First Sunday in Advent
Sunday, 30, November 2003
Jeremiah 33:14-16
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36
Psalm 25
Sermon: (Frank Eberhardt)
On Dante's Peak, you can look down 200 feet and see Blackwater, a bad town, or up 14,500 feet to Mt. McKinley. You can either choose to look down at the dirt, or up to God. Advent is about choice. Advent is a latin word for "coming to you." At Advent, we celebrate Christ's birth, return and the present in word and sacrament. Stand up, the redemption is near. You can either look at the dirt, or up ahead at the Lord our Righteousness.
There is a book entitled Elizabeth's Second Chance. It's about a woman who has a chaste relationship with a man. She set boundaries. She prayed for a sense of purity, she prayed that they would know each other personally before they knew each other's flesh, but emotion was taking over. She'd made some bad choices in her early years and the man found out. "It's true then," he said. She said yes, and the man said, "God renews purity." It wasn't what she expected him to say. He called her pure. They married, even though she expected condemnation.
We think that we don't fit in the box of God's blessings. We think that belongs to everyone else. That is a lie from Satan. It keeps us from affecting others. When it comes to forgiveness, God chooses the what, when, where and who he forgives. He chose to forgive us because of Jesus. It's not about you. It's God's choice.
Jesus chose to die, to be judged by his creatures, man giving him the death sentence.
C.S. Lewis was a Cambridge scholar. He began as a skeptic and later became a Christian, and he offered other people this choice: they could either call Jesus a fraud, or God, and that is the only important choice we have. We look at ourselves as sinners, but through Jesus, we see ourselves as saints.
"I'm an alcoholic. I can't help myself." "I'm gay, I can't help myself." Some people have no control, because they choose to lose that control. It's an emotion. Love is a choice of will, not an uncontrollable thing in our body.
In a movie, a doctor staying in Calcutta was offered this choice: "Choose to be compassionate, or do nothing."
A little girl in Illinois, saddened by the death of her grandfather, wrote a letter to him, attaching it to a helium balloon. She got a letter back from someone saying that he couldn't keep letters in heaven. She kept the love, it fell back down. Nobody knows who wrote the response letter, but someone had made a choice. Someone had their own business to take care of, but they chose to care about this little girl. Like that person, we're free to choose to love, like Jesus.