Sun. Nov. 28, 2010 (Veronica Dyck)

Veronica Dyck spoke on the First Sunday of Advent, noting two very different perceptions of time at this time of year. Parents may well think, "Oh no, is it already time to get ready for Christmas?" while some children wonder "Will Christmas ever come?" Our culture has lost so much of its capacity to wait patiently, yet scripture repeatedly asks that we both watch and wait, and that we fully engage our imaginations in the process. The Book of Isaiah opens most discouragingly, but the day's reading from the second chapter (2.1-6) is very positive, having ideas and phrases which are also found in Micah 4.1-5. These texts anticipate--and wait for--the time when Yahweh will be truly worshiped everywhere, when weapons will no longer be stockpiled, and when people will once again climb up to Zion and seek to follow Torah faithfully. The writer then imagines ideals and faith flowing down from this exemplar to all peoples, utterly transforming them. These passages spoke directly to the writers' contemporaries, to early Christians and to us, though each group had a different appreciation for the ideas. The morning's gospel reading (Matthew 24.36-) gives us our way of understanding Isaiah 2/Micah 4, underlining the inherent tension of this 'time of waiting', of not knowing when the Son of Man might return. Many of our Advent hymns of waiting and anticipation have verbs in the present tense, and although Jesus had come on earth, we have much more for which we are to wait, actively wait. [JEK] Listen to the sermon audio MP3 recording from Sunday, November 28th, 2010 using your browser's preferred media player.