Well, good morning everybody. If I haven't mentioned it yet, my name is Greg. I'm one
of the pastors here at the house and today is in fact the first Sunday of Advent and
we are talking about hope. And if you don't mind, I'm going to get moving. I want to jump
straight into the scripture that we're going to read for the day. And so it's in the book
of Isaiah, which is in the Hebrew or older Testament in the first half of the Bible that
we have. If you see Song of Solomon and then it goes Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, that's
the neighborhood that it is in. If you don't have a Bible, feel free to grab one on your
way home. We have them out on the bookshelf. You can take one or download one from any
of the digital app stores. So we're going to be in Isaiah chapter nine. We have a tradition
of giving the scriptures our full attention while we read them. And so you can do that
any number of ways. You can do so by standing with me or sitting with your heart turned
towards God, however you prefer. But those who would like to stand, please stand with
me as you are able. All right. Isaiah nine, starting in verse six says this, for to us
a child is born, to us a son is given and the government will be on his shoulders and
he will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, Prince of peace. Of
the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's
throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness
from that time on and forever. Let's pray. God of every tribe, every tongue, every color,
every nation, we thank you for the scriptures that this particular book and chapter has
existed since 600, 800 years before Jesus. We thank you that it has persisted. We still
have it today and I pray that whatever you have for us to learn, pray that it would stick.
It would become a part of the framework of our faith that our faith would become stronger,
that we would become more like your son. Amen. Thanks. I can have a seat. So this is a passage
of hope from Isaiah, but I actually want to back up for a second. We asked the question,
do you have a good sense of time? And I actually think that right now would be a great time
for us to actually find out. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a little
experiment, okay? So what we're going to do is in a second I'm going to ask Liam, who's
in the office, run in the computer. I'm going to ask him to click on a, there's a five-minute
timer. Don't worry, it's not going to take five minutes. It's just the best option. And
he's going to click on that five-minute timer and you're going to see the five and then
you're going to see it start counting down. And what I want everyone to do is as soon
as you see the first second click by, I want you to close your eyes and I want you to open
your eyes when you think it's been one minute. So you're trying to open your eyes when it's
hitting four, four minutes, okay? Because it starts as five minutes and once we get there,
I'll also be like, all right, everyone open your eyes if anyone happens to still be holding
their eyes shut. Ready Liam? All right, let's pop that up there. Ready? You may have to
clear the graphic first. Here we go. All right, close them.
Okay.
All of our eyes open.
All right, you can stop it Liam. How close were you? Easy enough, right? Okay, Greg,
why are we doing a countdown experiment? I'll tell you, because today is the first sunny
of Advent and the word Advent just means arrival. And if there's an arrival, then there's almost
always anticipation and waiting and time. And I wonder if how we think about time or
we feel time impacts our hope. In the Advent of Jesus, time and waiting and hope has two
reasons. First, because Advent is meant to remind us of how long the Israelites waited
for a Messiah in the first place. And then secondly, it's meant to remind us now that
we are waiting for Jesus to arrive again in the context of Orthodox Christianity. Now
it's safe to say that most of us probably know that it's been 2,000 years since the
last ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. That's how long that we collectively as Christians
have been waiting. But those years are actually layered onto the years that the Israelites
had already been waiting. And it's probably also safe to say that most of us are unfamiliar
with the period of waiting that happened before Jesus. So here's a brief history of the Israelites
and their waiting. Around 1800 BCE, BCE just means before the common era, used to be just
before Christ. And then they realized, well, not everyone believes in Jesus, and so maybe
we should come up with something else, right? So before the common era, 1800 years before
that, 3,800 years ago from now, is where in the Bible it begins describing Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob, nearly 4,000 years ago. 500 years after that, around 1300 BCE, Moses is called
by God to go and free his people from their 400 years of enslavement in Egypt. 300 years
after that, around 1000 BCE, the nation asks God for their first king. Those of you who
are like Bible nerds have already thought of his name in your head, King Saul, and then
King David, and then his son, King Solomon. So if you're keeping track, this is about
3,000 years ago. After Solomon, things start to fall apart again. His father, King David,
had united the southern and the northern kingdom, all 12 tribes of Israel, into one united
kingdom. But after Solomon, the kingdoms break up again because of idolatry, because of power
struggles, even because of a lot of the bad things that Solomon had begun in his lifetime.
