https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/Come_On_Up_Advent1A.m4a<\/a><\/audio>\nAdvent is an Interruption<\/h3>\n
Today I suppose many of us are turning from gatherings at which we celebrated the last great moment of fall, thanksgiving, toward the holiday season. In our house, that will mean brining boxes of decorations down from the attic, sorting through them, telling the stories that go with each one and putting them out. It will mean cleaning and making lists of things to do. Jacquelyn will be working on airplanes full of people traveling for the first time; I will be busy as well, considering our church has something planned for each weekend in December. We\u2019ll all be busy. But here and now, today, God is calling in the midst of our lists and memories and decorating: stop! look! listen!\u2014pay attention. God intends to interrupt us. Advent is an interruption.<\/p>\n
The oracle we heard this morning is an interruption. We tend to take the Bible for granted, rarely remembering that somewhere, somehow, someone took bits and pieces, some written, some sung, some remembered and put them together into the books we know today. The Book of Isaiah starts out with a dark word of condemnation and then suddenly, out of nowhere, that Word is interrupted by this prophecy. The same prophecy also occurs in Micah; it\u2019s as if God was saying, \u201cThis is so important, I want to make sure you get it so I\u2019m going to repeat it!\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Lord’s Mountain is a Beacon<\/h3>\n
The oracle starts out with something strange because it\u2019s not true today: \u201cIn days to come, the mountain of the Lord\u2019s house will be established as the highest of the mountains\u2026\u201d [Isaiah 2:2] Now anyone who knows the geography of Judah can tell you that Mt. Zion, where the Lord\u2019s house is located, where Jerusalem is and has been for more than 30 centuries, is not by any means the highest mountain. It\u2019s not the highest in the world; it\u2019s not the highest in that area. What does Isaiah mean? What does God mean by saying that it shall be raised up? One image of what we raise up is the beacon. Since ancient times, people have raised up beacons along shorelines; we call them light houses. Groping along in the fog, sailing in a storm, light houses, beacons, raised up and shining forth are not only a guide but a source of comfort. All sailors know their home light house. Isaiah is asking us to imagine that in the future, Jerusalem is raised up like a beacon, like a lighthouse.<\/p>\n
Now a beacon has a purpose and the purpose is to draw travelers. But this vision of Isaiah is astonishing because the travelers it imagines drawing include\u2026well, everyone! \u201cMany people shall come and say, \u2018Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.\u2019\u201d Who does Isaiah have in mind, who are these \u201cmany\u201d? Only a moment later, Isaiah pictures the Lord judging between nations, making clear who the many are: all of us. Amazingly, surprisingly, it\u2019s not just the nation of Judah, it\u2019s not just the children of Abraham, it\u2019s everyone, everyone is being summoned to walk in the light of the Lord.<\/p>\n
Together-And Divided<\/h3>\n
All of us together, all of us walking together: that\u2019s not our best thing as people. What we are best at is figuring out how different we are. In this culture, that often has to do with skin color. In other cultures, it has often has to do with religion. In some cultures it\u2019s a matter of birth. Jacquelyn and I have been watching a series about Queen Elizabeth II, and the British royal family and it\u2019s made me wonder what it must be like to have your whole life dictated by the family into which you are born. India has a system of castes and even today, though legally banned, the caste into which you are born influences your life. We mark differences by clothing, food, custom. When we come to a meeting, for example, we assume we will sit in chairs; two thirds of the world\u2019s people don\u2019t use chairs. How can we meet with them?<\/p>\n
God’s Future: Inclusive<\/h3>\n
So when God asks us to imagine all of us together, walking together, it is an interruption; it is not what we normally do, it is not what we ever do. When will this be? \u201cIn days to come\u2026\u201d So now you know: now we know, this is where we are going, this is God\u2019s vision of our future. This vision has three parts. First, it is inclusive: many come, nations come, peoples come and when they come, they are coming up from where they are to a higher understanding. This is not just a trip, it\u2019s a pilgrimage, a place to experience God\u2019s Word as a living reality: \u201cFor out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.\u201d [Isaiah 2:3b] God means to interrupt our journey and invite us to a pilgrimage. Like a mariner anxiously wandering who suddenly sees the loom of a light house and knows his or her position, God is creating a beacon to show us where to go. <\/p>\n
