THE Hope for Peace

[This message, for the First Sunday of Advent, was shared today with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Jeremiah 33:14-16

Recently, a committed Christian, considering the tragedy, violence, and nastiness in the world and the upheaval in his own life, asked me, “Are there times when you wish Jesus would hurry and come back?” 

Yes, there are. 

I want Jesus to return and the dead to be raised. 

I want Jesus to bring an end to this sorry old, death-dealing planet.

I want Him to usher in the new heaven and the new earth in which the eyes of all will be fixed on God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and the tears of everyone who has dared to believe in Jesus will be dried and we will live in peace with God, each other, ourselves, for all eternity. 

I want all of that very much!

Even secular, unbelieving people seem to yearn for some version of this new world that we know only Jesus can bring. On his LP released three months ago, Paul McCartney, sings this refrain, “People want peace / A simple release from their suffering / People want peace.”

This yearning isn’t new. 

In 587 BC, the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah sat in a prison in Jerusalem. His crime had been to tell the people of his homeland, the southern remnant of God’s people Israel, that they needed to repent for their sin and trust in God. (The God that all the world can now know in Jesus Christ.) 

The northern kingdom of God’s people, Israel (or Samaria) was already gone, eliminated by a hostile foreign power. 

And, now Judah, which itself had endured decades of domination by foreign powers, faced the same fate. 

Not because Judah hadn’t had a strong army. 

Not because Judah didn’t possess economic power. 

Judah had enjoyed these things. 

But, Jeremiah and other prophets told the people, their land would be taken from them because of their three abiding sins: idolatry, injustice, and materialism. (Does this sound familiar?) 

No people, no nation, no church, can long endure if it spits in the face of God through idolatry and the injustice, and materialism that results. 

Just a short time before Jeremiah committed the verses in our first lesson for today to paper, Judah had been under the dominion of the Assyrian Empire. Then the Egyptians chased the Assyrians out. Then the Egyptian Empire crumbled and for a brief period, Judah had enjoyed independence and freedom. But even then, God’s people refused to turn from their sins and trust in God alone. While Jeremiah wrote down the new word God gave to him in prison, the renewed Babylonian Empire was near Jerusalem’s city gates. Jeremiah could probably hear the din of battle as he received the word of God. 

• Judah was going to be conquered. 
• God’s people would face the consequences of their rebellion against God. 
• Their land would be taken from them. 
• Their nation would die. 

Jeremiah had already warned the people of his homeland that it was naive for them to superstitiously cling to the bricks and mortar of the temple or the worthless words they offered up as "worship" to save them from destruction while refusing to let go of their sins and injustices to take hold of God as their only hope.

But as Jeremiah sat in the darkness of prison, he perceived the light of God bringing hope, not just to Judah, but to all the world. Beyond wars, sin, death, and heartache, God was going to bring something new and never-ending. God would (and will) bring everlasting peace to those who trust in Him. 

The Word given to Jeremiah in that prison cell includes our first lesson for this first Sunday in Advent, a Sunday on which we at Living Water have chosen to remember that even as we await the advent, the coming return, of Jesus to our world, we wait in HOPE. 

So, take a look at our first lesson, Jeremiah 33:14-16. We’re going to read it from the English Standard Version, which gives a better and more literal translation than the New International Version here.

It begins: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” 

All of us know what it’s like to have someone break their promises to us. All of us know, if we’re honest, what it’s like to be the person who breaks promises to others. Promises broken, intentionally or unintentionally, make our relationships with each other painful and difficult. 

But God never forgets a promise. God always does what He sets out to do. 

Sometimes though, as is true of God's promise of sending His Son back into this world to usher in the Kingdom of God in its fullness, we have to wait. 

We can get impatient. 

We can begin to think that God doesn’t care or that maybe God isn’t even there. 

The coming of God on the first Christmas, born to a virgin in Bethlehem, should tell us that we can depend on God keeping His promises. 

His death for our sin and His resurrection to give us life should tell us that we can depend on God keeping His promises. 

But, in the world in which we live, it can be hard to wait for God to act--hard to wait for answers to our prayers, hard to wait for God to bring loved ones lost to Him back to faith, hard to wait for God to help those who are hurting, hard to wait for God to reconcile our relationships. 

But God has promised us in Jesus, “I am with you always to the close of the age." 

He has promised those who trust in Him, “Never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you.” 

He has promised that all who die believing in Him will live eternally with Him. 

And He has promised that not sin, not death, not the powers of this world, not anything can separate us from the God that comes to us through Jesus Christ. 

All of this is true even when God seems to be taking his good, sweet time. 

The apostle Peter says, “...do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:8-9) 

God never fails to keep a promise. 

And, God told Jeremiah--and through Jeremiah, us--that the promise of a peaceable eternal kingdom would come to pass. 

