Isa 2.1-5 — Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 2:1-5 and Matthew 24:36-44
preached on November 27, 2016, at Discovery Church, Clayton, NC

A few years ago, a college student named Andre Sanchez spent the better part of his Thanksgiving holiday waiting at the doors—not at the doors of his grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner but rather at Best Buy, where he arrived at 1:00 on Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving so he could save some $600 on a couple electronics items when the store opened early on Friday morning. Afterward, he told a reporter, “When I finally got in, it felt like the gates of heaven opened up.” He was surely not alone—based on the sheer volume of advertisements via paper, email, and television these days, a great majority of Americans spent at least some part of the last few days shopping, and more than a few of them spent some time waiting at the doors.

This is a season of waiting at the doors. Even if we did not wait to get into a big-box store on Thursday or Friday, I suspect that all of us are filled with some sort of waiting and expectation these days. We are waiting at the doors for the inauguration of a new president to bring an end to a brutally long campaign and election season. Here at Discovery, you are waiting at the doors to welcome your new interim pastor as he begins his work in your midst. And we are waiting at the doors of Christmas during this Advent season as we prepare our homes and our hearts to welcome Jesus.

But what are we waiting for? What stands on the other side of the doors for us? Will the gates of heaven open to reveal a great Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal? Are we expecting a radical and dramatic change on January 21st after the inauguration? What are we asking and expecting of your new interim pastor Alan as he begins his work and service here? Most of all, are we ready for the dramatic and real change that comes among us when Jesus is born at Christmas?

Our two texts this morning give us a glimpse of what awaits us on the other side of the doors of Christmas—a time well beyond Jesus’ birth, looking to his second coming in power and glory to make all things new, to the radical and dramatic shift that is made possible because God has been at work in our world in and through Jesus Christ. Our texts today give us a glimpse of what we are waiting for, not with visions of angels and shepherds and wise men but with a look well beyond Christmas Eve to a world that comes into being because of what God is doing in these days.

Isaiah starts us out with a hopeful vision of peace and justice that shows us how things will look one day—not just on the other side of the gates of heaven as we wait for all things to be made new but “in the days to come” here on the earth, too. The prophet assures us that one day, God’s life in the world will be more evident and real. People everywhere will be drawn to God and look for God’s presence, not just in their own ways as they feel led, for their own individual benefit, but together, as many peoples joining as one, to seek instruction in how to live for the well-being of all. But these days to come are not just a time to sit around and enjoy something new—in this time, the word of the Lord will go forth to bring justice and peace to all the world, to “beat… swords into plowshares, and… spears into pruning hooks” so that the whole world will know the fullness of God’s presence and can live differently in light of this each and every day. Finally, if it weren’t already clear, the prophet invites everyone to join in this waiting and watching: “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!” All of us can prepare for these things ahead with hopefulness, doing our best to make this new way that awaits us on the other side of these gates real here and now.

Then our reading from the gospel according to Matthew gives us another vision of the things that await us on the other side of the doors of these days. Here Jesus suggests that the things that we are waiting for will be quite a surprise—a sudden, dramatic change that isn’t at all understood or imaginable but that is coming nonetheless. Jesus goes on to make it clear that we won’t know anything about the days to come until they come. All we can do is stay awake and alert for the day when the Lord is coming and be ready for it to appear without any warning. One commentator sums it up well:

We are not expected to know everything, but we are expected to do something. The Jesus of the verses before us calls persons to a life of work in a spirit of wakefulness. (Mark E. Urs, “Homiletical Perspective on Matthew 24:36-44,” Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 1, p. 23)

One way to think about this might be to adapt that wonderful old adage, “Jesus is coming—look busy!” While we need to be doing things to get ready for the days ahead, our busyness in these days needs to be real. We are called to be aware of what time it is, to turn away from the world’s pull upon us toward greed and consumption and to turn toward preparation and readiness. We are called to live like people who know what time it is, to deepen our practices of faith and to act to further the justice, peace, and reconciliation of our world along the way.

