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Text: 2 Peter 3:8-14
(Isaiah 40:1-11) 2 Advent Home for the Holidays In the name
of Him who is called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting
Father, and the Prince of Peace, dear friends in Christ: We are now, as I’m sure you know, in what is
the busiest travel time of the year.
During the period that begins right before Thanksgiving and goes through
a few days after New Year’s, more people we be using
our airways, railways, and highways than at any other time of the year. Now, it’s true that overall more people travel
during the summer months, but their number is spread out over a greater period
of time, so there’s not such a spike in traffic. And there’s another big difference: in the summer, most people are traveling on
vacation – they are trying to get away from it all for a while. They want to relax, or see new things and
visit places they have not been before.
Travel at this time of year is for a different reason: most people traveling now are not trying to
get away; they are seeking to return home. Which may seem kind of strange: why would anyone have to travel to get
home? The obvious answer is that an
awful lot of people (perhaps most) do not live at a place that they consider to
be their home. And that may be a little hard for
some to understand. I know some of you
live on century farms; many others come from families that been around this
area for generations. There’s no question
about it: for some you, this is
home. But in our country, you are the
exception. Most Americans are
transplants living in cities and suburbs.
They have shallow roots and they move fairly frequently. For the most part, they do not think of where
they live as home. When I served
in the military, I worked among entire communities of
people in which no one was really home (hmm … “nobody’s home in the
Army” – that works on two levels, doesn’t it?). No, home was that someplace special; it’s
where everyone wanted to be for the holidays. And it’s funny, even people who
have never had a place to call home know what one is and long for
it. It’s something that exists in their
minds that they hope to find one day.
Similarly, our immigrant ancestors left the lands of their birth and
heritage to come here; but what were they looking for? I submit that they weren’t looking for a
frontier to tame so much as they were searching for a place to call home. So we understand that home is much more than
a house, or a certain place where you grew up or spent a lot of time. Home is an ideal. It’s a concept – an extremely desirable
one. It’s a place where you feel you
belong. It’s where there is a sense of
permanence and security. It’s where
there are the people you love and cherish.
It’s where are the things, sights, sounds,
smells, tastes, and customs that all go together and say, “This is right. This is how things are supposed to be. This is where I am comfortable. This is where I should be.” Now, the people who lived in
ancient times were a whole lot less mobile than we are. They really stayed put in one place. And as a consequence, they had an especially
strongly developed sense of home. They
were part of the land. They knew where
they belonged, and every rock and tree of their home was precious to them. And for no ancient people was this truer than
for God’s chosen people, the Jews. The
Lord himself had selected their homeland for them. And after long years of promise, and through
mighty wonders and miraculously won battles, he had settled them there in this
land flowing with milk and honey. This
was their home. And for seven hundred
years or so, they lived in it. Sure,
there were ups and downs, good times and bad – usually directly related to the
people’s relative faithfulness to the Lord.
When they recognized and worshipped him, things went well: good harvests, peace, general
prosperity. When they turned to sin and
idolatry, things would get bad:
droughts, invading armies, that sort of thing. But still, this land was always their
home. It was God’s gift to them, and so it
was the one thing they thought they could always count on. Unfortunately, over time, the
periods of their faithfulness became fewer and farther between; and the periods
of sin and idolatry became more and more the standard – each time sinking to
new depths of depravity. Finally the
Lord said to them, “If you keep this up, instead of just making life difficult
for you so that you turn back to me, I’m going to take your home away. I’m going to make you exiles in a foreign
land.” Now, in our day and age, the idea
of sending someone into exile is not very familiar. We jail our criminals. We lock them up. But in the ancient world, exile was the form
of punishment one step down from the death penalty. And usually it was individuals who were
exiled. Somebody commits a serious
crime, not so grave that it required his life in payment, and they’d hand down
the sentence: “You’re exiled.” And what that meant was that you had to go
away and not come near your homeland ever again. You were cast out: forbidden to see your loved ones, and
deprived of the privilege of enjoying the pleasures and comforts of home and
all the things that were precious to you.
You were condemned to a life of being a stranger in a foreign land. So, instead of taking your life, the idea was
to take away the things that made your life worth living. And now, because he was completely
exasperated on account of his people’s persistent faithlessness, the Lord
threatened to exile the entire lot of them.
The whole nation of Jews would be cast out of their homeland if they
refused to repent and return to the Lord.
Sadly, this threat was not enough to get them to respond, and so the
Lord was forced to make good on it.
