Jeremiah 33.14-16, Luke 21.25-36
First Sunday of Advent, 28 November 2021, Austwick
Have you ever made a promise you didn’t keep? I know I have; often with the best intentions of keeping it but ultimately failing; occasionally just to keep another person happy or to avoid conflict or dodge a difficult decision - the sort of empty promises which tend to come back to bite you.
We’re all only human, we’re bound to get caught up in promises made and broken, well intentioned words which don’t work out. And we’ll also be on the receiving end of those broken promises sometimes, with the emotional pain, sadness or anger that goes with them.
In our time and place, people are inclined to disbelieve promises. We live in an age of empty words in public life, the broken promises we’re daily dealt leading to a breakdown of trust between the people and those meant to serve us. It is a crying shame and a real crisis of our times.
In private life too, we make it hard for ourselves by making promises we cannot keep. I’m thinking of the modern trend in non-religious marriage ceremonies for couples to create their own vows. Almost always they are along the lines of “I will always be at your side”, “I will never let you down”: absolute promises that will inevitably fail. What wisdom, then, in the words of the traditional marriage vows, promising devotion and commitment along realistic lines: “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…” and so on.
In all of this we appreciate the importance of creating and cherishing moments in our lives when we speak words of solemn promise. Our marriage vows are the obvious ones, or the words spoken for us or by us at our baptism, the oaths we make in a court of law. Words freighted with deep and heavy meaning, words we don’t speak lightly, and we do, deeply, intend to keep.
And we appreciate the power of words to transform, to form new worlds from promises made. When we make a vow we know that our words express our promise that the people we once were will be transformed into different people for the future. Isn’t it interesting that even people who don’t regard themselves as religious, nevertheless feel the need to utter such words of promise in a church or on a bible, in the presence of a God who hears, and helps us hold those promises.
Solemn, truthful, and absolutely serious, these are like the words which God himself spoke to Jeremiah: ‘The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfil the promise made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah...’
The days are surely coming. Our God is a God of certain promise. Those who first heard Jeremiah’s words would remember the earlier promises of God, fulfilled - his promise to Noah of mercy and new beginnings for a broken world, his promise to Abraham of a new nation, to Moses and his people of a promised land. And now, they hear God make the promise of a ‘righteous branch’ to spring up - one who would bring justice and righteousness to a land troubled by injustice and unrighteousness, one who would bring salvation to Judah and safety to Jerusalem - one they would call The Lord, ‘our righteousness’.
For us, that promised man is Jesus. For us, Jesus is the source of all that is just and right. For us, Jesus is the one who brings salvation and keeps us safe.
How much we need the certainty of that man of promise today. For we live in a world which promises itself that our civilisation and progressiveness will save us whilst we’re aware as never before of how our ceaseless consumption is causing our forests to burn, our villages to flood, our sea cliffs to fall. It’s a world we recognise as being very much like the world Jesus described to his disciples in this passage which we heard today, where ‘People … faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens [seem to] be shaken.’
It’s vital to our understanding of his message to appreciate that Jesus was speaking to the current situation in his time and place. In the gospels his context was always the conflict between the Jewish people and their Roman oppressors, and his prophecies were always about the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, which did take place in AD70. His message was not that he would come again at some vague indeterminate time in the future to sort out our mess; his message is that although the Temple falls, he is the new Temple - in other words, he is the new way to God, [2] and he’s coming into our lives right now whenever we turn to him. Listen: for he speaks; watch: for he acts in our current situation, in our time and place.
The words of Jesus in today’s gospel passage don’t feel that comfortable. Luke has freighted his message with the language of apocalypse. But Jesus’ words serve to impress on us that though the signs of the times seem dark, and we may feel the weight of the burden of them, nevertheless he is coming into the world, and that means that our ‘redemption is drawing near’.
Although the Temple falls, he is the new Temple. What are the ‘temples’ of our day? The systems of the world we have given our obedience and service to throughout our lives, we see them crumbling before our eyes. The time is up for oil; democracy is broken; the god of endless growth is an emperor without clothes. But we live in the hopeful promise that Jesus is coming into the world.
When is Jesus coming into the world? It can’t be a day too soon. Truth is that Jesus is coming into the world each and every day, every moment we open the door of our hearts to him.
But how can Jesus bring redemption to this world? Are his promises empty words? No, Jesus can bring redemption to this world through the lives of his followers as we live out the values of his peaceable, gracious, loving kingdom, through small acts of kindness towards neighbours, friends, and in particular towards our enemies, those who persecute us, and the vulnerable ones around us.
This is the promise which Advent brings. Words with the power to lift the heaviness of the world from our shoulders; words which shine light into the world’s darkness as we let the sure promise of Jesus’ presence and power unfold in our lives.
There will be some promises of Jesus which you have always found especially helpful or comforting or inspirational, those gospel passages and messages which have always encouraged you and helped you on your way. In this prayerful time we share this morning, and every day of Advent, you might bring those special words to mind. Listen: for he speaks; watch: for he acts in our time and place.
‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away’, he tells us.
So today, again, with confidence, hold on to Jesus, and his words of promise to you.
Notes
[1] A rewrite of the sermon preached at Eldroth and Keasden in 2018, in Devon in 2012 and in Somerset in 2015.
[2] See Paul Nuechterlein, My Core Convictions, Part 3 on his Girardian Lectionary website, outlining N. T. Wright’s ‘groundbreaking work on Jesus as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. Luke 21, as a parallel to Mark 13, is a key passage for Wright’s thesis. For almost a century, New Testament scholars have assumed along with Albert Schweitzer and Rudolf Bultmann that either Jesus or the evangelists or both were wrong about the end times - namely, that they expected them to arrive within a generation. Wright challenges this entire line of thinking, hypothesising instead that Jesus was predicting the cataclysmic events of the Roman defeat and destruction of Judea, which did happen within that generation.’
Comments