Hope

In this message, we dive into the first Sunday of Advent, exploring the profound theme of hope. Through the stories of Zechariah, Herod, and Mary, we reflect on how biblical hope isn’t mere wishful thinking but a tangible, future-oriented anticipation rooted in God’s promises. From Zechariah’s skepticism to Herod’s fear and Mary’s faithful response, we see how hope challenges and transforms us

You can take interactive notes here. At the end of the message, you can email the notes to yourself.

 Please turn your Bibles. If you have them to, uh, Luke chapter one, we’re going to look at a few passages in Luke. We’re going to jump to Matthew, but then we’ll go back to Luke. So just stay in Luke. Uh, we’ll meet there together in a few moments. Uh, like pastor Trey said. Today’s the first Sunday of Advent.

So we’re gonna talk about what that means and what that, uh, looks like for us. Uh, but thank you for, for worshiping with us, uh, this morning. Let me pray for us. Uh, if you’re still turning to Luke, you can continue to do that. And then we will dive in.

Uh, so father, we, uh, we ask that you would meet us, uh, here, uh, over these next few moments and God, we ask that you would help us. Uh, to encounter you through your word, not just as words on a page, but as a person that you would be real to us, that we would sense whatever it is that you’re inviting us to, to receive this morning and then put into practice this week, we ask that you would help us to be receptive, that you’d give us the courage to, to live this out.

And that you’d help us put aside all distractions, anything that we’ve come in with that might prevent us from doing that. So Father, we, we, we love you and we ask all this in your name. Amen. Uh, this isn’t what I asked for. That was the first thought I had when I ripped open, uh, the first of my Christmas presents on that Christmas afternoon in third grade.

Uh, yes, afternoon, by the way. My family never has and still doesn’t open Christmas presents first thing in the morning. It’s not until, like, two or three o’clock in the afternoon. Since I couldn’t remember, we just, we waited that long. We do a whole breakfast and everything and then maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll open gifts.

Uh, so I learned patience at a young age. Now, I felt like I had been pretty clear with that mall Santa that my parents had let me wait hours in line to talk to. What I wanted was the police officer playset that was black and grey, and it came with the sunglasses, the shiny badge, the toy flashlight, and the tiny little toy Nerf gun.

It was a high point of the whole thing. What I got was a blue and orange police officer playset with a notepad. A Velcro safety vest? Who, what third grader wants a Velcro safety vest? And no little toy gun. Which is probably for the best, I have two younger sisters and they would have been, it was, God and his providence saved them from me with my tiny little Nerf gun.

Uh, now I’m naturally really cynical and skeptical, and I’ve been that way for a while. But at this point in my life, those were only budding, uh, and growing and festering. But this moment cemented my disbelief in Santa altogether. At, uh, however old you are in third grade, I had friends that were talking about what Santa was gonna bring them, and, uh, what Santa had gotten them, and I had to tell them, he’s not real, guys.

The guy at the mall, that’s not who you think he is. He doesn’t know what you actually want. Now, today’s the first Sunday of Advent. Uh, this has been historically the time where the churches celebrated, uh, Christmas, the birth of Jesus. The four weeks leading up to Christmas is what we call Advent. It comes from the Latin word adventus, uh, which means arrival.

So as busy as Christmas usually is for us today in our world, historically, the church has slowed down these four weeks. They’ve paused and they’ve re centered, reflected on what it means for Jesus to be born into the earth. And then to promise to come again. See, Advent is really about celebration, and we celebrate.

We love the Christmas spirit, the music, all the activities, the parties we go to, the gifts we buy, the gifts we receive and don’t receive. But it’s also about waiting. In Advent, we recognize that God will one day right all of the world’s wrongs, that he will meet all people’s needs and restore his good creation back to the way it was meant to be.

But that’s the end of the story. And even though we know the end of the story, it doesn’t make waiting for it any easier because we live in tension. We hold both future hope and present reality in both hands. That reminds us that though the end is coming, we’re not there yet. Evil, death, sickness, tragedy, suffering are all reminders that the world is not yet as it should be.

And yet, In the midst of this waiting, we celebrate. And so each week the church around the world focuses on one theme to help us wait for Advent hope. It’s hope, peace, joy, and love. And so to kick off the Advent season here at Passion Creek on the docket for today is hope. Now hope, Seems like one of those words that Christians like to throw around as a complacent response to tragedy or a cliche answer to questions about suffering.

It seems more like a meaningless placeholder than a virtue with any real substance. And most of us, if we’re honest, have lived long enough with both despair and disappointment to know that things don’t always get better. Sometimes God lets us down. Our expectations aren’t met. We get the wrong police officer playset for Christmas.

