Reading: Luke 21:25-3625“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. 28Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

​29Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; 30as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. 31So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. 32Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. 33Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. 34“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, 35like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. 36Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”
 
I can still feel the anticipation that filled me as a child when Thanksgiving came, and I knew Christmas was “just around the corner.” When we were expecting company, I would watch from the couch in our living room, because it had a great view of the street and I would be able to see the guests arriving. I spent the entire month of December, figuratively speaking, leaning over the back of the couch, trying to make the time go faster! I was desperately curious about all the details of the parties being planned—what food would be served, when my cousins would come in from out of town, what service we would attend at church, what Santa would bring me, and could I please, please, please go along when my dad went to pick up my grandmother and great aunts? Every minute seemed like an hour, hours like days, days like weeks.  Christmas was all I could think about, and at the same time it felt like it would never get there. Advent is a time to follow what Jesus calls us to do in Luke—watch the signs, be alert and prepared, and I certainly had that down, even if I was more focused on parties and presents than the birth of Jesus!
 
Time has changed since then, or perhaps, it is my perception that has changed. Now rather than being painfully slow, the month of December flies by so quickly that I hardly have time to realize that it’s Advent before suddenly here it is—Christmas Eve. Being who I am, I am always prepared, at least in one sense. The presents are bought and wrapped, the tree trimmed, food for the family meal prepared. But spiritually and emotionally, I am always taken by surprise when Christmas comes. I spend more time on my to do list and less time leaning over the back of the couch, and as the years go by I find myself yearning for the time I spent as a child simply anticipating.
 
Our effort to be present and wait during Advent is certainly not helped when we have to walk past several aisles of Christmas decorations in the store in order to get to the Halloween costumes in mid-October, all the while listening to Deck the Halls and Frosty the Snowman piped through the sound system. Everything around us seems to call us to a flurry of activity . . . . buy, bake, order, send, and hurry up because time is running out! And of course, it is important to do the things necessary to get ready to welcome and celebrate with family and friends. But in the midst of all of this activity, on top of the regular daily life that continues, it is easy to forget that Advent is about waiting, and it is particularly easy to forget what we are waiting for.
 
So, what are we waiting for? The obvious answer is that Advent is a season of waiting for Christmas, Jesus’ birth. But it is so much more than the birth of a baby that we await. God, in all God’s fullness—the God who, as Jeremiah described, will bring justice and righteousness, the God who Luke tells us can place signs in the sun and moon and stars and make the waves and seas roar, the God of all creation—came to live with us in the messiness of life in the person of Jesus. We remember not just the historical event of Jesus’ birth, but the reality of God’s presence and work in us and in the world, here and now. Advent is a time to remember that God is with us today, a time to live in hope.
 
When we look at the world, it can sometimes be really challenging to have hope. All we need to do is read the headlines to see evidence of pain, suffering, and evil in the world. We hear of the suffering of immigrants desperate for a place of safety and the feelings and actions of fear at our borders. We hear of wars and violence around the world. We hear about raging fires in California and the reports of the distress that our planet is in, and the urgent need for us to respond in caring for the earth, our home.
 
The pain of this world is not new. A couple of weeks ago, we heard Jesus telling his disciples that no stone would be left on another. In the verses before today’s passage in Luke, Jesus describes war, earthquakes, betrayal, murder, destruction. And he encourages his followers, promising that nothing is too much for God to overcome, that life will come out of destruction and death. With the psalmist, we can bring the brokenness of our communities, and our own pain and brokenness, to God, and put our trust in the God who has promised to lead us and protect us, and ask God to be faithful to we who wait.
 
The miracle of the hope we have in Advent is that we are waiting on a God who has never turned away from our pain. As Christians today, whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, whatever challenges we face, we await the birth of Jesus knowing the rest of the story—Jesus lived, taught, challenged, loved, forgave, healed, called. And Jesus died—and rose again. Death was not the last word then, and it is not the last word today. Jesus transformed people’s lives, and we are invited to put ourselves completely in God’s hands, like clay ready to be formed by the potter, willing to be changed, to be made new.
 
In Advent, we are called to live in hope that God is with us today, to trust that the kingdom of God is at hand. Waiting, anticipating, living in hope don’t easily find their way onto our “to do lists,” but in this moment, for this season, it is the most important thing for us to do. We don’t know the day or the hour when the kingdom of God will be fully accomplished, but we can keep watch, and if we do, we will see glimpses of it. We can see God at work in the world in the way people love and care for each other, in voices courageously speaking truths that are hard to hear, in the beauty of creation. And we can call out like a watchperson—Hey, look, there it is, God is here, did you see it?—so those around us will also know that we have great reason for hope. We are called to witness to God’s presence by being the hands and feet of God in the world ourselves, by showing God’s love and care for others and calling for justice where it is due, so others can see God at work through us. And most of all, we can put our trust in God, who sends Jesus to show us that we are never alone.
 
I plan to spend a lot of time leaning over the back of the couch this Advent, anticipating God’s coming into the world anew. I invite you to join me, so we can support each other in our commitment to take seriously the call to keep watch for the presence of God in our midst. We don’t know the day or the hour, but there is plenty of room on the couch, and it has a great view.
 
