(Written and preached by Pastor Wayne I Schulz)

What is the word on the street for most of us at this time of the year? “Only 16 more shopping days until Christmas. Food pantry supplies are on the low side. Get your mail in early this. I’m so busy that I think I will skip writing Christmas cards.It seems to get busier each year.”Then there is also the bad news we hear and read: “More car bombs in Iraq.Higher gas prices.” These headlines seem to have no regard for the coming of Christmas.Some people are so overburdened with information that they ignore it.They shrug it off as did an officer at Pearl Harbor when someone told him that a large force of planes was on its way.“Well, don’t be concerned about it.” Around the world for years people have heard that Jesus will return at an unexpected time.But the way they and we go about it, it is as if we are saying, “Well, don’t be concerned about it.”

For the child of God there is no need for alarm and terror at the thought of the Lord’s advent, his coming.You are a child of God because of what Jesus has done for you. You rest in his forgiveness and in his promises.You look forward to his arrival.You do so with comfort—“Comfort, comfort all my people!”

Isaiah first spoke these words of comfort to the wearied, burdened, exhausted, disheartened, scattered, and crushed people of Israel, exiles without a home in the Babylonian Captivity. They were despondent and refused to sing.They had waited so long and forgotten that God was still gracious and merciful.For 50 years they had paid double for all their sins in the captivity of a foreign power.To them through the prophet Isaiah God came with a special message of comfort and joy—her sin has been paid for. God’s people would return to the land of promise—a Savior would be born!For them it was a message to enjoy and proclaim:“YOU WHO BRING GOOD TIDINGS TO ZION, GO UP ON A HIGHMOUNTAIN. YOU WHO BRING GOOD TIDINGS TO JERUSALEM, LIFT UP YOUR VOICE WITH A SHOUT, LIFT IT UP, DO NOT BE AFRAID; SAY TO THE TOWNS OF JUDAH, ‘HERE IS YOUR GOD!’”

The Advent message God has called us to enjoy and bring has nothing to do with shopping days or gift ideas.God’s people who received the good news in Jesus that made them God’s people are to be heralds of good news.Heralds are evangelists, good news sharers.That is what we are in the church.That is why we are here. To shout out good tidings, not to keep the faith, but to SHARE the faith!“Lift up your voice with a shout!Say to the city of…., ‘Here—in the Christ of Bethlehem, in the Word made flesh—is your God!’” That is why you are here.That is why your congregation is here, --to enjoy this message and to infiltrate ____ with this message.

AN ADVENT MESSAGE TO ENJOY AND PROCLAIM

1) A MESSAGE OF COMFORT AND HOPE.It is the simple instinct and response of a parent to and injured child, “It’s OK.Don’t cry.You will be all right.I am here.I’ve got you.Comfort!”These are words that promise the hurt will go away.Words that offer hope.That ease the pain.

In the early days of North America, people set their hope in God.In the 19^th century people placed their hope in the nation—the last best hope for mankind.By the end of the last century and now North Americans are told to hope in themselves and instant gratification. Douglas Coupland in his book Life after God shows how his boomer parents wanted nothing to do with God and religion.He was totally on his own in coping with life’s difficulties and his unguided conscience.“For me there was nothing,” he said. Later he finally comes to terms with the fact that he needs God and must have a spiritual foundation in his life.Riding in his four-wheel drive he confesses a hunger for spirituality, for he has nothing left within himself to love even another human being.

For too many people there is NOTHING, nothing at all going on in the inside. Just emptiness.And there are people like that all over.There are people you know who have no comfort, no joy, no hope.They are desolate like Israel of old. (FRANK story)

You who enjoy a message of comfort and hope in Jesus Christ, lift up your voice with a shout!God does not want his disciples to be wusses who hide their light and comfort in the walls of their church or in the secret chambers of their heart. We are disciples of Jesus who ride high on the strength of his word of comfort.We are not spiritual wusses who grow weary from the delay of the return of Christ and momentary setbacks. We bathe and live in a message of hope and have a message of comfort and hope for those who have been wussified and disenfranchised by what the world idolizes as relativism.To those who are lost and have nothing but emptiness within, you can say, “Here is your God!” When there is no hope, you can speak a message of hope.You can speak a message of love when there is no love.You can speak a message that helps when people feel helpless.You can speak a message of hope when people feel hopeless.(People like LIZ SPERRY) Advent is a message of comfort and hope to be enjoyed and proclaimed.

