Year A, Advent Three

Theme: Hard Work

Quotes

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

When you live for a strong purpose, then hard work isn’t an option; it’s a necessity.
Steve Pavlina

Revised Common Lectionary Readings

Isaiah 35:1-10, Reconsidered

For the information of the reader: This rewrite adapts and places the traditional reading in the present tense to expose the dissonance between the promise faith always offers and what it can actually provide. By setting the promises against the current realities the world faces, it becomes easier to see how improbable they are and how inaccessible when human hearts and minds are the only things we have to bring them about. Writing it in the future tense, as the Isaiah passage was written, produces a promise that simply cannot be justified. We are the source and the agents of goodness, but we are only the potential for good. There is no promise that good will out.

The wilderness is beautiful and the dry land wonderful. The desert is bursting with life; like the crocus, it blossoms profusely and sings beauty into my eyes. The glory of our cities – London, Kiev, Kampala, Islamabad –  shines. We are no longer weak and have found our strength. We are no longer afraid.

How we had faltered and our knees buckled, our eyes were blinded, and our ears become deaf! Yet here we are, relieved that all is restored. Not only in people, but in the very earth. Waters flow clean and filled with living creatures, and streams flow in the desert; the burning sand has become a pool, and the thirsty ground is watered by springs.

We have built a pathway to the future upon which no one need walk alone or go astray. No horrors await us but those we create in the corridors of our own minds, and we know how to shelter one another from them. No traveler is unwelcome; the future is ours. As we walk there, may we sing our songs of joy and let the fears of the past fade away.  

Psalm 146:5-10; Luke 1:46b-55

James 5:7-10

Matthew 11:2-11

For complete texts, please see Vanderbilt Lectionary Resources: Revised Common Lectionary Texts

For commentary on original texts, please see Chris Haslam’s Commentary on the Revised Common Lectionary Texts

Alternate Readings

Words to Introduce the Reading(s)

Where is it you think you’re going? What is it you think you are doing? When it is you will be done? As we enter into this time of expectation, may we share our lives in tension with our dreams and may we find a way forward in hope.

Reading(s)

For the information of the Reader

Anaïs Nin was a French-born novelist whose journals gained her international acclaim long after they were written. She is now esteemed as one of the twentieth century’s leading writers

Reading

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.

Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

For the information of the Reader

Bill Maher is a TV personality best known for his acerbic wit and consistent ridicule of all forms of what he considers stupidity.

Reading

[F]reedom isn’t free. It shouldn’t be a bragging point that “Oh, I don’t get involved in politics,” as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn’t insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable.

Bill Maher, When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism

Response to the Reading

Leader: Offered as wisdom for the journey
All: May we walk in its light

Focused Moment

To be read by two speakers at the same time. Each speaker is to be understood as sharing the truth as they are experiencing it, dissonant though the two perspectives are. An image to accompany the reading is appended below.

Hymn

Forward, Humbled
_{Tune: Stuttgart}

Would that we had found the wisdom –
long ago, or far away –
sure enough to alter outcomes,
lead us to a brighter day.
Few the decades we have driven
Earth to its now mournful state.
Few the voices that had striven
to prevent our tragic fate.

Still, the matter is not finished!
Still, the children born today
build our hope, yet undiminished,
challenge us to chart the way.
Open hearts find greater courage.
Open minds plum deeper truths.
Forward, humbled, we shall manage.
Earth’s true beauty, we shall prove.

© 2022, gretta vosper

Thoughts and Additional Resources on the Week’s Theme

Standard Outline:

Theme:

Given the theme and readings, where do you want to take the message this week? When exploring it with your congregation, what is the ultimate point you wish to bring to them to consider? Think this carefully and have a good idea what you want to say before continuing.

Relevance:

The following questions are meant to help you personalize and deepen what you will be offering your community. Because you have clarified the focus of the message already, it remains central and is strengthened when imbued with or attending to the realities in the lives of those who will hear you.

