Remembering the Past...
        Planning the Future

    Park Christian Church
                                                                    (Disciples of Christ)

November 29, 2009

Scripture:         Jeremiah 33:14-16

Sermon:           “Looking Ahead”

            Turning our hearts and minds now to the word of God, let us read together the scripture lesson for the day.  Turn with me to the prophet Jeremiah, chapter 33 where we will read together verses 14 through 16.  You can find that easily on page   of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, in the pew Bible.

            In the darkest days of the people of Israel, God’s prophets spoke to the people about days to come when God would bring about a great restoration.  Those darkest days were in the years following complete and total devastation at the hands of the great empire of Babylon.  What had happened to them was painful, disorienting, and humiliating.  They were dark days.  And the words of God’s prophets offered a new hope and new reasons for being faithful to God.

            The prophets are quite clear about how these dark days came about.  The people had not taken seriously God’s call upon them to be a just society that reflected God’s own goodness.  If they were God’s people, they would not have treated the poor the way that they did.  They would worship the Lord and their lives would reflect what they claimed to be worshiping.  Their leaders compromised their principles in order to become more powerful.  And ultimately, the nation that God had created by freeing a people from slavery had become too much of what God had saved them from in the first place.

            Their last king was a man named Zedekiah.  There was never a king after him.  When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, that was the last man to ever legitimately be called the “King of Judah”.  The Bible says that he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.  Zedekiah abused the poor and made a mockery of God.  He was, in a word, un-righteous.

            His name, however, means completely the opposite.  Zedekiah, in Hebrew, means literally “The Lord is my righteousness.”  Oh, the irony.

            I love how Jeremiah plays with this irony at the end of our scripture.  Watch for it.  Jeremiah proclaims that there will be a future king to bring hope and fulfill all of what God ever promised.  And his name?  Well, this coming king will be called, “The Lord is our righteousness.”

            We read these words in Advent because they are the very words that sustained the people of Israel for hundreds of years.  As they learned to look ahead to what God would do, we also learn to look ahead at this time of year.  This is the word of the Lord.

            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.  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.”

            I grew up down the street from a girl who never made any promises.  We’d all get off the bus in the afternoon and say, “See you tomorrow.”  But, she’d say, “Maybe.”  She never made any promises.  She never made any promises because she never knew if she’d be around from one day to the next.

            What’s it like to be 12 years old and know that the body you’ve been born with doesn’t have a liver that will sustain your life?  That was her story.  She was tiny.  And frail.  And she didn’t have a clue if she would live to get into college or even high school.

            She never made any promises.

            We all knew the score, too.  All of us.  We knew that she was going to have to get dangerously sick before she’d be eligible for a liver transplant.  There aren’t enough liver donors to meet all the needs of liver patients.  So, you have to get very sick in order to get to the top of the list for a transplant.

            Isn’t that something?  You have to get really sick before you can be considered for a transplant!  Dangerously sick.  Sick like you very possibly could die.  She was 12 years old.

            Next to her bed, though…Next to her bed was little red suitcase.  She had this little, red suitcase packed and ready to go with everything she needed just in case the phone rang and she had to get up in the middle of the night, drop everything and go to the hospital where she would have very risky surgery that might result, might result, in a liver transplant to prolong her life.  And even then, her body might not accept the new organ.

            That little, red suitcase was always ready to go.  She believed that phone was going to ring.  Someone said that it would happen someday.  She’d have to get really sick.  But, someone said that it would happen.  And not a day went by when she wasn’t ready.  And she didn’t make any promises to anyone.

            I think that’s what it’s like to truly live with hope.  You can talk about hope.  And you can have a smile on your face.  But, if there isn’t a little, red suitcase involved, I wonder if any of us ever really know what having hope means.

            Jeremiah’s words are all about hope, you know.  The days are surely coming.  They’re coming.  Hang in there.  Believe.  The days are surely coming.  That’s about hope.  The days are surely coming when God will raise up a savior.  And as opposed to now, there is going to be justice and righteousness in the land.