Another advent message is

2) Tenderness and compassion.“Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.” Advent heralds/evangelists must offer content. The content of God’s message is compassion. Disobedient Israel had served her term. Now the penalty is paid in full. The tender words of God are filled with compassion. Compassion is comfort that has taken on legs in the lives of people. There is an unmarred future ahead for the people of God, a future full of promise in the coming Messiah to seek and to save what was lost.

Undeserving you and I have been loved by a compassionate Savior. Our compassion comes from God’s compassion toward us.Compassion causes us to take action, and not to sit around waiting for it to happen through someone else. Compassion asks “Who is my neighbor?”And compassion reaches out to that neighbor. Compassion offers hugs and a hand that lifts up.“Every valley shall be raised up” when God’s people demonstrate their Christianity in love for the neighbor.We are here for the neighbor, God says, to love our neighbor as ourselves.To speak tenderly to the neighbor. God’s people look for ways to love the neighbor so they can speak tenderly to them with the kindness of the good news of Jesus Christ. If we do not love our neighbor whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen? Tenderness and compassion will be the words and actions of the people of God right here.(Examples:WADE AND KAREN; Heidi. Guyana)

An anguished cry kept coming over the radio from a truck driver at mile marker 14 near Harlowton, Montana.“Help!Help!I’m going 70 miles per hour and my brakes are out.I can’t stop. Please help me.”A short time later another trucker radioed that in near whiteout conditions he had just barely avoided hitting another truck stopped dead in the road at mile marker 14.Several other trucks then also stopped. What they discovered was that the first trucker frightened and disoriented from the blizzard and thought he was going 70 miles per hour when in fact he was standing still while the snow whizzed past him.It took three truck drives to calm him down, form a convoy around him and get him off the road.

This is a parable that illustrates our text: the solution to the trucker’s problem came in the form of compassionate friends who understood and then acted compassionately and spoke tenderly to the terrified driver.Like the driver, life seems out of control for many. Tenderness and compassion in Christ Jesus are the hallmarks and message of the child of God to those who feel terrified on the highway of life.It is time for us in the church to speak tenderly and compassionately to terrorized people. When that happens people will be ready to face Jesus when he returns.They will rejoice in his presence./ It was a great joy for me and others to meet with a mission congregation on Monday night and to listen to members talk for almost two hours about their efforts and joy in reaching lost people.When we listen to lost people God will create opportunities for us to speak tenderly to them.For we are a people of preparation and purpose.

3) Preparation and purpose. God’s plans for his wayward people were not halting or hesitant. They were still homeless, outcasts, and seemingly powerless in a hostile world. But the Lord calls on them to prepare the way of the Lord. He asks them to live with purpose, to be faithful until he returns.Such faithfulness includes demonstration of Christianity and proclamation of Christ.Our preparations are not to be merely cosmetic.It means re-sculpting the contours of our world: “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plane.” The picture is that of preparing a processional highway for the coming of the King Jesus. John came with that message.And God sends us out with that message as a kingdom and priests to serve him.

Advent messengers don’t just talk.They do.They act.They move forward in mission.They team up with each other, pray for each other, encourage each other along the way. They and you in this congregation move purposefully into the world, infiltrating a world of lost and desolate people, giving them the comfort and hope that comes only from God our Savior.God’s messengers don’t think small. Playing small will not serve God’s world. Instead, prepare the way of the Lord, and that is a big undertaking.It’s a mission that confront the mountains of greed and power, corruption, and apathy and hatred, and lust.It’s a message that requires power.And the good news of Jesus which you have heard time and time again is that power.Use that power of Jesus Christ with preparation and with purpose. That power that enlightens you as a child of God. And this is what you are—a child of God bending toward eternity, but not roughriding it over the world as you do, butcomforting, lifting up, raising up, and speaking tenderly with the good news of Jesus as you go.You have a message to enjoy and to proclaim. You are meant to shine, to make manifest the glory of God in Christ, to find your voice in Christ, and to inspire others here to do the same.To be a congregation united in purpose and preparation, to enjoy God comfort and tenderness, to proclaim it to your forlorn neighbors. (3 Marines SoO, 85% on plateau)

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