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Sunday November 29, 2009 "In Those Days" Jeremiah 33:14-16 |
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Location: Blogs Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons |
 | | Posted by: Brad Miller | 12/2/2009 9:28 AM | Advent can be a strange time.
Advent is part of our Christmas celebration, yet it is something completely distinct and different, too.
Advent is about preparation, but it is not always clear what it is we preparing for.
Advent is firmly rooted in future, yet cannot be fully appreciated unless we can position ourselves in the past.
Advent is about celebrating what is to come, even though it already HAS come.
Advent is about taking comfort it what HAS come, and preparing to be surprised by what we already know.
Yes, you could say that Advent is a confused and confusing time.
And nowhere is that confusion more acutely felt than in the Jeremiah passage we heard read this morning.
But before we get to Jeremiah’s confusing times, let’s think a bit about our confusion with Advent.
Advent is the beginning of the Christian year. It is that time of year set aside for two purposes. First, we are to work to prepare ourselves to be worthy of the messiah’s presence. Embedded in that preparation is the fact that Jesus promised that he would one day come again, and so, we must prepare ourselves for that glorious day. The second purpose springs from the first: in this time of preparation, remembering and celebrating how our Hebrew ancestors prepared for the coming Messiah will go a long way to understanding how we are to prepare today. Using the time immediately before the celebration of Christ’s birth adds some immediacy and some reality to the notion of preparation. This event, you see, was what the Hebrew people had been preparing for all those years. And it is an event that we can’t help but celebrate as well.
That tension between understanding the past and preparing for the future is what sometimes has us confused. What is more important? The celebration of the past or the anticipation of the future? And when you throw Christmas into the mix, how can you not help but want to rush through Advent to get to the good stuff, the celebration of the coming of Emmanuel, God with us?
If you think I’m going to say something to resolve that tension and confusion, you are sadly mistaken. First, because I think that is where we must be to truly prepare ourselves. If we understood everything, our preparations would be simple prescriptions and without the hard thought and prayer that is so necessary to become closer to God. We must pay attention to our faithful Hebrew ancestors because they knew what they wanted, but had no good way to understand what they would get. And I believe that is exactly where we find ourselves as we contemplate Advent.
The second reason that I am not going to give you some word that will clear up all the tension and confusion is that I do not know what that word would be, because I am as confused as anyone on this point!
Which makes this the perfect time to go back to our scripture lesson this morning to see where it might lead us.
Jeremiah is preaching to his fellow Hebrews in the days after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. The house of Israel has been seemingly decimated, scattered to the four winds – their holy city in ruins and their holy worship place lying in rubble on the ground.
The bulk of the best and the brightest of Jerusalem have been taken to Babylon, where they live in exile from their homeland.
And here’s the thing: Babylon wasn’t all that bad. Oh, it wasn’t home and every exiled citizen of Jerusalem would have surely rather had things as they were. But overall, they were not being kept in chains or required to do meaningless labor to earn their keep. They were not slaves. They may have been separated from their homeland, but they were with their people, their families and friends.
This was not by accident. Some empires, such as the Egyptian Empire, took their vanquished opponents as slave and kept them subservient by use of the whip and chains. They would strive to make their enemies irrelevant and completely without resources or power to do anything about it. The Babylonians, however, were different in their approach. They too did not want to have to deal with their vanquished opponents becoming violent or uprising against them. So, they simply took the citizens of Jerusalem away to Babylon and said, “Now you live here.” They were allowed to work, they were even allowed to worship, but the whole time that was happening, Babylonian culture and the Babylonian way of life was all around. Over time, many could see the wisdom in simply leaving the old ways behind and becoming more and more assimilated with their Babylonian neighbors, taking on their ways, their customs, even their religion. Intermarriage with the Babylonian people hastened that assimilation.
These are the people that Jeremiah is preaching to. He brings to them the word of the Lord. He tries to speak a word of hope amidst the landscape of the dashed dreams of the Hebrew people. Dreams that began with a belief that God would never leave them and led to a place where God was nowhere to be found.
And so, it was not unusual for the exiles to succumb to the pull of leaving their heritage behind and becoming more and more like the Babylonians. Not because they chose that life, but it was the best life available to them.
