Psalm 25:1-10; 21 – The Advent of HOPE
/Lectionary Readings for Nov. 28, 2021 1st Sunday of Advent, Year C
Jeremiah 33:14-16 The Righteous Branch and the Covenant with David
Psalm 25:1-10; 21 v5 Lead me by your truth and teach me, for you are the God who saves me. All day long I put my hope in you.
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 v12 And may the Lord make your love for one another and for all people grow and overflow, just as our love for you overflows.
Luke 21:25-36 v33 Heaven and earth will disappear, but my words will never disappear.
Weekly Meditative Exercise
Christianity includes a long and rich tradition of embracing meditative practices as a way of keeping us connected with God, ourselves, and each other. I encourage you to spend some time each week (ideally 10-30 minutes) trying each weekly exercise. You will naturally find some more appealing and effective than others. You’ll like some but not others, and after 6-12 months you’ll better understand what’s available and what helps you.
This week’s exercise focuses on Simplicity (pages 84-87).
From Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices That Transform Us by Adele Ahlberg Calhoun. InterVarsity Press, 2005.
Desire: to uncomplicate and untangle our lives so we can focus on what really matters
Definition: Simplicity cultivates the great art of letting go. Simplicity aims at loosening inordinate attachment to owning and having.
Scripture: “I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything.” (Philippians 4:11-12)
Simplicity comes in many forms: our material objects, our activities, our relationships, our eating, our entertainment, etc. None of those are inherently bad, but each of them can become burdens or become distractions from what is most important: loving God, loving ourselves, and loving others.
Living simply is living in a way that frees us to embrace what is most life-enriching. A natural consequence of embracing simplicity is finding gratitude. As you engage with this exercise, I encourage you to ask yourself several questions:
“Does my lack of something cause me to expend energy envying others? Can I find joy by letting go of my desire to obtain that thing?”
“What can I eliminate from my schedule that is life draining?”
“In this season of gift giving, what can I release, so that someone else can have?”
“What does society want me to add to my life that does not bring me joy?”
Peace through Leadership Quotes
“Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.” ~ Pliny the Elder (23-79)
“Hope will never be silent.” ~ Harvey Milk (1930-1978)
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” ~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931-)
For thousands of years and around the world, hope has always been a treasured value of humanity. Our hope actively ties us all together. Our hope actively connects us with God’s hope. Our hope drives us to cry out against injustice. Our hope compels us to push through the darkness in and around us as we seek to create peace for ourselves and for others.
Any time I preach or lead a group, regardless of age, I start the same way. I’m going to say three short sentences. Please repeat each sentence, with enthusiasm.
God made me. God loves me. God has plans for me.
Preface to Today’s Scripture Reading
Today is the first day of the church season called Advent, a word which means the arrival of something or someone. It can also mean the transition into a new era of history – the 1970s was the advent of the digital / information age. (Click here to learn more about the history and meaning of Advent.)
But today and every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, we Christians await the advent, the arrival, of Jesus, God in the flesh. 300 years ago, churches focused on the advent of Jesus’ second coming. Today, most Christian churches focus on the advent of Jesus’ birth. We believe this was a once-in-forever moment in time that marked a new era of history. We are blessed to live on this side of the Advent of Jesus because we have a deeper understanding of hope, peace, love, and joy – four themes for the four Sundays between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
This week we’ll focus on hope. The four traditional readings for this week come from Jeremiah, Psalms, 1 Thessalonians, and Luke. Of those four, today’s Psalm most directly speaks to hope. The author offers a beautifully honest confession of his faith, his predicament, and his need for forgiveness. In the original Hebrew, this Psalm is an acrostic which means that the first letter of each verse corresponds to each consecutive letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Fortunately, The Voice (a relatively new English translation) honors this structure; I hope you enjoy hearing it as much as our Tuesday night Bible Study group did.
Listen for the author’s words of hope throughout this Psalm – hope that God is listening; hope that God will forgive his past failures and provide him protection from his enemies; hope in God’s love, mercy, grace, and compassion; hope that God will honor their relationship, their commitment to each other.
Let’s open our ears, minds, and hearts to the hope in today’s Scripture.
Read Psalm 25:1-12; 21 now and the entire Psalm 25 later this week.
