Creekside Church Sermon of December 16, 2001 "As Long as There is Hope" Isaiah 35:1-10	Rev. David Bibbee
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It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Growing up, it began to look like Christmas in my hometown on the first week of December. Real garland was woven on electrical lines which spanned the streets. On the garland were colored lights and a red bell hung in the center. At Crawbaugh's Hardware Store, a big sign was mounted on the façade. On it was a cheerful, rosy-cheeked, rotund Santa and three words in bright, multicolored letters… "Toys, toys, toys." Once these were displayed, we could start counting the days until December 25.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, everywhere you go. It has been looking this way since the week before Halloween. Only 60 shopping days till Christmas. "I've never seen as many Christmas lights on houses as I have this year," Ron Fritz said to me. Those old electric candles with orange bulbs we placed on the windowsill were sufficient years ago. Now, lights by the thousands are strung on anything that doesn't move. Some neighborhoods radiate enough light to be seen from the space shuttle.

We go to great lengths to make it look a lot like Christmas. It helps us get in the swing of the season, to feel good-to put a lid on things that aren't as they ought to be, or you not being as you should be because of the burden of your life. Merchandisers try to manufacture joy. People spend money they don't have on things they can't afford and don't need. Pity you if you don't feel the way you're supposed to feel at Christmas. Go have yourself a mug of Christmas cheer. Listen to Bing, Burl Ives, and Nat King Cole sing Christmas songs. And if you think it will help, go to church on Christmas Eve. Look at the pretty manger scene. Get cozy holding a candle in the dark while singing Silent Night.

But the church of Jesus Christ doesn't dispense mood enhancers to make everything "feel" right. I think we keep getting more Christmas excess each year to cover the fact that manufactured moods cannot meet our deepest desire.

In Greek mythology there is the tale of Pandora's box. The box was a kind of vault in which the god's locked the dark and evil powers of the earth. Pandora's curiosity led her to lift the lid and peek inside. Spirits and sickness of every order escaped. Spite, hate, jealousy, and revenge blew with the four winds and took root in people's hearts. Pandora tried desperately to close the box, but all its inmates had escaped, except for something on the bottom… hope. The truth of this tale is that no matter what may assail you, or no matter how dark the day may be, hope lingers.

This is the truth of our text from Isaiah. The chapter beams with hope. The desert shall be glad and be filled with blossoms. The weak will become strong, the fearful, courageous; the lame will no longer limp but leap. The ransomed of the Lord shall sing all the way back home. What makes Isaiah's prophecy so powerful is the fact that he delivered it during a period of Israel's deepest distress. Everything that shaped Israel's identity was taken away. They were exiled in a foreign land. I see some of them circled around a fire tallying their losses. "We got no land. We got no king. We got no temple. We got no home. Nothing is left!"

Isaiah may have said, "I know what you don't have, but I know what you do have." Isaiah didn't tell them to cling to wishful thinking, happy thoughts, walking on the sunny side of life, nor pretending everything was fine when it wasn't. When everything you thought necessary to live is taken away, hope remains. Their hope was built on nothing less than God who loved them and would deliver them.

Saint Paul said "hope does not disappoint us because love has been poured into our hearts."

We are at the end of this year and at the beginning of the next. We are, depressed about the world's troubles and sick from the shallowness of our society. "The road society tells us to take won't get us where we need to be." Without hope there are people who think their lives will have meaning if they get a Ralph Lauren sweater or a George Foreman grill.

Advent calls us with the message that there if far more to our lives. No matter what we say about our ability to maintain control and cope with whatever comes our way, we know we can't. We think we are free which often means we think we are free to do as we please, which leads to following the rest of the pack to another sure fire plan for better living that has gone the way of the 8 track tape, and someday, George Foreman's grill. There is something more beyond us and within us to be had.

