Yet Even Now

Sunday, December 6, 2020
Pastor Mark Aune

Joel 2:12-13, 28-29

If today’s reading from Joel sounds familiar it should be. It is usually heard in worship on Ash Wednesday which marks the beginning of Lent.

Today is the second Sunday in Advent. Lent and Advent are similar seasons of the church year. Themes of preparation, contemplation and repentance are present in Lent and Advent.

Yet for most of us, in a normal Advent, the days are filled to the brim with concerts, parties, family gatherings and school events; all piled on top of normal activities that most families over schedule themselves with each year.

Getting ready for Christmas is a sprint layered on top of a marathon of exhaustion with a large helping of stress added just for a good measure.

I had a friend share with me that in a normal December he was doing something almost every night of the month. When some people call December the silly season, there is some truth to it. We arrive at Christmas having drained our emotional and spiritual tanks and we’re running on empty by the time Jesus shows up in Bethlehem.

But this year is different isn’t it. You don’t need me to tell you that. Everyday we wake up to different. Perhaps you are already running on empty.

How are you coping?

How are you holding up as the darkness gets darker and much of what you look forward to in this marvelous month of December and season of Advent won’t be the same?

The prophet Joel has a word for you today. An important word.

Joel is a prophet in the post exilic period for the people of Israel. They have returned from exile in Babylon, returned to the land and the place where their house of worship once stood.

Joel is warning the people about a natural disaster that is about to come upon the people.

Under normal circumstance, when a prophet speaks a word of warning to God’s people, they would go to the temple, the house of worship to pray, offer sacrifices to God and seek God’s guidance and comfort.

But life wasn’t normal in Joel’s time. The temple was in ruins and the country was in ruins.

Then God speaks through the prophet and this is what God says;

Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; ¹³rend your hearts and not your clothing.

How do we return to God when we are shut out of our place of worship and prevented from coming together as the body of Christ in a manner we are accustomed to?

What does a returning to God look like for you and me in December of 2020?

The invitation is in the first three words of our reading for today; yet even now.

Yet even now; whatever your now looks like or feels like, we are invited to return to the Lord.

Yet even now; whatever your sin and your struggle, your closeness to God or your distance from God, we are invited to return to the Lord.

And notice how we are to return to God. In our Sunday best with smiles on our faces and the illusion that all is perfect in my life and in your life?

No, return to me says the Lord with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning. God doesn’t care about the externals. God is interested in what is going on inside of us.

What if we were to honestly acknowledge that right now, even now, we are a grieving people, a weeping people. To just be honest about it and return to the Lord with our lament, our grief and our loss.

What if we were to set aside the need to approach God and worship with a sense of positivity and return to God with the truth about our lives.

The truth about our feelings,
our losses,
the struggles we are facing,
yes, even our sin and our broken and hurting lives.

We are told to rend our hearts and not our clothing.

This season of Advent, so different than any we have ever experienced, can truly become a time of repentance and waiting for all of us who seek to follow the one whose birth we are preparing for in a few weeks.

When God says we are to rend our hearts, God is in effect welcoming our lament and inviting us into deeper contemplation and a deeper relationship with the one who has the power to heal our hearts and make us whole again.

This Advent we could prepare spiritually for Christmas in a different way than we normally prepare.

All the external stuff, as fun and enjoyable as it is, the gift buying and giving, the concerts, the food, the gatherings that are so meaningful and fun are all things we are good at and even though we can complain about being too busy we enjoy these things and we think of them as preparation for Christmas.

Yet even now, says the Lord, especially now in 2020, return to me with all your heart.

And I wonder, what will this Advent season give to you in new ways, different ways, as you prepare for Jesus?

A sabbatical from the cultural craziness of the season and new ways to open your heart to God.
A spiritual awareness you didn’t have before, one that brings you closer to God and more in tune with how God is leading you and how God wants to use you in this world.

Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. This is the promise.

And isn’t this what we need now more than anything?

To understand and live each day in the gracious power and presence of God in our lives.

To know in the deepest reaches of our broken hearts the steadfast love of the Lord.

A love that completely and fully manifests itself in the birth of our savior. The one we wait and prepare for each day.

Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; ¹³rend your hearts and not your clothing.

This Advent, God is giving us a new way to prepare and we have a different sense of time.

Time to pray, to reflect, time to return to God with our whole hearts. And with this time, comes the promise of an outpouring of God’s Spirit.

Of new dreams. A new vision. One of hope. One of peace.

Come Lord Jesus come.

Bring comfort to your people, as we give our hearts to you.

Thanks be to God. Amen

Past Sermons

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

The book of Romans is a letter. An actual letter. Like, a letter written by hand and then sent to someone else for them to read. Paul, the author of this letter, wrote a lot of letters. Paul was an apostle, that is, someone who is sent – in this case, he is one who is sent to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to the furthest reaches of the known world. He’s really, really good at it.

