Sunday Sermon: “Something to Anticipate”
|
Jeremiah 33:14-16
“Something to Anticipate”
Series: “Plans for God’s Good Future”
Like for many of you, spring is my favorite season of the year. I especially love the way that everything around me buds and blooms in a cascade of colors that not even Picasso could come close to matching.
A good part of it, no doubt, is that spring just happens to be the season that comes after winter, which as we all know is almost always a dreary and dismal time. Even though we live far enough south for it not to get too brutally cold down here in Birmingham, we get just enough of the chilly stuff that we soon weary of it, which makes the springtime something we anticipate most anxiously.
The feeling of anticipation may well be the one emotion that we humans can’t afford to be without. We may think that time is today’s new currency, but if you have no sense of anticipation in your life, then you are truly a broke individual; for if you have nothing to look forward to in life, if there is no future for you to set your hopes upon, then your present holds no real purpose. Your today is empty if there’s nothing promising about your tomorrow.
That’s what the people in the prophet Jeremiah’s day came to see as they were finding themselves grasping for something to hold on to as their city was withering because of the seen enemy at their city gates, the Babylonians.
Today, we’re finishing up our series on the book of Jeremiah, which we began the first Sunday of the year. The reason I felt led to take us through a somewhat extended journey through Jeremiah is because while we all know the verse where God says to His people, “I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future” (29:11), what we too often fail to understand is that in order to realize that hope and that future, God often has to allow us to go through a season of testing, where in that season we turn to God as we have never done before so that God in that season forms us and shapes us into a people worthy of the good future He has for us to know.
In this section of Jeremiah, God’s prophet has been confined to the courtyard of the Jerusalem temple guard by order of King Zedekiah. In other words, he’s in the Jerusalem City Jail, where he will remain until the city’s fall to the Babylonians. Jeremiah is under arrest because the king has grown weary of his pessimistic preaching. After all, even corrupt kings like Zedekiah need a future to look forward to, and Jeremiah’s preaching has left the king locked up in what we might call his own “winter of discontent.”
So, why was Jeremiah so negative? Because so many of Jerusalem’s kings, just like Zedekiah, had squandered the chance God had given them to lead the people to live rightly and justly so that everyone in the land had the same opportunity to benefit from being a part of God’s covenant community. But as it was, Zedekiah and his cronies had rigged everything to come up roses in terms of their own interests and had shoved God’s commandments to the side, leaving the people to look to other gods, lesser gods, for help and for hope. Little wonder, then, that Jeremiah felt led to pronounce God’s judgment on the nation, which when introduced, would become the time of testing where God would then be able to form and shape His people so that He might do in them and through them something that would one day lead to the salvation of the entire world.
“The days are coming,” thundered Jeremiah from his dungeon, “when God will fulfill the good promise that He made to the people of Israel and Judah. He will make a righteous branch sprout from David’s line. Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety, and the land will be called ‘the LORD Our Righteous Savior.’”
We can’t really see it in our English translations, but trust me when I tell you that Jeremiah wasn’t pulling any punches with his prophecy. On the surface it sounds like everything that Zedekiah had been asking for, and more! I can hear Zedekiah now. “Finally, some good news!” But in reality, what Jeremiah was saying to the king, whose very name, given to him by Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, meant “the Lord is Our Righteousness,” was, “The first thing you must understand, Zedekiah, is that you didn’t live up to your name. You didn’t promote God’s justice and righteousness in the land. So, do you know what God’s going to do? He’s going to cut you off, and from the stump that is left behind, He’s going to raise up a righteous branch, whose name will be given to him by no one less than God Himself, and it will be a name before whom every knee will one day bow and every tongue will one day confess, because he will do what you could not do. He will do what is just and right in the land.”
What Jeremiah was saying to Zedekiah and, for that matter, all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, was while earthly rulers will never fail to disappoint, God will never fail to come through. Therefore, in a time of distress, people of faith must learn to look past their painful present to the new day and the new life that only God can bring about.
Might that be a word that you need to hear and heed today? In the midst of this present time of confinement where you are no longer as free as you were as recently as one month ago, can you dare to believe that even in this present distress God is digging and shoveling and planting seeds of favor that in His time and by His power are bound to come to life?
The tendency we humans have is to believe that once things get past a certain point on their downward slide, they will never come back up again. We might phrase it this way: “What goes down will never come back up.” Call it “Gravity’s Reverse,” which we tend to apply to everything in life from the markets to our moods and everything in between. But when we get to thinking that way and our fears and anxieties begin to get the best of us, how much better it is for us to remember our Easter faith and “how what you sow does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Corinthians 15:36).
Maybe that’s why from the very beginning of Scripture, in the book of Genesis, there is in the Garden of Eden a tree of life. And maybe that’s also why at the end of Scripture, in the book of Revelation, it concludes with, you guessed it, a tree of life. And in between? In between there is another tree, a cross-shaped tree, a tree upon which Jesus gave his life as the Righteous Branch who sprang forth from the line of David so that you and I might know life more abundant.
When life goes down, it is Jesus who lifts us up. Little wonder that in every season of trial and tribulation people look to him as the reason for the hope for which every one of us yearns.
Somewhere I remember reading the story of a community in South Dakota that had been devastated by a tornado. We in the south know those kinds of stories, which unfortunately tend to happen during the season when winter seems to be in a massive tussle in handing over control of the weather to spring. Among the structures that were destroyed in that little South Dakota community was a Lutheran church.
The day after the tornado had ripped through the town, the pastor of that Lutheran church walked through the devastation along with other townsfolk numb from the wreckage. She writes that it was an unbelievable sight – a grain elevator twisted and fallen, the town’s water tower toppled, cars and trucks and other heavy items strewn around like toys, and lots of trees uprooted and thrown about in places they were never meant to be.
When she got near the site of the church someone called out: “Look! There he is! There’s Jesus!” And sure enough, the pastor said, there was the statue of Jesus that had once stood at the altar of the church – a beacon to what had been the site of a 100 year old congregation’s place of worship.
The pastor thought it fitting that she could look up from the chaos all around her and see the outstretched arms of Jesus, the Righteous Branch from the stump of David. She wondered how the statue had survived the devastation and later learned that two young girls, helping clean up for a family member in a nearby home had taken time to cover to where the church had been and found the statue in the rubble. They decided among themselves that everyone in town needed to see that Jesus was still there, and so they set him up for all to see.
In this present time of devastation, let us do the same. Let us look for ways to lift up Jesus. For he is very present to give us, as the hymn puts it, “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.” His is a hope that will never disappoint, for he brings to bear in our lives the power of a God whose promises never fail, the power of a God who in Christ always springs up and always comes through.