Longings

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
November 29, 2009
First Sunday in Advent

Longings
Jeremiah 33:14-16

In the timeless movie “A Christmas Carol”,
the 1951 version starring Alistair Sim,
Tiny Tim is left by his mother for just a few moments
while she goes into a small shop
to buy a few more things for the family’s Christmas dinner.
He stands outside a store,
a simple toy shop in Victorian London.
He looks through the window into the store.
He marvels at all the wonderful toys:
Boats and trains
puppets and mechanical toys.

He knows all too well he will never have any toy from the shop;
his family doesn’t have the money for such a luxury.
But, he can look,
he can imagine,
and he can dream.
There’s a smile on his face as he looks at everything,
but the smile melts when he sees one toy,
a beautiful model boat,
a steamship,
taken out of the display by a clerk.
Someone is about to buy the boat,
probably for a little boy about the same age as Tiny Tim,
but a boy clearly from a more affluent family,
a boy who would find such a wonderful surprise
on Christmas morning.

As Tiny Tim watches the boat
sail away from his dreams,
you can see the longing in his eyes
and feel the ache in his heart.

Travel back in time,
back to a time more than 500 years before the first Christmas,
travel to a place known as Babylon,
and walk through the land.
The children of Israel had been living there for decades,
ever since the Babylonians invaded their country
in the year 587 BC and forced them off their land,
forced them to move a thousand miles to the east,
back to Babylon.
They were not slaves like their ancestors in Egypt
almost a thousand years before,
but neither were they free
under the repressive rule of the Babylonian King.

They were filled with a sense of longing,
longing to return to their homes,
longing to return to the land given them by God,
the land their ancestors settled on so long ago
when Joshua led them across the Jordan River
after all those years in the wilderness.
“Will the Lord spurn us forever,”
they cried out,
“has his steadfast love ceased forever?”
(Psalm 77)
“Restore us, O God,
let your face shine [on us]”
(Psalm 80)

They’d been living under Babylonian rule for so long
that those who could remember the land,
remember what life had been like in the promised land,
were dying off, one by one.
The young people knew no other place,
no other life.
But they’d heard the stories,
heard the songs sung,
the laments lifted up,
and they too longed to return,
longed for their land.

A sense of longing is such a powerful emotion,
it can overwhelm us,
it can drain us of energy, strength, will;
it can drain us of hope.

But the promise is true:
God hears us when we are filled with longing.
God hears us when we cry out desperately,
“give me hope!”
Our anguish never falls on deaf ears.

The prophet Jeremiah made that clear
when God spoke through him with words of hope
for the children in exile:
“The days are surely coming…” says the Lord.
A day when a righteous branch would spring up for David.”
A day when the children of Israel would return home,
would reclaim their land,
their days of longing at an end.

The prophet Isaiah spoke similar words when he said,
“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”
(Isaiah 11:1)

This was God’s loving message to his children,
a response to their cries of longing.
“For surely I know the plans I have for you,”
said the Lord through Jeremiah,
“plans for your welfare, and not for harm,
to give you a future with hope.”
(Jeremiah 29:11)

We have an advantage over the Israelites
who lived in exile,
for we know that God has given us all a future,
a future filled with hope;
a future in Jesus Christ.

It is so wonderfully fitting
that we mark the First Sunday in Advent
with the Sacrament of Baptism
to remind us of that message,
that we have a future filled with hope,
for every child is a message of hope,
every child points us to the future.

You hear me say with each baptism,
“See what love the Father has given us,
that we should be called children of God,
for that is what we all are.”
(1 John 3:1)
I say those words from scripture because they are true:
We are all God’s children,
regardless of our age on the calendar.
Every one of us is a message of hope.
We all point to the future,
the future that God has yet to create,
when Christ will come again in glory,
the very message of Advent.

