Days to Come: 2022 Advent Sermon Seeds Series
In the days to come
Isaiah 2:2 CEB
the mountain of the LORD’s house
will be the highest of the mountains.
It will be lifted above the hills;
peoples will stream to it.
Advent celebrates anticipation. It reminds us that the days to come offer promise and a future with possibilities. We remember days of our past, heritage, and history as a testimony to the evolution of time and circumstance:
“One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along ,that while we need to be reassured of God’s arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is God’s grace that gives us that faith. As with all spiritual knowledge, two things are true, and equally true, at once. The mind can’t grasp paradox; it is the knowledge of the soul.”
― Michelle Blake
Anticipation is best accompanied by preparatory action. How do we respond to the confession that Christ has come, Christ has risen, Christ will come again? How shall we ready ourselves and participate in the coming of Christ in the world?
Let’s explore these possibilities this Advent season!
Days to Come
November 27, 2022: Matthew 24:36-44 | “Stay Alert” | Sermon Seed
December 4, 2022: Isaiah 11:1-10 | “Stand as a Signal” | Sermon Seed
December 11, 2022: James 5:7-10 | “Strengthen Your Resolve” | Sermon Seed
December 18, 2022: Isaiah 7:10-16 | “Ask a Sign | Sermon Seed
“Anticipation lifts the heart. Desire is created to be fulfilled – perhaps not all at once, more likely in slow stages. Isaiah uttered his prophetic words about the renewal of the natural Creation into a wilderness of spiritual barrenness and thirst. For him, and for many other Old Testament seers, the vacuum of dry indifference into which he spoke was not yet a place of fulfillment. Yet the promise of God through this human mouthpiece (and the word “promise” always holds a kind of certainty) was verdant with hope, a kind of greenness and glory. A softening of hard-heartedness, a lively expectation, would herald the coming of Messiah. And once again, in this season of Advent, the same promise for the same Anointed One is coming closer.”
― Luci Shaw
The Rev. Dr. Cheryl A. Lindsay, Minister for Worship and Theology (lindsayc@ucc.org), also serves as a local church pastor and worship scholar-practitioner with a particular interest in the proclamation of the word in gathered communities.