The Promise
NL Year 2 • Sermon • Submitted
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I am going to get a little personal in a way that I don’t know that I have in a sermon before. But I thought of no better way for me to share with you how I see today’s story.
The summer of my 8th grade year my parents informed my brothers and me that they were going to be getting a divorce. Apparently my two older brothers saw it coming but it took me by surprise. I told you last week that I was devastated by my family moving from Laguna Hills to Escondido. That pales in comparison to the news that my parents were getting a divorce. In a moment my world had changed forever and life as I knew it was never going to be the same.
Then a year later my father decided to get married again. I had only met her twice before that and she eventually told us that she married our dad, but that she never wanted kids. Which always baffled me that she would marry a man that had 4 children. My oldest brother was already in college and a year later my next older brother went away to college, so it was just my younger brother and me. It was a very difficult time in my life and to be completely honest it was hard to find hope at times. It was my senior year in high school when their marriage didn’t work out and she was no longer in my life. I have to tell you that those were the hardest 4 or so years of my life I can also say that it has very much shaped and formed me. I tell you all this because it was the most difficult part of my life. It was also something that lasted for years and wasn’t just a tragic event that happened and then went away.
The reason I share that with you is that is the one event that I can say gets my mind in the right framework for how life must have been for both Jeremiah and the people of Judah. The text we have today is a beautiful text of hope and the fulfillment of a promise, but that’s not what is actually happening in the life of the people of Israel. Babylon is the new power in the world at the writing of Jeremiah, and Babylon has already conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel, and Judah in the south is currently being besieged and a year after the time of Jeremiah’s writing it will fully fall to their rule. They will then be exiled and not permitted to return until another power rises. Jeremiah himself is in prison by his own king because Jeremiah feels it would be better to submit and save lives than to fight against what God has already said is going to happen.
I tell you all this because it was the most difficult part of my life. It was also something that lasted for years.
The people of Judah in the beginning of are tearing down the city of Jerusalem to try to stop the Chaldean of Babylon. They are literally destroying their homes and their palaces, places of worship to try to stop them from defeating them. Jeremiah even goes so far as to describe that the bodies of the dead are being used as a way to slow down the invading army. They are doing everything they can to stop them but Jeremiah says from jail that it’s not going to do anything. No matter what the people and King Zedekiah do the city of Jerusalem will fall and the people will be exiled from the promised land. There seems to be no hope for the people. There seems to be no hope for Jeremiah either being imprisoned by his own king.
There is this sense that it is the end and that there is nothing they can do to stop this seige no matter what they try. It is a very dark and despairing time for Judah and Jeremiah doesn’t want to have to always share these kinds of words with the people and King Zedekiah. In fact there are times that Jeremiah laments over all the difficult words from God that he has to share with the people.
So imagine what it must have been like for Jeremiah to share the words he gets to share with the people in the next parts of including the verses we hear today. Jeremiah gets to say from his own prison cell that God will restore. There will be a time when there will no longer be rubble in the city. There will be a time when there will no longer be dead bodies scattered around the city. There will be a time when people will walk through the streets happily talking about their days and how good God has been to them. Not only that, but the righteous branch of David will spring forth again.
In the midst of destruction there is a call and a promise for hope for the future. In the darkness of despair and maybe even depression and how terrible life seems God is declaring that there is something better in the future. We know that that promise of a better future will not happen for a long time for the people of Judah and Israel, and that before Babylon was Assyria, after Babylon is Rome. So the promise for this hope doesn’t necessarily happen right away, but the hope will come.
Now I would never want to live through my parents divorce again, and I wouldn’t ever want to live through the 4 years with my step-mom again, but looking back at that time of hopelessness I can see how it has shaped me today. I can look back at it and I can see how God’s hand was active and alive in it. I can look back and realize that even though it seemed like a hopeless time, there was hope and light and a promise for a better future.
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.”
As we enter the season of Advent today we enter a season of waiting. We enter a season of anticipation. We enter a season where we see the promise of hope in maybe a time of hopelessness. God promises that the day is coming where all that death and destruction, all that despair and depression will be no more. Amidst all the pain of life there is a promise that there will be safety. Not only will there be safety but God is our righteousness.
That righteousness is proclaimed in the promise of a chid who will execute justice for all people. There is the hope. There is a promise for a better day. That hope and that promise, is what we hold onto each year as we enter Advent. God’s promise that life even though life isn’t always easy or happy, that God is always there and that there is hope for a better day. That time where you feel God’s justice and righteousness may not today, and it may not be tomorrow, but it is there. In this season of hope, in this season of waiting may you know the hope of God as found in Christ Jesus who is the one who turns our darkness into joy. Amen.
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