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Somewhere today a woman picks up another dirty shirt and tosses it into the laundry basket. She shakes her head and thinks, "I've got to get out of this marriage! He treats me like dirt! I deserve someone better, someone who really loves me! God knows I've put up with more than anyone needs to."

But she sees the picture of their wedding day on the dresser and stops. She remembers the promise she made that day: "...for better, for worse...." And she decides to stay and see if she can make this thing work.

Somewhere today a father tells his friend at the office, "I don't know what to do! She hates me! My daughter actually despises me! I remember when we were pals, best friends! But now it's like she deliberately antagonizes me every morning when she goes to school and every night when she stays out late. I'm so exasperated! Sometimes I just wish I could tell her to leave and never come back!"

His friend puts a hand on his shoulder. He remembers what it was like when his daughter was young and she hugged him. He remembers the day she was born and the day she wore her grandmother's little white dress for baptism. And he remembers the promise he made to God that day to be her guardian for life. He goes home, hoping she might be there, hoping maybe tonight they can talk again.

Somewhere today a college student makes her plans to end it all. She can't see a career in the future -- doesn't even know if her major is worth it. The smell of last night's date lingers on her body, and she loathes herself. Why can't relationships work out? Why did he have to do that to her?

She runs a bath and fingers the razor. But the church building in the tacky picture on the wall catches her eye. She remembers her hometown and the day she made Public Profession of Faith in front of her congregation. And she decides to call the chaplain and try to piece her fragmented life back together.

Promises, promises, promises ... Around the world today people are making promises. The amazing thing is that many are keeping those promises, and their lives are different because of it. Somewhere today people still have loved ones they will not forsake, even though they are a pain in the neck. Somewhere today people are sticking to causes that others have given up long ago. Somewhere today people are walking roads that are surrounded with pain and terror, simply because they made a promise to see the thing through.

And when they do this, they are like God.

It is God who makes promises, says Peter. And when we learn to keep our good promises, we are like him.

This is a tough thought in an age that makes promises as popular as a dentist's drill. Maybe you read it too -- a few weeks back Michael Courten wrote about dating and marriage in his "Single-Minded" column in the London Free Press. Promises and commitments, he said, were the worst slavery that could happen to a person. Avoid making promises at all costs!

We've become a generation that doesn't like to stick with what we've been stuck with. That's why, as Peter notes, religious practices run off people like hot butter from a Teflon pan.

And that's where Peter's call on this Advent Sunday sounds like a music box in the middle of rush hour traffic. Few stand still long enough to catch the melody. But if you do, there are some powerful lyrics to sing when promises are made.

Human History Hangs On A Promise

For one thing, according to Peter, history itself hangs on a promise. "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise," says Peter. But it surely seems that way.

One of the greatest challenges to our sense of God's care in life is the scientific theory of the "steady state." Put simply, it means that things are always changing, but that the changes conform to natural laws. Not only that, but the changes take place over the years at a constant rate. Since this is the case, there is no need for anyone to believe in a God who interferes in human history. God is dead, and that's just fine.

But Peter says that people misread the signs of the times. The flashing yellow light of time is more than just a chronometer. It's a warning light, and the red STOP signal is sure to follow. Says Peter: "The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (3:9).

The future of our world hangs on the thread of a divine promise. Only one thing determines the course of history, and that is God's promise of grace. This is the story of Abraham, called from his family in the heart of the ancient Fertile Crescent to travel toward a home he had never seen. What made him go? Only a promise: "I will be your God! I will give you land! I will make your descendants as numerous as the sands of the seashore, and as multiplied as the star dust of the skies."

Abraham took a present more secure than our own and traded it for a future more ominous than any we could imagine. And he did so because God made a promise.

The same thing happened to Moses. Moses, the outcast heir to Pharaoh's throne. Moses, the wandering mystic. Moses, the self-righteous shepherd. Moses stands in front of a bush on fire in the desert heat and carries on a conversation with powers unseen.

"What's your name?" asks Moses, trying to limit the power of this specter and bring it to subservience.

But the Voice belongs to no genie in a bottle. "I am that I am!" comes the reply. "Your times are dependent on my eternity, and not the other way around. I am the one who will be there with you! I am the God who makes promises!"

And when Moses brought a ragtag bunch of renegades out of the precincts of Egypt, they came to that same mountain to receive the Covenant of Life from the God who makes promises.

When David builds the kingdom of Israel, and he wants to consolidate its spiritual and temporal dimensions, he makes plans to erect a palace for God on the upper slopes of the capital city. But God will not be bound by regent rule. Instead, God turns the tables on David and announces a promise: "You will not make for me a house, but I will build your house! I will cause you to have a son sit forever on the throne!" David falls to the ground in worship. A promise has been spoken, and the future has direction.

