Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Friends, it's so good to be with you this morning on this first Sunday of Advent. Thank you, Pastor Matt, for inviting me back. Let's pray together before we begin.
[00:00:11] Lord, open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as the Scriptures are read and your word is proclaimed, we may hear with joy and with hope what you say to us this day. Amen.
[00:00:26] Today's passage comes From Jeremiah chapter 33, verses 14 to 16.
[00:00:34] The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah in those days. And at that time I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
[00:00:54] In those days, Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called. The Lord is our righteousness.
[00:01:05] This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
[00:01:09] Oh, friends, today is a beautiful day. It is the day when we are finally unified. Whether you started listening to Christmas music the day after Halloween, or a strict no Christmas before Thanksgiving person, or even go so far as to say no Christmas before December 1st, wherever you stand, today is officially the day. We can all agree that we are in the holiday season.
[00:01:36] And as Christians, the Advent and Christmas season are our Super Bowl. This is our time. Our time to show the world what Christmas is really about. The joyful good news of Jesus Christ.
[00:01:50] Isn't it our job to represent the words of Advent, hope, joy, peace and love? There's no room for darkness or lament.
[00:02:00] If you bring anything less than that joy or celebration, you are deemed the Scrooge of Christmas.
[00:02:08] And even as I say this, some of us are already feeling a little bit uncomfortable because these words, hope, joy, peace and love feel jarringly juxtaposed to some of our present circumstances.
[00:02:22] When we enter the Advent and Christmas season weary of family tensions, national unrest and division, overwhelmed with anxiety about the future, hurting with loneliness or grief, or feeling hopeless, the themes of Advent and Christmas feel more like some naive optimism that ignores our reality.
[00:02:46] As a self professed Christmas enthusiast, I consider myself to be the real life embodiment of Buddy the Elf, whose job is to spread Christmas cheer to all who hear.
[00:02:58] And for the longest time, I wanted everyone to believe again in the magic of Christmas.
[00:03:04] And then over the years, Christmas became, well, more complicated.
[00:03:09] It's not as simple as just getting into the Christmas spirit, is it?
[00:03:13] And I'll be honest with you, when I agreed months ago to preach on the first Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of hope. I did not realize how hopeless the world would feel coming into Advent.
[00:03:26] What does it actually mean for Advent to offer us hope when the future feels uncertain, when hope feels empty and fleeting, when division is ripe and when we are tired and weary?
[00:03:41] The temptation in these times is to lean on what I call little h hopes, these temporal hopes that put a band aid on our negative feelings.
[00:03:51] They give us this fleeting sense of control and certainty about our future and thus make us feel a little bit of hope. These little h hopes are the silver lining moments.
[00:04:05] But I think as I've sat over the past couple weeks with today's passage, this promise and prophecy from Jeremiah 33 I think teaches us that Advent invites us to let go of these little h hopes and embrace a big h hope.
[00:04:24] Because this big h hope is not a naive optimism.
[00:04:29] It's not about mustering festive cheer or ignoring the struggles of life.
[00:04:35] Rather, big h hope is a hope that is grounded in trust, grounded trust in God's faithfulness.
[00:04:44] It is about glimpsing, even through tear soaked eyes, a future that is greater than our present circumstances, a hope that is anchored in the promises of God.
[00:04:56] And I believe that in offering us this kind of hope, the season of Advent is not calling us to buddy the elf like Christmas cheer, but rather it invites us to live in the tension between the hard realities of now and the faithful assurance of what is to come between the present and the promise, between the hopelessness and the true hope.
[00:05:23] Jeremiah knew this tension intimately.
[00:05:27] He was a prophet who stood at the intersection of despair and promise, of lament and hope.
[00:05:35] Jeremiah's call to ministry was profound and sobering.
[00:05:39] God told him, behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.
[00:05:55] And boy did Jeremiah fulfill that first half of his call.
[00:05:59] Much of the book of Jeremiah doesn't hold any punches when he despaired and lamented over the state of Judah.
[00:06:08] You see, at the time of Jeremiah's writing, Judah, though small and heavily influenced by large foreign powers, was in a period of political independence. Led by their own monarchy, the kingdom of Judah sat precariously between two foreign Babylon and Egypt.
[00:06:27] The Babylonian empire to the north rapidly gained power, while to the south, Egypt used Judah as a buffer against Babylon.
[00:06:37] In an attempt to maintain political independence, Judean king after king played dangerous political games, vacillating their alliances between Babylon and Egypt.
[00:06:50] In the process, their covenant with God. And their sense of justice and righteousness in God's land were mere afterthoughts, if that.
[00:07:00] So here entered Jeremiah.
