Standing on the Promises?
Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 80,
1 Corinthians 1:1-9[1]
We live in a world of broken promises. I would imagine that
most of us have been through the experience of someone making a promise to us
and then breaking it. Depending on the situation, it may have been simply
disappointing. Or it may have been devastating. Or something in between. The
reality of life can leave us feeling hurt and bitter. It can lead us to doubt
whether we can ever trust anyone anywhere at any time for any reason. And that
doubt may spill over into our faith. We may wonder what kind of God would allow
some of things that happen to us in this life. I think that’s the path that has
led many to question whether there even is a God, or perhaps refuse to believe
in God at all. In my experience, a lot of the people who call themselves
“atheists” have been through great disappointment in life.
Some of us take the opposite approach. Because life has
been so disappointing, we track down every promise in Scripture and cling to
them as if they were some kind of magical spell that will make everything turn
out just the way we want it. If we just repeat the “promise” enough times, and
with enough “faith,” God will “have” to grant us our wish. This approach to the
promises of Scripture turns God into a “genie in the bottle” who is there to do
our bidding. But the problem is that while we may convince ourselves that
approach to faith “works,” it will not hold up against the inevitable hardships
that come our way in life. When hard times come, that kind of “magical” faith
will fall like a “house of cards,” because it has no real foundation. And the
result can be the same: we may think God didn’t “live up” to his promise, so
we’re left wondering why we should trust in him.
I think the problem with both of those approaches to the
promises of Scripture is that they miss the point. The promises of Scripture
aren’t about guaranteeing certain outcomes in our lives. They’re there to
remind us who God is. They remind us that we believe in a God who will “never
fail us or forsake us.” We may feel like God has let us down, or we may feel
abandoned by God, but the promises of the Scriptures remind us that God isn’t
that kind of God. God sticks around, no matter what. We may not always be aware
of it, but God is always there, loving us, guiding us, seeking our best. When
we look at the promises of Scripture this way, it gives us a different way of
relating to them. Instead of trying to use them to get what we want out of
life, we can use the promises of the Scriptures to build our lives on a
foundation that lasts: God’s love for us that never fails.
Our Scripture lessons for today point us in this direction.
I think the people to whom the lesson from Isaiah was directed must have been
questioning God’s promises. After 70 years of captivity in Babylon, some of
them were allowed to return to their home. But when they got back to Judea, the
reality of their “new life” fell far short of what they had hoped. The temple
lay in ruins. Jerusalem had no walls to protect them. Instead of returning to a
“land flowing with milk and honey,” they returned to a land that had been
devastated by war and was left a wasteland. The prophet speaks aloud the
questions that must have been on the minds of the people. Their circumstances
and God’s seeming silence and absence left them questioning what they had been
told for generations, that God would never forsake them.
We see something of the same thing in our Psalm for today.
The Psalmist gives voice to what must have been on the minds of the people who
returned to Jerusalem. They remembered how they had prospered like a grapevine
planted by God that had spread its branches far and wide. But now, they were
like a vineyard that had been “chopped up and burned” (Ps 80:16, NLT).
They knew it was because they had abandoned God in the past. And they also knew
that their only hope was for God to “Turn us again to yourself.” Their only
hope was for God to “Make your face shine down upon us.” As the Psalmist
concludes, “Only then will we be saved” (Ps 80:3, NLT)! Even though they
knew they’d failed God, even though they felt the burden of their circumstances
as if God had abandoned them, they knew that their hope laid with the God who
promised never to fail them or forsake them!
We all have times in our lives when we feel God’s “silence”
and “absence.” Perhaps we’ve fallen short in some way, and we feel the sting of
our failure keenly. Or perhaps others have let us down, and the pain of
disappointment burdens us. Or perhaps life just hasn’t turned out the way we
hoped it would, and we’re left wondering where to turn and what to do next.
Precisely in those times it is the promises of Scripture that remind us that,
though we may feel like God has abandoned us, God never abandons anyone. The
promises of Scripture show us a God who always cares for us, so that we can
always cast all our cares on him, whatever may come our way. They show us a God
who never forsakes us, though everyone else we know may turn their backs on us.
They show us a God who loves us with a love that will never let us go. I think
that’s something to hang onto when life leaves us wondering where God is and
whether you can even make it through another day.
In this season of Advent, our hope goes further than that.
The promises of Scripture not only assure us that God will never fail us or
forsake us, and that God loves us with a love that will never let us go. The
promises of Scripture also assure us that the God who began this creation as
something “very good” will not rest until it has been restored to being “very
good” again. And they promise us that God has begun to do that very thing
through Jesus Christ. In the birth of the one who is “God-who-is-with-us” and
“God-who-is-for-us,” God entered this world to break all the cycles of pain and
fear and suffering. In Jesus’ death and resurrection, God used his mighty power
to break the power of all that would harm us, to break the power of death
itself. It’s in that confident assurance that St. Paul could promise the first
Christians that God would keep them strong to the very end because God “is
faithful to do what he says” (1 Cor 1:9, NLT).
On this first Sunday of Advent, we’re reminded that the
birth of our Savior Jesus Christ calls us to live in hope. We live in the hope
that people of faith have cherished for millennia, the hope that our help comes
from the one who made all the heavens and the earth. We live in the hope that
people of faith have cherished for centuries, the hope that the one who raised
Jesus from the dead is working through him to make all things right and to make
all things new. There are times in our lives when this life may seem to
contradict those essential foundation stones for our faith. And for some of us,
this time of year may serve as a painful reminder of all the ways that life has
disappointed us. But the promises of Scripture remind us that God is always
“faithful to do what he says.” The only way for that to change is for God to
stop being God. And the promises of Scripture remind us that God loves us with
a love that will never let us go. As St. Paul assures us, no matter what we may
have to go through, there is nothing in this life that can change that. As we
make our way through this season of Advent, may God’s unfailing love for us
rekindle a spirit of hope that will help us face all that life may bring our
way.[2]
[1] ©
2023 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 12/3/2023 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Cf. Henri Nouwen, Finding My Way Home, 101-103, where he says, “I have
found it very important in my own life to try to let go of my wishes and
instead to live in hope. I find that when I choose to let go of my sometimes
petty and superficial wishes and trust that my life is precious and meaningful
in the eyes of God, something really new, something beyond my own expectations
begins to happen in me. To wait with openness and trust is an enormously
radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that something is
happening for us that is far beyond our own imaginings. It is giving up control
over our future and letting God define our life.”
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