The 10 tribes in the north, when they split up, the 10 in the north keep the name Israel,
the 2 in the south take the name Judah. The south is where Jerusalem was. But they would
find out that they had been better together. Because around 740 BCE, Isaiah, which we read
from, begins prophesying that Israel would be overthrown and sent into exile because
of how they had failed to follow the Lord, and particularly because of the way the leaders
had failed to follow the Lord. But he also said, one day there will be this kind of Messiah
that would reign forever on the throne of King David, the kingdom of peace. And then
it began. In 721 BCE, the Assyrians overthrow the northern kingdom. The 10 tribes are kicked
out of their land, they are exiled, they become known as the diaspora, the 10 lost tribes.
And even to this day, it is believed that those 10 tribes never completely returned
to the land. Isaiah's first prophecy of being defeated is happening. So the waiting for
Messiah begins. Now when the Assyrians defeated the north kingdom, they attempted to defeat
the south as well, but the southern kingdoms were able to defend Jerusalem and they maintained
their independence until 135 years later. In 586 BCE, when the Babylonians came in and
defeated the Assyrians in the north and the Israelites in the south, destroying Jerusalem.
And the Babylonians, just like the Assyrians, sent the southern Israelites into exile out
of their land. What I've been describing here, this is what an old friend of mine would call
extreme home makeover empire edition, because it was just like one empire after another.
And then after this, only 50 years later, what happens is Persia comes in and defeats
Babylon. Another years after that, Greece takes over in 332. Then for the first time
in 444 years in the year 142, 142 years before Christ, there was a Jewish revolt led by the
Maccabees. Some of you have heard of that. The Festival of Lights has its connection and
roots back to the Maccabee revolt. The Jews once again controlled Jerusalem. Was this
their Messiah moment? Well, it only lasted 79 years until 63 BCE when the Romans defeated
the Jewish armies. Then the Romans would rule the region longer than anyone. They would
control that entire region for 539 years. The entire Roman Empire in its totality lasted
1101 years. So when Americans get all huffy about being the best country ever, Rome has
been beaten by like 850 years. They were the boss. Now by the time that Jesus was born
in or around 2 BCE, his people had been under the rule of five different empires. The Assyrians,
the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans. There won't be a test later, don't
worry. In the words of Isaiah, the promise of a Messiah, the promise of hope had been
hanging in the air for 720 years. 720 years, mostly under the subjugation of other nations.
720 years of being kicked out of their own land. 720 years of waiting and testing hope.
Let me back up again. When we did that experiment earlier, some of us, some of us we opened
our eyes a few seconds early. Some of us opened our eyes right at one minute. Others, we opened
our eyes a little late, very late. The truth is, there's a lot more to that experiment
than just counting time. When I was preparing this message, I wanted to look into how our
brains perceive time. I found something fascinating. Dr. Heather Berland wanted to know how accurate
humans are at perceiving the passage of time. And so she did this simple timing experiment
with people that had no known brain injuries and with people that had something called
orbital frontal cortex lesions. The frontal orbital is this part of your brain that makes
all these really important decisions. But also for context, if you have a brain injury
there, it affects your emotions, it affects your behavior, and it can affect how impulsive
you are. So the experiment was simple. She had people try and time exactly nine seconds.
She distracted them a little so they weren't able just to count one, two, three, four,
five. What she found was really interesting. Let me read part of this. This is what the
report said. Participants with orbital frontal cortex damage would stop her at almost exactly
90 seconds, indicating a more accurate perception of time. More accurate. Then she found out
that participants without these brain injuries tended to let a few more, even 95 or 100 seconds
pass before stopping her, indicating a slightly slower perception of time. One of the conclusions
that can be made here is that while this particular kind of brain injury seems to make people
perceive time more accurately, which I think is surprising to some people when you read
that, the other side of that is that it at least implies that the uninjured brain is
in less of a hurry. Made me wonder, beyond brain injuries, what about our hearts? What
about our hopes? What if our brain is fine, but our hopes are damaged? What about the
traumas we experience when our prayers seem to go unanswered? Does hope deferred year
after year have a way of compounding impatience, making us count a little faster with God?