[00:07:03] He really honed in on this coal to pluck up and break down, as over and over he condemned Judah's unfaithfulness to God and their neglect of justice and righteousness.
[00:07:15] He warned Judah that calamity was coming.
[00:07:19] And he was right.
[00:07:21] Judah's destruction was imminent.
[00:07:24] In 587 BC, after a two year Babylonian siege on the city of Jerusalem, the city fell.
[00:07:33] Jerusalem was the spiritual, religious and national center of God's people. And it was gone.
[00:07:43] The kingdom and monarchy of Judah was dissolved, many of its citizens deported, leaving God's people divided and exiled.
[00:07:54] This was unimaginable, not just for the loss of home and city, but for its devastating implications for the people's relationship with their God.
[00:08:06] To understand the impact of this, we have to know the historical and spiritual context of this city to the people's relationship with God.
[00:08:17] Centuries prior, King David wanted to build a temple for God. And so God promised David that his son Solomon would construct a temple.
[00:08:27] In 1 Chronicles 7:10, 14 we read, I declare to you that the Lord will build you a house when your days are fulfilled, to go to be with your ancestors. I will raise up your offspring after you, one of your own sons, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for me, and I will establish his throne forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. I will not take my steadfast love from him as I took it from him who was before you, but I will confirm him in my house and in my kingdom forever. And his throne shall be established forever.
[00:09:07] This promise from God was extraordinary. It meant two major things.
[00:09:13] First, it meant God for the first time would live among his people in the temple, meaning that the people of God finally had a direct avenue to God.
[00:09:22] Both the people and foreigners living in Israel could use the temple to worship and pray and offer sacrifices for their sins so that they might be reconciled to God.
[00:09:34] Second, it meant that the monarchy, the kingdom and lineage that God would establish, the kingdom and lineage of David were important to the people because it was through that kingdom and lineage that God would establish his kingdom, and that kingdom would reign forever, no longer subject to the invasions of foreign powers.
[00:09:58] So you see, when Babylon destroyed their temple, Babylon was cutting off the people of Judah from their God.
[00:10:07] There was no temple to make sacrifices to reconcile their relationship. There was nowhere to pray or worship.
[00:10:15] When Babylon dissolved the kingdom from the line of David, Babylon was cutting off the people from that great promise of God. In 1 Chronicles that God would establish a kingdom to endure forever through David, the city and the temple were symbols of their covenantal relationship with God. And it was all gone.
[00:10:36] Jeremiah's prophecy was fulfilled, but that wasn't the totality of Jeremiah's call.
[00:10:44] He was also called to build and to plant.
[00:10:48] And so we read in the book of Jeremiah, chapters 30 to 33, a collection of prophecies and promises widely labeled the Book of Comfort or the Book of Consolation.
[00:10:59] They are prophecies and promises offered to a people in the depths of darkness and despair.
[00:11:06] These are not little h hopes, not optimistic platitudes detached from the pain of God's people.
[00:11:14] Nor are they called to conjure up forced cheer and ignore the weight of their despair.
[00:11:21] Rather, Jeremiah offers these words from God that are the promises of truth.
[00:11:26] They are the big h hope words born from a deep understanding of the hopelessness of God's that God's people bear, and an anchoring in God's unshakable promises and relentless faithfulness.
[00:11:43] So Jeremiah 33:14 begins. See, the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah, to a people who could only see their present reality, a reality marked by devastation. The Lord said see.
[00:12:04] To not just look with their eyes because their eyes can only see the now, but to look with their faith and glimpse the not yet.
[00:12:15] Where the people saw a promise and relationship broken, God invited them to see beyond, to see a promise still unfolding, a God whose faithfulness is unrelenting.
[00:12:30] Despite Israel and Judah's repeated unfaithfulness and their failure to heed God's warnings through Jeremiah, God's resolve remains the same to fulfill his promise to save and restore his people and establish a kingdom that endures forever.
[00:12:49] Now many of us in this room today can only see the present reality. We see so clearly the world that is not as it should be.
[00:12:59] We see the lack of righteousness on earth, the destruction, the death and the darkness.
[00:13:05] It's overwhelming and paralyzing even, and can feel inherently hopeless.
[00:13:13] So it's timely that we are reminded of these promises in Jeremiah. On this first Sunday of adventure, we are reminded of this big age hope.
[00:13:24] We are invited, like the people of Judah were, to see beyond the now, to glimpse the not yet.
[00:13:32] To see with more than eyes fixed on the present moment, to see with our faith the restorative end to which the Lord is constantly moving to know that no matter how dark the present feels, God's resolve remains the same to fulfill his promise to save and restore his people.