But even as we wait, even as we long,
the good news is that we don’t have to wait,
we don’t have to long:
God is already at work creating the future.
Jesus does not sit passively
on the right hand of God the Father;
Jesus is already working at his coming,
working toward the future,
calling us here and now to prepare ourselves,
to be ready,
pushing us to be Kingdom builders now,
not to wait.
“The Kingdom of God is at hand,”
he said to his followers.
And he says those words to us here and now.
(Matthew 4:17)

We stand here on the threshold of the future,
the threshold of the Kingdom
even as we stand on the threshold of Advent,
the threshold of the room we call December.

It isn’t the future or the Kingdom we see, though;
The bright lights of Christmas distract us.
We are enticed by the sights
and the sounds and the smells:
the lights, the packages,
the carols, the laughter,
the fragrance of evergreen, gingerbread,
and turkey in the oven.

We’re distracted by all the emotions
that come with Christmas time as well,
from great joy to deep sadness and everything in between.
Young children reflect emotion with abandon,
with their giddy excitement that grows with each day.
As we age, excitement gives way to so many different emotions
from contentment to despair.

Longing is an emotion that too many of God’s children
find their companion in the days and weeks ahead:
the child who longs for a toy,
but who knows that this year,
with one parent out of work,
and the other putting in longer hours,
the toy isn’t likely to be under the tree
on Christmas morning.

The teenager who longs for spring semester
to be better, so much better than the fall;
classes, sports, and especially friends;
why do such wonderful years
that carry a child into adulthood
have to be so difficult?

The young man or woman who longs for the safe return of a spouse
who has been deployed
to serve in parts of the world that seem
to grow more dangerous by the day.

The mother who longs to be reconciled with her daughter,
to patch up an argument that was really so petty
and yet escalated until things got out of hand
and broke apart so bitterly.

The man, fully grown, with a family of his own,
who longs to be reconciled
with his own parents,
especially his aging father,
knowing time is growing short,
wondering why the gap still exists
after all these years.
If only his father would say just once,
“Son, I’m proud of you.”

The unemployed man or woman who longs to find a job
that will not only restore finances,
but just as important,
restore self esteem,
a sense of self,
that someone will hire them,
and in the process say that they are worth something.

We each have our longings,
our individual longings
that are as unique as each of us is.
But we all have longings in common,
or at least we should,
as God’s children and as disciples of Christ.

We should long for a world of justice and righteousness,
a world in which no child dies of hunger,
or thirst,
or from lack of medicine
or access to medical care.

We should long for a world in which equity is restored,
a world no longer marked by the richest 1%
owning more than the bottom 90%;
a world in which we no longer celebrate wealth
or celebrity,
but call on those who have more
to share with those who have less.

We should long for the world that Mary sang about
when she learned that she was to give birth
to the Son of God:
a world where the proud would be scattered,
the powerful brought down,
the lowly lifted up,
the hungry filled,
and the rich sent away empty.
(Luke 1:51ff)

This is the world we should long for:
a world of righteousness,
a world of justice,
a world which the humble shall inherit,
not the Forbes 400,
This is the world we should long for
and it is the world we should work for
as we help God create the future.

Building a world of righteousness
is, as one writer put it,
as simple as “…doing the God thing,
a humble ethic of living toward others
in just and loving relationships.”
Where selflessness reigns
and selfishness is condemned.

Doing the God thing is remembering
that the very essence of Christianity
is community,
looking after one another,
sharing what we have,
feeding, sheltering, clothing one another,
something we struggle with
in a society that prizes “rugged individualism”.
But go back and re-read New or Old Testament
and see what fate awaits the individualists,
even those whose bank accounts bulge.

Advent calls us to be Kingdom builders
even as it calls us home,
calls us to the home we long for,
for in building the Kingdom,
we build a world filled with
righteousness, grace, hope,
justice, and peace,
a world we can truly call home.

The Kingdom is at hand, said our Lord,
“Through Jesus it is so close
that we don’t have to wait for it;
We can already seek it and its righteousness.”
(Moltmann, 92)

We stand on the threshold of the Kingdom and peer in,
and we find ourselves beckoned in,
beckoned and welcomed by Christ himself.
Our longing is over,
for in that room we find righteousness and peace,
all because a child has been born for us,
a son given us,
a child whose name is hope,
a child who gives us a future,
a child whose name is love.

AMEN