The prayers that we’ve held before God for years go unanswered. What we thought would happen never happens. And life isn’t what we had hoped it would be. So, we settle. For life as it is. And we put our vague expectations of a better future in God’s hands, or we hope. We hope for things like better weather tomorrow, or we hope that we get that promotion at work or that job that we feel like we bombed the interview for.

We hope our spouse forgot about that dumb thing we said yesterday. We hope our kids are better tomorrow than they were today. We hope our football team wins. They didn’t. I was hoping you wouldn’t say that second service too. You did.

But this isn’t really hope. Now, today we’re going to look at the biblical story of hope. What the Bible describes as hope by looking at three key people in the Christmas story. Now, the Christmas story ultimately is about one person. How Jesus is born into the world at the center of the story to redeem us from sin, Satan, and death.

But throughout the Christmas story, we have key leaders. Key people who come into contact with hope and respond in different ways. So, for today, that’s what we’re going to do. Zechariah, the realist, Herod, the fatalist, and Mary, the faithful. So first, Zechariah. Luke chapter 1 starting in verse 5. Now in the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest of Abijah’s division named Zechariah.

His wife was from the daughters of Aaron and her name was Elizabeth. Both were righteous in God’s sight, living without blame according to all the commands and requirements of the Lord. Now that doesn’t mean that they were perfect or sinless, that just means that they observed all of God’s law in the Old Testament.

That they atoned for their sins through sacrifices and things like that. But, they had no children, because Elizabeth could not conceive, and both of them were well along in years. Now when his division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, it happened that he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and burn incense.

At the hour of incense, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. An angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing to the right of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified and overcome with fear. But the angel said to him, do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your prayer has been heard.

Your wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son, and you will name him John. There will be joy and delight for you, and many will rejoice at his birth. For he will be great in the sight of the Lord, and will never drink wine or beer. He will be filled with the Holy Spirit while still in his mother’s womb. He will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord, their God.

And he will go before them in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the disobedient to the understanding of the righteous to make ready for the Lord a prepared people. How can I know this, Zechariah asked the angel, which by the way is one of the funniest verses in all the Bible.

There’s a literal angel, and Zechariah’s like, how do I know, how do I trust you? For I am an old man and my wife is well along in years. The angel answered him, I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and tell you this good news. Now listen, you will become silent and unable to speak until the day these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their proper time.

Now to understand why Luke starts his Christmas story here. With an old priest and his barren wife, knowing where we’re at in the big biblical story unfolding in these passages is really important. So, uh, to the beginning, Genesis. And you know the story, at the beginning of the biblical story, the world is created good.

Creation is good, humanity is good, and a good God communes with his people. In some sense, there’s no real need for hope yet. Work is fulfilling, humanity is cooperating, and there’s meaning and purpose to everything. Adam and Eve are put in the garden as representatives of God’s goodness and presence, and they’re meant to spread the garden to the rest of the created world.

But as the story goes, instead of spreading God’s goodness and presence to the world around them, instead they spread sin, evil, and death. And when God confronts Adam and Eve after seeing their decision to misuse their authority and their representation of him for their own gain and their own good, he confronts them and he gives them curses.

He confronts Adam, Eve, and the serpent. But notice, God starts his curses with the serpent. Genesis 3, 15, we get hope. God says, I will put hostility between you and the woman. And between your offspring and her offspring, he will strike your head and you will strike his heel. Now God’s people hearing this prophecy told and retold over and over again as a story of their national identity, but also as a story of humanity, would have recognized how significant this promise from God is.

God is saying that he’s going to provide someone who’s going to crush the originator of evil and rescue humanity from sin, Satan, and death. That is hope. A future promise, a guaranteed outcome, an end to the story. It’s real, it’s tangible, it’s concrete. It’s God stepping into the chaotic, evil, broken world that humans have distorted and promising that he’s going to do something about it.

So hope isn’t vague optimism, positive energy, or wishful thinking. It’s looking forward to something concrete, to something promised, something real and tangible that we know is coming. It’s the orientation of our energy, our focus, our hearts, and our bodies towards something better. Hope is about anticipation.

Now as a priest, this is a story that Zechariah would have known really, really well. Now he and his wife, Elizabeth, who’s also the daughter of a priest, so they’re like doubly righteous, uh, would have oriented their entire lives around this story. Now Luke goes out of his way to tell us that they’re righteous in God’s sight, and that’s important because at this time in this culture, to be childless was believed to be a sign of God’s disfavor on you and hidden sin in your life.