[00:13:55] As Pastor Matt mentioned, as a community, Knox is going through Kate Bowler's Advent devotional and preaching series the Weary World Rejoices.
[00:14:04] I love this devotional and sermon series because at the core of it, Bowler understands that we are a people who sometimes struggle to rejoice in our weary world, even and especially sometimes at Advent.
[00:14:20] And rather than calling us to ignore the weariness and just rejoice anyway, Buller reminds us of the truth bound up in the narrative of God and His people, that the advent of hope, peace, joy and love is about seeing the world as it really is while still hoping for a future we can sometimes only glimpse.
[00:14:47] Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Seemed to understand this tension, an offer of that real big H hope.
[00:14:55] He saw the despair and long history of inequality in America. And yet he also saw a future where there would be justice and righteousness for every man, woman and child.
[00:15:08] He said, I may not get there with you, but I have seen the promised land.
[00:15:14] He believed that the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends toward justice.
[00:15:21] There is an anchoring. In MLK's words, he understood that he might not see the future that was promised.
[00:15:30] He seemed to believe, though, that in that great big H hope, a grounded trust in God's faithfulness to all people, an anchoring in the promises of God for a kingdom that would execute justice and righteousness and endure forever.
[00:15:49] We see the state of the world today, the state of our individual worlds today, and we see the promises and the faithfulness of God in a future that is still unfolding.
[00:16:03] The Lord continues in verse 15 saying, I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
[00:16:16] Their present lament and despair are painfully real, but God assures them that darkness will not have the final word.
[00:16:25] The Lord reaffirms the promise he made to David in one Chronicles that an offspring will in fact rise up to establish his throne forever. That promise was not lost.
[00:16:37] It's still unfolding.
[00:16:40] This is the promise that we get to know now is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the Son who came from David. That line was not destroyed, the Son of God who became king.
[00:16:55] And we know that this promise is also still unfolding. God's kingdom is still coming.
[00:17:03] And so at advent, in the face of a weary world, we hold onto the truth that God's promises were fulfilled in Jesus Christ, in whom we were adopted into the people of God and so became recipients of God's promises to his people.
[00:17:21] We became recipients of this big H hope in the middle of our now that God is relentlessly faithful.
[00:17:33] As theologian Walter Bruggemann writes, this kind of hope is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts.
[00:17:47] Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality, which is the majority opinion.
[00:17:54] And one does that only at great political and existential risk.
[00:18:02] Man does he nail that.
[00:18:04] That hope right now feels absurd because it does fly in the face of the facts of the present or even in the face of the future that the news articles tell us is coming.
[00:18:19] It refuses to accept the reading of reality that is the majority opinion and does so at great political and existential risk.
[00:18:32] I think this big H hope does that because it puts the future in the hands of God instead of our hands, and that feels risky.
[00:18:45] After all, what do we do when the future feels uncertain or anxiety provoking? We try to create a sense of certainty. We make plans.
[00:18:55] We rally our Christmas cheer and plan out a fun family Christmas activity that is going to go amazing. It is going to go amazing.
[00:19:06] Unfortunately, our plans have nothing on the unpredictability of skipped naps, contracted viruses, meltdowns, theirs and ours, forgetting and or not bringing enough snacks, and just the natural unpredictability of human emotion and experience.
[00:19:25] And you would think we would learn not to hold so tightly to our plans then. But what do we do? We plan harder and better, convinced that this time it will go differently, convinced that we will be able to control the outcome.
[00:19:41] But that's insanity, isn't it? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
[00:19:50] But it's because we depend on those plans. They are those little h hopes in the weary world.
[00:19:57] But that's all they are, little hopes.
[00:20:01] In his book 4000 Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Berkman says, we treat our plans as though they are a lasso thrown from the present around the future in order to bring it under our command.
[00:20:17] But all a plan is, all it could ever possibly be, is a present moment statement of intent.
[00:20:26] It's an expression of your current thoughts about how you'd ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future.
[00:20:36] The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.
[00:20:42] Our plans are just thoughts, just little hopes for how the future will pan out. But the future is under no obligation to comply because the future is not in our hands.
[00:20:58] So instead we are reminded in Jeremiah 33, that the future is in God's hands, and that is the big H. Hope.
[00:21:09] While our plans give us this illusion of certainty, God's plans and promises are certain because God has shown God's self to be faithful time and time again.
[00:21:23] And that does feel absurd. It does feel risky, because we have that urge to make the future ours, to make plans, to make hope happen. We're desperate for it, but it's temporary, it's little. It's not ours to control.
[00:21:42] And it may be absurd and it may feel risky right now, but it's a hope that's real and that's not cheap.
