Scripture: Jeremiah 33:14-16;
Luke 21:25-36
Happy New Year! It’s the first Sunday of Advent, the start of the
year for the religion of Christianity! Christmas will soon be here! Time to get
ready, to look forward, to make New Year’s resolutions! Who’s excited?
Yeah. Me neither. I’m not really in a Christmas mood. And maybe that
will change in the next 23 days, but maybe it won’t. The truth is that this
time of year, late November and December, seems to accumulate difficult moments
in my life. Almost nine years ago, a few days before Christmas, the only
grandfather I had ever known passed away. Last year on Thanksgiving day, the
father in a family dear to my own passed away suddenly from cancer. Over
Thanksgiving this year, I learned that my last remaining grandparent is in far
worse health than I had realized. And to top it off, in the last week I found
out that my martial arts studio—a place that served as my church during my
teenage years—is closing just in time for Christmas. Not because the grand
master is retiring (if that were the case the school would surely be passed
down to advanced students), but because of skyrocketing rent. Twenty to thirty
years of community building and service wiped off the map because of the grand
greed of American consumerist culture. So no, I’m really not in the mood for
Christmas or celebrations.
And with finals approaching, not to mention any personal
difficulties lay on all our hearts here tonight, I must say it would not
surprise me if y’all aren’t really in the mood either.
I mean what is so great about another Christmas? What is so great
about suffering now and still having to wait? With tests, papers, building
stress, possible blizzards, graduation (for some of you), exhaustion, and
seasonal depression, it’s a wonder we get by at all. And we’re the privileged ones,
the ones well off enough to get to go
to college, to have beds and homes and food. Reading that passage from
Luke—“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth
distress among the nations”—well, that sounds pretty much like the last 2,000
years! And then some. So how exactly is our “redemption drawing near” and yet
so little seems to have changed? War, discrimination, oppression, and
individual lack of fulfillment still plague humanity as far as I can tell.
---
Who here has read the whole book of Jeremiah in the Bible? Yeah, I
can’t blame you. I did earlier this week, and you know what I figured out? If
you want to read something depressing in the Bible, after the Book of Job,
Jeremiah is a pretty good choice. The verses we heard a moment ago are
deceptively positive compared to the overall tone of the prophet’s book.
Allow
me to explain. Personally, I like to read the Old Testament like a love story
between God and the Israelite people, in which God deeply loves humanity, but
we tend to screw up. As centuries passed following the construction of the
Temple in Jerusalem (something Cody preached on previously this semester), the
people of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah (collectively the Israelites) began
to take God for granted. They began to believe God and the Temple would remain
there in Jerusalem forever, no matter what… and there lies the problem. So God
sends the prophet Jeremiah to speak to the political and religious authorities
and to call the people back to righteousness and justice. But no matter
Jeremiah’s warnings and pleas, the people continue in their infidelity to the
God that loves them and saved their ancestors from oppression in Egypt.
Everything
changed for the Israelites when the Babylonians attacked.
See,
the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem three times in the late 6th
century BCE. They destroyed the temple and slaughtered the people, just as
Jeremiah warned, and those Israelites who survived the assault were taken into
Exile in Babylon. The song we just sang, Don McLean’s “Babylon,” is about this
horrific trauma. And it was a trauma, because general knowledge across the
ancient world was such that if my nation is defeated by your nation, your god
or gods have defeated my god. The conqueror would assimilate the conquered and
my people would essentially cease to exist. You don’t get much lower than that.
---
Y’all
know about TED talks, right? There’s this one TED talk I love by a scholar who
studies shame and vulnerability named Brené Brown. She actually spoke here at
the U of M recently, and I went to see her. The auditorium was so packed that
the event organizers had to get an overflow room and play a video feed of here
there, and then that room filled up. She
is popular, but you wouldn’t necessarily think that. See, Brown posits that the
key to a fulfilling, wholehearted life is vulnerability. A little
counter-intuitive… That moment of uncertainty and frightening risk is essential
for living a deeply meaningful life. We have to be vulnerable with each other
in order to have true, loving relationships. But what’s that mean? What’s that
look like?
It’s
saying “I’m sorry,” and meaning it when I’ve screwed up. It’s saying “I’m hurt”
instead of giving in to anger or judgment. It’s trying something new. It’s
asking for help when society says we should be perfect and entirely
self-reliant. It’s loving. It’s praying.
Here’s
the catch: Just because I am vulnerable in my relations with friends, family,
strangers, or a significant other does not
mean I’m going to be successful, or have fun, or get used to the overriding
desire to turn tail and run when I’m afraid of the mess I’ve gotten myself
into. Chances are I’m going to get my heart broken, chances are someone will
betray my trust, chances are I’m going to get beat up and continue struggling
all the same.
Brené
Brown has said, “our capacity to be wholehearted can never exceed our
willingness to be broken hearted.” Paradoxically, this willingness to be broken
hearted is how we develop hope: “Hope,” she writes, “is a function of struggle…
[It is] a cognitive behavioral process that we learn when faced with struggle.”
Without difficulties, we humans cannot truly hope for anything, nor can we
truly relate to anyone. To paraphrase a friend, hope is not a happy feeling,
but the ability to dust ourselves off after getting our butts kicked by life
and being vulnerable again anyway.
As
they were taken from the land of Zion to Babylon thousands of years ago, the
Israelites made a huge theological leap. As the conquerors jeered, the
conquered theorized that their god had not
been defeated. They themselves had become an oppressive people, they had broken
their covenant with God, they had messed up. It happens. Yet God had not
abandoned them. Like I said before, I personally like to think of the Bible as
a love story between God and humanity. In the midst of great struggle, God still
had high hopes for the Israelites, even in Babylon, far from their home and all
they knew. These people would not cease to exist. One day, they would indeed
return from Exile, and a righteous king would lead them once again.
---
Fun
fact: the word used to say “king” in the book of Jeremiah is “shepherd” in
Hebrew. Sound familiar? So getting back to Luke.
“Distress
among the nations,” that’s our cue to look for Jesus in our midst. He tells his
disciples and his audience in Jerusalem to be on guard, to stand vigil, for
everyone and everything in creation is going to be a part of the redemption
that is drawing near.
I
think something the Israelites in Exile came to understand that in the midst of
deep struggle are the seeds of hope and new life. In the midst of a
dysfunctional world, there still exists the kingdom of God, just under the
surface, waiting for us to notice, waiting for us to take down the walls we
build.
Though
we might suffer now, we don’t have to wait for hope. Hope is something we do. Hope is something that moves us.
Hope is taking the risk of trusting God to see us through.
Yeah,
we are distressed. But nonetheless the kingdom of God—an alternate reality of
how the creation could and should be—is at hand. We participate in bringing the
kingdom of God near, and we do that every time we trust in God, every time we take
the risk of vulnerability despite our struggles, our fears, and our
difficulties. As we draw closer to Christmas, we approach an end to Exile.
No comments:
Post a Comment