A Flood of Mercy

Sermon by Torin Eikler
Luke 21:25-36             Jeremiah 33:10-16

This week I received one of those little stories that are often forwarded again and again on email.  Usually I feel put out by messages like that because they take up space and waste my time, but this one came from someone who knows me well and doesn’t often send them my way.  So I opened it up for a glance before deleting it.  Here’s what I found….

 The Best Explanation of Stress…

A young lady confidently walked around the room while leading and explaining stress management to an audience with a raised glass of water.  Everyone knew she was going to ask the ultimate question, 'half empty or half full?'..

She fooled them all .... "How heavy is this glass of water?" she inquired with a smile. Answers called out ranged from 8 oz. to 20 oz.

She replied, "The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance. In each case it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes." She continued, "and that's the way it is with stress. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won't be able to carry on."

"As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden - holding stress longer and better each time practiced.”

We stand at the beginning of the season of Advent:  a season of hope … a season of joy and happiness … a season in which we celebrate liberating love.  But, this is also a season of business and of stress.  There seem to be too many events to get to and too much to get done.  And then there are the presents.  Who do we buy for, and what do we buy?  Can we get a gift that seems to fit a friend perfectly without buying something for everyone else that we know?  Who do we have to get something for even if we know that it’s something they won’t really love?  And … can we afford to get even small things for everyone on that list.

That’s just part of my list.  (You all know that.  You have your own lists.)  But Even that’s enough to stress me out … to twist my advent season into a bit of a nightmare instead of a joy. … And then there’s the added challenge of doing all of this … of putting together a meaningful Advent season for all of us to share, and it doesn’t help when the whole thing starts off with hints of the apocalypse that will come with the end of time….

In the words of Emory Gillespie[1] … When Advent comes, I worry, agonize and [stress out]. Advent is daunting. Advent is my Everest….  The problem is that I’m working with a hairball of Advent scriptural phrases.

Once again I read the account of “distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.” Once again I react—both personally and as a pastor thinking of my congregation—to ominous forecasts that speak of people fainting “from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world.” People are fainting, heavens are shaking, and there is fear and foreboding in abundance—how am I to shape all of this into something that the congregation will find charming …?

Advent scriptures are unapologetically crude. Their prophetic barking and guttural slings make me feel spat upon. My personal context is to blame for this oversensitivity. I’m feeling fairly normal right now, fairly pulled-together. My family is healthy. My employment at church seems solid—knock on wood. My phone is ringing a modest number of times with modest news. My wardrobe is working. In ordinary times such as this, when my family is afloat on a sea of relative stability, the bellicose and crass war cries of Advent are incomprehensible to me. They come off as misplaced, misanthropic rants, to which I’m tempted to reply, “You can’t mean me. If, by chance, you can and do mean me, your anger is disproportionate to my [transgression]."

 

That is exactly how I feel every year.  Who me?  Again?  Then I start thinking about the past year and worrying if I have actually done anything that might warrant such a response.  I usually come with some small things but nothing that deserves an apocalypse on the scale of roaring seas or a shaking of the heavens.  “I can live with this,” I think to myself.  “It’s meant for other people.”  And I feel okay… for a while.

But this text from Luke doesn’t go away so easily.  It doesn’t let you off the hook just because you are reasonably well-behaved.  The coming of the Son of Man will affect everyone.  We will all see the signs in the heavens.  We will all hear the roaring of the waves.  We will all feel the overwhelming sense of foreboding that leaves some fainting from fear.  We will see and hear and feel it all … unless we have kept our hearts free from the worries of this life. 

 

Where is the hope in that?  Who among us is free from worries?  Those teachings about following the example of the birds of the air and the flowers of the fields are all well and good, but it is hard to live that way.  It would be difficult enough for a person who is all alone, but for those of us with families to care about, it is next to impossible.  It would seem that these words just add one more worry to my list.

But Jesus is speaking in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets here.  He is intending to offer hope.  In the face of a world gone wrong – a world where justice has been perverted and compassion seems to have gone extinct, Jesus was offering a vision that stood at the heart of the Jewish faith … a vision that stands at the heart of our faith – a vision of a future where the world will be remade according to God’s intentions rather than our own.

If the prophets are to be believed (and I choose to believe them), that world will be a place where justice and righteousness hold sway in place of corruption and greed.  Its soul is marked with love and compassion in place of hatred and selfishness.  And instead of suffering and want all people will enjoy abundance and peace.

Jeremiah describes the wonder of that future with powerful images of renewal:  In the wasteland there will be towns filled with people, animals will graze on lush grasses in the desolate places, and those who live in bondage will know freedom.  And what is the source of all this wonderful change … of this outpouring of mercy on the people?  “The days are surely coming,” he says, when the Lord “will cause a righteous branch to spring up . . . and Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.”

There's our hope. 

There's the fulfillment of the promise we have been given. 

Christ will come … the Prince of peace … the one who brings justice to the oppressed … Loves Perfection … Immanuel – God dwelling with us … pouring out enough mercy and grace to cleanse us of our sins and wash away our worries.

 

You remember that glass of stress that I mentioned earlier this morning.  As we head into Advent – into the time of preparation for the coming of our hope, instead of adding more and more to that glass and trying to hold it up even though it may be killing our souls.  Set the glass down and take a break….

Better yet, pour it all out.  Give it all to the God whose grace bring new life.  Empty your heart of all the worries that weigh you down, and make space for mercy to flood into your soul. 
Make space for the Son of Man … the shoot of Jesse’s tree.

Make space for a flood of mercy that comes to us in a little baby whose birth brings us hope.

---

[1] from Living by the Word in the November 28 edition of The Christian Century.