No one on earth at that moment in history could have predicted the spectacular rises and the dismal failures of the people to whom these promises were spoken. Abraham died a wanderer, a failure of a father and at uneasy peace with his neighbors. Moses never lived to see the promise fulfilled. He struck the rock in savage anger and died alone on a windswept mountain crag. David suffered defeat at the hands of his own tricky son and limped into eternity on the hot flesh of a concubine.

Yet one day, in an unexpected setting, a man born of a promise let his blood be spilled over God's ground, and the promises of history were sealed. The Voice of Eternity shouted in time: "I will never leave you! I will never forsake you!" And people began to number years in the Name of the Lord.

No crystal ball can tell us the history of tomorrow. No tarot cards can form the index to the twenty-first century. No web site carries the technology to mark the rise and fall of stocks and economies and governments.

Yet Peter says that our future is secure and determined. And his evidence is simple: "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promises." Those who have the wisdom of Peter keep the watch of Advent. "The day of the Lord will come...."

People Of Promise Have Posture

No one on earth today can predict the future. That's why, says Peter, people live as if there is none. The scientific reports about our natural environment are ambiguous. The evidence from human history is a mixed bag of hope and despair. The lessons of the stars are cheap imitations of wishful thinking. So we live as if we are free in time to be what we choose to be.

But what do we choose to be? What is it that happens when we make a promise, to ourselves or to anyone else?

For one thing, a promise is a declaration of freedom. When we make promises we stake our claim on freedom's bank, sifting for the gold of expectation. A promise is a date with destiny, an appointment in a future that is shifting sand, a mark on a calendar that has infinite possibilities.

When I make a promise to you, I declare that I will meet you at a particular corner in time, and that when I get there, I expect you to be there too. No matter what roads you have been traveling. No matter what other options are open to you. No matter what the siren calls of other free choices.

When I make a promise I shout that my destiny is not locked up by the fateful chromosomes of my ill-chanced DNA. When I make a promise I take my life into my own hands and say that my parents are not the fault. When I make a promise I grab hold of the limitless character of grace and weave a web of my own choosing from it.

Only a free person can make a promise. Only one who has a future to choose can step outside of the predetermination of culture, or the limitations of genetic codes, or the preconceived stereotypes of society. I am free to be a friend. I am free to be your partner. I am free to stick to you as a parent.

No android can make that promise. No pet dog is ever faithful in that manner. Only a free person can make a promise that matters.

But more than that, when I make a promise to you I choose to limit my freedom so that your freedom can blossom. My vow is that I will give up my freedom for your sake. I stand at my marriage day saying that you, in your freedom, can count on me being bound to your calendar, your future, and your creative energy. I tie myself with the tender tissue of loyalty to the alliances I make and the covenants I keep. I glue myself to you in such a way that, no matter what the swirling tides of tedium or the stormy winds of wanderlust, you will find my name on your appointment book.

Peter says, "So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to [the day of the Lord], make every effort to be found ... blameless...." Faithful. True to your word. People of commitments. Folks who make promises and keep them. To God. To family. To a world rushing freely to self-destruction. "What kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God...." You ought to be people of promise.

For, in the final analysis, a promise is the secret to my identity. Some people look to their feelings for a sense of self. Whatever I feel today, this is what I am.

Some people check out their wants and desires, and suppose that these give them purpose. We are consumers in a consumerist society. The person with the most toys at the end wins the game.

And some folks look to their achievements. "I conquer; therefore I am!" I won the corporate race! I bought the best plastic surgery to become the fairest of them all! Our children are more successful than your children!

But Peter says that we are the promises we keep. We are the people who live in a way that ties heartstrings to the covenant of eternity. We keep ship with the Captain of commitment.

Robert Bolt, in his powerful drama of the life of Sir Thomas More, says it well. In A Man for All Seasons, King Henry VIII has blown with the winds of new politics and reformed religion. Now he wants his people to swear to him an oath of loyalty that transcends the old pledge to God by way of the Pope. More refuses. He does not make a public judgment about the taking of that oath, nor does he defy the authority of his king. But he will not take the oath himself. His conscience is bound by a previous promise, one that no temporal authority can overthrow.

Henry spars with More until someone must win the contest in order to save face. More is imprisoned and likely to die.

His beloved daughter Margaret comes to plead with him. She is More's kindred spirit in so many ways -- quick mind, feisty will, keen tongue. Today she begs him to take the oath and live. Take it with your mouth, but not your heart, she says. Do it as a formality and come home. We need you!

But her father reasons with her soul. "Meg," he says, "when a man takes an oath, he holds his own self in his hands like water, and when he opens his fingers he need not hope to find himself again."

You are what you promise. If someone wants to find the real you, let him look to the water of eternity that you hold in your hand. "What kind of people ought you to be?" asks Peter. It is the season of Advent that tells the answer in the church. You ought to be people who make promises and keep them. Promises of faith. Promises of grace. Promises of hope. Promises that gather other people into the sacred fabric of the Covenant promises of God.

