Perspectives on Hope

Scriptures for the
First Sunday of Advent
Jeremiah 33:14-16
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

"New hope" is the general theme of this Advent study, and we are a people in need of new hope. We find ourselves facing new challenges, and no one can suggest that there are easy answers. In the midst of such enormous struggles as international conflict, terrorism, climate change, immigration and racial tension — to name a few! — we also have our individual lives to lead, and we need hope there if we are to play any useful part on a larger stage. Some of us may, for various reasons, have strength only for our personal challenges. There are surely times when we can be excused from constant concern with the headlines. Also, if our personal lives lack confidence and hope, we can be of little use to others.

The lessons we have for this first week of the Advent season provide three radically different perspectives on the hope that anchors our faith. The prophet Jeremiah is calling his people to repentance and renewal in the wake of defeat and disaster. In the midst of overwhelming catastrophe, he holds onto a vision of a future filled with hope. However despondent we may be about our national challenges and failures, our role as people of faith is to cling to our knowledge of what God is able to do even through national disaster. The centuries since Jeremiah's time enable us to hold hope with even greater confidence, since we can see how God has worked through other times of crisis to give the church an ever broader vision and renewed strength.

Paul's letter to the Thessalonians is more personal. He writes to friends to speak of the joy that pervades his life and theirs. That joy came to them as they came to know Christ as Savior, and they awaited his return with joy. We surely can share that same joy knowing Christ is already at work in our lives with a strength that cannot be overcome. Paul would encourage us, I believe, to find our joy in the local community, in the immediate challenges that we can face with friends and fellow workers. Joy begins where we are.

The Gospel reading sets our hope in the broadest possible perspective and asks us to think of God's final purpose. It shows us a terrifying vision of ultimate disaster, but even here there is a call to stand up and be confident because, whatever may come, God is at work within world events. As Christians, as the people of God, we can find new hope in knowing what God has done before and knowing also that the best is yet to come.

JEREMIAH 33:14-16

Advent has to do with coming, and coming involves change. However close the relationship, however joyfully we look forward to the visits of parents or children or close friends, when someone else comes into our lives even briefly, our lives are changed by the event. We may need to clean out a spare bedroom, lay in more supplies of food, and cancel other events because our lives will no longer be ours alone to direct. There is joy in looking forward to such reunions, but we also need to prepare for change and take another individual's interests into consideration.

Jeremiah speaks of a life-changing "coming:" a "righteous branch," a descendant of David, a ruler who will do what is "just and right." That will definitely change things.

Something we should have learned in recent years is that leaders seldom feel free to do always what is "just and right" even as they understand it. They are subject to the influence of individuals, pressure groups, and "circumstances beyond their control." President Reagan promised to reduce bureaucracy, but the bureaucracy continued to grow. President Obama promised to withdraw from the Middle East, but found himself drawn back in. What would happen if God sent us a ruler who always did what was just and right without fear or favor? Certainly things would change! But is Jeremiah's message a threat or a promise?

At the time and in his context, Jeremiah's overall message was a threat. He knew that God, unlike human rulers, always does what is just and right. What Jeremiah saw all too clearly was that the Hebrew people were in danger for precisely that reason. God's people had turned away from God in pursuit of their own interests. What Jeremiah understood was that God is just and cannot tolerate injustice. If God's people acted unjustly, God would make no exceptions for them: They would face defeat and exile.

This was not a message Jeremiah wanted to deliver. Jeremiah can be called "the prophet of 'my people.'" His message of judgment is not of doom for others but for his own people, "my people." He does not point a finger to say, "God condemns you," but rather he says, "my people have exchanged their glory for what has no value" (Jeremiah 2:11). "If only my head were a spring of water," Jeremiah writes, "and my eyes a fountain of tears, I would weep day and night for the wounds of my people" (9:1). When he was first called to speak for God, Jeremiah did his best to avoid the calling and to keep quiet when God commanded him to speak. He had no desire to speak of the judgment facing his own people. But God's word, he said, was like a fire within him that could only burst out:

I thought, I'll forget him; I'll no longer speak in his name. But there's an intense fire in my heart, trapped in my bones. I'm drained trying to contain it; I'm unable to do it. (Jeremiah 20:9)

Rabbi Abraham Heschel said that Jeremiah not only heard God's word but personally felt in his body and emotions the experience of what he prophesied. Jeremiah saw all too clearly the consequences for his people, "my people," if they continued to ignore God's justice, and therefore Jeremiah wept. He saw vividly what was coming. And, of course, he was right. As surely as one plus one equals two, a righteous God plus an unrighteous people equals destruction.