An old Advent hymn puts it well, I think, when it asks, “O Lord, how shall I meet you?” How shall we get ready for the bigger changes ahead? How do we make this Advent season about something more than decorating our homes, completing our shopping lists, and meeting the world’s expectations of everything that must be done in the countdown to December 24th? How do we respond to the real divisions and challenges that are becoming more and more visible in our communities in light of the election? How do we make Discovery Church ready for the things that God has in store in and through your new interim pastor’s ministry but even more in the days beyond? In all these things and in all things, how do we set our lives in order to truly welcome Jesus?

I don’t have any easy answers to these questions, but I do know this: As we wait at the doors of what God has in store for us as individuals, as the people of Discovery Church, and as citizens of the United States and our world, God calls us to remember that the things ahead will be dramatically and completely different. They cannot be described or contained in human words, for they hold a new, transformative way of life that begins by God’s own initiative.

As we wait together here at these doors, we can remember that this promised transformation has happened once before—not through one announced with trumpets, attired in regal robes, living in a gold-gilt palace, or even elected by the people, but rather through one announced by angels to lowly field workers on the night shift, one wrapped in swaddling clothes, laying in a manger. And so the things we do as we wait at these doors ought to reflect the life of the one who brings new life, a way of justice and peace described by Isaiah that comes when our swords are beat into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, a way of radical expectation described by Jesus that insists that we be prepared to welcome the fullness of new life in God’s kingdom at any time, a way of hopeful waiting that comes when we remember the incredible gift of transformation in Jesus Christ that stands behind all real transformation in this world and the next.

As my friend Carol Howard Merritt put it:

We will never know the reign of God that is in and among us until we wake up and become attuned to those promises of peace and justice, until we can become alert to those things that are going on around us that remind us of God’s presence, until we walk away from the cynicism and despair that can sedate us and become busy, working for a world where the downtrodden will be [lifted up] and the ravaged will be made whole.

So may God open our eyes to the possibilities before us as we wait at the doors of God’s kingdom in our individual lives and in our life together in this place, may God help us to trust that our waiting at the doors will bring us something more than just temporal pleasures and seasonal highs, and may God show us how to look for the real joy and hope and new life that come as we walk in the light of the Lord.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

a sermon on Psalm 122 and Isaiah 2:1-5
preached on the First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As many of you have figured out by now, I love Advent. This brief four-week season that starts out the church year and bridges that gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas is my favorite time of the church year. Some of that is because I think we too often forget about the importance of preparation in our world. I believe that it is essential to pause and get ready for the major milestones in our lives, to spend time intentionally getting our house in order so that the coming celebration can mean all the more.

But this year, I think there is something different in my thinking about Advent and Christmas. This year, it doesn’t seem like there is the same sort of preparation before us. I don’t see the kinds of substantial and uncertain change ahead in our church or our world that help make Advent more meaningful to me. The anxiety of this year’s Christmas season seems to be much more focused on the immediate stress of these busy days and not on something else. There is still plenty of war and strife and poverty and injustice in our world, but it seems to be touching us less and less, and so our longings for something new seem to be less dramatic and immediate than they have been.

And yet this season of preparation for radical change, this time called Advent, is still before us. It calls out that there is something new ahead. It insists that our preparations for Christmas be more than simply buying the perfect presents, setting out the perfect decorations, and getting all the other festivities of the season in exact order. It reminds us that Christmas is not a simple and sweet holiday about the birth of a baby but rather a radical intervention by God that changes everything.