Beginning in 604 BC, the Lord sent in the armies of It is to them, the exiled Jews,
that the prophecy of Isaiah that we heard as this morning’s Old Testament
reading was initially addressed. And
it’s interesting because it was written to them more than one hundred years
before their exile began. The Lord had
already foreseen their exile, and wanted to give them a message of hope well in
advance. It’s a message of comfort and
good news. It’s a promise to bring them
back home again when the penalty of their sin had been paid. But, now, place yourself in the
role of these exiles. Remember, the
exile lasted around sixty years. What
that means is that toward the end of it, only the oldest folks would have any
memories at all of having been home in the Promised Land. And of those, the ones who were younger than
seventy would only have had vague, childhood memories of it. The vast majority of the exiles would have
been the children, grandchildren, and perhaps even the great-grandchildren of
those who had been sent away. They’d
never seen their homeland. All they had
were stories of a place the old folks called home. And by now they were pretty well settled
where they were. Sure, things had been
rough at first; but what had been a refugee camp had by now become their own
small city. They had built homes,
learned the local language, and started their own businesses; they were well on
their way to becoming assimilated into the life and culture of Now, if you can appreciate this
tension between those old die-hards who wanted to trust the words of the
prophet, and not sink their roots too deeply in Babylon, and those who were
more … what shall we say? Practical? Realistic? Who felt
that they should forget the pie-in-the-sky stuff and make the most of things
where they were – then you can better understand what St. Peter is saying to us
in today’s Epistle lesson. My friends, we are the
exiles. We are the ones living as
strangers in a foreign land. Our true
home is in St. Peter urges us not to forget
that fact. In the verses right before
the reading we heard, he warns that in the last days people will be saying,
“Forget this stuff about Christ coming back and taking us to heaven. We’ve waited a long time, and he hasn’t
come. Get over it: it ain’t gonna happen. This is the only home we have. This is where we live and die, and that’s the
end of it; so we might as well make the most of it, and concentrate on being as
happy and comfortable as we can.” Now, I know that at some level we
would all say, “No, that’s not right. I
really do expect Christ to return one day.
I believe in the resurrection of dead, and the life everlasting. I know that one day I’m going home.” We’d all say that. But Peter goes on to ask the question,
“Knowing what you do about the future, how should you be living your
life now?” Oh, he really knows how to
hit us where it hurts. You say you
believe that this is not your home; but do your actions, your interests, the
way you spend your time, your investments for the future, your plans, hopes,
and dreams … do they reveal a different set of beliefs? They say that, “Home is where the heart
is.” So where’s your heart? On the things above, or the
things below? And here we all stand convicted,
don’t we? Because if we really believed,
as St. Peter says, we’d be living holy and godly lives as we look forward to
the day of the Lord and speed its coming.
We’d be in a rush to share the good news with our friends and neighbors,
knowing that the time is short. We’d be
making every effort to be found spotless, blameless, and at peace with God at
all times. Instead, we just sort of plod
along, business as usual, falling for every worldly distraction and temptation
that comes floating by. What it reveals
is that we really don’t believe. We are
as faithless and inconsistent as the Jews the Lord sent into exile so many
years ago. As so it is to us that Isaiah
speaks: “Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God. Speak tenderly to [them],
and proclaim to [them] that their hard service has been completed, that their
sin has been paid for.” Yes, all paid
for: even the sin of unbelief. And to help us overcome our
unbelief, the Lord gives us proof of his goodwill. We sang in that last hymn, “That all people
see the token that God’s word is never broken.”
What token of proof or sign is it taking about? I can give you a whole list of them. For the Jews in exile it was the
fall of the mighty Babylonian empire. In
one night the thought-to-be impregnable walls of its capital city were
breached, and the empire collapsed. In
less than a year the new king of But we have greater signs than
that. We have the sign of a virgin who
conceived a child by the power of God’s Holy Spirit. We have the sign of a star in the east
proclaiming the Savior’s birth. We have
the sign of angels telling shepherds and singing his praise. We have the sign of the Holy Spirit
descending as a dove upon him, and the voice of the Father saying, “This is my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Above all, we have the sign of the cross on which the Savior died for
our sin, and the sign of the empty tomb that tells us that his sacrifice for us
was accepted. And we have the sign of
his ascension, that tells us that even now he is
interceding for us at his Father’s right hand, and he will continue to do so
until he comes again in glory. And until he comes, he has given
us other signs. He has given us the sign
of Holy Baptism by which he cleanses us and makes us the temple of his Holy
Spirit. It’s a sign we can revisit each
day as we come to him in repentance. And
he has given us the sign of his Supper by which he brings us into personal
contact with him in a way that says with unmistakable clarity, “My death is for
you. My forgiveness is for you.” And these signs, together with his Word tell
us, “My life is for you – and because I live, you also will live forever
with me in Paradise, your true home.” Now, those are words of comfort
and hope to people living in exile. They
say, “Be ready. I’m coming to take you
home.” May God grant us the grace to
live by them, as we wait with eager expectation for the day of the Lord, and so
speed its coming. In Jesus name. Amen. Soli Deo Gloria! |