Hope is like the homing instinct. A salmon grows from an egg to a fry then a fingerling, and when the time comes, it makes a treacherous trip downstream encoded with the scent unique to that river. They travel hundreds even thousands of miles into the sea where they disappear for four years. When the time comes they heed a summons and smell their way back to where their life began. The adult artic tern flies each year from the Artic Circle to the southernmost shores of South America to breed and bear their young. When the new ones are big and strong enough to fly they will make a continuous flight north until they arrive at their parent's point of departure even a solitary tern totally separated from all the others, can find its way back.

God created us with an instinct, too. We feel it as longing, restlessness, dissatisfaction, or emptiness. We usually don't take a direct or uninterrupted route through life. We get diverted and sometimes stop altogether and settle for tinsel and fa la la la la when the need can only be met by hope set upon someone else.

Frederick Buechner spent his first nine years in ministry as a chaplain at a private boys school. Hundreds of teenage boys from all over the map from all sorts of religious backgrounds and no backgrounds at all filled the school church because attendance was mandatory. They brought with them their hostility toward religion in general and church in particular. They came with skepticism about God and a determination not to look interested, even if they were. They looked like people who come each Sunday to church with questions and doubts about the church and sometimes, God as well.

Buechner had a feeling that for many of the boys, this would be the last time they would ever set foot in a church again. This meant it was possibly the last chance for anyone to speak to them about Christ and what life involves with him or without him. Every Sunday his stomach was in turmoil as he considered the urgency of his preaching to the boys who didn't want to be there at all and showed it. But as he looked at their faces he had the sense that from time to time, and in spite of themselves, they were truly listening.

What they were after was the same thing which brought people to churches hundreds and hundreds of years before them. It is what brings you here. It will remain the reason that generation upon generation will continue to come. They are after hope.

There is no point waiting for anything or anyone without hope. There's no point in doing meaningful work if there's no hope. There is no point in bettering yourself or contributing to the betterment of others without hope. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for." Saint Paul said. There is no point to faith in God without hope. There is no point in loving anyone without hope that love never dies. There is no point getting out of bed without hope. Sunday mornings would be better spent reading the paper in your pajamas than coming to worship without hope. Without hope there is no reason for Christmas. Hope is what life would be unbearable without.

Someone said, "Our heart's deepest hope for release from pain and death, fear and all our sad separations and goodbyes, are all wrapped up in the same cloth that swaddled the newborn infant in Bethlehem. Our greatest hope became flesh and dwelled among us. Hope in Jesus elevates us above what the world says is real and what we would be better off hoping for than wild dreams about deserts blooming with flowers or some holy highway on which the Lord's people shall find at last their great and final home."

In Advent we hold fast to our hope in a world at war, and in a culture that degrades the meaning of Christmas. And despite all evidence to the contrary, we have hope that God reigns. We have hope because the ground on which we walk is holy ground because Jesus walks it still. We have hope that we are not just noticed by God, but known, and that we can find our very best self when we live as he meant us to live. We have hope that he knows the hurts we harbor and will send his son whose birth we honor at Christmas to save us. Let's look through the glitz and glitter and see the real way that it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. The great artist Raphael created a painting called The Alba Madonna. In it Mary sits with the child Jesus on her lap. In his hands is a toy made of two sticks tied together that form a cross. Mary's focus is not upon Jesus, but the cross. Raphael tells us that Mary's baby, the hope of Israel, was born to die.

The best Christmas display I have seen so far is on East Jackson at Goshen Avenue. It doesn't have lots of lights. It's not nearly as pretty as the decorations on homes nearby. It's easy to miss, or for some, dismiss. It is stark, but it expresses the heart of our faith. It is a cross… an instrument of death which is for us a sign of hope. It is hope that God who gives life, and takes away life, and then gives new life will not abandon us. This is the hope that stirs in us at Christmas.

Untold numbers of books have been written to define the life of Christians, and to sum them up in a single sentence, "Christian people are hopeful people."

With this hope, there is always hope.

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