In the meantime, we’re to live in daily repentance and trust that the God we know in Jesus is giving us the time the world needs to come to know and believe in Jesus, the time we disciples need to tell the world about our Savior.

Our lesson continues: “In those days and at that time [we don’t know the days or the time, because as Jesus reminded us last Sunday, “about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Mark 13:32)], I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” 

Shortly after Jeremiah received these words from God, the descendants of David were stripped ot their throne and would never again sit on an earthly throne. But God had long before promised that a “son of David” would be the Messiah--God’s anointed, Savior King. God would make the impossible possible: A Savior born into the Davidic line, as Jesus was, when God the Father placed God the Son in the arms of his adoptive parents--Mary and Joseph, descended from David, would come into our world to make things right between God and sinners. 

When the Word became flesh, that is, when sinless God the Son, Jesus, came into this world, He did so with one purpose: To become the perfect offering for sin that no sinful human being--no ancient Israelite, not you, not me--could be and to win a not guilty verdict for those of us who are mired in sin from death. God makes us right through Jesus and our faith in Him. (Romans 3:23-24)

Back to our lesson, verse 16: “...In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell securely. And this is the name by which it will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’” 

C.S. Lewis said, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” 

Jeremiah and the other prophets didn’t go to God’s ancient people and say, “You’re bad; try to be good.” 

They said, “Your bad is growing worse because you’ve walked away from God. It's time for you to make it a habit to keep turning back to God so that He can displace your bad with His good! Only God can make you righteous." 

It’s the Lord alone who is righteous and He alone makes righteous those who are bad. It's the God we know in Jesus Who is our righteousness! 

This God revealed in Jesus has even been known to turn renegade atheists into grateful believers...and then make them into reluctant preachers.

We long for the peace that will only come to God’s creation when Jesus returns to this world. But if we rely on our own goodness to prepare for that day, we will regret it eternally. The peace that passes all understanding belongs only to those who trust in the God we meet in Jesus, who have given up on trying to prove themselves, given up on being models of religiosity, because those are sinful, self-worshiping enterprises. 

The peace that passes all understanding belongs, even now in the midst of this fallen, confounding world, only to those who, day by day, let Jesus be their Savior. These are the people who can face the stuff of this world and look for the day of Jesus’ return with hope. 

They hope--we hope--because believers know that it’s Jesus, the Messiah born of the Branch of David, Who IS our peace (Ephesians 2:13-14). 

Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Making Our Relationships Work: Covenant

[This was shared during the first Midweek Advent Worship of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier tonight. It was inspired by a sermon from Reverend Roger R. Sonnenberg, although it bears no resemblance to his work. So, don't blame him!]

Jeremiah 33:14-16
A woman told me, during a conversation several years ago, about her marriage, then entering its fourth decade. With humor, she recounted some of the trials she and her husband had weathered, including some that might have torpedoed other relationships.

Seeing an unspoken question on my face, she asked me, “Do you want to know how we’ve made it this long?” “Sure,” I told her. “It’s simple,” she said, “Before we even said, ‘I do,’ we made a promise to each other. No matter what, we would stay together.” She laughed and went on. “I also promised my husband that if he ever made me miserable, because of my commitment to him, I’d spend a lifetime making him miserable in return.”

She meant that last part as a joke, you should know. But the takeaway from my conversation with that woman was that the commitments, the promises, she and her husband made at the beginning of their relationship is part of why they remained together.

Now, we all know that not all marriages stay together. Things like infidelity, abuse, or other things can tear marriages apart. But in an age when people end their marriages on the flimsiest of pretexts, that woman’s words to me were telling. This couple decided at the outset that no matter how rocky things got, divorce was not an option.

Whether stated explicitly or simply believed internally, all relationships—marriages, friendships, or those between parents and children—are built on commitments or promises to hang in there together. Those two words—commitment, promise—really help to define the word that is the focal point of tonight’s worship, the first essential ingredient in good relationships: covenant

Covenant isn’t often included in the lexicon of the world outside the Church. (Sometimes, I think that we ought to hand visitors to our churches dictionaries so that they can understand the strange words we Christians use.) But covenant is a fundamental concept for we Christians…and for anyone who wants to have healthy relationships.

It won’t surprise you that as we develop a few thoughts about covenants and the part they can play in keeping our relationships together and strong, we have to start with God.