            That’s about hope.

            Advent is about hope.

            Waiting for God to fulfill a promise…that’s about hope.

            And Jeremiah wasn’t just passing along the good news that God had shared with him.  He was saying, “Folks, keep a bag packed and ready to go.  Be ready to act on this hope.  Live your life according to this hope.”

            Well, now, that’s not so easy to do.  Not when everything around you, and everything about you suggests that nothing’s ever going to change, nothing’s ever going to get better.  That’s not so easy to do.  And, truthfully, not everyone bought it.  Not every

            Jeremiah spoke these words in the middle of the darkest days these folks had ever known.  The days are surely coming when…The days are surely coming…Do you see that?  Faith and hope don’t look at what is and throw up its hands.  Faith and hope look at what is and says “I won’t settle for this.”

            Hope has a look to it.  It looks like a little, red suitcase.  That’s hope that someone is living their life according to.  Hope has a look to it.

            And what does hope look like for you?  What does it look like if you really believe that God can and is in the business of doing something?

            I don’t know.  But, maybe it looks like a 65 year old man ordering a spinach salad for the first time in his life instead of the usual meal that’s been killing him slowly for years.  Just a little thing like a spinach salad.  But, it looks like hope to me because there you’ve got someone who believes that life can be different and better and longer.  And he can be there for major milestones in the lives of his grandchildren.

            My dad recently got that kind of wake-up call from his physicians.  “Your heart can’t take any more of what you’re doing to it.”  So, do you just give up?  Or, do you start walking a little bit.  Do you order that spinach salad instead a cheeseburger and fries?

            Hope has a look to it.

            Maybe it looks like a Chicago Cubs hat.  Some people call them the Lovable Losers.  Haven’t won a title in over a hundred years.  1908 to be exact.  And I know a man that wears that hat almost everywhere he goes.  “How do you wear that thing?” I ask him.  He just winks and says, “Hope springs eternal.”

            And it does, by golly.  The man that wears the Chicago Cubs hat?  In the course of his lifetime he’s been through two divorces.  He’s been fired from at least a dozen jobs.  He’s had enough money to invest in properties all over Southern Indiana.  And he’s filed for bankruptcy more than once.  We were introduced down at the Robert E. Lee Nursing Home where he lives now.  And he’s told me bits and pieces of his story over the years.

            Always, though, he’s got on that Chicago Cubs hat.  “Hope springs eternal.”  And he’ll pull out a picture of his great-grandchildren.  “See there?  Hope springs eternal.”

            Hope has a look to it.  Hope has a look to it because faith has a look to it.  If faith believes in something, you can see it in how the believ-er lives accordingly.  Maybe that’s what Jesus’ brother James meant when he said “Faith without works is dead.”  (James 2:17)  If it doesn’t change the way you approach life, it isn’t really faith at all.

            I think children get this.  Especially at this time of year!  They absolutely live in the expectation that something is about to happen.  My daughter is just now getting old enough to get a little Christmas crazy.  And she says, “Santa Claus is coming to my house?”

            She’s not old enough, I don’t think, to really take advantage of this.  You know?  “You better be on your best behavior.”  She’s not old enough.  But, she’s starting to live in that belief, in that hope, that something magical is going to happen very soon.

            Children get that.  It’s the reason they lie awake dreaming of what it will mean for them.  They make lists to mail to the North Pole because they really do believe.  They make sure that Santa, or one of his local helpers, gets the message and gets it right.  Children get that.  They will live according to that belief for the next four weeks.

            It’s something of what Advent is supposed to be for all of us.  Jeremiah says that surely the days are coming when God will raise up a new king.  And this king will see to it that there is justice and righteousness in the land.  Only for us it is not the next three or four weeks that we will spend waiting for it.  Advent is here to teach us how to live our entire lives according to what God has promised.

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)