I suppose some of us wait for the end of the day so that we can head home.
Maybe we wait for that package to finally arrive in the mail.
We wait for the line at the grocery store to finally move because the person in front of us is paying in coupons and pennies.

We wait for the bus, for the appetizers to arrive, for the other shoe to drop.

I think that in most cases, we have a pretty good grip on what we are waiting for. I knew that my mom was sending me a new shirt so when the mail came yesterday and I opened it up, I wasn’t at all surprised to see a new shirt.

Sometimes we wait for something totally out of our control and we know it. We know something is coming down the road but we haven’t the slightest clue what it is going to be.

And then there are times when we are certain about the future. We know with absolutely surety what is going to happen for us or to us. And yet, when it finally gets here, it is the most unexpected thing we could have imagined.

The Israelites in the time of Isaiah fell into this category. They waited for something they were absolutely certain of… A king that would come and drive away those evil nations that threatened them. A savior that would sit on David’s throne and rule their country. A messiah that would physically and militarily right all the wrongs that had beset them for so many years.

A child would come and grow into a man who would free them from tyranny and oppression. He would be a wise, mighty, eternal prince.

And they waited for it.

And they waited.

The years rolled by. The oppressors changed names. Rulers came and went. And still nothing. What must that have been like? Hundreds and hundreds of years waiting for something of which they were sure was supposed to happen.

I get a little agitated when Starbucks doesn’t get my coffee to me in the first 2 minutes after placing my order.

But then they day came that the Messiah did come. That which they waited for, centuries long, had finally arrived.

But it wasn’t at all what they expected. It wasn’t what they had ever imagined. The Savior of the nation of Israel didn’t come riding a huge horse, sword in hand, slaying the Roman tyrants and restoring the power and wealth of Israel.

A carpenter’s son. Born amongst the animals. In a backwoods little town that wasn’t special in any way.

Even those who believed in him, who felt that all their waiting and anticipation had been justified, in the end, didn’t have much of a grasp on the situation.

And yet this Messiah who wouldn’t take up a sword against violent oppressors, who wouldn’t march his army into Jerusalem and set up some new monarchy, set about freeing people in the most unexpected of ways.

And he would free everybody.

That’s the thing about that first Advent, it wasn’t at all what everyone thought it was going to be. It was something so much more amazing that it couldn’t have even been imagined.

We would think that we, as we await the last Advent, could learn from those who came before us. From those who sat waiting for the first Advent. It’s not a bad thing to wait for something. In fact, it is one of the best of things. But we should remember that was the unexpectedness of what occurred that made it so magnificent, so powerful.

As we wait in anticipation of Christ’s return, of the last Advent, let us not lose sight of the lessons we have been taught.

We have been promised the return of the wise, mighty and eternal prince but I imagine that return will be as unexpected as the first. And in that, it will be something awesome.

It is this start of the Church of the calendar that brings back to remembrance not just what we wait for but also why we wait.

We wait to show ourselves as good and faithful servants for whenever the master returns be it the middle of the day or the dark of the night.

I have the coolest nephew and nieces ever. They are flat-out awesome. I have grown quite fond of them.
I think it’s going to be interesting to see what Ryan will end up being in his life. What he is going to end up choosing as a career. The same with his sisters. I am fascinated by who they are and who they will become and what choices they will make in life.

We all have those choices. Drive a cab. Teach 6th grade. Manage a warehouse. Sell office equipment. Proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of the Most High. That last one is not a bad gig.

And as it’s the vocation that we are all called to participate in, that is a pretty important one to have. And I assume that most of the people in this room have committed to just that in one form or another. Yours is supposed to be a very different kind of life. Whatever your job is, this is your vocation.

You meet people that will simply awe you –the faithful, the caring, the humble. You see things that will amaze you –the smile of a person turning to Christ, little children finding love, the elderly discovering grace.
And I wish that was all we encounter. But we all know that we have watched people grow angry with God and abandon their faith, you have attended the funerals of little babies, and we have sat for hours at the bedside of the sick and the dying.

We experience heartache and loss and suffering.

But hear me when I tell you that even in times of the darkest despair, you can find your relief in God.

It’s really not unusual for God’s servants to become saddened, frustrated, maybe even depressed as they suffer along with the world as Christ suffered with it.

Some of you might have heard of George Washington Truett. My seminary was named after him. We know him as the boy preacher from North Carolina who spent 47 years as the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas. We know him as the president of the Baptist World Alliance and the Southern Baptist Convention.