• What may be happening in each or any of these constituencies that may be relevant? Be sure to allow yourself to consider each one independently of the others; on occasion, one might tend to overwhelm the others, but all are significant. Your effort is to be relevant to the people, not to list a host of connections. They are able to make their own connections
  • the congregation
  • the congregation’s neighborhood/municipality
  • your country
  • the world

Grounding:

The purpose of your message is to provide meaningful insights and inspiration in the lives of those who gather before you. Closing is often difficult if times are challenging, and most of our times seem to be. This carefully but simply constructed outline gives hearers straightforward pieces to take with them and is based on consideration for self, others, and the planet. Consider that they leave asking themselves:

• How does what I have heard today make a difference to me?
• How does it allow me to see and act differently toward others?
• How does it call me to be in relation to the planet?

Video

David Eagleman on Possibilianism.

Further Reading

Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives, by David Eagleman

Celebration of Commitment

We are thankful that our lives can come together in this place, our dreams be renewed, our possibilities laid out, unchecked. May these, our offerings, keep this work long and broad that we might create space for the joys and sorrows of living to be held, honoured, and released.

Commissioning

The world shivers imperceptibly as lives accept the shocks of truth, minds leap to new possibilities, arms reach out to embrace, hold, and make new. We live in a world we do not control and yet it is, very much, a world of our own making. Go into that world as agents of possibility, ever leaning in toward the places that need your voice, your love, your heart. And may those you meet throughout the coming days, lean in toward you with words and the healing powers of love. Go in peace.

Image(s):

All images are my own. They are included here for your ease of use and are often edited. You may also find them, unedited, on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/@grettav. Please use your own creativity to accompany readings during your service. Unsplash has thousands of royalty-free images to engage your community.

Bonus

Sermon Notes created for a previous year

• Outline a work-in-progress that is going on in your life or in the community you’re involved in – perhaps the congregation or the neighborhood; perhaps even the municipality but keep it close and something people can identify with
• explore what the plan was and the ideas that were shared as it was developing; discuss some of the features that might have been “in the wind” but never made it to the final plan – things people might have hoped for but that didn’t unfold
• discuss the difference between hope and plans: the first doesn’t require any responsibility – it puts ideas out there and checks off the great ones; the latter assumes responsibility and realizes its relationship to reality
• hope dependent upon a worldview of intervention or synchronicities – the universe will unfold as it should or our prayers will be answered, or even that familial relationships will right themselves – he’ll come to his senses
• Don Cupitt’s work on the word life taking the place of God – life will bring the people we need to have in our lives into our lives when we need them
• plans are created because of hope – because of hope’s absolutely terrible record, bad things happen:
  • hoping you don’t get pregnant when you have sex doesn’t prevent you from getting pregnant; taking precautions to ensure you don’t get pregnant – much better statistics when you plan ahead; planned parenthood;
  • hope doesn’t save your home in a flood zone; planning for a flood saves your home;
  • hoping for a financially carefree retirement doesn’t get you to retire without any cares – planning for a financially carefree retirement will help out there and then, only if you have the resources to be able to do that
  • hoping the kids will land great jobs when they grow up doesn’t make that happen – planning makes that happen
• the reading from Isaiah is originally written as a text of hope describing what will happen in the future; the rewrite is in the present tense as a way of preventing an easy pass on responsibility
• God as source of goodness, agent of goodness, and the purveyor of the promise of goodness  – just as Isaiah said; but we are letting go of hope and planning for the future – we are creating the future: we are the source of goodness, those who create it in the world and within human community, and those who can withstand the truth that there is no promise of goodness
• return to the plans you mentioned in the beginning and tell what work it has taken to get where it is today
• speak to personal aspirations and the plans that will make them real
• speak to global needs and aspirations and the hard work that will fulfill them
• we are the source of goodness – we state what is good and what is not and we have done that for ages
• we are responsible for the good that can be done in the world, in our community, in our lives; we cannot leave that to some other source – we are the agents
• but we bring no promise; we only bring potential and we only fulfill our potential with much hard work.