Hope and Delight in the Midst of Destruction
Text: Jeremiah 33:14-16, Luke 21:25-36
Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who destroys the pits of despair.
Expectations. So, I write on Thursdays and this week, all I see is really the forecast for this weekend.It’s snow, snow, and maybe some ice. The expectation is that service will be cancelled. We don’t like bad news. I don’t like cancelling worship. I was expecting to get together with some friends I haven’t seen in a while at the Lutefisk andMeatball dinner last night. Our Old Fashioned Christmas was cancelled yesterday and moved to the 16th after our Christmas Program.
The expectation is that everything will go well, that God will provide for us our expectations. But, those expectations don’t always come to pass. For a variety of reasons, which our lessons here dwell on. The two main causes of lost expectations are inward and outward, I like insert the word sin here, to show that these things are not caused by God. Outward sins, and inward sins.
Doom and gloom are hard, because they tend to surround us all the time. Refugees fleeing gang and drug warfare in CentralAmerica, Refugees fleeing war in Syria and the middle east. Racism, Sexism. GunViolence and school shootings. Anger and ill will. Loss of jobs, illness, sickness. It seems everyday there is a new story of dread coming from somewhere.
Our gospel text talks again of apocalypse. The seeming end of times. The destruction of what is. “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming up on the world, for the power of the heavens will be shaken.”
Outward forces are difficult, because they come from a variety of areas, things like natural disaster, illness, accident. These are not caused by God, they are not retribution for things we have done, you or someone else’s actions do not cause God’s wrath in this way. The hope we find is that God is with us in the midst of them. It’s the central promise of Jesus through his death and resurrection. God has gone through what we go through, and God is with us in what we go through. Our Advent hope is the promise that God will come to us. We sing a Christmas Hymn as our closing hymn each week of Advent, both to hasten the time Jesus will be born, but also to remind ourselves that he already has. The Hope we find this week is from O Little Town of Bethlehem and the last stanza of the first verse, the Hope andFears of all the years are met in thee tonight. In Christ’s birth, we place our hope and our fears, and God brings us in.
The other part of lost expectations is on inward sin, and often not individual but, corporate, the sin of the whole people. The whole people have gone against what God wants. That’s the situation in Jeremiah. The people do not listen to God. They go against what God wants.The question of advent becomes, what if we are part of the community, culture, or nation that is oppressing the people that God loves. I’m reminded of a quote from Stephen Colbert, the late night TV host, but also devout Catholic andSunday School Teacher. “If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.” The question these texts really wrestle with, that advent really wrestles with is, how does God work within us so that we are indeed made right with God, how does God recreate us to follow God’s commands. Our texts talk many times of righteousness, which means, being right with God, and God working to bring us to righteousness.
That’s where we get Jeremiah, with its doom and gloom as the backdrop. Jeremiah actually finds himself in jail at the time of this proclamation. The reason is that the people got tired of hearing his doom and gloom. This is chapter 33, and for the most part all Jeremiah has done up to now is prophesy and proclaim to the King of Judah in Jerusalem what God has told him, that the King and the people there need to change their ways, they are turning away and disobeying God. The Babylonian Empire has conquered all the cities of Judah except Jerusalem and two others that are holding out. The End is in sight. And Jeremiah says, this town will fall to theBabylonians. The King says, why are you still telling me this. Why can’t you say good things. I don’t want to hear bad, I want to hear good.
Jeremiah is imprisoned, looked down on, spat upon, disgraced and ignored by the king, nearly killed even, they have not listened to a thing Jeremiah has told them, and so you’d expect him to say, well, you should have listened! I told you so! You had it coming, you’re getting what you deserve.
But, no, Into the midst of the pain, the despair, the unknown of what is coming to the king and the people, Jeremiah says, a righteous branch will spring up. There will be righteousness. Righteousness, made right by God. Even in the midst of this horror before you,God will bring Justice and Righteousness. Even if everything is decimated, burnt, ruined, destroyed, a sprout will rise up. This will not be the peoples end.
That seems harsh, well, everything else was destroyed around him. Advent is hope in despair, but it’s also are shaping in the midst of that despair. Being made right with God, means being remade to be right with God. It means that the case of Judah and Jerusalem, everything but that sprout needed to be destroyed, because well, it was not right with God.
A theme of Hope and Delight that starts with destruction of Judah and exile, apocalypse and Armageddon seems odd. But, it’s also needed for true advent to occur. There are things that are wrong in our world, our country, ourselves that need in fact to be destroyed and reduced to nothing before any new sprouts can come forth. Before righteousness can come, removal of sin must occur.
I think of Redwood Trees. Their pinecones don’t open unless they’re subjected to high heat, usually fire. All the undergrowth is destroyed by that fire, seemingly Armageddon, and in that place of nothing, that redwood tree will sprout and grow.
We start Advent by saying we are in the midst of pits of despair. Places of our own making, where we have put ourselves, and places others have placed us, places of despair in our country and world, and those pits need to be destroyed before we can rise from them. We need to remove the power of those pits so we can truly rise up from them.
That’s the hope this week, through God, the pits will be destroyed, and the delight is that God is right there with us the whole time, reminding us you will live, through Christ, you have been saved, your life in me is established.
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