Though Zechariah is at a high point in his career because he gets to burn incense in the sanctuary of the Lord, which was literally a once in a lifetime opportunity, he’s hopeless. God’s promises were far from fulfilled. Rome ruled over God’s people with an iron fist. Not only that, but it’s been at least 400 years since God has spoken to his people, giving them any indication that hope was coming near.

Zechariah is childless. Unsure of what he has to do to pass on his priestly legacy, but then he gets hope. An answer to their prayers and an answer to God’s silence. God will provide Zechariah and Elizabeth with a son, John the Baptist, and this son will have the spirit and power of Elijah, one of the great prophets of the Old Testament.

See, that’s what prophets in the Old Testament do. They look behind at God’s Past faithfulness and promises in order to look ahead towards God’s promised future. Which is exactly what Zechariah’s son John is going to do. They’re going to give birth to a prophet, one who’s going to continue the biblical story and then bring it to its climax.

The last prophet before the promised anointed one comes, Jesus, the Messiah himself. John the Baptist will prepare the way for Jesus, meaning he’s going to remind the people of God’s promise to restore the world and invite them to live in that reality here and now by repenting, which means aligning themselves with the rule and reign of the coming King, and then being baptized as a sign of that allegiance.

All of God’s Old Testament prophecies are about to be fulfilled, and it’s going Zachariah. How should he respond? Transcendent and heavenly hope come clashing here with the immediate and observable daily life of an old priest. Heaven and earth colliding once again in the temple. The fulfillment of God’s promises to his people reaching back centuries was about to unfold before Zechariah’s own eyes.

Zechariah, a priest whose entire life has been oriented around these very promises of Yahweh, and he almost misses it. How can I know this? Zechariah said to the literal angel standing in front of him. Next Herod. If we go to Matthew’s, uh, telling of the gospel story, the beginning of the Christmas story, he gives us an introduction to the Jewish King Herod.

So Matthew chapter two, starting in verse one, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod, wise men from the East arrived in Jerusalem saying, where is he who has been born King of the Jews? For we saw his star at its rising and have come to worship him. When King Herod heard this, he was deeply disturbed and all Jerusalem with him.

So he assembled all the chief priests and scribes of the people and asked them where the Christ would be born. In Bethlehem of Judea, they told him, because this is what was written by the prophet. And you Bethlehem in the land of Judah are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, because out of you will come a ruler.

who will shepherd my people Israel. Then Herod secretly summoned the wise men and asked them to exact the exact time the star appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, go and search carefully for the child. When you find him report back to me so that I too can go and worship him. See, like the prophets in the Old Testament, there was another ancient vocation that was meant to point ahead to God’s future promises.

And in the garden, when the world was good and there was no need for hope, Adam and Eve were royalty. Uh, Genesis 27 tells us that they were made in the image of God, which is a phrase that scholars and pastors, academics, theologians, philosophers, even sociologists have debated the meaning of, uh, for years.

But among its many meanings, uh, one meaning is this. This is royalty language. To be made in the image of God was to be made into the image of king, to extend the rule and reign of the king. Adam and Eve were put in the garden as representatives of God’s rule and reign over creation. They were co rulers with Yahweh himself.

But again, instead of wielding their shared authority to spread goodness, they spread evil and oppression. That oppression spreads and extends from Genesis 4 all the way to the Gospels when God’s people are under the oppression of the Roman Empire, humans, again, wielding their God given rule and reign to oppress others.

Now, throughout the Old Testament, as God’s people struggled against other nations, they wanted a king. And they didn’t want their God’s promised Messiah in the future. They were fine to wait for that. What they really wanted, though, was someone to rule over them here and now. So they got a few. Kings came and went, each one failing to fully save God’s people and represent God’s good rule, reign, rule and reign to the rest of the world.

Some of them were really good kings. Some of them were, a lot of them were really bad kings. All of them failed miserably. By the time we get to Herod, we get a false king, ruling over God’s people again by way of oppression, reputation, power, and fear. Now Herod the Great was an architect. He was a builder of massive structures in great cities.

He was a renovator, an inventor, building things like the aqueduct system, which revolutionized how people got water in the time and place that he was ruling in. People knew about him. But he was also a fraud. He wasn’t even really Jewish. He was just given power by the Romans to keep the Jews in line. And that’s exactly what he did.

Again, ruling by reputation, power, and fear. So what happens when he hears about the true King, the coming Jewish Messiah, about hope for the world, he gets scared. Right, he’s afraid. What should give him hope drives him to fear. And he’s so afraid of this future king subverting his own rule and reign, that he’s willing to tarnish his legacy as a king who built great structures and cities to become a king, so insecure about his power and reputation that he commits infanticide just a few verses later, ordering the massacre of Jewish boys for fear that one of them might grow up to overthrow his rule as king over the Jews.

Now, how should Herod have responded to the wise men who reveal that the Jews promised Messiah was to be born? What would it have looked like for Herod, instead of fighting God’s promises, to instead participate in them? To use his earthly power and authority to point and lead people to a true and better kingdom, to use his role as king to bring God’s promised future into the present by ruling generously, seeking the well being of the people, providing for those in need.

What would have been like for Herod to see his role as a part of the larger story that God is writing? What would it have looked like for Herod to respond to hope?

Lastly, Mary. Jumping back to Luke chapter 1, verse 28. And the angel came to her and said, Greetings, favored woman, the Lord is with you. But she, meaning Mary, was deeply troubled by this statement, wondering what kind of greeting this could be. Then the angel told her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.

Now listen, you will conceive and give birth to a son and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever and his kingdom will have no end. Mary asked the angel, how can this be since I have not had sexual relations with a man?

The angel replied to her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the Holy One to be born will also, will be called the Son of God. And consider your relative, Elizabeth. Even she has conceived a son in her old age. And this is the sixth month for her, who is called Childless.

For nothing will be impossible with God. I’m the Lord’s servant, said Mary. May it be done to me according to your word. Then the angel left her.

So this is really where the Christmas story begins. I’ve noticed the angel didn’t give the announcement of the birth of the long awaited anointed one, the Messiah in the middle of the temple to Zachariah, the center of the holy place for God’s people. The angel didn’t go to the courts of the powerful fraudulent King Herod.

The angel comes here. In the middle of nowhere to a girl named Mary who is so ordinary that she’s taken back by the mere presence of the angel. And at first it seems like she expresses the same doubt as Zechariah. She says, how can I be sure? How do I know this is gonna, how is this gonna happen? Now it’s subtle, but it’s not quite the same as Zechariah’s doubt.

Zechariah expressed doubt, he wanted a sign. Mary just said yes and wanted to know how.

And so in faithfulness. She accepts God’s invitation to play a role in the story. I am the Lord’s servant, she says. May it happen to me as you’ve said. To borrow from author Dan Darling, here’s what Mary is saying yes to in this moment. She’s saying yes to the social stigma of being pregnant before being married.

She’s saying yes to To the pressure of not just keeping the Messiah alive, but also raising him well. You ever think about that? You ever think, I’m sure Mary trusted God’s providence, but imagine Jesus running around his, uh, earthly father’s carpentry shop, touching knives and utensils and things that probably made Mary’s heart beat as she’s wondering, like, I got to keep that guy alive.

That’s the hope of our people and not just that, but raising him well to treat others kindly. I don’t know what Jesus was like as a kid, but I mean, toddlers are toddlers. I don’t know. Sinless, yes. Stressful, yes. She’s saying yes to seeing her son heal, teach, and restore, but also yes to seeing her son get mocked and ridiculed, beaten, and ultimately murdered.

Why does she do it? Because Mary responds to hope. She takes what God has just promised through the angel to her, Gabriel, here now, and she reorients her life around that promised future. Now, just a few verses later, Mary gives this song of praise, what’s often called in Latin, the Magnificat. It’s a song of revolution, and it’s one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible.

Here’s what she says. My soul praises the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior. Because he has looked with favor on the humble condition of his servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed because the mighty one has done great things for me and his name is holy.

His mercy is from generation to generation on those who fear him. He has done mighty deeds with his arm. He has scattered the proud because of the thoughts of their hearts. He has toppled the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly. He has satisfied the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped to serve in Israel, remembering his mercy to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he spoke to our ancestors.

Now has any of that happened yet?

I mean, some of it, yeah, God has done mighty deeds, but at this time when Mary is living, uh, the proud, the mighty. The empires are still on their thrones. The lowly are still in need, not being fed and given the things that God has promised to give them yet. She’s writing this as if it’s already happened because she’s reorienting her life around God’s promised future.

After Jesus is born, the angels famously appear to a group of shepherds in the middle of the night and share what God is about to do in the story. Redeem the world through the birth of the Messiah. And those shepherds hear that good news that there’s an answer to sin, Satan, and death, and that it’s happening soon, they go and they visit Jesus and they share what they’ve learned about the Messiah with Mary.