After all, their home has been destroyed; a home that God promised them. Their temple ceased to exist; the temple built to God’s own blueprint. They had been uprooted, broken as a people. God had been their hope, but surely for the exiled Hebrews, hope of a return to the heady days of being God’s chosen people was a forlorn hope, at best.
Then along comes Jeremiah. And what does he bring? An almost laughable message of hope. He points to the future, where “in those days” God’s promises will be fulfilled! He stands before his brothers and sisters and proclaims, “Despite all signs to the contrary, days are coming when things will be good…and we get there, not be giving up on God’s promises making the best of the situation in Babylon, but by trusting in the creative and redemptive and sure purposes of God!”
Can you imagine the deaf ears this fell on? The world as they have known it has crumbled, but Jeremiah is pushing his people to see God’ future. To recognize that if they keep the commands of God, if they continue their worship of Yahweh, if they stay committed to being the people God would have them be, they will have their most heartfelt longing fulfilled. Their longing for the restoration of their place in the world will be a reality. If only they are faithful.
This is how Jeremiah seeks to prepare his fellow Israelites for the future: by telling them that their greatest longings will one day take form and they will rejoice in the midst of all they seek.
Author Heidi Neumark, who for years pastored a church in the roughest section of the Bronx, muses that she loves that Advent is always in sync with where she is. These are her words: “Advent unfailingly embraces and comprehends my reality. And what is that? Longing. Advent is when the church can no longer contain its unfulfilled desire and the cry of longing bursts forth: Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus! O come, O come Emmanuel!”
The exiles saw that they could survive in Babylon, but they longed to thrive at home, at peace. “In those days”, Jeremiah intones, “all this will be achieved. The messiah is coming! And we will celebrate that the Lord is a righteous God!”
Where are we in all of this? We have seen the coming of the Messiah, yet the heralded kingdom is still not completely achieved. And so, we too, find ourselves in the exile that comes from knowing that we can be comfortable if we let ourselves become pulled firmly into the prevailing culture of consumerism and creature comforts. Like the Babylonian exile, it doesn’t look too bad. Why stay so closely tied to God’s way of doing things when we could just give in and have a life of comfort?
Because, like the exiles, we know in our heart of hearts that it is a false comfort. We know that it may look good, but it is not what we truly long for. Our longings are for God’s promises to be made real and Jeremiah’s message is to us, as well as the exiles: God’s promises rest on our willingness to be God’s people. To continue to worship and strive to spread the Good News and embrace the hope, no matter how dim it sometimes seems, the hope that God is with us and will deliver a messiah to us, again, just like the first time.
How do we prepare for that coming? In the same way that Jeremiah instructs: to trust that God will indeed fulfill the promises made that justice and righteousness will be achieved. And it takes our trust and our faith and our work to move us closer and closer to that day.
What are you longing for today?
I am longing for those days when public discourse is uplifting and positive and the world is no longer torn asunder by racism and sexism and classism and homophobia.
I am longing for those days when keeping the peace is not a function of law enforcement, but a celebration of the reality of our lives.
I am longing for those days when arms manufacturers turn their skills to other, more profitable endeavors because there is no longer a market for their products.
I am longing for those days when the poor are lovingly cared for and not sent to shelters or forced to sleep on the streets.
I am longing for those days when people truly know and trust the God that Jeremiah heralds.
For in those days, God’s kingdom will be at hand.
As much as I long for those days, I don’t have any idea when those longings will be fulfilled. But that is exactly the point of our Advent journey: neither did the people of Jeremiah’s time.
But here’s what we do know: Jeremiah’s prophecy is important not only because it gave the Babylonian exiles hope, but because it gives us something concrete to go on: in this time of waiting we have seen that Jeremiah was right! In this time of preparation, we know that all things are possible in God! In this time of Advent, the tension and confusion is summed up in the great mystery of the church, the most comforting words we could hear: Christ has come, and Christ will come again.
And in those days, we will never be confused again.
And we will rejoice.
Let us pray: Lord, we believe; forgive our unbelief. Help us to heed Jeremiah’s words and to hold close to your ways, your will and your word. Help us to prepare for the glory of what has come and what will come again, in your time and by your precious hand. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
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