 

Reading: John 11:32-4432When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
33When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. 34He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35Jesus began to weep. 36So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 37But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
38Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. 39Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” 40Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” 41So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. 42I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” 43When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
  
Grief is a tricky thing. We are used to things happening in a linear fashion, and can expect grief to unfold in the same way, that we should progress through the stages of grief one stage at a time, until we reach a magical point where we are finished. Completely ready to move on, with the sadness, anger, loneliness, exhaustion that comes with grief relegated to the past. Those of us who have experienced the death of someone close to us know that this is not how grief works. The memories and spirits of those who have died are a part of us, and grief ebbs and flows over time, but never completely goes away. It is important that we take time each year on All Saints Day to remember those we love who have died, to honor their memories, share stories again of who they were and what they meant to us.
 
We as Christians live in the promise of Jesus’ resurrection that death is never the final word. Jesus promised us eternal life. Although we don’t know what that will look like, we trust that God’s love knows no limits, not even the limit of physical death. Isaiah tells the people living in exile, separated from loved ones and their sacred land, that God would wipe away all tears. The passage from Revelation promises the same, telling us that death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more. We know because of Jesus’ resurrection, and because of all of the many signs of life and recreation in the world around us, that God really is making all things new. Even death cannot prevent the creative, loving, redemptive Spirit of our God from continually bringing new life into this world, and into our lives.
 
God promises to make all things new, and we know God keeps his promises. God wipes away all tears. And, the tears of grief are real. I sat with parents whose beloved son had lost his 15-year struggle with depression, and as they considered the message they wanted to share with those who would come to the funeral, they wanted to be sure to include lament, sorrow and grief, because many of those attending were not church participants, did not share faith in the resurrection. The lament, they felt, was for those who did not know that hope. What we realized together is that lament—grief—is for us, too. It is for people of faith that the psalms of crying out to God in sorrow were written. It is for people of faith that the poetry of Revelation speaks.
 
Jesus himself knows grief. When Mary comes to him and kneels to the ground in her grief and tells Jesus that Lazarus would still be alive if he had not been too late, Jesus does not dismiss or minimize her pain. He does not tell her she is wrong to think this way, or criticize her lament for the brother she has lost. Instead, he feels his own grief. Then he walks, not away from the reality of death, but right into the middle of it, where he can smell its stench. He does not erase death, and grief, but faces it head on without looking away. And in the midst of it, Jesus, the Son of God, weeps.
  
God cannot wipe away tears from our eyes if we are not crying. God cannot end a mourning that does not exist. The promise of God to bring an end to pain does not mean that death is not real, that our grief is invalid, or that we as people of faith should not feel loss and should not mourn. The promise of God in Jesus is that, in Jesus, when we weep, God weeps with us. And then Jesus calls on God to raise Lazarus from the dead, showing those with him and all of us that death and grief, as real as it is, will never be the final answer.
 
And there is more to the story. Lazarus comes out of his tomb, alive, but is still wrapped in the burial linens, from the top of his head to his toes. To those witnessing the event, it must have been something like seeing a mummy emerge from a tomb. And Jesus invites them to participate in this miracle of resurrection. “Unbind him,” he says. Lazarus could not unbind himself. Family, friends, neighbors were called to take off that which held Lazarus back, that which separated him from the community.
 
This invitation is for us too. When we think of those who are today awakening after spiritual, emotional, physical exile, who comes to your mind? Those who have been in prison? Those who have been seriously ill, physically or mentally? Those who have been walking through a deep grief after losing someone significant in their lives? God brings people to life all around us, and we are invited to participate in their resurrection embracing them and bringing them back into the fullness of the community. We are called to unbind our siblings and remove that which separates us.
 
Today is a day to remember those we love who have died. It is a day to honor their stories, and our own loss and grief. It is also a day to celebrate God’s promise of resurrection and new life, and enter into that promise as we seek to unbind one another. It is a day to remember that God’s love and mercy knows no bounds, and that death is never the final word.
 

Reading: Mark 10:46-52
46They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” 50So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” 52Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
 
 I was sitting in a restaurant, eating dinner, when I heard several thunks. I turned and saw a bird flying around inside the restaurant, banging into windows in her frantic attempt to get outside. When she landed on the floor, exhausted, I laid my jacket gently over her and carried her through the door. I opened the jacket cautiously, expecting her to burst out, but instead, she clung for dear life, her tiny talons hooked into the lining, afraid to let go and be free. As I held her, I wondered, how often do we do that? Struggle to be free from that which confines us, and then cling to our cage when the door is opened? What does it really mean to be free, and why are we, when we are really honest with ourselves, terrified of it?
 
We in the United States pride ourselves on being a free country. People have quite literally given their lives to make us so. And in many ways we are free, especially those of us with good health, steady income, solid education, and the privileges that come along with being white, middle-class, American-born. We can travel, study, walk our neighborhoods without fear, eat knowing we will have enough food for another meal, send ourselves and our loved ones off for the day with the belief that we will all come home safely. Most of the time, we have the luxury of living in the illusion that we are in control of our lives, even if it is only through the false security of believing we know what our future holds. Jesus in John promises freedom, and his followers protest, saying they are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone, and we might well make the same claim. We live in a free country, slavery was abolished almost 150 years ago! What do you mean by saying “You will be made free?”
 
