Sermon transcript:
Each of us is a collection of stories. They shape our understanding of the world, define our identity, and influence the choices we make. The stories we tell ourselves have an incredible power to either uplift us, help us grow, or hold us back.1 We walk around hardly even aware of them and how important our stories are to us until something happens that causes us to re-examine them. Some years ago, a friend of mine discovers she is adopted, it throws her into turmoil. Who is she now? She needs to formulate a new story about herself.
For many centuries, the people of Israel hear the passage from Isaiah as a resurrection story. The author is writing in a time when Israel’s kingdom, a kingdom that under David and Solomon stood as tall and proud as the mighty cedars of Lebanon, is reduced to a stump through the ravages of war. For Jews, the image of the branch sprouting from the stump of Jesse (King David’s father) is about the irrepressibility of life, the power of God to raise Israel from a seemingly hopeless situation.
Then Jesus comes along. His impact on Judaism is so profound it causes some Jews to re-examine their stories in light of his life. So, this story from Isaiah, filtered through the experience of Jesus’ life and ministry becomes a story about the fulfillment of God’s promises to the people of Israel. Jesus is the shoot from the stump of Jesse, the one who brings God’s ways into the world. Those first Jewish followers of Jesus now relate to Isaiah differently; Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises. The story shifts.
Where in your story are you waiting and hoping for fulfillment? Is it a relationship that needs healing, a loss that you grieve, is it uncertainty and insecurity about where life is taking you right now? What about in the story of our community, our nation, our species? Is it the end to homelessness and the presence of encampments? Is it on the journey of right relations with Indigenous peoples? Is it in the achievement of climate justice and sustainability? We’re waiting for the fulfillment of outcomes; our stories are incomplete. We sit in frustration, anxiety, cynicism, and hopelessness.
I’ll share a story about this. Some years ago, I suffer a debilitating bout of depression. It results in me being off work, completely exhausted, only able to perform the most basic of daily tasks. Spiritually I am bereft. I experience what is known as a “dark night of the soul” where I feel utterly and completely abandoned by God. I have no sense of the divine presence in my life. This only deepens the depression. I see a therapist, who is also a person of faith, who asks for my thoughts on whether the absence I feel is about my personal experience now or whether I feel God is absent from the world. I respond that I don’t think God is absent from the world, which makes me feel worse: why would God step away from me specifically? This therapist says, “Well, if you feel abandoned by God, but God is still active in the world, isn’t it a matter of you just not being where God is?” I hadn’t considered that possibility. I go away from that session wondering, if I’m not where God is, then how do I get back to God?
Here’s what I realize: God isn’t over-work and pushing through limits of energy and well-being, God isn’t in constantly neglecting my needs, God isn’t in the self-judgment of condemnation and comparing myself to others. With this realization I begin to locate the presence of God in the gentle acceptance of my limitations and the affirmation of my gifts. I locate God in self-care and prioritizing my well-being. I locate God in relationships, in my roles as a husband, father, brother, son and friend, not just Minister.
As I increasingly sense God’s presence in my life and become ever more confident about where God is located, my story begins to shift. It isn’t that God abandoned me; it was that I walked away from where God was. So that’s my story ever since. If I begin to feel the absence of God in my life, I see it not as a sign of abandonment but a sign that I’m not where God is. I start with the question, “Where are you God, right now?” That part of my story is complete, fulfilled, but not in the way I expected.
The hope expressed in Isaiah is for the restoration of a kingdom, ruled by a king with the spirit of God resting on him.2 It’s a vision of justice where enemies are vanquished and peace reigns to unimaginable extents. Still, the promise rests on the seizing of power and the imposition of a vision.3 Along comes Jesus; he’s not like that. He has no earthly power. But in him, they locate the presence of God in a way they’ve never seen before. In his teachings, his healings, his relationships they see the spirit of God resting on him. They see the promises in Isaiah being fulfilled in and through him but in a very different way, a way that relies not on the seizing of earthly power but through the power of love. It is a way which requires not strategy and cunning and a reliance on human abilities, but faith, trust and surrender to what God is already actively doing in the world. Jesus is the promised one from the lineage of Jesse, David and Solomon. The story is complete, fulfilled. The story shifts.
On this second Sunday of Advent I wonder if that’s the way to peace—to settle into what’s already there; God’s active presence in our lives and our world? I wonder if the promise of peace is fulfilled when we stop seeing the unfulfilled parts of our stories as problems to be solved and start seeing our stories as the realm of God’s activity, and our only task is to locate that activity and cooperate with it? To hold our stories loosely, to be willing to have our stories shift because love calls us in a new direction. Perhaps peace comes from a sense of holy harmony, an alignment between the way of love and our lives. Perhaps peace comes when we say, “not my will, but thine be done.”
What do you think: would that shift some of our stories, to wait and hope in an expectant way, listening and watching, open to seeing our stories through a different lens? It’s the way that gave us the Christmas story; the story of Emmanuel—God with us. It’s our story—our Advent journey continues.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
1 How Storytelling Shapes Our Identity: The Stories We Tell Ourselves, Medium, https://clearest.medium.com/how-storytelling-shapes-our-identity-the-stories-we-tell-ourselves-db43ee14d503, November 17, 2024.
2 Anna Grant-Henderson, Old Testament Lectionary: Isaiah 11: 1-10, https://www.oldtestamentlectionary.unitingchurch.org.au/indexadc3.html?page=isaiah-11-1-10.
3 Anna Grant-Henderson.