God’s Vision: Peace<\/h3>\n
\fSecond, this is a vision of peace. \u201c\u2026they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.\u201d [Isaiah 2:4b] Did you catch the last part: war forgotten\u2014\u201cneither shall they learn war any more.\u201d Rick Atkinson has written a series of books with a painfully detailed account of World War II. His account focuses on the individual experience of people caught in the war and in his first volume, An Army at Dawn<\/em>, he traces how plain American men had to learn to become killers in order to win battles. <\/p>\nWar is not natural; it is learned. Yet thinking over my life, I can\u2019t think of a time we weren\u2019t at war. I grew on stories from World War II and was born as the Korean War ended. I loved playing with toy soldiers and my friends and I endlessly acted out little battles. Perhaps like you, I remember the fears of nuclear war and atom bomb drills in schools. I was formed intellectually in the antiwar movement of the 1960\u2019s and ordained as the Vietnam War ended. Much of my adult life has been lived with the rhetoric of a war on terror. What if that were interrupted: what if we stopped learning war?<\/p>\n
God’s Vision: Walking Together in the Light<\/h3>\n
The third part of this vision is simple: walking together in the light. Isn\u2019t this what we do when we are with someone we love? Early on in my relationship with Jacquelyn, I remember vividly how she told me, \u201cI want someone to hold my hand.\u201d We all want someone to walk beside. Bruce Springsteen\u2019s song, Land of Hopes and Dreams, imagines a great train on the way to a land of hopes and dreams. He sings,
\nYou\u2019ll need a good companion now
\nFor this part of the ride
\nLeave behind your sorrows
\nLet this day be the last
\nTomorrow there\u2019ll be sunshine
\nAnd all this darkness past
\nAnd then he goes on to describe the passengers on the train,
\nThis train…Carries saints and sinners
\nThis train…Carries losers and winners
\nAll of us: saints and sinners, winner and losers, all children of God, all together, all on a pilgrimage.<\/p>\n
Today and Tomorrow<\/h3>\n
This is not where we are today. We are still divided into groups. We are still learning war. We are still walking so often in darkness. That is our present. What Isaiah preaches, what God means to do is to interrupt that present with a hope about our future, a vision of that future.<\/p>\n
Have you seen glimpses of this? I have and often the glimpses come in a particular circumstance. The Snow Goose<\/em> is the story of a hump-backed man with a hand shaped like a claw so hurt by the way others draw away that he himself retreats. He\u2019s a painter and a photographer and a sailor; he buys a lighthouse and a salt marsh in England and there he lives alone, sailing the shore and caring for birds. His name is Philip Rhyader, but no one calls him that; to the villagers who whisper about the ogre out by the lighthouse, he\u2019s \u201cthat odd looking chap\u201d or simply \u201cRhyader\u201d. <\/p>\nBut one day a girl from the fishing village comes to him, holding something: a wounded goose. She\u2019s desperately afraid of the ogre by the lighthouse but she\u2019s heard he has healing powers. So she goes to him, shows him the goose. Together, they work to splint the bird\u2019s wing, together they nurse it back to health. Her name is Frith and one day, he hears something strange and wonderful. The goose is almost healed; she\u2019s happy. And she calls him Philip. In the act of healing, Philip and Frith have become friends.<\/p>\n
Advent is an Interruption<\/h3>\n
Isaiah\u2019s vision is a reality meant to interrupt the reality we take for granted. Today as we begin the season of Advent, God means to interrupt us, interrupt our shopping, interrupt our plans, interrupt our lists to remind us that we are not people of the present: we are people of hope. I have seen the present but I have seen this vision sometimes, I have caught glimpses of it, and those most often when, like Philip and Frith, people share together in some healing, some peace making, some gathering. Then indeed, then quiet as a breeze or the beam of a lighthouse, everything is interrupted and I hear, we hear, the call to come up, up from where we are, to the hope of God\u2019s vision; to come up and walk in the light of the Lord.
\nAmen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Advent Directions 1: Come On Up A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor Advent 1\/A \u2022 November 27, 2016 Listen to the sermon being preached at the link below Advent is an Interruption Today I suppose many of us are turning from gatherings at which we celebrated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68,39,3,2,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advent","category-exegesis","category-sermon","category-worship","category-year-a"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":437,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions\/437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}