The days are surely coming (Jeremiah 33)
“The days are surely coming” (Jeremiah 33.14-16)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, December 2, 2018 (Advent 1C)
Tom James
You’ve heard the expression, “You reap what you sow.” Most of us don’t farm very much anymore, I’m guessing, but we can still understand the metaphor. Put a seed in the ground, and, though you may not see much going on and you might even forget that you put it there, rest assured, something is happening in those hidden depths. And something will happen as a result.
The problem is that we human beings—and I think this is true of our generation more than previous ones—we have a tendency to forget what we’ve put in the ground. In other words, life is moving so fast that we are pretty much focused just on keeping up, and we can easily overlook the big picture or the longer timescale. We can forget that we’ve done things to people, to nations, to the environment, and that those things are going inevitably to have consequences. A controversial preacher some years ago now called this, “chickens coming home to roost.” How much of what our ancestors sowed long ago, perpetrating what some have called America’s “original sin” of slavery and racism, aimed both at people within our borders and those beyond them, is now being reaped in a contemporary harvest of devastation? How much of what we are sowing now will be reaped as a harvest of devastation for those who will come after us?
Jeremiah was writing in a time when the chickens were coming home to roost. He was probably in jail after offending the king with his prophecies of doom. What had gotten Jeremiah in trouble were his sermons about how injustices in the land, the exploitation of the poor, the neglect of the vulnerable, the king’s attempts to safeguard his own security by making alliances with Egypt, all were going to lead to no good end. Jeremiah told the king that his kingdom was tottering, that disaster lay just around the corner. Kings don’t want to hear that! Heck, no one wants to hear that. We want our prophets to tell us good news, or at least to sugar coat the bad. We want to feel good, to be assured, to have blessings repeated to us, even if that means numbing ourselves against the pain of reality.
But Jeremiah was made of a different kind of stuff than that, you might say. They call him the “weeping prophet,” and not because he indulged in self-pity but because he shared God’s grief over a failing nation. Israel had been chosen, set apart to be an expression of God’s own heart, caring for the widow and orphan and remaining hospitable to the foreigner and resisting the imperial pretensions of the surrounding nations. Israel was supposed to be different. But it had failed to do those things, and God’s judgment was about to fall upon a nation that insisted on remaining ignorant of its faults and of the consequences of those faults. It preferred to numb itself with bromides and clichés and to wrap itself in self-righteous complacency. But the Babylonian empire was knocking at the door, and soon, Jerusalem would fall, its leaders would be deported, and its temple would be destroyed.
Jeremiah wept for Israel, and he wept for God.
But, by the time we get to chapter 33, we read that “the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah a second time.” I suggest that two sentences capture the meaning of Advent for us Christians. First, the title of this sermon: “The days shall surely come.” Whether we can see them coming or not, whether we welcome them or not. The days are surely coming. The future is not fully determined by the past—but what we have done has a bearing on what will be. The chickens will come home to roost. But, do you know what has an even greater bearing than our actions? God. “The days shall surely come” means something completely different when you figure in the work of God. And the second sentence that is important for Advent points in that direction. The second sentence is, “the word of the Lord came a second time.” The coming of the word of the Lord a second time tells us that the first word, a sorrowful word of judgment, an expression of God’s disappointment and heartache at a dream deferred and a nation that has failed, is not the last word. Another word, a second word, is even greater than the word of judgment and grief.
This is the point, the gospel, the life-giving word, in a nutshell: God is still God, even if we have made a mess of things. Even if Israel failed to be Israel, the God of Israel did not fail to be God, and hope for a restoration did not crumble with the city and the temple. The word of the Lord came a second time.
Of course, this isn’t just for Israel. Even if, in our own time, the church has failed to be the church, even if all that was glimpsed in those glory years when the church was new, those first stirrings of a faithful community that grew more powerful as it engaged in ministries of healing and sharing and hospitality—even if all that has degenerated into a dying institution filled with meaningless repetitions, even if the only thing it now strives for is its own preservation, even if it has grown into the habit of numbing itself to its neighbors and shutting itself off from God’s world; even if the church has not really been the church, but more like a club or a clique whose time has come and gone; even if all that is true, still, God has not stopped being God. God’s love for the church remains because God has not forgotten what the church could be. And, so, the word of the Lord comes a second time.
What does it mean to look up from the rubble of a broken city, or country, or church, and hope? Nelson Mandela, called by many the “grandfather” of South Africa, was imprisoned for nearly 27 years for the trouble he caused the Apartheid government. He fought hard against Apartheid. He struggled with all his might for a country in which blacks and whites could live together justly and equally. One of his famous, most oft-quoted lines from his speeches and writings was, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” Freedom for himself and for his people must have seemed a long, long way away from his prison cell. It must have seemed like he was facing an impossible task as if he were on a fool’s errand. The obstacles were too big, the odds too long, the powers of evil too entrenched. And yet, we know that he did walk out of that cell and into a new country. I wonder if the line came back to him: It always seems impossible until it’s done.
I wonder if that could be a third sentence for Advent. It’s a season in which we await the impossible—or what seems impossible until it comes.
Advent is a new song time. Because we are looking forward to a new beginning with the birth of Christ, it’s time for us to sing new songs. Now, new songs are not new in the sense of being unfamiliar to us—they are new in the sense that they announce something that is hard to imagine without a great injection of novelty into our lives. The great American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote that only covenant people sing new songs. What he meant was that only those who are gathered to hear the word of promise, a word that contradicts the frozen words of despair daily repeated in the prison cell, in captivity, within the rubble, are able to lift their voices and sing of a new reality, to string new words together, to imagine and embrace a new way of life.
I challenge you to listen to the hymns and the music this season, not just for the pleasing old melodies that warm our hearts every year, but to the words of longing and promise. Most of the songs we will sing are songs that we have sung countless times, and they remind us, perhaps, not of the future we long for but of the past whose memory we treasure. But listen to the words, again. Let the stories and the lyrics strike you as if for the first time—with all their audacity and their radical hope. Let them remind you of what it means to hope, and even to expect. For we exist as a people who are defined by what we hope for. We exist as a people who know that life in our community is not yet what it could be. We exist as a people who await a savior. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
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