As always, our Tuesday night Bible Study group offered brilliant insights on this week’s reading. Several people commented on how these verses address last week’s topic of “Where is God located?” Pam and Margie both called out verse 7, “God’s goodness may be demonstrated in all the world,” music to the ears of panentheists everywhere.
Several people thought the author must be a fan of free will since he writes about God leading us, not forcing us. He writes about the need for God to teach us, which implies we need wisdom to make our own good decisions.
We also spent a fair amount of time talking about the word fear in verse 12. Should we fear a God who loves us more than we can imagine? Pam suggested replacing fear with “knee-dropping respect.” We talked about how a greater understanding of something’s or someone’s power can also give us a greater sense of fear of that same power. Firefighters have a fear/respect relationship with fire. Someone said, “there were times I feared my loving father.” The same could be said for some of our grandparents, aunts & uncles, or coaches. Many years ago, I heard a story that speaks to how love, respect, and fear intermix in our heads and hearts.
Once upon a time... in a large gymnasium, a crowd was gathered to celebrate the newest graduating class of special forces troops. These were the best of the best, highly trained in all forms of combat techniques, maneuvers, and equipment. Each new graduate was called by name and walked out wearing their full gear, their bodies covered in the latest and most lethal collection of guns, knives, grenades, and so forth. As you can imagine, the gym was barely big enough to contain the pride the families felt as well as the testosterone of the newly minted troops.
Halfway through the ceremony, one man’s name was announced, and like the others, he walked out to cheers and whistles. But there was one little six-year-old girl who did not get the full briefing from her mother that morning. When she saw her father, she let go of her mother’s hand, bounded through the velvet ropes, yelling “Daddy!” as she ran into his arms. Her love and her trust far outweighed any fear she had of his size, his strength, or his weapons.
Our loving God wants nothing more than for us to run into His arms with the love and trust of that little girl. And that, that is the hope we have in our relationship with God. Jesus (God in the flesh) showed us that we can have a joy-filled, loving relationship with God WHILE we fear God’s universe-creating power.
Now that all sounds great, but living with hope can, to say the least, be challenging some days. I love the quote earlier today from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Having hope requires effort and determination on our part.
More and more, I think hope (along with the other themes of Advent) is something we co-create with God and with each other. And sometimes, this co-creating process requires patient waiting. The psalmist talks about putting their hope in God all day long, expectantly waiting with hope.
I love the psalmist’s brutal confessions. He opens this prayer with his immediate concern: being embarrassed in front of his enemies. How often have we heard someone (especially teenagers!) say half-seriously that they would rather die than be embarrassed. Lord, save my pride and my honor! How many people suffer mentally and physically from the burden of carrying shame, “I hope nobody ever finds out that I ______.”
Fill in the blank with whatever secret you may be carrying. Fill in the blank with whatever God already knows about and would love to relieve you of. As I’ve said before, we are all part of a faith community and – when we are at our best – part of our commitment to each other is to be a place of healing and hope, a place where we can share our embarrassments and flaws while we look to and lean on each other for compassion and restoration.
In verses 7 and 11, the author pleads with God to turn a blind eye to the sins, the failures, the embarrassing shortcomings of his entire life. The psalmist’s hope is based on his belief that his relationship with God is centered more on love, forgiveness, and growth than on punishment. All of us today should hear these as words of hope, a reminder that no matter what we have done or what we have failed to do, God is always with us, always ready to forgive us, to mend our hearts and souls, and to teach us so that we don’t repeat the errors of our past, but instead, better follow God’s leading in our lives.
We need God to lead us through what may feel like dark days.
As headlines tell us that a new generation of the Covid virus is growing, we can find hope in the care and concern we show each other.
As headlines remind us of the container ships anchored offshore, we can find hope in the abundance of nutrition, smiles, and words of encouragement we’re able to endlessly give others through our HOPE Food Pantry.
As headlines often hit us with one dramatic and depressing story after another, we can find hope by turning away from the TV and turning toward our faith and our faith community.
Today’s reading ends with these beautiful words, “VIGILANTLY I wait for You, hoping, trusting.” In this season of Advent, we too expectantly wait for God, hoping and trusting that God will help us sense God’s life-giving presence in and among us.
Amen? Amen!