Jeremiah's ministry spanned the last forty-some years of Judah's independent existence, years that led up to destruction and exile in 587 B.C. He saw his prophesy fulfilled. He continued to speak even as the Babylonians were besieging Jerusalem, his beloved city. He went into exile himself, going to Egypt in the aftermath of Jerusalem's destruction. But the text we are given today tells us something else about the God for whom Jeremiah spoke. God judged "my people," Jeremiah knew, because God cares. We set a much higher standard for our own children than for others. If we judge our children and discipline them, it gives us no joy. We weep over their failures even as we judge them. But where there is that sort of judgment, there is also the possibility of mercy and forgiveness. We look for the opportunity to welcome our children back into the family circle. God waits for the opportunity to offer us forgiveness and renewal.

If, then, judgment is coming, so too is a time of renewal and promise. Jeremiah imagines such a time in today's text, Jeremiah 33:14-16. What will that be like?

Here the prophets are at a disadvantage. Perhaps we are too. War and destruction were all too familiar to the prophets; they are still familiar to us. A time of righteous peace and safety is less familiar either to us or to Jeremiah, and Jeremiah can offer us only a hint of what such a time might be like. "Judah will be saved," he tells us, "and Jerusalem will live in safety." Why? Because the Lord will raise up a successor of David and his name will be Righteousness.

Again and again, when they try to see the future, the best the prophets can do is recall the past and the time of David. David was far from perfect. He committed adultery, and he failed to discipline his children. But he knew God's claim on his life, and he knew how to repent. Therefore he was greatly loved and was held up as an ideal for the future. Something like that, "a branch from David's line," is the best Jeremiah can imagine.

So we begin the Advent season, the season of coming, by recalling a time in some ways like our own. We also live in a time of political and moral confusion. We seem unable to find leadership that can embody our deepest values and highest ideals. But Jeremiah, speaking to us out of a similar time, leaves us with the hope that can provide an anchor and the trust in God that enables us to look forward.

We begin, then, with a model from a far distant day that reminds us how, even in times of impending disaster, God has sent prophets to hold up a vision of the future. What is that vision?

Jeremiah is able to offer only a new, improved David. That's not bad, but it's not enough. But Jeremiah gives us a name that we know more about than he. God will send a ruler, Jeremiah says, who will be called, "The LORD Is Our Righteousness." Perhaps Jeremiah saw only a better David; we hear those words and think instinctively of Jesus.

Yet we are also "vision-challenged." What would peace and security look like for us? Would we, like Jeremiah, be satisfied with a new and improved version of some past era, that of Roosevelt or Eisenhower, for example? Would we imagine a messianic age brought about by military superiority, the defeat of all enemies, and the soothing of the passions that inspire terrorism? Advent calls us to be unsatisfied with the mere improvement of the past, mere stability in the present. These four weeks are given us to be renewed in hope, to remember those in the past who have promised us a coming age that belongs truly to God, and to be unsatisfied with anything less. God calls us toward the change that is coming, a change that has a name. We think instinctively of Jesus and ask how the vision comes to life in him.

What deeper identity can we hold on to in the midst of international, national, local, or personal chaos, and how can we let hope in God's promise provide an anchor for us? What vision of hope can you keep your eyes on to give your life meaning and purpose today?

1 THESSALONIANS 3:9-13

We said that "coming" was a central theme of these Advent readings and never more so, perhaps, than in this brief reading from one of Paul's letters. This may well be the oldest document in the New Testament, and it brings us a vivid picture of life in the new Christian community. The coming of Christ is the hope at the center of their life, as it must be of ours. We will need to say more about hope, but for now we can concentrate on the nature of the coming that we hope for.

What did it feel like to be a Christian in a world where there had never before been Christians? Can you imagine? To become a Christian now in America is usually to enter into an established community with an accepted pattern of life. For the first Christians, it must have been more like a constant process of invention. Some, of course, were Jews; they had been members of a synagogue and knew that pattern of life. The new Christian community inevitably would adopt some aspects of that pattern; but all of it would be open to question and subject to change. In my own experience, whether in a congregation or in the larger community, I have often thought, "If I could reinvent this community from scratch, I would do it differently." But once a pattern is set, significant change is difficult. The Thessalonians were starting from "Square One." What must that have been like?