But what we might not know is that all this almost never happened. Early in his career at First Baptist Church, Pastor Truett become great friends with a man named JC Arnold. He was a former Texas Ranger who had become the Chief of Police of Dallas and was a faithful member of Truett’s church.
One day they went hunting and it happened that Captain Arnold was walking a little ahead of the preacher when Truett shifted his gun and it accidentally went off. He struck Arnold in the calf and they immediately rushed him to the hospital.
The doctors patched up the leg and told everyone that it would be fine but George Truett just didn’t feel right about it. He had a terrible feeling in his spirit. Sure enough, a few days later, a blood clot formed and Arnold died.
Truett was inconsolable. He blamed himself for the death of his best friend. His depression became so deep that he vowed he would never preach again. He just couldn’t find the joy anymore.

For Jeremiah, he believed that he had been called to preach a message of salvation to his people. When they heard it, surely they would turn from their wickedness and return to God.

But his hopeful expectations turned into dismal reality.

God had lied to him. The creator of the universe had deceived him about his mission. Who would not be affected by that?
We know what it is to have our enemies badmouth us but Jeremiah lost even his closest friends. They hated his message and turned on him and turned away from him. He couldn’t go on preaching but he found that it was worse for him to stop preaching. He was caught between God and a hard place.

There are probably times when it seems to you as if nothing is going right, as if your world has crashed down around you. You may think that your God and your friends have forsaken you.

Guilt, anger and depression are very real. These even come to those who we would not expect.

One of the reason to be watchful of this is that your reactions to these feelings can be very serious to those around you.

In Jeremiah’s time, the announcement of child was a great thing and to have it be a son was to know that the family would continue. The name would be passed down. The man who brought that message would be a hero.
But Jeremiah was so distraught that he curses the man who told his father about his birth. He wished this man dead. The messenger had done nothing wrong. He had committed no sin or crime but Jeremiah felt that he had to lash out at someone. He wanted this man to suffer.

And for nothing more than delivering a message that Jeremiah found distasteful.

He also takes it out upon himself. He cries out that he wished he had never been born, that he should have died in his mother’s womb. But wasn’t Jeremiah the one who was betrayed by his friends? Wasn’t it God who had deceived him? Jeremiah had committed no sin, no crime. After all, he was just someone bringing a message. He didn’t deserve all of this. And yet he wanted to die.
If we look, we can see the effects of depression in the lives of those around us. I came across the story of a woman named Lisa. She is a 30 year old with 2 children. She starts her story off by telling of her divorce. See, she had grown tired of her life and let the depression sweep over her. She started having an affair with a married man who also had a child. She got to the point where she couldn’t be with either man but didn’t want to be without them either. After her divorce from the father of her children, she had to move into her parent’s home with her kids. Eventually, Lisa quit her job and lost her friends, all the while dreaming of a perfect life in another state away from all of her problems.
So we can only imagine the impact she has on those around her. Two marriages destroyed, parents having to support a 30 year old woman, children without a role model to show them what is good and right. This is not a story to condemn Lisa, I certainly hope she finds the help she needs, but it can help us see how our actions affect more than just ourselves.

When we are totally focused on the things of our own lives, we treat people, even those we love, worse than they deserve. Be mindful of this so that when trouble falls, we can remember that our family and friends and neighbors and congregations are there to be a help for us in times of hardship.

If the story ended there, it might seem pretty bleak. But thank God that through all of it, we can recover our peace through the praise of God.
For Jeremiah, in the middle of all of this emotional and physical and spiritual turmoil, he was able to find his faith. He found his peace. And he did it when he turned from himself and back to the Lord. He called out to God and remembered his promises. He found that he was able to recall the nature of God. He knew God to be the protector. He remembered that Yahweh was righteous and everlasting and forever faithful.
When Jeremiah cried out, “Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord! For He has delivered the soul of the needy one from the hands of the evildoers” I don’t know if I can say that he fully understood what he meant for himself.

Maybe you have had a bad day or month or year and one Sunday you find yourself sitting in a pew while the offering plates are being passed and the organist is playing or you’re at home in your favorite chair or even driving along in your car. And your heart is longing for peace. Maybe the best you can do is mouth the words to the old hymn,

“O, Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder Consider all the worlds thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, thy power throughout the universe displayed. Then… sings my soul, my savior God, to thee, how great thou art, how great thou art.”