Made me think about how time, maybe you've all experienced this, how time just seemed
so slow when you were a kid. Now the older I get, it's like the years are just racing
past. And I wondered if God can heal our hope. And I remembered 2 Corinthians 5 17 where
Paul tells us, therefore if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old is gone,
the new is here. Romans 12 2, Paul says, we can be transformed by the renewing of our
minds. And 1 Corinthians 2 16 where he says, but we have the mind of Christ. I remember
that Isaiah 55 quotes God saying, as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. There is a promise in
Jesus that our minds, that our thinking, that our thoughts can be healed. I thought if we
can be made new, if we can have the mind of Christ, if we can share in the way that God
thinks, then we can learn again to put our timing down, learn to count like God. Then
I remembered in Psalm 90, verse 4 where Moses says, a thousand years in your sight is like
a day that has just gone by or like a watch in the night. And in 2 Peter 3 8 when Paul
says, beloved, do not let this one thing escape your notice. With the Lord a day is like a
thousand years. A thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his
promise as some understand slowness. I think our way of thinking, our way of waiting, our
way of counting and keeping track of time, our way of hoping can be healed. Maybe, maybe
you need your hope healed today. So I was like, close this up. There's just two more
things I want to say about time and how we perceive it. About two years ago I started
helping out at the hospital. There was something wrong with me. It was like the height of the
neck. And Trish Britton, Pastor Chris's wife, emailed me saying that they were looking for
more chaplains and I thought, you know, what a better time to go work in the hospital.
But this last week I learned something new about being a chaplain. It turns out that
research shows when it comes to patients and caregivers like nurses and doctors and chaplains,
they found that when patients have a caregiver that will sit down with them, everything else
being exactly the same. But if the caregiver sits down with the patient, the patient will
perceive that visit lasting five times longer than it did. Five times. Some of us have heard
that phrase, the time is a construct. Like, there's something that's happening. I wonder
if some of us just need someone to sit down with us. To slow down, to just be present
and watch God multiply our hope in this setting. Because if you have this much left, maybe
someone would sit with you, it would be multiplied by five. Some of us need to stop and be the
one that sits down with someone else. And last, I want to acknowledge, I'm not saying
that waiting is easy. I'm not saying that hope is cheap or that it's magic. I am saying
that how we perceive time isn't as sure as we think it is. And there's plenty of proof.
There's another experiment I want to tell you about. In this one, the doctor took two
different groups of people, well, actually many different groups of people. There was
no, like, mental or brain injuries involved. It was just people. And what they would do
is they would put them in a room and they would give them basically like an assignment,
a task to do. Something like handing them a paper and saying, I need you to underline
every time that there's a double letter, like the two T's and the word letter or the two
L's and all. And we're going to give you ten minutes to do it and we're going to see if
you can underline all of them. And then the person leading the experiment would say, okay,
click ten minutes and leave the room, making sure that they saw that the only timer left
and that had been started. And what would happen is that then they would go back in
after ten minutes and say, okay, it's done. It's been ten minutes. And then for other
groups they would go in after twenty minutes and go in and say, all right, it's been ten
minutes. Other groups they would go in after five minutes and say, okay, it's been ten
minutes. Other groups they would go in after ten minutes and say, okay, it's been five
minutes. Other groups they would go in after twenty minutes and say, it's been five minutes.
And they found out something fascinating. Then when they had them fill out a survey
about how satisfied they were with how they did, the people that were most satisfied,
whether it had been five, ten, or twenty minutes, in reality, the most satisfied people were
the ones that had been told it had only been five minutes. Just being told, just being
told, lied to, just being told that it was shorter than it was made them feel better.
It reminded me of 2 Corinthians 4 where Paul says, Therefore we do not lose heart, though
our outer self is wasting away, yet our inner self is being renewed day by day, for our
light and momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory that is
far beyond comparison. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.
For what is seen is only temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. And it made me think
of something beautiful. I believe there is a future advent. I believe Jesus will return
and he will make all things new. And I think that when it happens that maybe some of us
are going to ask Jesus, what took you so long? It's been thousands of years and Jesus will
look at us and say, My child, it has only been a few minutes. And we will feel better
and our hope will be satisfied. Amen. Let's pray. God, I pray that you heal our hope today.
That you take away that we keep track of time, how long hope has been deferred. And you teach
us again how to count like you. Then in the moments where it still feels like too much,
I pray that you convince our hearts that we will see you again one day. Because for you,
a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. You will tell us this long
wait has been but a moment. We will believe you. Amen.