Jeremiah 33:14–16 & Luke 21:25–36
The promise of the Advent season—the promise of Christ, and the promise of creation; the promise of Jeremiah, and the promise of Revelation—is that what feels like the end of the world is never the end of God’s story.
Now, I’m guessing that most of you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about kings. After all, we live in a republic, not a monarchy. Our leaders don’t have massive amounts of mostly unearned power over our lives, right? We don’t have a government that spends more on its army and its own paychecks than on caring for the populace, right?
Oh, wait…
Hope does not come from denying the reality of oppression and injustice. It comes from trusting that those things are never, ever the end of God’s story.
No election, no candidate, no empire—no powers or principalities, thrones or dominions—can change the promise, or the mission, of God.
Deuteronomy 6:1–9 & Mark 12:28–34
Love is an inexhaustible gift from God, the only gift that truly keeps on giving. Our ability to love each other deeply and profoundly is divine and very much an integral part of our love of God and God’s love of us.
That’s the strange thing about sorrow and pain. We want an answer, every time. But it often turns out that we don’t truly need one. We just need enough to go on.
1) Never suffer alone.
2) It is okay to be mad at God—just make sure you do it to God’s face.
and 3) The stories we tell of suffering mean everything.
All of creation up until now has been good, good, very good—until God sees that the human being, the creature made of earth, is alone. It’s the first thing God ever calls “not good” in the entire Bible.
It’s not what we expect from salvation. I mean, it is, now, because we’ve heard this story for millennia.
But imagine 2000 years ago. Imagine hearing all of this for the first time. Imagine Peter thinking he mostly agrees with the crowds.
And then imagine Jesus saying he has to die, painfully, publicly, and alone.
You might try to talk him out of it, too.