God hears the cry of his people. Of that I am certain.

Now I am not just going to leave Reverend Truett’s story unfinished because eventually he found his relief in Christ. And we know that he did preach again and be a great witness to the power of the Lord. His life was never again 100% wonderful but it was never 100% desperate either. And that’s how our lives as ministers of reconciliation go. But we must always remember that even when we can’t find the tune or the melody, our souls need to sing to our God.

I like to cook. It’s fun. I get to mix and match and add a touch of this and a dash of that. Don’t have one ingredient, that’s ok, I’ll use a different one.
My mom saves up recipes so that when I am home visiting, we can go through and cook all the new dishes together. It’s not so much that I’m a great cook but again, I like to do it and I am good at being flexible with the ingredients.

I hate baking. I love to eat baked goods but I hate to actually bake. It’s too precise. Requires too much accuracy. Too much following of the rules.

When I was young I tried to bake some kind of German chocolate pie. I tried to follow the rules, obey the recipe, do it right. What emerged from the oven was horror the likes of which this universe had never even comprehended.
Needless to say, no one ate it. And while I have never come as close to wiping out existence as I did with that pie, I have tried to bake since then and never with good results. I make bad cakes and pies.

And there isn’t much worse than thinking you are going to get to enjoy a nice slice of cake and having it be so bad that you want to physically harm the cook.

It takes a certain amount of concentrated effort and careful planning to be a baker it seems.

There were times in Israel’s history were they were pretty good bakers. They knew how to take their time, measure out their ingredients, and set the oven at just the right temperature. And their pies came out pretty darn tasty.

They knew where they security lay, they knew to whom to pray, they understood who gave them strength.
And as the people of God they were blessed.
They were a people focused on their purpose and not their privilege.

But that didn’t last.

And so 2800 years ago, God sent Hosea, an Israelite, the son of Beeri, to his people to explain to them that they had lost their way.

He speaks to Ephraim, the largest tribe of the north. He has some words to set to them right if they will listen.
Hosea calls them a “cake not turned”. The idea is that a cake baked like that would be raw on one side and burnt on the other. Neither of those conditions is good to eat and neither does anyone any good. That sort of cake is more than just inedible; it is a waste of time and resources. It shows not that the ingredients were spoiled or rotten but that the baker had neglected her job and forgotten about her purpose. The cake goes unturned.

If you don’t want to be a baker, fine, don’t be one.
If you want to be a baker, then do it right and do it well.
The book of Revelation talks to us about a church that faces the same dilemma. God calls out the church in Laodicea as being neither hot nor cold in their works.

Mostly I have heard people say that passage means that God wants people to either be good (hot) or bad (cold). But that doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t think God is telling people to be bad.

The city of Laodicea sat between two water sources. One was a hot spring that could be used to cook food or keep you warm. The other was cold, cool and refreshing.
The problem was that by the time someone hauled water from either source back to town, it was tepid, lukewarm. Not much fun to drink or do anything with really. The issue wasn’t that they needed to decide whether or not to be good or bad, the issue was that they needed to decide whether or not they were going to be close enough to their source of comfort, strength and power for it to be of any use.

This was where the Israelites found themselves so many years before. Clinging to ideas and institutions that separated them God and being too uncomfortably content to do anything about it.

As we will see repeated throughout history, the people of God had become just fine with parceling out purpose to those around them.
They sold out their purpose to the foreign nations which removed their strength and security without them even being aware of it.
Who do we mix ourselves with? Who do we entrust with our purpose, the purpose God has specifically commanded his people to be a part of?

This is in no way a call to remove ourselves from the world but to always remember that while we are in it, we are not of it.

Who have sold our birthright to for a mere bowl of soup?

We get content when we think that we have it all going our way. When we think that everyone around us is bound by our way of thinking, by our purpose. Pride has interesting ways of sneaking up on us. It invaded Israel long before any foreign government stormed their borders and scattered them to the wind.

The people had become so spiritually lazy that even when they felt the need to cry out in help for something, they cried out to every other man-made deity except for the one true God of Israel.

Idols, statues, horses, chariots… now all their symbols of power and peace.
Stock markets, military might, political parties… now all our symbols of power and peace.

And if we are, as a Church, in some ways like Israel of 2800 years ago, then what a great opportunity for the Church to reclaim its mission. To be once again set apart for its purpose and not privilege.