Annual "Christian" events are tough when you are a preacher. Christmas, Easter, Good Friday...everyone knows what you are going to preach on.
I remember one Easter Sunday back when I was a kid when the Pastor preached on something from the Heidelberg Catechism. My mom was ticked. Jesus rises to life and we open the dead catechism.
In any event, it also means that I spend more time thinking about the events themselves. What is fresh to me this year? What is new that I can share?
Our advent series in 2014 is called "the Canvas". The idea is that our lives are a canvas upon which and through which God is going to paint the story of salvation. He is going to use our very lives to demonstrate to the world what life in his Kingdom looks like; what faith looks like. I'm beginning to notice a theme as I consider the four topics of advent–hope, peace, joy, and love–and it's not necessarily an encouraging one. The theme that these traits have in common is that they require a corollary to truly be seen.
That is, if God's going to paint a picture of Hope on the canvas of your life, he's almost always going to do it by walking you through a period that would otherwise be hopeless. You have to need something or desire something to have hope. And it can't be something that is easily attainable. It's almost always something that is out of reach. "Who hopes for what he already has?", asks Paul in Romans 8. If you already had it, it wouldn't be hope. Which means that if Hope is going to be painted on your canvas, it's probably going to require that other things are stripped away. Most of that stripped-away-stuff is related to false hope; it's the stuff that might fool us into believing that something else can save us. Our money, our relationships, our comfort, our health, or whatever. When all of that is gone, why does the Christian still have hope? Because our hope is not in the temporary or the fading, but in the unchanging and unfading and unfailing God of the universe. Hope usually requires calamity if it is to be clearly seen.
Peace requires turmoil.
Joy requires trial.
Love requires the unloveable; it's seen most clearly when we love our enemies.
But then salvation requires a baby and forgiveness requires a cross and life requires death.
The Lion Aslan told Lucy and Susan that when a willing victim took on the death of another, the stone table would be cracked (the law) and death itself would begin to work backwards. I guess that's our story now. Everything is being reversed. The curse is being re-written into blessing.
Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love share another common bond, though. When you really have them, you wouldn't trade them for all that you have lost. Calamity, turmoil, trial, enemies. They are worth enduring if in the end you have Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. We'd love to have each of them without their corollary, of course, and someday we will (with the exception of hope! Someday, our hope will be fulfilled and will be no more.) Until the day we have perfect Peace, Joy, and Love, however, more often than not the way they will become evident in our lives is when they are held up against their alternative. The Christian's Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love, are all more powerful than the forces that work against them, because they are rooted in the goodness of God himself.
That's the promise of the good news.