New Hope

Pastor Robarge’s Sermon
Advent Service, November 30, 2011

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

How many of you like to receive presents? Who likes presents? We can probably all say at one point that we like presents. I know we’re supposed to like giving more than receiving. I know that’s a good line, but we all like presents, too. We like to receive them. We like to open them. We like to see what’s underneath it, right? That’s kind of the joy and excitement of what it is to have a present sitting in front of you.

But have you ever had one of those presents that you kind of opened up and you get to the present itself and you look at it and it looks like it’s been used, maybe re-gifted? Anybody ever had an experience like that? I’ve had a couple of them and it’s kind of different because you’re thinking, “Well, how am I supposed to feel about this? Am I supposed to be excited? It’s still new to me, but it seems like it’s been used.”

Sometimes, we get a little sad. Sometimes it can send us to a place where we’re like, “I guess nobody cares about me. They just want to re-use gifts on me.” We can get to that place. What happens, though, in the Advent season, what we often do is we have this message. It never changes. We got the message of Jesus Christ that’s the same as the day it happened to the time that we receive it right now.

But every year, every season, we have these new packages for it. We have a new logo. We have a new design. We package it. We put a bow on it nice and pretty so everyone will say, “Wow, look at this. This must be different. I’m excited for this. Look at this, All Things New From Prophecy to Revelation.” Great title, right? But it’s just the packaging of something that’s old. And we put a new picture on it. It’s kind of like the same premise, so we see this new package and we see this present that sits before us and then we open it up and we’re like, “Wait a second, I’ve heard this before. This isn’t new. This is the same old message.” Instead of leaving us at a place where we’re like, “Oh wow, no one cares about me,” do you see what happens with a familiar message? It actually warms our hearts a little bit to know that the message hasn’t changed, not one bit.

The message is still the same. The themes we receive are the same themes that were spoken about thousands of years ago. And that’s what always is a great joy to me to be able to say, “The things we do, the things we talk about every Advent or every Lent, they’re just the same theme or the same message but they’re just packaged a little bit differently.”

For awhile, we have been using this Advent wreath. Every Advent, we have it out here. We try to figure out, “Well, let’s make sure we dress this a little bit differently. We have to make sure there are new greens on it because we don’t want old greens. We don’t want people to think we’re just pulling it out of storage and not dusting it off and making it look new.” We brought it out because we use it every year.

But sometimes those old traditions and old customs, if we don’t recognize what they’re there for, sometimes they can lose their meaning. It’s the same thing with the Advent wreath. We use it every year, but if we never realize what it’s there for, if we never realize what the tradition even is there for, then it loses its meaning.

And so in this Advent series, as we’re looking at all things new, the message is, like I said, the same thing. It’s the same theme. It’s the same understanding. Christ is with us. Emmanuel. What does He bring? We talk about these Advent pieces on the candle. The first candle itself is the prophecy candle that was lit tonight. It’s also called the Candle of Hope. And that’s why we talk about hope tonight. Hope, because it’s a part of this tradition that we hold. It’s a tradition that came from the old German tribes and they used to want to light the candles up and be able to celebrate that Christmas because they understood from John 1 that God became life and dwelled among us. He was a light that cut out the darkness. No darkness could overcome the light of Jesus Christ.

So that’s why we have the lights of the candles. When they would light the first one, they would say, “So what does this mean? What are we talking about?” When the light is here, we look at hope. It’s a hope that we look back and we heard from the prophets here tonight. It’s a hope they understood. It’s a hope that we can say, “Look at these prophets. They talked about a coming Messiah.” There was a reason. There was a purpose for them looking forward to something, even though for many of the prophets, as they spoke, they never fully realized the Messiah but they knew of the Messiah. They hoped in the Messiah.

That’s why the candle was there on that day. As we talk about hope, as we talk about that prophecy that was spoken of about Jesus, the hope was there. But now we look at it and we say, “Well, we’ve seen. We know the Messiah has been here.” God with us. Jesus came. He walked amongst us. He was amongst the people. But you know what, we also wait once again for His return.

So the hope we have is a little bit different from the hope that the prophets had. It’s a different kind of hope because we have a hope that we’ve already seen. We’ve already heard from the prophets, from the apostles, from the teachers as they passed it down over time through families and generations.

That’s why we light the candle tonight because it’s a candle of hope. Hope is one of those fleeting ideas in our culture and generation today. The problem is there are a lot of things that get hoped for and they get hoped on, they just don’t come true. A lot of people hope for a perfect relationship and they place all of their eggs in the basket of that. But what happens when the relationship is gone? There are people who place a lot of hope in the basket of possessions and they say, “Just another thing. Just another thing.” And what happens when it’s gone? So is the hope.

I was reading a story about a lady who just said, “I just don’t feel like celebrating Christmas this year.” A couple of months ago, her family was in a car accident and her husband and her children were killed. She said, “Christmas has lost its hope. There’s no reason to celebrate. There’s no reason for joy.” I don’t fault her for the place she was in her despair but to be able to take the hope out of Christmas means there was no hope there at all in the first place. If hope can be stolen that quickly, where was hope in the first place? If hope was so easily taken and stripped, how is it that there was hope there at all?

