DREAM NEW DREAMS

            There’s something about the mountains—their beauty, their mystery and in some cases, their unpredictability…They provide a vantage point, a sense of perspective that is unavailable to us otherwise.  This week, I’m going to be spending a few days in view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe, New Mexico.  If the weather cooperates, my friend Andy might even take me snow shoeing atop one of nearby peaks.  I can’t wait!

Mountains and high up places have always loomed large in the human imagination.  Olympus, Fuji, Everest… 

And it’s no different for the people of God.  For Noah it was Mount Ararat.  In the case of Moses it was Mount Sinai.  For Jesus and the disciples the Mount of Olives was an especially memorable and important place.  The prophet Isaiah has a mountain in mind too, a mountain that has yet to be climbed, from which the view has yet to be seen.  “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills, and all nations shall stream to it.”  Talk about an inspirational view.  Can it get any better than the Lord’s own mountain?

In the sense that mountains afford us a sense of perspective of helping us to see the surrounding landscape in a completely different way, mountains can play a metaphorical role in our lives too.  I mean, let’s face it, in an otherwise confusing and fearful world there are times and seasons when we long for those “high up” places to help us make sense of our lives—a place, a space, a time to consider where we’ve been and where we’re headed, to imagine new possibilities, to dream new dreams, to find hope in a new day.

            And what manner of possibilities, what sort of dreams, what kind of hope shapes our reality these days?  Another election cycle is heating up.  The first primaries are only weeks away, and the candidates are busy each of them doling out hope and promises like candy—a renewed economy, peace in the Middle East, secure borders.  And certainly there are the promise and hope that we cling to personally.  Maybe we’re hoping that despite many disappointments, that golden opportunity is just around the corner-in a new and promising career.  Or maybe we’re hoping to find that perfect person to share our life with.  Maybe it’s renewed health we’re hoping for these days or the much deserved, long overdue recognition and respect of colleagues and co-workers.  Still others of us, more of us than would care to admit perhaps, may be hoping for that big lottery payoff.  Hey, why not?  In our world, just about anything is possible. 

And that’s just it.  Even if the odds aren’t in our favor, we tend to put our hopes in what think is possible, if even a one in a million shot.  But sooner or later there comes a point when reality comes crashing in upon us, when dreams die and hope is lost.

Today marks the beginning of a new year for us as the Church, the First Sunday in Advent, new chapter, new page in our life together.  In a sense here we are standing shoulder to shoulder in a mountain kind of place surveying the landscape around us.  And what of our shared desires, dreams and hopes for this congregation?  Where are we pinning our hopes these days?  In the right program or plan that will “breathe life” into us again?  In the proverbial “quick fix” that will suddenly turn things around?  In income sufficient to meet our expenses in the year ahead?  No doubt these are uncertain and anxious times for us as a congregation, uncertainty and anxiety that we’ve lived with for a long time it seems.  How are we going to get by?  How will we survive?  They are questions on all of our minds, I suppose.  And why not?  Our hope has to be realistic, based on what we see and what we know, right?

But the message of Advent runs counter to our assumptions, to hope based on what is pragmatic, realistic and discernable from what we see and know, from our limited tale on the present.  “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house will be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.”  From dark days eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, Isaiah offers an uncertain, desolate people a word of new hope, hope that rises up in spite of present possibilities—a call to hope in a future unlike anything we could ever imagine.        

            And yet, how can we begin to imagine a future if it goes against what is humanly possible?  Or more practically speaking, how are we as God’s people going get to the place that Isaiah is talking about?  I suspect that more than anything else, it means getting out of God’s way.  See, finally the future is not in your hands or mine, or even someone else’s hands but in God’s, God alone who is the Lord of all history, past, present and future.  It’s not fate or circumstance at work in us, at the same time neither are our doubts and fears in control, but God, God who is stirring among us today, opening our blind eyes, showing us the extent of our sinfulness so that he might raise us up to new life in Christ Jesus our Lord.    

            God calls us to us to hope, not in what we can conceive, but in what God surely has in store for us and for our world.  As Advent people, we wait in hope, hope-filled expectation of the coming of God’s reign that God is going to raise up a mountain from the flatlands of our broken world and broken lives.  The old rugged cross on a hill far away is the first tectonic sign of what is to come, a world transformed not by might or sword, but by love, love that has no end.  In the meantime, we are with the house of Jacob invited to come, come and walk in the light of the Lord.  Joining together as God’s people of hope, we dare to imagine a world of peace, where instruments of war become instruments of the harvest, that all may be fed with good things.

            In hope we can live as God’s people today, full of joy, full of the promise that is ours in baptism.  We can face the future without apprehension and fear, free of the overwhelming burden of responsibility to be in control of life’s outcomes including that of our own congregation.  Freed from every burden we can finally begin to live as God intends, as those who walk in the warm brilliance of his light.  Surely it doesn’t mean we have all the answers or that we know just exactly what the weeks, the months and years ahead hold for us as a community of faith.  As the family God at Ascension, we can join together to prayerfully consider how best to use our many gifts to serve God’s mission in the world.  And with God certainly all things are possible, a light of hope and peace shining over our community in such a way that even more people may come to see and know the wonders of God’s love.   

            One blue candle lights the way for us today, a light that shines bright even as the winter darkness grows deeper.  Here today, my friends, God is with us, blazing a trail, showing us the way to everlasting peace.  Come, let us walk, walk in the light of the Lord.  Amen.