November 29, 2009 Des Moines

TEXT: Jeremiah 33:14-16

Hanging On By A Twig

It's good that we are lighting candles. Advent arrives at a time each year when the days are growing shorter and shorter, and the nights are stretching longer and deeper. Though it hasn’t quite happened yet, it won’t be long before the air, growing colder and wetter, will hang around us like an imprisoning skin. It's good to see a new -- even if small -- flicker of new light, and to feel even a tiny current of warmth. Because Advent betrays the darkness that is wider than the night.

We have done so much and driven so far. We are proud, at times, for all we've done. Proud, even if desperately tired. Our lives are surrounded by the evidence of innovation -- technology has automated and simplified so much of our lives -- we don't have to chop onions anymore; we just drop one in the food processor. We don't have to kneed and pull bread anymore; we just dump the ingredients in the machine and watch it do all the work. Science has made our lives so much healthier -- diseases that once killed us are now routinely prevented, and aches and pains that once debilitated us are now numbed with over the counter pills.

But streamlined, digitalized, computerized and modernized, we don't always feel like we've gotten very far. Though once we wouldn't have known the difference, we've learned the hard way that innovation is not the same thing as progress, and it is progress that we are sorely lacking.

Life, instead of becoming ever more precious, seems to be retailed at "after Christmas" prices. It starts with ourselves. We are still over-eating, even though we know full well it's killing us. We are spending more and more time in front of monitors – either computer or television -- even though we know we need to get up and get some exercise. We are still swimming in saturated fat, even though we know we will drown in it. Never mind. Our lives are apparently cheap.

And if we little value our own, we find even less in others. You don't have to walk very far from this building to find blood stains on the street. Scratched into the mortar of this very building from time to time is the symbolism of gang violence. If you watched coverage of some of the town meetings held over the summer on health care reform you would have thought rabies had become epidemic. Watch the city council and they are shouting at each other. Watch the U.S. Congress and they are deriding and condemning each other. Watch the evening news and nationals are bombing each other. We haven't progressed very far. The darkness, in the winter, just seems to deepen.

For different -- but strangely similar -- reasons, the days were dark for Judah, as well. However their fortunes had ebbed and flowed over the years, the tide just now was definitely out and winter had settled in. The nation had largely fallen, and now Jerusalem, itself, was under siege. The Babylonian army had made of the countryside a wasteland, and now politically as well as spiritually, the situation was grim. Everything the people had understood and believed about themselves and their country was disintegrating. Their sense of worth, power, place, and assurance was deteriorating. Their history suddenly seemed meaningless; the existential infrastructure -- the covenant, the Davidic monarchy, their understanding of being God's chosen -- seemed suddenly meaningless and painfully false.

Emotionally, it was hard to take, and intellectually it was hard to understand. This shouldn't be happening. Hadn't God guaranteed their existence as a nation? Hadn't God certified their security? It was simply inconceivable that they could finally be defeated. God wouldn't let it happen.

"Oh," says Jeremiah, "but God would." God had not given Israel a book of signed, blank checks to be filled in at whim and cashed at will. There was a relationship to be nurtured and a covenant to be honored, and through the years the people had done little of either. God's salvation was not the same thing as political survival, and Israel had earned its disintegration.

But anything different was hard to fathom. They were the people that God had chosen; they were the nation that God had formed. It was all they knew and all they could imagine. As a result, they wouldn't -- couldn't change. All their confidence and trust was in the shape of the status quo. There was no such thing, to them, as life in a different shape. The current shape was the only one that could be. Therefore, the people and their leaders continued to look for accommodation -- to shore up the rough edges and decaying corners, rather than allow themselves to grow into something new.

But allow it or not, the old was ceasing to be. Like it or not, God would create something new.

Perhaps there is a darkness there with which we, too, are familiar -- a cold, wintry night of decline and deterioration. We have lived through the thick and blinding depression of a present that was painfully distant from its past – of suddenly oppressive memories of a time when we were large and powerful and instrumental in the city and the denomination. And we, too, had never thought it could change. We had grown accustomed to doing things certain ways that were, quite simply, the way those things are done.

But it became palpably clear that we were no longer that church. We understood some of the reasons -- the mobile society and a neighborhood that had changed. Though we still grieved it, we acknowledged that the University across the street had changed in character and focus and that that had surely had some impact on this sister institution across the street. And while all of those dynamics no doubt bore some measure of the truth, we had to confess our own responsibility as well. We had done some significant things through the years, but we had not done everything right as a church.

We bore some culpability for our own decline. We had made certain choices through the years -- right ones and wrong ones, with consequences to them all. We had been active in some areas of our discipleship, while sadly neglecting others. At times we had pushed down roads with the best of motivation only to find them empty dead ends. At other times we had simply sinned, and we afforded ourselves no honor and did ourselves no service to deny it. The church as we had known it had corroded and deteriorated and at times, like the Israelites, we felt ourselves under siege. We tried to hold it together -- bargained and made accommodation in certain ways. At times we even tried to convince ourselves that it simply wasn't happening, and carried on our business as usual.

But as we are still getting our collective minds around, our business will not be usual again. What we have known ourselves to be these last 100 years -- and assumed we always would be – had broken apart. And even after these several years of engaging this transition – Following the Fire of God’s leading, offering ourselves to God’s transforming impulse – I still do not know what we will be, or what we will come to look like. I only know that the ways we even now do things -- the way we worship, the way we play, the way we nourish and feed our souls, the way we organize and the way we serve are still being redefined. In the days ahead, we will hardly recognize ourselves as this church.

But Jeremiah’s reminder to the Israelites is our reminder as well: God's covenant with us has nothing to do with our appearance or the shape of our staff or our congregational design. God's promise to us was not that we would always have this characteristic or that reputation, but that God would be actively present here, moving and speaking here if we would have attentive ears. If we would be faithful and true.

Israel, then, was waiting for redemption and renewal – a dawning, so to speak. What are we waiting for? While these may not be our most powerful days, neither are they our last. I said a moment ago that the only thing I know is that in the days and years to come we will change to the point where we will hardly recognize ourselves as the church. That's not quite true. I know one thing more. I know that God is working something new because God has promised to do so. The old may be dying, but that is only lamentable if the old was all that God was calling us to be. I believe in something new that God will grow from something old: a branch from a well-rooted stump; an ancient promise of salvation and grace and life in the company of God made supple and green for a new time and day.

And to that hope, this day, we have lighted one candle to mark the way. One candle by which to see our way more clearly, more humbly, more naively. "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.'"

To that twig of hope, under that same name, we will not simply hold, we will wait, and we will grow. Amen.