December 1998 Issue

J. Barrie Shepherd has penned a collection of poems named A Child Is Born: Meditations for Advent and Christmas.¹ The meditation on today's text unravels child hope, then adult hope, and finally about how God sends the authentic word in the revelatory child. This poem is no full-blown homily. It will, however, help any preacher conjure sharp images.

Richard Hoyer begins his sermon, Expect, with this observation, "To hope in Bible language is not wishing at all, but confidently expecting! So when Paul today calls on us to hope in God, that means we are called to live before him in confident expectation."²

In developing his theme, Hoyer puts forth a rhetorical question, "So, what do you expect from God?" This section sets up the rest of the sermon, for this opening says finally, "to expect nothing from God we are left only with death." Here, Hoyer takes his hearers back toward the light suggesting what people expect from God: Protection, guidance, heaven.

Hoyer then moves on to how people expect. Using the Roman's text he says "Paul lets us know that people who hope are people who are steadfast." This plays out by tying repentance to forgiveness, and forgiveness to harmony. How can people expect? By living in faithful hope, which begets harmony with one another.

In Facts That Undergird Life, Paul Scherer uses the last verse of our Epistle lesson in his sermon titled The Book of the Ages.³ Scherer, known for his incendiary sense of ironic humor, starts his sermon by lampooning the efforts of advertisers to sell more Bibles. Referring to "Rainbow Bibles" and the like, he says, "It's a cheap if rather pathetic attempt to bolster the sales of a Book which though never more useful than today was perhaps never less used, never more widely sold and never more consistently unread." Using Moffatt's New Testament translation, Scherer concentrates on the phrase, "instruction, steadfastness, encouragement, hope."

The sermon rotates on an axis of contrast between the flux of modern America and the "point of permanence" which the Bible provides. In fact, the governing analogy is between images of a "Book-of-the-Month Club" and the "Book-of-the-Ages Club." In 1938, this image may have had a great effect.

Scherer uses this Advent sermon to drive home the importance of scripture as the Word. He says, "I tell you, it's life that's in this Book; don't chatter to me about duty: It's all right in its place, but this isn't its place! It isn't your duty to live: It's a chance you have." He follows this line of thinking by emphasizing three words from the Roman's text: Steadfast, encouragement, hope.

Closing with a play on the common cliche, "keeping up with the Jones'," Scherer ends his sermon, saying, "In these days of books by the month, my friends ask me if I'm `keeping up in my reading.' I wonder if they mean `keeping up!' It isn't difficult to keep up—with God!"

In the 1910 sermon, Peace Is Believing, published in The Battle of Life and Other Sermons,¹⁴ Phillips Brooks concentrates on Romans 15:13. His sermon text says, "Now the God of hope fill you with all Joy and Peace in believing, that ye may abound in Hope through the Power of the Holy Ghost."

Brooks spends the first fifth of the sermon defining what peace is not; then, what it is. "It is the harmonious relation with our surroundings, and evidently, then, Peace will become a deeper and deeper word, a deeper and deeper thing to men [sic] as they become aware more and more of what their surroundings are, as they open their eyes to more and more intimate and sacred things with which they have to do." This is the peace God offers to belief.

The middle section of this sermon covers, in order, our peaceful surroundings vis-a-vis our relations with others, God, and ourselves. Brooks believes, "the true picture of Peace is simply the restoring of true relations, so that each soul of us should give its full due to, and so get its full due from, the souls around it, and its own self, and the soul of God..."

But, "how can this condition, so precious in itself, be won?" Brooks thinks that Paul's suggestion in Romans 15:13 holds the key. "Everything is a part, nothing is complete and absolutely a whole...this is a universal principle." Brooks fills out this principle by using the idea of a controlling theme. Paintings, stories, pieces of music, even government have a controlling theme, holding to gether all of each's singular parts.

The controlling theme in human life is the Peace derived by believing, which for Brooks is belief in God. God is the controlling idea for life, for even God believes in Himself [sic]. This being so, because God is the highest principle in life itself. The rest of "Peace in Believing" describes how this faith manifests itself in living relation with others, God, and the individual believer. This Peace is given by belief in Jesus Christ: Not in our will, nor even in our strength.

The last sermon to be noted is Martin Luther's Exhortation to Bear With The Weak.¹⁵ Since the text is thirty-five pages covering some eighty-six paragraphs, suffice it to say this sermon contains excellent, though lengthy, exegetical material. The section, "the Word of Hope" is exceptionally helpful.

Most of the sermons on this Roman's text converge on the theme of expectant hope: A gift of God. This, of course, is an overriding theme of the Advent season.

David Neil Mosser
Georgetown, TX

1. J. Barrie Shepherd, A Child Is Born: Meditations For Advent and Christmas (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988), p. 57.
2. Richard O. Hoyer, Expect (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1977), pp. 19-23.
3. Paul Scherer, Facts That Undergird Life (New York: Harpers & Brothers Publishers, 1938), pp. 153-158.
4. Phillips Brooks, The Battles of Life and Other Sermons (New York: E. F. Dutton & Co., 1910), pp. 187-207.
5. Martin Luther, Luther's Epistle Sermons: Advent and Christmas Season (Minneapolis: Luther Press, 1908), pp. 28-63.