WHEN GLORY COMES

“They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.”  (Isaiah 35:1-10)

If advent is about anything, it is about the promise of the glory of Lord becoming evident and real in each and every one of our lives.  Isaiah’s words make this perfectly clear when he declares at the beginning of the 35^th chapter that “They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.” 

If you know like I know, the glory of the Lord is not like any other type of glory that can be found in the world.  In our popularity driven culture, we tend to glorify too many things and too many people that really mean too little to us.  We glorify sports and entertainment figures; we glorify politicians and people with power in our lives; some people we even glorify preachers.  And if the truth is really told, some of us are seeking glory for ourselves.  But this is not the same type of glory that Isaiah promises that the people will see. 

With picturesque and vivid imagery, Isaiah told the people of Judah of a time when the glory of the Lord would be revealed to them. 

And so it was to be that some 700 years later, the people of God would experience this glory when angels proclaimed in the Book of Luke, the birth of Jesus, and declared this same glory when they sang, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth toward all people.”

THERE'S HOPE!

Luke 1:39-45

 

In this day and age, there seems to be a paucity of hope among us, and thus we are led to wonder, what is there that we can really be hopefully about.  An inventory of our world, and the days of our lives, would indicate that we teeter (and teeter) on the brink of hopelessness and despair. 

The news abounds with such signs.  The Affordable Health-care Act (what is known as Obama-care) has consistently been threatened with failure and demise over the past several weeks.  Sequestration, fiscal cliffs, foreclosure, shut-downs, bankruptcy, have become are part of our everyday reality. 

Crime continues to infect our neighborhoods – in Baltimore city, again there will have been over 200 people murdered in 2013.  Global conflict and wars persist, natural disasters kill thousands around the world, preventable diseases like AIDS and malaria continue to afflict too many of our sisters and brothers – especially in the two-thirds world.  The days of our lives often appear to be hopeless – don’t they?

And yet, the death of Nelson Mandela (three days ago) should remind us that regardless of how hopeless things might appear, regardless of how dire our circumstances may feel, regardless of the despair and disappointment that we face, there’s always some reason to hope, and  we should never give up hope. 

History shows that South African Apartheid brought on some of the most despicable forms of human atrocity and suffering in modern history.  We should not forget, that through decades, the majority population in South Africa and in other southern African countries like Rhodesian (Zimbabwe), were subjected to deplorable living conditions, under oppressive political and military power structures.  And it was people like Nelson Mandela – even in the midst of 27 years of imprisonment – who never gave up hope that the day would come that Apartheid would come to an end, and that all people – blacks and whites - would have rights to live as they were created by God.

And we know that the apparent paucity of hope that I began with is not new or exclusive to the present age.  Luke tells us that as the angel Gabriel came to Mary to announce that she was about to give birth to God’s son, the world – and especially Israel - faced similar apparent hopelessness. 

God’s people in that day found themselves under Roman occupation.  Their land had been overtaken by political and economic structures that served to oppress them and subject them to human suffering not unlike Apartheid in South Africa, or slavery in America, or imperialism in India, or the Holocaust in Germany, or ethnic cleansing in Europe.

A WAKE UP CALL

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.  (Isaiah (11:1-10)

 It is clear that ours is a world that in many respects has become insensitive, if not downright rebellious and resentful of the ways of the Lord.  Much of the crime that continues to permeate our communities, the corruption that perpetuates itself at all levels within our society, and even the hatred that persists among too many people, can be attributed to the fact that we have collectively, and often individually, fallen out of relationship with God, and thus out of relationship with one another.

If we searched for a metaphor to describe the collective spiritual posture of our world, and even of many of our churches, one could easily ascertain that we are spiritually asleep – not awake – in a slumber – and thus not fully attuned to the ways that the Lord would have us to go, and the things that God would have us to do.

We are asleep.  We are on a sort of spiritual “snooze control” - where the clock of God’s divine annals of eternity sound out to awaken us, only to see us tune the Lord out, roll back over, and continue to sleep.  We’re on snooze control.  Indeed, the Lord sounds an alarm that it is time for us to wake up, it is time for us to get up on our feet, and do something about the spiritual condition of our lives, our churches, our homes, our communities, and our world. 

Indeed, God sounds the alarm, and indicates that it’s time for us to wake up, but we just turn the clock off, ignore that God is alarming us, and keep on sleeping and slumbering.  We’re on snooze control.

As we search the Scriptures, we discover that this matter of God’s people being spiritually asleep is not a new phenomenon.  We see, as we look at the book of Isaiah, that the people of Isaiah’s day were spiritually asleep, as well. 

The prophet Isaiah was writing to the people of Judah some 700 years before Christ was to come into the world, and it was Isaiah’s calling then – his mission – to alarm God’s people – to give them a wake-up call – to speak to them about the spiritual snoozing that he witnessed in the land.   They we spiritually asleep – not willing to worship like they knew how, not willing to pray like they used to, not willing to care for one another like they used to. 

BE A BLESSING!

And now, brothers and sisters, we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches.  In the midst of a very severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity.  (2 Corinthians 8:1-2)

  

I must confess that for me, Thanksgiving is a holiday for which I have some mixed feelings.  For I wonder – at least on one level, why we find ourselves with the need to set apart a day to celebrate and give thanks to God for what God has done for us all year long.  In some way every day should be a day of thanksgiving for us.   And also, one to the most interesting things about Thanksgiving is that it is the one day of the year that we express our thanksgiving by eating more food than on any other day of the year.  For most people, that is our primary act of thanksgiving. 

And if that’s not enough, for many, our thanksgiving will extend into the next day, and what we know as “Black Friday” – which has become the day where we as a nation spend more money shopping – and engaging in conspicuous consumption - than on any other day of the year.   

In the church, our typical act of thanksgiving in liturgy and worship is to remind ourselves of how good God has been to us, and to sing and say “thank you” to God in our time together.  In our thanksgiving, seldom are we led to reflect on anything we might do beyond saying “thank you” to God.  Seldom are we led to act on our thanksgiving.  Seldom are we led to think about how our thanksgiving can and should become thanks-living.

This is the matter that the apostle Paul sought to address with Christians in Corinth.  In the days of Paul, Corinth was a major port city on the Mediterranean Sea. It was a major city for commerce and trade, and many of the people in Corinth as a result of the economic prosperity there were blessed with a more than a modicum of good living and good success. 

 

 

 

 

Nelson Mandela was a person of great courage, compassion, prophetic imagination and vision - and his impact will be felt for generations to come. Mandela's life should lead us all to reflect on what our legacy will be.

"No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."

Nelson Mandela from "Long Walk to Freedom"