GeeDubya's Sermon Site: Isaiah 35: 1-10 - Third Sunday of Advent, December 14, 2025

It’s been a full month since I’ve been able to bring baseball into a sermon, so I need to correct that. As many of you know, our son played Little League baseball for ten years and through his involvement in the game, I got active in it as well, and something one learns when coaching ball, is it involves a whole bunch of individual skills, and few children are going to be good at everything. The trick is to keep the athlete developing those things that might not come as easily or naturally, while at the same time praising and further honing the strengths. As a coach, you hope (a) that the kids enjoy the game and (b) that you’re able to avoid making them disheartened by over-focusing on the things they dislike or find hard, and (c) that you can awaken a sense of striving for more in the player in those things that come easily, to keep building skills and avoid complacency.

I use baseball as the example, but the same thing holds true elsewhere. In our working lives, there are sure to be favourite tasks things you feel confident in and do skillfully and other things that do not come naturally and are a tough slog. A healthy job has a balance of easy and difficult, and so does a healthy life. This is very much true in our faith lives as well.

On this Sunday when we light the candle of Love, and prepare to adorn the Christmas tree with angels, we bring to mind that time when Jesus needed to identify the commandment that stood out above all others. (see Matthew 22: 36-40, Mark 12: 28-34, Luke 1-: 25-28) I suspect that when Jesus was asked this, those within earshot of the question hoped that he would name a commandment that they were drawn to and found fairly easy to fulfil. But Jesus named not one commandment, but two: Love God with your entire being, and Love your Neighbour as yourself. That two-pronged answer would likely have been sort of good and sort of bad for most people in the crowd, as most would be more inclined to one half of the statement than the other half. Yes, there would be a few of them who were naturally inclined toward loving God and loving neighbour– like the “five-tool” ballplayer who can do everything well– but for most in the group, their understanding of what was most important in their religious lives would tend to lean toward (a) prayer, devotion and adherence to the traditions, or (b) the sacred insistence on attending to the needs of the impoverished and marginalized as THE most important thing. The embodied example of Jesus’ friends Mary and Martha (Luke 10: 38-42) also comes to mind: Martha, the busy one, mostly attended to people’s needs/love of neighbour, while Mary was mostly drawn more to contemplation and prayer/love of God.

As a denomination, I don’t think I’m stepping out on a limb by saying that “love your neighbour as yourself” is be the aspect of the two-fold great commandment that we United Church folks are more drawn to. It still needs honing, as we are told by those who feel like they are on the outside looking in when it comes to Church life & inclusion in the community in general, calling us to adapt and expand our action and advocacy; but over the years, I have found that most of the congregations I have served were pretty attentive to the practicalities of noticing and addressing need. Where we, and I personally, could use some additional work, is on the other side of the great commandment: loving God with my whole being, and fully trusting in the everlasting promises of God, promises of life and life beyond life.

Advent is a time for us to give thanks to God, for the gifts of Hope, Peace, Love and Joy, qualities of our Advent candles, each with a practical aspect. But Advent is also a season which imagines a plane beyond that which we see, envisioning the bigger picture of what God is about: the Advent, or beginning, of God’s new realm. This morning’s reading from the 35^th chapter of Isaiah, written some 750 years before the time of Jesus, reaches into those hopes of holy renewal, using bold images that we can relate to here in the south Okanagan: flowers blooming in the desert, scorched lands bearing springs of water, a safe roadway lifted up for the journey from what is to what is to come. While the understanding of the afterlife is very different in Judaism than it is in Christianity, Isaiah said to the people of Judah there would be relief of their present woes, relief emanating from the eternal God’s concern that they not remain stranded in an unending cycle of despair. Much in the way that Jesus coupled love of God and love of neighbour as qualities connecting God’s love for us in the here and now, and the hope God gives for a future we can scarcely imagine, Isaiah endeavoured to bring practical, daily blessing to the people by connecting them to the one Holy God, who cared for them now and was sovereign over all creation, forever.

A few minutes from now, we will be decorating this tree with angels. The angels you are invited to place on the tree can be placed in memory of those who have died or loved ones who are not nearby now, but we wish they were, or they can represent other forms of longing and yearning in life, where things are falling short of what you hope for. This, then, is one of those moments when our trust that the faithful departed are in the hand of God, and our actions to love one another in God’s name in the here and now, function as one; placing the angels is a moment where the fullness of time is real, what the Celts might call a “thin place”. And while I mentioned earlier in this sermon, my sense that we as people of The United Church of Canada are in general more comfortable with showing our love in tangible, practical ways, and somewhat less comfortable with more devotional language about God and our understanding of the eternal realm, our calling is to be both these things, even if we are more drawn to one part than another. Speaking our love of the Creator, and naming our yearnings to be disciples who love our neighbour as ourselves, are two ways that we live our love as healthy human beings. And that, to me, is the integrative love that Jesus has always intended: while “the great commandment” started as two separate commandments, we are drawn to understand love of God and love of neighbour as two aspects of the same love.

Written in 2006, the United Church of Canada’s Song of Faith express this faith in the God of the eternal realm who is at the same time, fully invested in our lives. I quote for you now the final three paragraphs of the Song of Faith, to close today’s sermon. May these words that reach from earth to heaven and then back again, complete and integrate our understanding of love that unites us with God and neighbour. And may these words rest upon us and those we love when we place our Advent angels on the tree, a symbolic action expressing God’s love, present and eternal:

We place our hope in God.

We sing of a life beyond life and a future good beyond imagining:

a new heaven and a new earth, the end of sorrow, pain, and tears,

Christ’s return and life with God, the making new of all things.

We yearn for the coming of that future,
even while participating in eternal life now.

Divine creation does not cease until all things have found wholeness, union, and integration with the common ground of all being.

As children of the Timeless One, our time-bound lives will find completion in the all-embracing Creator.

In the meantime, we embrace the present, embodying hope, loving our enemies, caring for the earth, choosing life.

Grateful for God’s loving action, we cannot keep from singing.

Creating and seeking relationship, in awe and trust,

we witness to Holy Mystery who is Wholly Love. Amen.

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