All of a sudden, we take our hope and we put it in places that it doesn’t belong. We put it in places that, all of a sudden, it’s going to lead to disappointment. And so often, we’ve taken our hope and we put it in those places hoping for something bigger, something grander, something greater to come along, only to be disappointed.

But listen from Romans 5, Paul writes, “Hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out with our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” So it is that hope doesn’t disappoint then. And we look at Paul later on in Corinthians when he speaks of those Corinthian Christians in the famous Chapter 13 that’s spoken out at all of the weddings, “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is, love is, love is,” but what does he say at the end? There are three things that remain. Can you tell them to me? Do you remember them? What remains? “And these things remain: Faith, Hope and Love.” Faith, hope and love. This is not a coincidence that our candles on this wreath stand for faith, hope and love. These are eternal gifts that God says, “To every believer, I give to you faith, hope and love that cannot be stripped or stolen from you, no matter what happens.”

This is the reason when we start to look at traditions and customs and understand it doesn’t just fall back on tradition. When we start to look at it, there’s a reason to hope. There’s a reason to love. There’s a reason for joy. It’s not in the things we can see and things we can touch, things we can smell. But it’s in Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God with us.

Far too long, we maybe have put our hope elsewhere. Far too long, we’ve been able to say, “I’ve hoped and all these other things. I’ve placed my eggs maybe in a relationship basket or in some other basket. And this year, I want the message of new hope in Jesus Christ to be real. I want the message of salvation to come to me so I can understand that this isn’t just some kind of tradition, just something we do every year..” But God with us? Emmanuel? There’s a hope there that can’t be stripped and it can’t be stolen. Maybe it’s something that becomes new or fresh once again.

There’s a great hymn and if you’d like to pull out your LSB in the little shelves on the bottom of the pews, turn to 575. It’s a great hymn and it’s not an Advent hymn. It’s found under the Justification section of the hymnal. If you look at the title of 575, it’s called “My Hope is Built on Nothing Less.” When we look at the hymn, it’s rich in meaning. It’s rich in understanding and I think we could probably have enough people in the room who know the song that we could sing it a cappella but I won’t make you do that.

I’m going to take you through just a couple of the words in here because it allows us to be able to hope on something different. “My hope is built on nothing less that Jesus’ blood and righteousness. Oh merit of my own I claim but wholly lean on Jesus’ name. On Christ the solid Rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.” If you remember where that actually comes from, the sinking sand, Jesus was talking about a parable about where to build your foundation and houses that are built and He was talking to these people who were around Him and He said, “You have an option. You can build your house anywhere you want to. It’s your choice.” Some people went over there and built it on sand and they try to build this great, firm foundation on sand and yet, when the rains came down and the floods came up, what happened to the house on the sand? It would crash.

The foundation wasn’t strong. What happened when they tried to build this great and grand place? The foundation is what was necessary to be strong and yet, what happened? They built it on something that wasn’t going to last. But Jesus says, “Build your house on the rock because on the rock, your foundation, your house will withstand the weather, the storm.” It’s the hope we talk about and the hope of Jesus Christ when He came to the world. When He was talking to the people who were around Him, He was telling them these things constantly, day after day. He would tell it in different ways and new ways, in parables and story and whatever it was. He told it in a number of different ways and yet, it remained the same. He said, “If you put your hope in anything else, it’s going to disappoint. But if you build your house, if you build your faith strong on the rock, on the firm foundation, that will never let you down. It doesn’t matter what happens.”

It doesn’t matter if there are storms. It doesn’t matter if there are those things in life that come along and just really crash against your house. It won’t matter because the firm foundation is there, and that’s when we talk about that hope. The hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. It’s not an Advent theme but when we look at it, there is no cross without a manger. There is no sacrifice if He never comes.

When we always look at these feast days and we look at Christmas and we look at Easter, we always have to look at it in combination between the two, because when we see that Jesus comes, He comes for a purpose, for a reason. So when people are there to understand who God is and why God had to come, He shares the story of salvation and life to those people. “There’s a reason I’m telling you these things because this is what I’m going to do for you.”

When we think about new hope, we think about those places in which we try to place our hope. We’d say, “There’s only one place to put it. In Jesus Christ.” When we think about all those and we look at our hope that is built on nothing less, when darkness veils His lovely face, I rest upon His unchanging grace in every high and stormy gale, my anchor holds within the veil.” Every verse, when we look at this, it’s rich in meaning. When we see that His grace doesn’t change for us, everything we’re doing, He’s calling us back to Himself once again and, here it is, in Advent, He calls us back once again.

Because maybe He’s ready to do a new thing in you. Because when He calls out and He says, “I’ve come to do a new thing,” when Isaiah, the prophet, prophesies that the Messiah is going to do something new, it’s new hope. It’s new hope for a day that our culture defines as hopeless. It’s new hope when we found that everything has led to hopelessness. It’s new hope when there’s nothing left to hope in.

I pray that this Advent, we open our hearts and we prepare for the king and His arrival and His coming. We’d say, “I’m ready for you to do something new right here in my life.” Amen.