December 3, 2006
Advent 1
Text: Jeremiah
33:14-16
A Sprig of Hope
…A
righteous Branch springing up for David.
I’ve seen such a thing – as, perhaps, have you. Tromping around in the mountain woods of
North Carolina or Vermont, I’ve seen the stumps of fallen trees – broken and
rotted – serving as the physical and nutritional foundation for a new tree sprigging
upward from the decay; the mulchy core of the old seemingly breast-feeding the
nascent shoot of the new.
And this is not the first time
such an image had been employed. The
prophet Isaiah, suggesting much the same promise and process, proclaimed words
we often hear this time of year:
A shoot shall come out from the
stock of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots. (11:1)
And the idea is certainly nothing
new. Those who make a habit of following
the activity of God can cite any number of examples in which God took the
detritus of efforts failed and fallen and raised up new life. The flood and Noah’s Ark come to mind, as do
Joseph’s first tragic, then regal experiences with his brothers, to say nothing
of the whole Exodus experience. But,
curse it all, history and generalities never seem to sweeten the bitter taste
of distress and agonizing disappointment when they are all too heavy in the
present tense. When we are hurting,
there has never before been such a hurt.
When our lives feel dead-ended and out of control, our morass is, as far
as we are concerned, without precedent.
We don’t need the vague reassurance of history. What we need is a word from the Lord.
And here, the Israelites, in the
midst of their disillusionment and pain, receive one.
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.”
It is a surprisingly hopeful
passage that seems to come out of nowhere.
As a prophet, Jeremiah was never much for “glad-handing.” Preaching at the time of the fall of
Jerusalem in 587 BC and the exile of its leaders into Babylon, at a time of
deep national depression and public paralysis, Jeremiah was one of those
cheery, popular sorts who go on TV talk shows to look into the face of the
people and growl, “It’s your own fault.
You had it coming. If you hadn’t
grown so corrupt and depraved this never would have happened. But here you are: sleeping in the bed you made, worthy of every
miserable lump in mattress. Gad! What a sorry, disgusting lot you are!” It is no accident that in our common
vocabulary, “mournful complaints” and “pronouncements of doom” have come to be
known as “Jeremiads” after the grim rants of this routinely negative
spokesperson of God.
Let’s be honest: we don’t generally like these kinds of
people. Never mind that they often speak
the truth – that our miseries really are, sometimes, the natural consequence of
the behaviors and lifestyles we have chosen; that our appetites and pleasures,
myopias and leisures often do create messes on which we’d rather
turn our backs. We prefer to think of
ourselves as the perennial “good guys” and that any displeasure we may come to
experience, any calamity that may befall us, represents a shocking tragedy and
unconscionable miscarriage of justice most grievously undeserved – heaven’s
poorly aimed zinger intended for that low-life, immoral “undesirable” down the
street.
While it’s true that “compost
happens” from time to time – while it’s true that we can find ourselves
mistreated, violated or in the wrong place at the wrong time, so is it also
true that consequences do follow actions, whether we want to own up to them or
not. We generally resent those who make
such distasteful connections, though the prophet Jeremiah didn’t seem to
care. Jeremiah was not one to sprinkle
and scatter hopefulness indiscriminately.
But here,
after 32 chapters of ripping and roaring, it is as though the clouds
momentarily part for some sunshine.
“Something good,” he announced, “was sure to happen.”
To be fair
to Jeremiah, this brighter word shouldn’t catch us completely unprepared. Judgment, after all, is never God’s final
word, any more than punishment is where any well-intentioned parent stops. The point of discipline is redemption, not
extinction. The endgame is restoration
on different terms, and Jeremiah understood that from the very beginning of his
work. In chapter 1, the prophet took on
this two-fold mission:
"See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant" (1:10)
Plucking up
was always about replanting. Winter was
always about the spring to come – as in this week we might do well to keep in
mind. The faith of Jeremiah – the
promise of this word – is that God will "enact
newness" [1] even
when the stench of decay is all we can smell and the pain of loss is all we can
feel.
All that
being said, it is important to note what kind of “good” the prophet
foresees. It’s not quite the same thing
as simple pleasure or ease. It’s a
little more than an epidemic outbreak of cheery carolers singing Happy Days Are Here Again. It’s not a sudden rise in the stock market or
profligate spillover of discretionary cash.
What the prophet reaches forward to proclaim is a new king – a good one,
for a change; a righteous one who will facilitate the orderly and just conduct
of public affairs; who will lead the people in the footsteps of the God they
are called to follow.
But it’s
more than just a change in government.
Kingship, for ancient Israel, was more than mere politics. A new king was all about an old promise – of
God’s own reign as represented through the throne of David. David’s throne was a sign of God’s presence
and covenant and grace, and the prospect of a new king to sit in that chair was
nothing less than the reordering assurance that God had not abandoned them
after all; that God’s arms were still poised for embrace, and that a future
with justice, righteousness and grace was a promise, not just wishful thinking.
In a
literal sense, we are novices at the kind of reality Jeremiah is
addressing. There are immigrants among
us – refugees from other parts of the world – who can tell us what it’s like to
have your country taken away from you – your sense of order and identity and
belonging that has shaped and framed your whole reality; but most of us have
never known such a thing. But in a
broader sense we are no strangers to the assault. We lost something of our innocence on
September 11 when the illusion of invincibility was shattered by two planes
flying into the heart of our psyche; we lost something of our nobility last
year when the magnitude of hurricanes like Katrina and Rita joined hands with
political incompetence and disorganization to produce a catastrophe from which
we are still reeling and groping to overcome, and which tore away the veneer to
reveal a poverty we could no longer deny or disclaim.
On a more personal scale, we have
lost our job and the security but also the identity that go along with it. We have closed businesses – or had them
closed for us. We have known the
devastation of family, sometimes by the assault of divorce, at others by the
puncture of death or disabling disease – losses that leave us reeling and
scrambling to retain or recover some sense of who we are.
Exile, as it turns out, isn’t all
that unfamiliar to us – whether or not we’ve ever left home. We have more experience than we’d wish with
dislocation and demoralizing grief; when the tall and towering trees that
ordered and secured and shaded our lives browned and broke and fell and
decayed, and all around us seemed barren and dead.
Whatever else it is, Advent is the
season of hope, when people of faith muster the courage and confidence to look
up from what is to see a sprig of green emerging and reaching beyond. A sprig of hope proclaiming that death is not
the final word; that stumps are not only the vestiges of the life that was, but
also the nests for the life that will yet be.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, To Build, To Plant: A Commentary of Jeremiah 26—52 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 91-103.