ADVENT 2023 - WEEK 1 - THE LION OF JUDAH

Many of you know that I am involved in the theater scene in Bend. 

One famous playwright that I have never done a play by - nor really even have the desire to do so - is a Russian playwright named Anton Chekov. He is famous for plays like Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters. But he is also famous in the theater world for a literary device known as Chekov’s Gun. In a nutshell he was saying that it was important for the playwright to strip everything down to the bare essentials - get rid of anything you don’t need in the play.

So for instance, if there is a rifle hanging on the wall in the first act, then that gun absolutely MUST go off in the second or third act. Here’s a quote: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it ISN’T going to of off; it’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”

This is the first Sunday in Advent. Advent comes from a Latin word that means “to come.” We sing the Christmas hymn: O Come, O Come Emmanuel. Emmanuel is a title that the prophet Isaiah attached to the promised Messiah. And the hymn depicts the longing of the people of God to fulfill His promise to deliver them. O Come, O Come. Advent. We need you. We cannot do it on our own.

Advent has been celebrated by churches for centuries. It’s designed to be a time leading up to the celebration of Jesus’ birth where believers prepare their hearts to recapture the meaning of that birth into our world. And in these four weeks that lead up to Christmas (five, this year, if you count Christmas Eve day when we gather at 9:30 for the Children's Christmas Pageant and at 6pm for the Candlelight Communion Service)...in these four weeks, churches have come to focus in on several aspects of the story of Jesus’ birth.

Sometimes you take characters from the story and focus on them. Sometimes you take concepts like Joy, Peace, and Love - and THAT’S what you focus on each week. Here at PBCC we have gotten creative as we have looked at Christmas Songs, or Christmas Movies, things like that. I think it’s cool when we can find a fresh perspective on a story that can - unfortunately for some - lose some of its wonder because it feels so routine and boring…the same old story told the same old way.

This year, as I mentioned last week, I want to use these beautiful banners you see behind me to guide our preparation for the celebration of Jesus’ birth. So we will be looking at Jesus as the Lion of Judah, the Lamb of God, the Lord of Lords, and the King of Kings: all titles that are found in the narrative of the nativity.

But we start today with the Promises of God - “Chekov’s Gun,” if you will, when God hung the loaded rifle up on the wall in Act 1, and promises that the gun WILL go off before the story is finished (of course, this is all metaphor!