Life Is Lived On The Edge Of A Promise

G. K. Chesterton said, "On the single string of a person, bound to his or her promise, hangs everything from a nuclear disarmament pact to a family reunion." From a successful revolution to a return ticket to Chicago, everything depends on a promise.

Os Guiness, in a wonderful reflection on our fallen temperaments, charts the "seven deadly doubts" that rob our faith of its immunizations. One of the most tragic of his "families of doubt" in the book In Two Minds (IVP) is that of "lack of commitment." Faith founders, he says, when people of promise fail to keep their daily commitments. Faith is frittered away when single strands of little vows break one at a time, until the cable that hooks us to God is severed.

God makes promises because people are depending on him. God keeps promises because people's lives are at stake. And so it is in the human arena.

When Thomas Carlyle wrote his great three-volume work documenting the doings of the French Revolution, he concluded that the revolution finally failed, not because of corruption and mistakes among people in high places, but because people in ordinary places of ordinary responsibility neglected to keep their promises.

This is true in any society. Think, for instance, of the very nature of the family. The census bureau calls a family "two or more people related by blood who happen to dwell under one roof." In a study done by the Carnegie Institute a family was merely a management device by which older people shuffled younger people around to others, who were really the primary external experts in child rearing.

Maybe so. Yet no family begins until a promise is made. Two people stand in a church and they say, "I will be there for you!" Or they hide in a dark corner and they breathe hot promises in the night. Or they move in together and they make joint commitments to the landlord for the rent. But a promise is at the heart of each transaction.

And then, when the promise is kept, there is safety for all who live under its umbrella. Not necessarily peace, mind you. But safety. Security. A place to belong. A home to come back to. A haven of confidence from the storms at sea.

By the same token, when promises are broken, the fabric of the world unravels. Sure, when we marry we don't have half a clue what we are getting ourselves into. We make bold promises to people we think we know, and then they change into creatures we've never met and sometimes regret encountering. We ourselves mutate. One man I know says, "My wife has slept with at least five different men since we've been married, and all of them have been me!" You know what he is saying.

We dream of mystic love in movies like Sleepless in Seattle, where, if we just jump through the magic hoops, the two right people, even from different sides of the universe, will find each other, and their marriage will be blessed by the gods for all eternity. But we know it's not so. We never marry the "one and only." We marry someone who was nearby at the time when we were ready. If we had lived in a different place and at a different time, there would have been someone else. That's why the songs on the radio fantasize about the predicament of being married to the "wrong" person when the "right" one comes along.

Here is where we need to know who we are. We have an incredible capacity to look for erotic fulfillment that expands outside of our commitments. The lover is always more alluring than the wife. The stolen kisses are more passionate than the peck at the door in the morning. The secret rendezvous breathes the sensuality of best clothes and best manners in a way that dirty bathrooms at home never do.

But what is the meaning of life? Who are we? Whose are we? Am I still the one who will be there with her, for her? Do I have the power to make a promise and then the courage to keep it? Will I bring life to another person by keeping my appointment, or will I destroy his psyche by calling in sick? One man I know, now in his late middle years, can still list every promise his father made to him as child, and every time his father broke those promises.

Marriage is just one of the pieces in the mix of life. The whole of our human interaction can quickly turn into a combat zone of competitive self-seekers. When people break trust, community dies.

Advent is about promises. The promises of God that Abraham and Moses and David waited for. The promises of God that whispered one chilly night in Bethlehem. The promises of God that lingered in a horrible way over Golgotha, until a Sunday morning earthquake rewrote the news.

And Advent is about promises yet to come. The God of promises isn't finished making or keeping them. Nor should be his people.

There are, of course, silly promises and stupid commitments. A political candidate often says too much in the days of the campaign and realizes too late that his reach over-exceeded his grasp. Generals swagger with grandstanding heroics that will become comic fodder to the next generation. Lovers often say too much too quickly and are embarrassed over coffee the next morning.

Still, as Peter says, it is in promise making and in promise keeping that we join God in stretching for the day of the Kingdom.

Thornton Wilder put it well in his play The Skin of Our Teeth. George and Maggie Antrobus have been married for years. But then World War II came along and upset everything. The whole world turned upside down. No one could have predicted it when they got married. Things changed, and today George has come home to tell Maggie that he's leaving her. He has fallen in love with young Miss Fairweather.

But Maggie doesn't fly into a rage, as he expected. Instead, she softly reminds him of a promise. "I didn't marry you because you were perfect," she says. "I married you because you gave me a promise."

She slips off her wedding ring and holds it up. "That promise made up for all your faults," she continues. "And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married, and it was the promise that made the marriage."

George doesn't want to hear this. He protests, "Maggie ... I was only nineteen!"

But Maggie isn't finished. "And when our children were growing up," she says, "it wasn't a house that protected them ... it was a promise!"

As we wait out God's promises during this Advent season, Peter's question lingers: "What kind of people ought we to be?"

The answer is found in the promises we make, and the promises we keep.