And driving along in the dark on 84 it occurred to me: that isn’t at all the way the rest of my life works, it isn’t how I sense your lives work either, and it isn’t how it worked in Isaiah’s day. For the most part, people tend to be more oriented toward the past than the future, and a good chunk of what we hold onto from the past is what has been difficult, painful, what fills us with regret, and what wrongs were done to us. This morning, Isaiah is especially distraught, coming to awful recognition of past mistakes that make him feel helpless in the present and anxious about the future: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you.”

Sometimes hope can be hard to come by. I’m sure you’ve heard that something like 60% of people surveyed said they don’t approve of the direction the country is headed, and there’s all kinds of finger-pointing going on about who and what is responsible for the economic crisis, and lots of people are looking all the way back to the Great Depression to make sense of this present circumstance. Retirement accounts and church endowments are dwindling, and cost cutting is coming, if it hasn’t arrived already. And we look back and wonder what we could have done differently to not be where we are right now. As citizens bound to an economy, it’s hard to move forward with hope when, collectively, we seem to have miscalculated along the way, or been unwitting bystanders to mistakes from the past.

And isn’t that true in our personal lives, too? We don’t know what’s going to happen to us next month or next year, but we sure know what happened last month and last year; it’s right there for us to analyze and relive, and because that is so, we tend to be conditioned by our too-familiar past more than we are drawn to our unknown future. Our mistakes can haunt us, the times we have been hurt can scar us, the pain and the injustices we have endured can shape future experiences in similar situations. Like Isaiah, we want God to give us another sign—“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down”—a clear indication that it’s going to be OK—OK for our world, our nation, our church, our families, our relationships. How good would it be to really start over, to set aside the errors and mistakes and injury from the past, and move forward with a clean slate?

Well, if ever there was a model for starting over, starting fresh when things aren’t working, it is no one less than the God we have come to worship this morning. The story of God and humanity told in our Bible is chapter after chapter of God setting aside the past, retooling and revising, and making fresh starts. In Genesis, the Great Flood washed the slate of past sin clean, and then God made an everlasting covenant with Abraham. When that arrangement didn’t work so well, God then came to Moses, first in a burning bush, and then on Mt. Sinai, and set things down even more clearly through the 10 Commandments. In the generations that followed, it turned out that having a set of rules for living didn’t necessarily mean people would follow them, and so God reconsidered and sent prophets like Isaiah to explain exactly what was at stake. And when we got really clever, and began to twist our interpretations of that Law to serve ourselves, God made the clearest fresh start: he sent Jesus Christ to model how human life was to be lived.

And what Jesus most strongly resisted was our insistence at making our past definitive for our future. The Law divided people into the acceptable and unacceptable, the clean and unclean, the righteous and the unrighteous—it basically made your past deeds completely definitive of your future. And if you happened to be on the short end of the stick—as most of us would have been—you had no reason to hope that your future wasn’t already etched in stone.

But Jesus turned that upside down; he showed that mercy, and compassion, and love, and forgiveness allows the past to be completely over and done. No one he encountered—not even tax collectors or prostitutes or lepers—was beyond hope because as far as Jesus was concerned, everyone can start over. God doesn’t keep score of the past, God is interested in us moving forward from this moment with fresh intention and commitment and willingness to trust that the future is in God’s hands, and not limited by what we’ve done or experienced in the past.

So if we’re feeling less than hopeful these days, if we are anxious about what tomorrow will hold, if we’re not very happy with who we are right now, it really has less to do with God being hidden, or elusive, or altogether absent, and more to do with us believing our past is more powerful than God’s grace. It is so easy for us to hold grudges, it is so easy for us to finalize our judgments about ourselves and about other people, it is so easy for us to be convinced that what has been is what must continue to be. But that is not Advent faith. Yes, Advent is the time for us to anticipate the birth at Bethlehem once more, God’s greatest new beginning, but it is so much more than that: Advent is believing new beginnings are still God’s will for us, and so Advent really is a state of mind, a state of heart, a state of faith that needs to be part of who we are the whole year.

We are God’s Advent people when we choose to treat ourselves compassionately and not with that harshness that so limits us. We are Advent people when we choose to see that our judgments of others are not necessarily the truth, and that the best course of action is, as Jesus showed us, to trust compassion and mercy. We are Advent people when we learn from our past mistakes and errors and sins, but choose not to be dragged down by them, and instead choose to believe that God isn’t so focused on a scorecard as helping us live more fully today and tomorrow.

And when we can stop clinging to the past and let God get a foothold in our thinking and seeing, fresh starts actually become possible. The person who had been a stranger might end up being one who can tell us the word we need to hear; an invitation to some new experience can turn from a threatening possibility to the opportunity that gives new life; the forgiveness of another that seems to go completely against impulse can now break a stranglehold that had lasted for years.

We are God’s Advent people, not just during these four weeks, but all the time. God’s Advent people have the heart to start fresh—and allow others to start fresh—not just in high holy seasons, but every day, and every moment, if necessary. Fresh starts, Advent experiences begin with having just enough faith to hope: hope that old habits can be changed, hope that old sins have been forgiven, hope that tense relationships and struggling economies and bad health and unemployment and terrorist attacks and bad dreams at night are not the end of our stories, hope that God is not yet done with you or with me. As far as our faith is concerned, the past is finished and done. Choose to allow the God of Advent to more fully direct your future, starting right now.