Sermon Jeremiah 23: 1-20 November 29, 2020 Rev. Peter Hofstra
For
Advent this year, we are going to look to four of the most wondrous prophecies
about Christmas. These are the Christmas
stories the people had when Jesus was born, Old Testament stories. Which may seem odd, as the Old Testament is
so often considered to be a book about God’s anger, about God yelling at the
people through God’s prophets.
And
when I say yelling, I mean that so many of the prophetic passages of the Old Testament
are about punishment and bad things happening to God’s people because they were
not listening to the Lord, their God, the grantor and guarantor of the Promised
Land, their leader and the one who chose them as God’s people. This is something of a paradox. God loved these people but God is always
yelling at them. What is up with that?
Well,
the prophets came with God’s Word to the people when they needed that
Word. And they needed that Word when
they were not doing what they were supposed to be doing. Prophets were not sent when they were not
needed, and they were not needed in the good and obedient times. So if we take the number of words that are
happy with God’s people versus those that are not, we get a very skewed view of
Old Testament prophecy.
Its
like a parent shopping with their children.
The other people in the store, when are they really going to ever notice
our relationship? When we are raising
our voices because of misbehavior.
That’s what reading the Old Testament prophecies can be like. The Children know how to behave, they know
what is expected. It is when they need
to be corrected that we speak up and others take notice. And that is the part people remember.
Like
our passage in Jeremiah today. Two
verses out of a total of forty in this chapter, of which we have shared twenty,
are in a positive light-easy to miss.
The rest is the Lord speaking out against the shepherds-the leaders-and
the other prophets who are NOT leading the people of Israel as they are called
to do. If we compare verses 7 and 8, in
verse 7, these are familiar words because this is the anticipation of the
Exodus, when the Lord brought his people up out of Egypt, freed them from
slavery, and established them in the Promised Land. Verse 8 looks to the coming Babylonian Exile
where, for seventy years, the people of Judah will be carried off into Exile as
punishment for turning from the Lord.
It is
in the context of the punishment that our two verses that prophecy Christmas
come to us, verses 5 and 6: 5The days
are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a
righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute
justice and righteousness in the land. 6In his days Judah will
be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will
be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”
Jeremiah
is writing these words around 600 BC. He
is referring back to David who lived some 400 years before that. Jeremiah is invoking a historical
memory. We have talked about David being the Warrior
King, the greatest king of the Chosen People.
His reign ushered in the Golden Age of Solomon. Jeremiah also tells us in verse 6 that Judah
will be saved and Israel will live in safety.
What we also need to understand from the history of the Old Testament is
by the time of David’s grandchildren, the Promised Land was split into two
Kingdoms, Israel in the North and Judah in the south. Israel has already been conquered and carried
off into captivity in Assyria, and they will never be reestablished as a
kingdom. Only Judah is left, and they
are about to suffer the same fate-although theirs will be temporary.
So
this descendant of David is coming, will be their king and rule wisely, will
execute justice and righteousness in God’s name. It is a promise carrying the weight of Hope
for the people in 400 BC. It is the
promise fulfilled in Jesus, Hope against the Romans in His lifetime. It is the Hope fulfilled for us, today,
knowing that Jesus began his reign of justice and righteousness when His death
and resurrection ushered in the Kingdom of Heaven, a reign of justice and
righteousness that will be made complete at the End of Time.
We
know how it is going to work out. We
know the story that Christmas points to, the story of Easter. We know that in the death and resurrection of
Jesus, salvation has been offered up to the Children of God. We know we have forgiveness for our sins in
Christ Jesus. We know that for God,
mercy is the new justice in judging us for our sins. We know that we are made right, made
righteous by God’s power. We have spent
the last weeks talking about how then we are made holy in God’s sanctification,
where we can share the love and compassion of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But
the full story, the complexity of what Jesus has done for us, the intricacies
of God’s plan for our salvation, that knowledge is to be learned and understood
and cherished by we who believe in Jesus’ name.
But these couple of verses in the midst of the dark and trying words of
Jeremiah to the people of Judah, they cast another angle for considering
Christmas.
Christmas
is the Season of Hope that points to the plan of God. With the baby in the manger, we have a place
to come and worship, to celebrate, to let go of the concerns of life-which are
going to be there when we come back-and, for a little while, simply bask in the
familiar wonder of Jesus born in Bethlehem, the City of David, a baby born to
Mary and Joseph, of the line of David, the promise celebrated by the angels
before the shepherds, pointing to Jesus as our Great Shepherd.
Maybe
another way to put it is this. God is
promising victory in these verses in Jeremiah.
In the midst of the darkness of those circumstances when Jeremiah was
sharing, there was a ray of light come down from heaven to illumine a way
forward. That does not mean there will
not be some serious work to be done, that there will be joys and frustrations
along the way, that it will be a struggle.
In this moment, there is the assurance of victory at the end of that
road.
That
is the power of Christmas. No, it is not
Easter, it is not the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It is the hope that is going to come in those
events. For Jesus to be resurrected, to
be raised from the dead, to be born a second time, he needed to be born a first
time. And in that birth are all the
expectations and promises and wondrous work of the Lord that shall be poured
out upon the people.
For
the visual learner, consider how we set up the sanctuary for Christmas. The creche is set up here in the center of
the chancel, top step, surrounded by poinsettias. It is an incredible moment in our
church. But it is in the shadow of the
Cross, hanging empty, but still hanging over it all. There is a time to count the cost of the
victory God wins for us through our Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ, and there
is a time to celebrate that God is going to win the victory for us through our
Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ.
In
the midst of a Covid pandemic, Jesus is born.
The King is among us. Victory is
assured.
This season is so hard on
people who have lost loved ones because the joyful traditions of the season are
now without someone dear to us. Despite that,
the light of the star that shone in the East, that brought the Magi to Jesus,
it is the light that continues to shine into our darkness. This is the promise of Christ for those of us
who have lost loved ones. In our times
of sorrow and grief, He is right there alongside of us. But it is a presence surrounded by hope, hope
of our loved ones being in the hands of the Almighty until it is our turn to
meet them again.
Some call Christmas the
stolen holiday, stolen by the world because the world wants it so bad. Other holidays are crowded in around it,
Hannukah and Kwanzaa and more. Let me
try and pronounce this correctly, “Chrismahanukwanzakah”. And if you have more pagan or wiccan
leanings, it is also the Winter Solstice.
Every year I see the call
to “Keep Christ in Christmas”. I am working
to a place in my life where every light, every overblown expression of this
season of giving and buying, every Santa, everything that is the Holiday but
not specifically Jesus is in fact a light pointing to Jesus. Because the world is desperate for hope. Our hope is in Christ Jesus. But the world has not quite made that
connection.
The people that Jeremiah
is speaking to, the people of Judah, are about to face the worst thing they
could ever imagine. They are about to be
dispossessed from the Promised Land. For
seventy years, they are going into Exile, forced to march to a new land of
imprisonment. But in the midst of that,
here is a beacon of hope. A light shines
through the darkness to reveal that, even in this worst time, God is with
them.
Welcome to the world of
Covid. There is a survey out there where
1 in 3 parents out there say the risks of getting Covid by visiting family are
worth the time that the family gets to spend together. If that translates into reality, the spikes
we are seeing now are nothing compared to what is coming. But through all of that darkness, there is a
light shining. Through the fogs of
uncertainty, something is lighting the way.
It’s a baby, in a manger,
down there where the light hits the ground. and he shall reign as
king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the
land. 6In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in
safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is
our righteousness.” No more
sin, no more Covid, no more danger, our Messiah is come. Our Messiah shall make all things right. Amen.
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