Hanging over whatever pattern they adopted was that word "coming." Even as they developed a pattern of community life, they could never settle into a comfortable rhythm because more change was on the way. Paul, first of all, prayed that he would be able to come back soon. So Paul would be coming back and no doubt would have guidance for them. Whatever they decided to do needed to be provisional against Paul's coming and the possibility of new instructions. But more important still was the promise of Christ's coming "with all his people" (verse 13). The Greek word here translated as "people" is literally "holy ones." So we are talking about an event beyond the normal flow of history. We may picture that in various ways, but it is enough to realize that it will be a "coming" that transforms all the normal patterns of life. If Christ comes with his holy ones, what changes in our comfortable life together will be needed? Two thousand years have gone by, but our patterns remain provisional, remain under judgment. If I have wanted to reinvent the communities familiar to me, how might Christ want to reinvent our community? It is, after all, his community, not ours. Have we thought about that? It's easy to measure our Christian communities against the standard of other Christian communities, but the familiar question, "What would Jesus do?" is surely relevant. If Jesus should come — and he is as near to us as he was to the Thessalonians — what would need to be changed? What would survive?

The answer to that question surely begins with two other key words in this passage: love and joy. Love is the cause and joy is the result. Paul prays that God will cause the Thessalonians — and us — to increase in love for each other and for everyone (verse 12). I wonder how often we look at our congregation in such simple and basic terms. We tend to look at our outreach programs and special events and worship, preaching, music, and education programs and ask how we could do these things better. But suppose we just asked ourselves, "Do we love each other enough?" Assuming the answer is, "No," unless you belong to a congregation that has achieved perfection, one where the kingdom has already arrived, what might we do to grow in this most basic of all aspects of Christian life? How do we go about growing in love?

The answer would seem to be as simple as it is obvious: Paul roots that growth in prayer. Every one of us has room for growth in prayer (verse 10). And that prayer, centered in love, must produce deeper, fuller, and more caring human relationships. Most relationships in a congregation are not, if we are honest, deeply loving. We work together, we enjoy one another, we support one another (though there may be room for improvement even there), but do we deeply love one another? Do we care for each other with the same passion with which God, we are told, loves us? There are people I see every Sunday. I nod to them, maybe exchange pleasantries about the weather; perhaps we serve together on a committee or work together in some outreach program. I like them, but do I love them? Do I love them as God, I trust, loves me?

But Paul doesn't stop there in his prayer. He prays as well that God will "cause you to increase and enrich your love for each other and for everyone" — for everyone (verse 12). Not just for the "in" group, not just for our fellow church members, not even just for our fellow citizens — though that's enough of a challenge in our current political climate — but for everyone. Of course our congregations have outreach programs. We may feed the hungry and house the homeless. We may well support outreach to other countries and continents. We may care about the people we serve. But do we love them? Can God "increase and enrich" our love "for each other and for everyone?" Beyond those with whom we have such relationships, do we love also those with whom we have no relationship or whose lives are set against us in active hostility?

I am a pessimist. I doubt we can do it. But Paul is an optimist and has no doubt that the little band of Christians in Thessalonica can do it. He expects results from them and surely he would expect results from us. Suppose we take this one step at a time and begin with whoever it is, whatever group it is with whom we are at odds, whose way of thinking we cannot understand. They may be within our congregation, or perhaps in our community, or out there somewhere in our national life. How can we love them? How can we moderate our reaction to them? How can we look for something in common, some way to reach out, some way to build bridges? It must be obvious that a society so bitterly divided over so many things is not sufficiently undergirded by Christian, Christ-like love. And the provision of love's impact surely begins with you and me.

So Paul is coming back to the Thessalonian church, and he prays that he will find them growing in love. More importantly, Christ is coming, and Paul prays that he will find us sufficiently developed in holiness that we may be "blameless" in that day (verse 13). Paul suggests no new programs, just prayer, but prayer that will change things, change us, change you and me so deeply and fully that we will be prepared for that coming we hope for. That hope and that prayer will bring to fulfillment God's purpose for us and for all the world.

Are you an instinctive optimist or an instinctive pessimist? Can you identify yourself with those early Christians whose lives were filled with joy simply because they knew God had chosen them for a purpose? What can you do to deepen your life of prayer?

LUKE 21:25-36

The Bible is many things, but it is not an "answer book." It does not provide us with dates and times for the end of the world. Many good people have studied the Bible and made detailed calculations about when the end would come. They gathered followers, even sold their possessions and waited — and were proven wrong. The Bible is not that kind of book.