At the time that Paul writes this letter to the church in Rome, he’s been doing this work for probably twenty years and is at the peak of his career. He’s developed a great pattern in his work: visit a place, get to know the people, continually share his faith with them, help gather a community of believers from all walks of life, and stay with them while they learn how to be followers of Jesus. Then Paul leaves – after all, he’s got other places to visit and more people to teach. He is an apostle – he is sent. But he doesn’t leave the church abandoned. He writes letters back to these churches, especially when he hears about crises or conflicts. Sometimes they need comfort, sometimes challenge, sometimes critique, but always he writes as one they know and love. They welcome his input.

The letter to the Romans is not like that. Paul has never been to Rome. There is already a Christian church there, one brought over likely from Jerusalem very early in the faith. And the church in Rome has recently seen conflict. A few years before the writing of this letter, the Roman emperor expelled all the Jews from Rome. Because Christianity was effectively a form of Judaism at the time, Christians were also exiled. After the emperor died and the Jewish Christians returned, they found a church that had continued to grow and develop – this time with Gentile Christians.

It’s hard for us to understand how shocking and despicable this would have been. Two weeks ago I preached on Acts 10, and how Peter’s vision of God calling all animals clean and good to eat flew in the face of millennia of culture, history, and society for Jewish Christians. Jesus himself was Jewish and kept these laws – surely if anyone else wanted to be Christian, they could likewise follow these rules. Peter’s vision and the general movement of the church revealed otherwise.

That didn’t mean it made things easy. It is hard to let go of tradition and expectation and legislation as the Spirit moves us to new places. I hear people struggle when someone sits in their pew or wears sweatpants to church. Let’s be honest: those are enormously trivial things. If still we grind our teeth at the thought of these worthless infractions how much more might faithful people be driven to despair by moving on from the purity laws ordained by God?

This is the faith community to which Paul writes. He writes to a church redefining and fighting. It is a church that feels a deep rift, a painful split, one that goes deep into matters of identity and righteousness, one that threatens to dissolve into name-calling and condemning and finger-pointing and disgrace to the very name of God in whose name they mean to gather – and if we’re honest, we know how that feels. Those fears are not unfamiliar.

So how does Paul start his letter? He has no standing in that church in Rome. They don’t even know who he is – and if they do, it’s possible that they might still remember him as he was in his youth, an aggressive persecutor of the early faith. What can he say that would possibly invite them to listen to him, to hear the word he will share, to receive the message that he hopes will join them together in the work of the gospel?

He keeps it simple: he tells them the truth. He tells them who he is, and it is fully wrapped up in who Jesus is. His self-introduction is the story of the gospel. Nothing he can say about himself means more than who he is in Jesus Christ.

He tells them he wants to come see them, that he wants to be with them, that he hopes he can share some spiritual gift – but even more than that, so that they might mutually encourage each other in faith. He doesn’t want to come to them because he’s better than them, because he can fix them so they can get things right, because they’re obviously sinful mess-ups who just haven’t been taught the truth. No, he wants to join them for mutual encouragement in faith. He wants to walk with them. He hopes he has something to offer them in his teaching and leadership, but just the same, he knows he will grow by being with them as well.

What if that’s how it’s supposed to be? What if we’re supposed to talk about what we believe and why, not because we’ve got it right and we want to establish our superior knowledge, but because we know that God works through our mutual encouragement in faith? What if we were not ashamed of the gospel, not afraid of getting it wrong, not worried that someone would think we were weird for talking about what we believe and why and then asking others the same? What if we trusted that the power of God was at work in this mutual encouragement? What if we were not so proud and short-sighted as to think that the way we see God is the only way God works in the world? What if we actually believed that God is at work in the world, that God has already been working long before we showed up, that we arrive as much to learn as to teach?

Ah, but I know the argument against it: we’re supposed to keep polite conversation, right? What don’t you talk about at the dinner table? Religion and politics, right? Look where it’s gotten us. It’s gotten us to a place where we can no longer have civil discourse, where we are more likely to condemn than to seek to understand, where we claim a Christian can only look one way, live one place, vote one direction, take one moral position. It’s gotten us built up and walled off and fighting against our own beloved members of the family of God.

So don’t do it. Take Paul’s example. Tell people who you are. Tell them where you’re from. Tell them what you believe. And then invite them to do the same. Make your story of faith as natural a part of your introduction as where you work and where you live and who’s in your family. And when someone’s story is different, listen to it. Hear it. See God at work in it. Be amazed. Allow for the mutual encouragement of faith, because this is how the gospel is shared.

No matter where you go from here, no matter where you find yourself, no matter what comes next for you – you can do this. You are called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel which is the power of God for salvation for everyone who has faith – no matter what. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Yet Even Now

Sunday, December 6, 2020
Pastor Mark Aune

Joel 2:12-13, 28-29

Past Sermons

Reclaiming our Place as Creatures of God

Living a New Life with Christ

The Power of God’s Love

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

Past Sermons

Reclaiming our Place as Creatures of God

Living a New Life with Christ

The Power of God’s Love

About Augustana

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Yet Even Now

Sunday, December 6, 2020 Pastor Mark Aune

Joel 2:12-13, 28-29

Past Sermons

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019 Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

Past Sermons

About Augustana

Quick Links

Contact Us

Worship Hours

Sunday, December 6, 2020
Pastor Mark Aune

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson