Jeremiah 33:14-16
Advent always gets here before I am ready for it. No matter how good my intentions, I am never quite prepared; I am surprised by the arrival of Advent, wishing time would slow down. But if the season of Advent is about making time and space to get ourselves ready, then maybe that’s as it should be. Maybe I don’t need to get ready to begin getting ready.
However it may be, here we are…at this special time…Advent 2021. And like it does every year, Advent takes us as we are – where we each are personally, where we are as a congregation, where we are in the world.
And where we are in the world is still kind of a hard place. We have been in this COVID season way too long for us to keep it in the forefront of our minds – and yet, even while not in the center of our consciousness, it is always lurking around the edges. Because it is always still here.
During this season, we may long for other times. We may long for the Advent and Christmas of our youth…or even just 2019. O, for a simpler time, a mask-free time. Yet, strange as it may be, here is where we are; now is the time we are in, so let us open our eyes and see where God has placed us.
There are three words that I have heard used to describe this time we are living in: uncertainty, exhaustion, and isolation.
Perhaps we should say that every age is full of uncertainty, and that would be true. None of us has access to a crystal ball telling us just what the future will bring. But these past two years have been a more uncertain time than usual, I think. And as time has gone on, and the pandemic has worn on – we surely thought it would be over and gone by now. Yet, here we are facing another winter, watching cases spike once more, reading about the new omicron variant, and realizing that there will be several more months of uncertainty ahead of us.
And all this uncertainty makes us exhausted. Just how long can we balance on the knife’s edge? We are tired of the constant watchfulness, tired of the constant adjustments.
And even while we are all experiencing essentially the same thing, there is isolation. Ever since the pandemic began in early 2020, it has changed the way we look at other people. Now we keep our distance. We shield our faces with masks. Now we are more likely to shop from home, work at home, even have doctor visits from home. We isolate. There is less community, and more a sense that each one of us is on our own.
Uncertainty. Exhaustion. Isolation. I don’t know if times like these make it easier or harder to hear the Old Testament prophets come crashing our season of comfort and joy.
We can tell that even back in the 6th century BCE they didn’t want to hear the prophet Jeremiah. Like most of the prophets, he was not welcome. He was full of doom and gloom, bad news. But the thing we should recognize is that the people who mostly didn’t want to hear Jeremiah were the kings. Because Jeremiah spoke truth to power.
Kings always like to put their own spin on everything that is happening. That’s the way of powerful people, they don’t want to acknowledge bad news and they certainly don’t like anyone broadcasting the negative impact of their policies. But this is what Jeremiah was doing. Jeremiah saw the failures of their kingdom; he saw the inevitable fall of Jerusalem, and he refused to close his eyes to it.
Jeremiah was called by God to listen and carry God’s message to the kings and the people of the land, a message that was hard to hear. There was so much that had gone wrong in Judah and Israel. Under the leadership of their kings, the people had abandoned the teachings of God. They had wandered off to try their luck with other deities. They had forgotten God’s law and drifted away to address other priorities.
To be fair, I am sure these were hard times in the kingdom. They had been pressured on all sides by adversaries who were greater and stronger than they were. They endured tremendous economic hardships. And then they did what nations often do – they turned inward.
The people got the message: we are each on our own. Of course, what happened then was predictable: the stronger ones survived while the weaker ones suffered.
Now, this is ancient history, I know that. But if we keep our eyes and our hearts open, as God asks us to do, we cannot help but see how this works in our own time as well. During the pandemic the strongest survived, more than survived, actually. Those with the most resources adjusted quite nicely. We adapted. We registered our Zoom accounts, we upgraded our home computers. We even built new rooms in our houses so everyone can have their private workspace. And for some reason, our retirement accounts grew by leaps and bounds. Our hardships were offset, you might say, by certain benefits.
But those with the least, those who were the weakest, grew even weaker. They did not have jobs they could work at home. For many of the most vulnerable, when the pandemic came, they no longer had jobs at all. Their children were sent home with inadequate heating, inadequate food, inadequate educational materials. Their schools were ill equipped to make the needed adjustments the pandemic demanded.
Well more than 2,000 years after Jeremiah, the problems remain the same: somehow, the ones who have the most are empowered by crisis to gain even more. And the ones who have the least, lose even more. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is another way – God’s way of righteousness.
When we see that word, righteousness, in the holy scriptures, we should understand just what it means. The Old Testament often speaks about God’s righteousness, and the word suggests things like God’s salvation, God’s deliverance, God’s vindication. We see it frequently in the Psalms, where the psalmists lament the ways they have suffered wrongs, and look toward God’s righteousness to save them. God’s righteousness is a thing that gives us hope.
God is righteous, and we may understand that to mean that God can be relied on to deliver us from affliction, from evil of all manner, from the suffering we may bring upon ourselves as well as our suffering at the hands of others. God will deliver us from the careless treatment of the ones in power, the ones with the power to take away from us and leave us desolate.
Here is good news: God is righteous; but the scriptures don’t leave it there. They also speak of righteous nations and righteous persons. And these righteous ones are those who put their trust in God’s vindication, who live as ones who believe in bringing down the powerful, lifting up the lowly, and filling the hungry with good things, as Mary sings in her hymn of praise. They believe that every valley shall be filled, every mountain made low, the crooked made straight and the rough ways made smooth, that all flesh shall see the salvation of the Lord – as John the Baptist proclaimed, quoting the Hebrew Scriptures . The righteous ones are those who believe in God’s plan, step forward, and say, “Sign me up.”
Jeremiah was one, and he had so much to say about the way things were. Jeremiah spoke up and said things that the king found so unpleasant and inconvenient, he tried to silence him. The king couldn’t see that through this hard news, Jeremiah pointed the way to hope. Today we hear him say these words: “The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill my gracious promise with the people of Israel and Judah. In those days and at that time, I will raise up a righteous branch from David’s line, who will do what is just and right in the land.”
We know the one, don’t we? From a tree that had fallen so long before, God raised up a righteous branch – Jesus of Nazareth. And through Israel will be the salvation of the world.
As we await his coming, we might ask ourselves how we ought to prepare. How does one prepare for the one called The Lord Is Our Righteousness?
Our theme during this Advent season turns our focus to the familiar story of Jesus’ birth. The well-loved story of the family who had no place to stay, so they bedded down with the animals. A baby who had no crib so they laid him in a manger. This is a story about making room for the ones who are in need.
During these next few weeks, as we prepare ourselves for Jesus, we will consider the ways we make room, and the ways God might be calling us to make more room, for what is holy. As the prophet Micah said, to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.
Following the one who is called The Lord Is Our Righteousness. How are we being called to open the door wider?
May the light of hope shine in our hearts, in our lives, and in our church.
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