"Prophets of Promise: Jeremiah"

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December 2, 2012 (First Sunday in Advent)

Old Testament Reading: Jeremiah 33:10-16

 Thus says the Lord: In this place of which you say,

‘It is a waste without human beings or animals’, in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem that are desolate, without inhabitants, human or animal, there shall once more be heard the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voices of those who sing, as they bring thank-offerings to the house of the Lord:
‘Give thanks to the Lord of hosts,
   for the Lord is good,
   for his steadfast love endures for ever!’
For I will restore the fortunes of the land as at first, says the Lord.

Thus says the Lord of hosts: In this place that is waste, without human beings or animals, and in all its towns there shall again be pasture for shepherds resting their flocks.  In the towns of the hill country, of the Shephelah, and of the Negeb, in the land of Benjamin, the places around Jerusalem, and in the towns of Judah, flocks shall again pass under the hands of the one who counts them, says the Lord.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfil 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.’

SERMON: Prophets of Promise: Jeremiah

“The prophets were drunk on God.”  Or so says that to-the-point preacher and writer, Frederick Buecher.  He goes on to say:  “In the presence of their terrible tipsiness, no one was ever comfortable.  With total lack of tact, they roared out against phoniness and corruption wherever they found them.  They were the terror of kings and priests.  The Prophet Nathan tells King David that he is a crook and an adulterer (2 Samuel 12:1-15).  The Prophet Jeremiah goes straight to the Temple itself and says, “Do not trust in these deceptive words, “This is the Temple of the Lord, This is the Temple of the Lord, This is the Temple of the Lord” (Jeremiah 4:7).  It was like a prophet to say it three times, just to make sure. 

No prophet is on record as having asked for the job. There is no evidence to suggest that anyone ever asked a prophet home for supper more than once.  Most of the prophets went a little mad before they were through, if they weren’t a little mad to begin with.”

Philosopher John Caputo seems to agree with ol’ Freddie B.  He says of the prophets:

“The voice of the prophet interrupts the self-assured voices of the powerful, the princes of this world, bringing them up short, calling them to account for themselves.  That is why the prophets had a habit of getting themselves killed a most serious occupational hazard (Jeremiah was apparently thrown into a cistern and left there),.  They were perhaps a little mad, mad for justice, mad about injustice, and, maybe, just a little plain mad.”

Finally, our rapid-fire introduction to prophets concludes with my old professor Walter Brueggemann as he writes:

“The prophetic tradition preserves for us these staggering enactments of redemptive madness.  This madness lingers in and through the text.  That is why the text has been kept until now.  When the text is resurfaced, revoiced, reuttered, re-experienced, it sometimes turns out to be the only sanity in town.”

The prophets were mad in order to point out the madness that is injustice and suffering, but they also possessed a holy foolishness: they were foolish enough, in the face of unimaginable suffering and sin, to claim that God was still speaking a word of hope and repentance, that a promised future was coming. 

These prophetic words were not spoken in polite conversation in the grocery store or in a beautiful sactuary. 

When Jeremiah, that child-prophet, uttered the words  ‘Give thanks to the Lord of hosts,
 for the Lord is good,
 for his steadfast love endures for ever!,’ he did so in the midst of utter ruin.  The year was somewhere around 587 B.C.  The greatest world power of the time, Babylon, had invaded, and rather than just carry off the people of Israel to enslave them, they destroyed their land completely, animals and all.  The Temple, where the presence of God dwelled in the Holy of Holies, was a smoldering ruin.  The siege of the city of Jerusalem was so crippling that cannibalism took hold.  Their king was killed, along with all of his family. 

And the covenant with their God?  Well, clearly God had reneged on the deal.  Except there was that mad prophet in town who said otherwise. 

“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.” Jeremiah said.  Such blind hope in the face of complete desolation seemed either callous or idiotic. 

So Jeremiah spoke up a second time: “In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David.”

People shuffled by on filthy feet with heads bowed down in submission, parents buried their children and the grief of an entire broken nation keened through the air.  And still Jeremiah spoke a third time:  “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.’”

In those days.  The relentless hope of this young prophet is centered around those three little words.  You see, if you are sharing a vision of “those days”, you are refusing to say that these days are all we will ever see.  Like that first defiant breath the morning after a loved one’s funeral, life continues, even when it seems impossible. 

It takes incredible hope to claim such a promise in the midst of these days.  These days are full of relentless violence in the Middle East, and even in our classrooms. These days are full of stretching our wallets and energy far too thin.

These days are full of politics informing our faith, not the other way around.  These days are full of unyielding worry for loved ones, pressure on teenagers and young adults to conform to self-destructive behaviors labeled as “normal.”   These days are full of people disillusioned with the church, feeling that pervasive hypocrisy and irrelevance have burned down the Temple of their once-strong faith.

But these days are not all the days there will be.  A day is coming when the life-withering drive to succeed will be overcome by the infant born of the branch of David.

A day is coming when the world’s insane lust for wealth and power will be toppled by the God who chose to be born, not into an upper-middle-class family, but as the son of a poor carpenter and his too-young wife.

A day is coming when the ways of nations defeating nations in an endless cycle of “us and them” will give way to the endless reign of this Prince of Peace. 

A day is coming, when the voices of gladness will be heard instead of numb silence, when we will know the comfort of passing under the hands of the loving Shepherd who counts us and protects us from suffering ever again.

We are not yet in those days.  Neither was Jeremiah.  But we cling with the mad hope of a prophet to those days, especially when it seems ridiculous to do so. 

We look around us at these days and proclaim with courageous voices and compassionate lives:  “This is not how it will always be!  Cancer won’t always be a part of our vocabulary.  War won’t always demand so much of our brave women and men and their families.  Despair and loneliness won’t always fill the days of the old or forgotten.  Rumbling stomachs won’t always be heard from the majority of the world’s children.  These are not all the days there will be!”

Advent is a time to be drunk on God, to foolishly, desperately cling to the hope of a child who was born into human history, forever altering it for the better, and to the hope of that Savior who will one day come to make all things new. 

Advent is a time to embrace the wild hope that God is not yet done with this world.   And so with a holy defiance against all that threatens God’s just reign, with courageous trust that the God who makes promises also keeps them, with the redemptive madness of a prophet, we wait.  Amen.