And despite our failures,
we humans are still God’s first choice as partners in healing.
It is a partnership that is happening now,
poking up here and there,
surprising us like an early spring crocus.
It’s not fully there yet,
but it will ultimately culminate in the divine-human reunion,
a cosmic kiss of reconciliation.
So we live in hope for that day,
and practice for it now.
Yes, we have another option.
It seems kind of anemic in comparison.
Since things are going badly as a result of humans behaving badly,
we can put our hope in better behavior by human persons
and having the economic and political systems of the world
repent and turn toward virtue.
So we appeal to our innate human goodness as our salvation.
If that doesn’t work, well, then, we’re doomed. And creation, too.
And it doesn’t seem to be working.
Despite the best of intentions,
and the best expectations of each other,
we don’t seem to be moving toward our own salvation.
So . . . where is our hope?
It is in the future God already created,
where human beings and God collaborate in mutual love—
We look forward to God’s ultimate salvation and restoration,
and we practice for it now.
We do not put our hope in escaping from God’s good earth.
Nor do we hope in the potential of humanity to heal itself.
We hope in God,
who is at work now to save and redeem the broken creation,
and who created us to collaborate in this work.
_____________________
That is our theological frame of mind
as today we issue a call to praise and Thanksgiving
for God’s abundance in the harvest,
and as we issue a call to stewardship,
as we prepare to offer the first-fruits of our harvest.
Every year on this Sunday,
we do a collective act of thanksgiving and hope.
We bring our regular offerings and offer them in worship to God.
And we bring our First-Fruit Faith Promises,
a statement of trust in God’s provisions,
and a statement of hope in God’s future.
You know,
our annual congregational spending plan is not just some
institutional exercise of financial management and budgeting.
Sure, call it that if you want. That’s not untrue.
But theologically speaking, it is much more than that.
It is placing our hope in God’s future.
It is being strategic about collaborating with God.
Part of God’s healing work, as we heard in Isaiah,
is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked,
bringing the homeless into our house for shelter,
and giving freedom to the oppressed.
We actually plan for these acts of collaboration in our budget.
Each of our gifts is a way to join together and join with God.
And that is not just putting a spin on it, to make it sound good.
Look carefully at our spending plan.
Ask questions about it.
Not just the parts of it we send away,
and we send a lot away in mission, locally and globally.
But ask questions about our spending on this building.
How are we using this building?
Is it really for ourselves?
Or in service of our divine-human collaboration?
Who is coming in and going out of it, and why?
In the course of a season,
you will see many in our community
being blessed by this building,
thanks be to God.
And ask questions about our grants for education
and faith formation,
and find out whose lives are being impacted, and how.
And ask questions about our spending on staff.
Find out how your three pastors and office staff
and other staff,
are touching the lives of our neighbors,
and those living on the margins,
or our own members who struggle with life.
Everywhere I look around PVMC,
I see us practicing now,
for God’s ultimate healing and reconciling work.
And I thank God for that.
If giving to the work and ministry of Park View Mennonite
is not an investment in this divine-human collaboration,
then I have no idea what is.
I hope that we all together can
live in hope,
proclaim hope,
and invite others to hope.
Just as God has called us to do.
—Phil Kniss, November 24, 2019
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