[00:21:51] It's not naive optimism, nor a meticulously laid plan at our hands to craft our future. It is a grounded trust in God's faithfulness and anchoring in the promises of God.
[00:22:04] Finally, the Lord promises in verse 16, in those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called. The Lord is our righteousness.
[00:22:18] Where a series of unrighteous rulers led Judah to ruin, God invites the people of Judah to hold on to a hope that feels absurd, that Judah will one day have a king that will embody justice and righteousness and will secure a kingdom that endures forever.
[00:22:38] Majority opinion would have Judah out for good.
[00:22:42] But the real hope of God is in this vision of salvation and the restoration for God's people, a hope not rooted in majority opinion or circumstance, but in God's unshakable faithfulness.
[00:22:56] What the world deems impossible has no bearing on what God deems possible.
[00:23:03] It is impossible that a kingdom could be established from the ashes of a dissolved kingdom and city. It is impossible that a people divided across nations and exiled could be united and saved.
[00:23:16] It is impossible that a branch could rise up out of a stump of a tree.
[00:23:23] It is impossible that a king could come to bring salvation, not just for God's people people, but for all nations. But for God. It is possible.
[00:23:36] The people of Judah were not able to see the fullness of God's promise in their time, but they were invited to glimpse it through faith.
[00:23:47] Many of us come to this Advent season overwhelmed, like Judah, by our present reality, whether it is global crises and national division and unrest, our own personal struggles or spiritual uncertainty.
[00:24:02] And like the people of Judah, we are invited to live in the tension between the now and the not, yet trusting that God is still at work. Even when the world feels really dim, we are offered this hope that is not naive, cheap or fleeting.
[00:24:24] It is not these little H hopes we often cling to in attempt to manage life's uncertainties.
[00:24:30] It is the big H hope, the grounded trust in God's relentless faithfulness and the assurance of promises still unfolding.
[00:24:41] It is the hope that sees the world as it is, yet dares to believe in what God promises it will be.
[00:24:50] Friends, may we not only hold this hope, this Advent, but also live in it.
[00:24:56] As the church community we are called to be the blessing to the nations, to model Jesus Christ, who is the embodiment of God's justice and righteousness.
[00:25:06] So let us embody God's righteousness and justice in our communities.
[00:25:12] Let us speak truth in darkness and extend love to those who feel forgotten so that all might see and believe that darkness is not the end.
[00:25:23] Let us proclaim with our words and our actions that God has not left the building, that even when life feels hopeless or our world feels weary, God is relentlessly faithful and his promises are still unfolding.
[00:25:39] Let us show the world that love that leaves the 99 to find the 1 that cares for the widow, the orphan, the child, the leper, the outsider.
[00:25:54] So this Advent seed is in. As we light these candles of hope, peace, joy and love, let us do so seeing beyond the present into the unfolding story of salvation, a story that began with a promise from a faithful God that was reinforced and expanded with a promised king, born in a lowly manger and will one day culminate in the Kingdom of God, where justice and righteousness reign forever.
[00:26:25] May we live into the words that Martin Luther King Jr. Declared, I have seen the promised land.
[00:26:33] Though we may not see it, yet in all its fillness we glimpse it and we journey forward together, carried by the hope that is both here now and still to come.
[00:26:44] May the weary world rejoice because hope is not destroyed. A restorative future is still unfolding.
[00:26:53] I want to end now with this prayer from Kate Bowler in one of her devotionals from the lives we actually have.
[00:27:02] It's called for when you need a little hope.
[00:27:05] Let's pray together.
[00:27:09] O God.
[00:27:11] These feel like darkening days with little hope to be found.
[00:27:15] We cry out, where are you, God, and where are your people, the sensible ones who fight for good? Why does the bad always seem to squeeze out all that is good?
[00:27:27] Oh, God, help us in our exhaustion and in our desperation, when we're tempted to throw our hands up in surrender, anchor us in hope.
[00:27:37] Blessed are we with eyes open to see reality. The sickness and loneliness, the injustice of racial oppression, the unimpeded greed and misuse of power, violence, intimidation and use of dominance for its own sake. The mockery of truth and and disdain for weakness. And worse, the seeming powerlessness of anyone trying to stop it.
[00:28:04] Blessed are we who are worn out from cynicism that we feel we've earned.
[00:28:10] We who are running on fumes without the promise of a destination.
[00:28:15] God, seek us out and find us and lead us to where hope lies and where your peaceable kingdom will come and your will be done. On earth as it is in heaven.
[00:28:26] Hope is an anchor dropped into the future. We feel you pulling us toward it once again. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, amen.