This year, in preparing for this season, our readings from the prophet Isaiah stuck out to me. Isaiah has the wonderful ability to speak so meaningfully to so many different contexts. First it speaks to the prophet’s own time, when he was encouraging the people to amend their ways and return to the Lord after they had taken up different paths focused on their own prosperity and righteousness. Then it speaks again in the days of the assembly and editing of the Hebrew Bible, what we often refer to as the Old Testament, when these words offered great comfort and challenge to a people who were struggling to reestablish their relationship with God and one another without the independence that had defined their identity. Isaiah speaks again to a later day and age, the time when Jesus emerged, when these words gave these hearers hope of a Messiah who would make everything different once and for all. And even now, today, these words point us forward to a future time when God’s presence will be all the more real and complete, when all things will be made new and all creation will walk in the light of the Lord each and every day.

Our readings this morning from Isaiah and the Psalms point us to this kind of journey of walking in the light of the Lord and show us a bit of the destination that is before us. The goal of this journey, you see, is certainly a new and deeper celebration of Christmas, but it is also something more, something that is more deeply transformative of us and our world than just another baby being born, something that gives us a glimpse of God’s new thing that was begun but not finished in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus. These readings point us to the holy mountain of God, to the sacred and holy place that stands at the center of all creation, to the great temple that stands as the highest of mountains, above all the hills. This holy mountain is the abiding place of God, the place where we know the fullness of God’s presence in our lives and our world, the place where instruction and wisdom flow forth each and every day, the place where swords are beat into plowshares, spears turned into pruning hooks, and the knowledge of war becomes the practice of peace. This year, as much as ever, I believe that the path from Advent to Christmas demands that make our way to the holy mountain of God.

But this vision from Isaiah only gives us a partial image of what we should expect to see at the end of this journey. We don’t have the same expectations and understanding of the temple that were prominent in Isaiah’s own time. The holy mountain of God that we need and expect for our own time is quite likely very different from what our parents and grandparents expected. And this holy mountain where we will know the transformation of our world is only now coming into view.

It’s quite like an incredible view of the city that I experienced on one of my several flights in recent weeks. It was a cloudy and foggy night, with low clouds hanging over almost all of the city—except for a small part of lower Manhattan and Battery Park City that was crystal clear all the way down to ground level and of course the spire of the Empire State Building, peeking its tip through the clouds. It was an eerie sight, with very familiar elements that were yet very different from the view that I know quite well. There was so much that was so familiar—and so much more that was still shrouded from view. This is what is before us as we approach the holy mountain of God this Advent—a glorious yet uncertain and incomplete view of something new, an astounding sight of God’s wonder and grace that is yet beyond our understanding until its full unveiling in the days to come.

Even though we don’t know the fullness of this new thing, exactly what this holy mountain will look like, or even when we might get there, we can still prepare ourselves to enter this holy place. Ultimately as much as Advent is about getting ourselves ready for Christmas, it is also about getting ready for this bigger thing, too, for the day that is to come when “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills.” These preparations involve an honest look at our lives and our world, a careful assessment of the things that distract us from the journey to God’s holy mountain, and a hopeful view of the things ahead that will help open our eyes for a glimpse of God’s new thing that is ahead. And just like that strange night view of the city, we will likely have glimpses all the way to the surface of this new thing, too—little spots where peace suddenly prevails over the ways of war, brief moments when we begin to understand what God is up to in our lives and figure out how to join in, surprising opportunities to do something new and take a couple steps forward on the path to the holy mountain.

There is no better place to take our first steps on this journey, then, than at this table. This feast is the closest thing we can know in the here and now to God’s holy mountain, for this table sits at the intersection of heaven and earth. It brings together the meal shared by Jesus and his disciples before his death and after his resurrection with the glorious feast that we will share with him and all the faithful on God’s holy mountain. We are right in the middle, right here and right now, ready to experience this foretaste of something new, to welcome this strange feast that will give us sustenance for the journey.

So as we set out on this journey for God’s holy mountain, may you spend your days reflecting on what this strange and wonderful holy place might be in your life and in our world, and may the feast we share today sustain us along the way until we join with the faithful of all nations, of every time and place, to walk in the light of the Lord each and every day. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Waiting at the Doors

The Path to the Holy Mountain I: The Holy Mountain