First Sunday of Advent

Four readings for a room that's already dreading December. Here's what each text is doing, the line worth building on, and the traps to step around. These notes come from Week 1 of Relative Peace, our free Advent series, which has a full outline for every one of these readings.

Old Testament

Isaiah 64:1–9

These are people standing in ruins. Most read the prayer as coming from exiles who made it home and found Jerusalem still burned (v. 11). Coming home was supposed to fix it. It didn't. The lament starts back at 63:7 and ends at 64:12 on a question nobody answers. The lectionary stops at verse 9.

What to notice

• The verb in verse 1 is the one for tearing a garment in grief. They want God to rip the sky open and come down the way he did at Sinai (v. 3; Exodus 19).
• Verses 5–7 are confession with no exemptions. Nobody else gets named. Keep verse 6 pointed at the people praying it, which includes your room.
• Verse 8 turns on two words, and yet. Nothing has changed since verse 7, and they call God Father anyway, something Israel's prayers almost never do. Then the potter: Isaiah used that picture against people who argued with God (29:16; 45:9). Here the clay uses it to plead.

Build on this

They prayed in the ruins, before one wall went back up, and called God Father with their sin still on the table. Your people can pray the same way into the room they're dreading: come down.

Watch out: If the sermon sends the room home thinking about somebody else's filthy rags, it has prayed the wrong prayer.

Psalm

Psalm 80:1–7, 17–19

A lament a whole congregation prayed out loud. The tribes it names are northern, so many place it near the fall of Samaria in 722 BC, though the date is uncertain. The skipped verses (8–16) hold the wound: Israel as a vine God planted and then left unfenced.

What to notice

• The refrain comes three times (vv. 3, 7, 19). Turn us is causative in Hebrew: make us turn. It's the Old Testament's main word for repentance, and they ask God to do it in them.
• The shining face is the priests' blessing from Numbers 6:25, the words Israel heard at the end of worship. In this psalm, rescue comes right after God looks at them.
• The name gets bigger each time the refrain returns: God, then God of hosts, then LORD God of hosts. The tired prayer gets bolder.

Build on this

Worn-out people asked God to do the turning and to look at them, three times, with a bigger name each time.

Watch out: Don't preach this as a psalm for people with weaker faith than yours. People who had given up would have stopped talking to God. These kept the complaint pointed at the one who could answer it.

Epistle

1 Corinthians 1:3–9

Paul writes from Ephesus around AD 53–55 to the church he planted in Corinth, a status-hungry port city. The rest of the letter takes on factions, a man sleeping with his father's wife, lawsuits between believers, and a Lord's Supper where the rich eat first. Paul knows all of it when he writes this thank-you.

What to notice

• Every line credits God. Grace was given to them, God enriched them, the message was confirmed among them. The Corinthians are the subject of almost nothing.
• He names the gifts they're abusing, their speech and their knowledge, and calls them real before he corrects a word of how they're used.
• He uses the same verb in verses 6 and 8 (bebaioō, make firm). The God who made the message solid among them will keep them solid to the end. Their future rests on God's record.

Build on this

Paul looked at the most troubled church he had and watched for God's work first.

Watch out: Don't preach it as the compliment before the correction. Paul doesn't compliment the Corinthians. He thanks God for what God put in them, and that doesn't vanish when people behave badly.

Gospel

Mark 13:24–37

Days before the cross. Jesus has just said the temple will come down, and four disciples ask him privately when (13:3–4). He answers in the picture language of the prophets. Mark's first readers were under pressure and wanted a timetable too.

What to notice

• The darkened sun and falling stars come from Isaiah 13 and 34, where they mark the fall of empires. Verse 26 borrows Daniel 7. The center of the passage is an arrival and a gathering.
• Verse 32 closes the door on prediction: not the angels, not even the Son. In its place Jesus tells a short story. An owner leaves, every servant gets work, and the doorkeeper is told to watch.
• Evening, midnight, cockcrow, and dawn are the four watches of the night, and Mark walks his reader through all four in the next chapter. Supper in the evening (14:17). Gethsemane in the night, where three of these same four disciples are told to keep watch and fall asleep (14:32–41). Peter's denial at cockcrow (14:72). Jesus handed over at dawn (15:1).

Build on this

Jesus gave his people no date and one job: watch the door for the one coming home. Bracing watches the room. Watching looks for him.

Watch out: Skip the end-times chart, and skip the scare. Plenty of your people were raised on be-ready-or-get-caught. Servants watch because the owner is coming home, and they belong in his house.

Into the room

Most people in a small church walk into Advent already braced. They know who's coming to dinner and roughly when it'll start. Bracing gets you through the evening without being in it, and Mark 13 hands them a different place to look.

Make it concrete. The guy coming off a twelve-hour shift on Thanksgiving and driving straight to a table where nobody asks how work was. The sister who hasn't spoken to her brother since the funeral, and they'll both be at Mom's. And somebody in your room is the one everyone else is rehearsing for.

A practice for the week

A two-word prayer for the week, from Isaiah 64:1: come down. Pray it every time you pass something you pass every day, like the time clock, the gas pump, or the end of your lane.

One question for your group

Where are you already braced for December, and what would it look like to watch for God there instead?