Here’s how she responds in Luke chapter two, verse 19, Mary was treasuring up all these things in her heart and meditating on them. Um, this is what biblical hope is about. This is what Mary does. She responds to hope faithfully. She takes what God has promised her in the future, treasures them in her heart, meditating on them, orienting her life around them.

To hope is to keep God’s promised future at the forefront of our minds. To recall God’s past faithfulness to us and to hold it in our hearts and our minds in seasons of success and fruitfulness and in seasons of doubt and despair. In times of celebration and in times of suffering when we get a yes to the things that we’ve held before God in prayer and when we get a no to our deepest longings or worse, silence.

To hope is to hold God to his word. That the world will be restored, that evil will, evil done by us, to us, and around us will be eradicated, and our deepest longings will be fulfilled.

So who are you in this story? How do you respond to hope? Are you Zechariah the Realist? See, like Zechariah, I think some of us live our lives with our heads down, stuck in the routine of daily life, only concerned with what’s real and what’s immediate. We’re so consumed by what’s going on around us, what’s measurable, what’s observable, that if hope were to break through and the transcendent power and presence of God himself was revealed in our lives, we wouldn’t even notice it.

Call it doubt, call it cynicism or skepticism, call it secularism, realism, whatever you want, the bottom line, some of us don’t even have a category for biblical hope based on a promise that’s so real and concrete we’re able to see our present circumstances in light of a future that’s not even here yet.

Some of us have been so disillusioned with hopelessness, so many no’s from God, we’ve been beaten ups by the world so much our lives are defined by hopelessness that if an angel stood before us. A literal angel that we saw with our very eyes, we would say, how can I trust you?

So what do we do if this is us? Well, we remind ourselves of the story. We tell and we retell ourselves of God’s promises and past faithfulness as a way to bring God’s planned future into the present. This is exactly what Mary does. We do our daily tasks with a hopeful expectation that the transcendence of God can break through the mundane at any moment.

We keep doing the things that God has called us to do. Normal life, boring, and routine, but with a posture of expectation. Expectation that the power and presence of God could break through the normalcy of our schedules and soccer practices and work, presentations and business meetings and house chores and commuting time and bedtime routines.

That we could be reminded of the story and then see our daily tasks in light of our eternal future. That hope could redirect our boredom, our suffering, our sorrow, our grief, and point it to the future. To hope is to remind ourselves of the promise, Jesus has come from heaven to earth once, he will come again.

Are you Herod, the fatalist? Again, what would it have been like if Herod had chosen, instead of fighting God, to participate in what God was doing to fulfill his promise to redeem the world? To play a part in the story? For some of us, that’s the invitation. To give up control, to stop fighting, to repent from our sins, and to join in on what God is actually doing.

To see our role in the story and choose to play our part, to use what God has generously given us, our resources, our time, our wealth, our abilities, to bless those around us as a way of bringing God’s promised future provision here and now into the present. To take the hope that we place in earthly rulers, governments, political parties, and presidents and instead redirect it to a greater end.

Eugene Peterson puts it this way, Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It’s not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It’s not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It’s the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations of scurrying and worrying.

And hoping is not dreaming. It’s not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time.

It’s the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God, but bullying God. See, hope requires patience. If it’s about anticipating God’s promised future, then it’s not something that we can force into the present by our own power.

Like Herod, I think many of us miss what God could be doing in us, through us, and around us because we’re too focused on building up for ourselves treasures, legacies, reputations, little kingdoms as a way to cope with life now as it is instead of looking ahead to life as it could be. Are you Mary, the faithful?

Maybe you’re holding on to a promise of God, but you are stuck in the waiting. This is what Advent is really about, waiting. Looking ahead to when Jesus comes and renews the broken world we live in and contribute to. But in the meantime, waiting. Waiting with hope. Hope that one day the sins that we still battle won’t have to be battled anymore.

The addictions that we’re enslaved to will be freed from the unanswered prayers and not yets that God has given us will be met with a resounding yes from God himself. And so we wait with hope. We longingly await Jesus second coming when God will right all the world’s wrongs and put the world back to its original state by bringing together heaven and earth in full.

Our deepest longings will be fulfilled, all of our prayers answered, and the malaise of living in the middle of an unfinished story will be cured. Because of this future hope, Advent is a time of waiting, but it’s also a time of hope and celebration. We joyfully and choose to orient our lives around the end of the story, keeping God’s future promises at the front of our minds.

And so as we enter into the Christmas season, as we gather with friends and family, we share meals, we give generously, we play and laugh, we buy gifts, we receive gifts, we do this as a foretaste of our future. When Jesus will come again to fully rule and reign, we wait with hope. So why don’t we stand and respond.