Wishful Thinking? Or Hope Born of a Promise?

We enter into the season of Advent today, using for our Biblical text one of the familiar passages for this time of year from the book of the Prophet Isaiah.  While this text and others like it (for example, Isaiah 7:14 or Hosea 11:1) have found their way into our hearts through well-worn pathways of Christmas tradition, they were not at the time of their writing prophecies about Jesus, the coming Messiah.  There was a local situation into which the Prophet spoke, and it is through the exploration of that local situation that we find connections not only to Jesus in His time but to our lives today as well.  And we find that the promise God made to respond to the plight of God’s people by showing up among them can engender hope in us as surely as it did in those of Isaiah’s time so many centuries ago.

We'll be using Isaiah 9:1-4, 6-7 to ground the message for this coming Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012.  I'm skipping verse 5 because I don't think the graphic descriptions of the bloody spoils of war add a whole lot to the sense of the passage and, for me at least, distract.  

What I want to do is explore the local situation into which "First Isaiah" wrote and draw a few parallels between that setting, the setting into which Jesus was born, and our own and the words of hope that Isaiah 9 were to all who lived (and live now) in "lands of deep darkness".  The trick is going to be to just touch on the negative settings so that the Promise is in much greater relief by the end of the sermon than the dire circumstances it was made to relieve.  

We have communion this Sunday, and I'll be singing "The Promise" by Michael Card during communion as a punctuation mark to the message.

As always, your comments and feedback are welcome!

Pastor Steve
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