Jesus’ reply to his followers is for us, too: “Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” And on this Reformation Sunday, it is appropriate to remember that, as Luther taught, we are all both sinners and saints. We all fall into the trap of relying on our own efforts or on what we can take from the world for our well-being, and we forget that we need God. We forget what our true relationship with God is.
 
We are free in one sense, but at a much deeper level, we are all slaves to our own brokenness. As a nation, we spend a great deal of time thinking about how to keep ourselves safe from those who we see as different from us. We labor under the illusion that we can create perfect safety with our own actions and will. At its worst, the result of this is nothing short of tragic, as we have witnessed one more time when fear of those who are different led an armed man to enter Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and take the lives of 11 people, and wound 6 others, while declaring that Jews deserve to die.
 
Martin Luther, whose leadership we celebrate today, did and said so many wonderful things, but he also said terrible things about Jewish people, and by doing that, he shared with us a heritage that contributes to hatred of our neighbors and siblings in faith. We as Christians have forgotten that the Jesus we worship lived and died as a faithful Jew! We may never go to the extreme of the shooter, but holding on to negative and fear-filled perspectives on our fellow beings unwittingly contributes to a culture that allows these kinds of actions to happen. And it so important for us as Christians to be aware of our siblings who are marginalized and attacked, and to stand with them, as Jesus would have.
 
When we depend on our fear of others to protect us, and ground our hope in our own efforts instead of trusting in God, we go beyond reasonable steps to take care of ourselves, and build walls that separate us not only from our neighbors, but from God. We find ourselves tempted and even trapped into doing whatever we feel we have to do to get the outcome we feel we need. When I get into this mode of thinking, I construct a narrative for myself that sounds something like this: I will be OK if this happens. I will not survive if that happens. If this situation doesn’t turn out the way that I am hoping, my world is going to fall apart. I end up stuck in a black and white story of my own making, terrified of losing control of the way it will end.
  
We are all slaves to our own brokenness, but Jesus made his followers a promise—makes us a promise today. “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” And the truth that Jesus talks about, the truth that will free us, is precisely why we are so afraid of freedom. The truth, as Paul proclaims it in Romans today, is simply this: we have all sinned, and we all need God. Every one of us, without exception. And, as we hear from the prophet Jeremiah, we are all beloved children of God, and we all have the capacity to know and love and trust God within us, written on our hearts. What terrifies us about this truth is that when we embrace it, it takes us completely out of the driver’s seat. We can no longer cling to an illusion of safety that is built on our own efforts or beliefs that we are in control. We are vulnerable, exposed for who we are, face-to-face with our own humanity. This is the truth that leads to freedom, the freedom to be exactly the people God created us to be.
 
We are freed by this truth, because grounded in our own humanity, we can understand Martin Luther’s claim that we are simultaneously sinner and saint. The very truth of our own weakness reveals our need for God, and our place as God’s children. The promise of the covenant Jeremiah talks about is our promise. God’s law has been written on our hearts, God is our God, and we are God’s people. In the core of who we are, God has written the law of love, faithfulness, forgiveness. This is the promise of our baptisms, that we will celebrate and remember together as we baptize Colt in a few minutes. And as our illusions, addictions, and sinfulness die in the light of this promise, we can see that we have been enslaved. And we can see that we are free.
 
Like the bird with its talons hooked into my jacket lining, we tend to cling to what we feel sure of, certain that there is nothing to catch us if we let go. The psalmist describes in vivid images the chaos we sometimes feel in this unpredictable world—earthquakes and roaring waters, nations at war. The chaos, as the psalmist sings it, does not go away. We of Bethel Lutheran Church—you as parishioners who love your congregation, me as your Synodically Authorized Minister for this time and place—are in the midst of unpredictable, sometimes chaotic-feeling, head-spinning change, and that can feel exciting, anxiety-producing, hopeful, fearful. Each of our dreams for this time may be different, and our perspectives may change as we move forward together. God’s promise to us is not that the chaos will end or that change will be easy, but that God will be with us, even if the world falls apart. And we can stand together as a community, as a congregation, in faith that God will not leave us hanging.
 
Promise and hope and certainty come from the presence of a loving God who never abandons us, regardless of the circumstances. “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble. . . . . The Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. . . . Be still and know that I am God.”
  
By seeing clearly the truth of our own powerlessness, our own brokenness, our own humanity, we are freed from our illusions. We live as people of the covenant, knowing that we belong to God, and we can do that because God has written God’s promise on our hearts. Our baptisms are a symbol of that promise, a sacrament of water and word that opens our eyes and hearts to the Spirit of God that gives us life. We know the truth. God is our refuge, and will be with us, no matter what may come. Jesus calls us to embrace the truth, and by doing this, we can, like the bird, unhook our talons from the lining of the jacket, and live fully in freedom.