One reason for that is that God is the inventor of covenants. The God you and I know in Jesus Christ makes and keeps promises. A few examples:

• God promised Adam and Eve promised protection from the elements after they fell into sin.
• God promised to protect Cain from murder after Cain killed his own brother, Abel.
• God promised never to destroy the earth by water after He sent the great flood in response to human sin.
• God promised to make a great nation from the descendants of a couple who shouldn’t have even been able to produce children, Abraham and Sarah.
• The Ten Commandments begin, as all you good Catechism students will no doubt remember, not with God’s commands of His people, Israel, but with a promise: “I am the Lord, your God!”
• God promised that one day, He would send a Savior Who would give His life on a cross and rise from the dead in order to offer forgiveness and everlasting life to all with faith in Him.
• After this Savior rose from the dead and before He ascended into heaven, He made another promise: “I am with you always…I will never leave you or forsake you…”

Our Old Testament lesson, given by God through the prophet Jeremiah, is one we especially cherish during the Advent and Christmas seasons:

“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.’"

In Jesus Christ, the baby born at Bethlehem, we see in flesh and blood, evidence that God keeps the promises God makes! “No matter what,” God tells us in His promises—His covenants for both His Old and New Testament peoples, “divorce is not an option. You may choose to walk away from Me. But I will never walk away from you!”

In the resilient toughness of God’s covenant promises to the human race, we see an important key to making all of our relationships work, making promises, making commitments to tough it out no matter what.

But, of course, there’s a problem with promises. I once read the story of a young man living in 19th-century England. As you know, that was what's called the Victorian Era. It was a time when young men were expected to write love poems or flowery letters to their girlfriends. So, this young man tried to write a love letter to his fiancé.

“I would cross the widest ocean for you,” he told her, “I would climb the highest mountain, walk through the greatest desert. I would do anything for you.” After that set of commitments, he added a PS: “I’ll be over tonight, if it doesn’t rain.”

Our promises are only as good as our willingness or our ability to follow through on them. And follow through on our good intentions isn’t generally a strong suit of we human beings. I don’t know about you, but I can so identify with the apostle Paul, when he writes in Romans: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.“

Among the things I’ve done that I hate, more often than I care to remember, is hurt my relationships with friends, colleagues, neighbors, and others by my failure to love others as God has loved me, to forgive others as God has forgiven me.

I should know better. More importantly, I should live better, in part because I’ve been the beneficiary of such great examples of people who live out their covenants, their promises, of love and concern for others.

Back in 1984, I graduated from seminary in May and still didn’t have a call to my first parish by August 11, the date on which Ann (then expecting our daughter, Sarah), Philip, and I had to be out of seminary housing.

My folks still had two teenagers living at home. Ann’s mother had just been through a divorce and was living in a tiny apartment. We couldn’t move in with family, then.

On top of that, my only financial contribution to our family came from what I made working part-time as a janitor. Ann, who I had torn away from a decent-paying position with the Greater Columbus Arts Council, so that I could do my seminary internship in Michigan, was working as a low-level coordinator with the special events office of Lazarus Department Store. We couldn’t even afford an apartment.

That’s when my friend Tom called me. Tom had just been through a divorce himself. It was a time when it would have been easy and understandable for Tom to be turned in on himself, licking his wounds. But Tom knew the jam I was in and asked if Ann, Phil, and I would like to move into his house with him.

Over a decade before, Tom and I had become friends. But then, he lived out the promise of friendship in a way that I could hardly fathom.

If you asked Tom how he was able to do that, you would eventually come to the real reason for his tough covenant love: Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior. When Christ lives in you, you find it possible to walk the talk of loving relationships.

Of course, it isn’t just with friends that we’re called to love as we’ve been loved. For several decades now, Pastor Mike Slaughter has challenged the people of Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church, located near Tipp City, Ohio, to adopt an impoverished family, usually from inner city Dayton. “Whatever you spend at your house for birthdays and Christmases,” he tells them, “spend the same amount on your adopted family.”

I’ve heard Slaughter talk about how hard that was for him initially, even after he'd convinced people in his church that it was the thing to do. But for decades now, the church’s members have been adopting families. The congregation has swollen to thousands of members precisely because of its commitment to living out covenants of love in Christ's Name.

The other day, Ann pointed me to an article in the most recent issue of Woman’s Day that, in part, profiled a woman who had been among the church's adoptees a few years back. She was a single mom finding it tough to make ends meet. But a giving family from her church helped get her through, and more than materially. Today, she’s an active member of the congregation herself. A few Christmases back, she heard Pastor Slaughter say that the congregation should send a million-dollars to help the refugees from the genocide in the Darfur region of the African nation of Sudan. He suggested that each household add to what they were already giving to attain the goal. “I could never do that,” this woman told herself. But at that moment, her young son leaned over and whispered to her, “We ought to do that.” And that’s exactly what they did!

God's #1 ingredient for relationships is covenant, giving and living the promise to love as we’ve been loved and not only our friends, neighbors, co-workers, spouses, children, parents, and classmates, but also all of the people Jesus was born to save: the whole world.

During this Advent season, let’s pray that the God Who long ago made a covenant to send a Savior, a branch of David Who would give His righteousness to all who turn from sin and follow Him, will give us the courage, tenacity, and openness to make and keep our own covenants of love for others.