What Kind of Prophecy Is This

What Kind of Prophecy Is This?
Jeremiah 33.14-16
Dr. D. William McIvor
November 30, 2003 — 1st Sunday of Advent
Presbyterian Church in Sudbury

The saying goes that no generalization is worth a nickel including this one. But having said that I’ll venture a generalization that I think is quite true, namely, that most preachers love Advent and most church members either don’t like it or don’t care about it. Here’s why I think this is true.

Preachers love Advent because the lectionary texts assigned to it, especially to the first and second Sundays of Advent, tend to be gloomy, judgmental, and apocalyptic. For example, if I were preaching from the gospel lection for today, we would hear Jesus in Luke’s Gospel say, “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (Luke 21.26) In other words, Advent themes are often about the end of the world because they emphasize Jesus’ second coming — the second advent — as much as his first coming in the Babe of Bethlehem. And preachers love texts like that. They are meaty, challenging, and, at least for us, fun.

Church members, on the other hand, even the most diligent and disciplined of church members, do not spend hours pondering Advent texts or Advent calendars or Advent themes. It’s even hard for preachers and much, much harder for church members to realize that Advent calls us to experience time differently. Advent calls us to live according to Kingdom-of-God time, not according to secular time. The secular calendar and the stores, some of them since soon after Labor Day and all of them since Halloween, are calling to us, “Get Ready for Christmas and Buy, Buy, Buy!” But Advent cries out that Christians ought to be getting ready for the Kingdom of God to come and much less worried about buying presents and decorating trees.

Friday morning I was in my favorite Starbucks as I often am about 5:45am — the only one there besides the two workers — and I was already being blasted with Christmas carols. I don’t want carols now and maybe not until Christmas Eve. But I confess this is a preacher’s viewpoint and I suspect if most of you were with me Friday morning you may have been humming along with the Starbucks’ Muzak machine. Preachers and church members have different perspectives about Advent.

I mention all this only to set the context for reading our text. On this First Sunday of Advent when we have lit the Prophets’ Candle, I want to grapple with a text from the prophet Jeremiah. He prophesies that Israel and Judah — the northern and southern kingdoms of the ancient Jews — will be blessed and Jerusalem will be safe. I want us to ask what kind of prophecy is it when the Jerusalem we know today is anything but safe and news from the Middle East is almost always bad? In our world today, what sense can we make of a prophecy of hope?

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.”

If you pay any attention to the Christian calendar — and we do print the designated Sunday at the top of your order of worship — you will know that since last June we have been in “Ordinary Time.” The Christian year is composed of three great cycles. Advent/Christmas is one and Lent/Easter is another. The Sundays outside of Advent/Christmas or Lent/Easter are the third cycle: Ordinary Time.

So the Christian year begins when Advent jolts the church out of its “ordinary time” with the invasive good news that God’s grace is newly impending. God will bring fresh possibilities for deliverance and wholeness.[1] That’s why Advent leads up to Christmas. When Jesus was born, God invaded the world with hope. And that’s why Advent emphasizes Jesus coming again, if not literally this year then at least powerfully in the lives of his people.

Our problem is making sense of this. On the one hand, we can be seduced by our culture at Christmas and wallow in sappy sentimentalism and material excess. Then hope is little more than an emotional sugarplum. Or we can despair at what is happening in our world where the danger and hatred in Jerusalem today mock Jeremiah’s prophecy that people will ever live there safely. It’s like walking a tightrope. If we misstep and fall off on one side we’ll drown in a vat of sugar. But if we fall off on the other side we’ll impale ourselves on the shards of despair. Some choice that is.

David Grossman is an Israeli journalist and novelist. In 1987 he wrote a book called The Yellow Wind, a book just republished last year. His title refers to an Arab phrase — rih asfar — which means the wind that they believe will one day come from the gates of hell. Grossman interviewed Palestinians living in the West Bank under Israeli rule. Some were dishwashers, some street vendors, some rock-throwers, some worse. But all of them flashed anger in their eyes. All of them felt it would get worse. One said, “We will remain before you like a curse cast in cement.”[2] When local Arabs speak of rih asfar — yellow wind — they mean “a hot and terrible east wind which … sets the world afire, and people seek shelter from its heat in the caves and caverns, but even there it finds those it seeks, those who have performed cruel and unjust deeds.… The rocks will be white from the heat, and the mountains will crumble into a powder which will cover the land.”[3] An apocalyptic vision, to be sure, and while Grossman’s book documented Palestinian hatred it also showed the moral and emotional cost of occupation for both occupier and occupied.

How are honest and faithful people going to make our way here? How can we make our way when just yesterday we read in our papers that the fragile harmony that has existed in Northern Ireland is about to come undone again? How can Jeremiah’s prophecy of safety in Jerusalem ever come about when hatred breeds there like a plague? How can we avoid desperate despair without falling into sentimental denial?

My friends, I suggest to you that this is exactly why we need Advent. Advent is a gift — time out of time. Advent is a time to wait, a time to be still, a time to not rush towards Christmas but a time to live between the “already” — Christ has come — and the “not yet” — there is more that God will do. That’s why Christians have a different calendar and we need to live by it. We’re not going to shut our eyes to the real world and just have visions of sugarplums in our heads. Nor are we going to live only by what is humanly possible. We’re going to live in hope, a hope which comes from God.

Living in hope can mean many things. One thing it means is connecting people with God. An English professor named Virginia Mollenkott tells how she helped students live hopefully. She is retired now but one of the courses she liked was freshman English, believing that was a place to help. She said, “Freshmen often come to you beaten down. All anyone has done was tell them how bad they were in English. You try to encourage them to write about who they are, to talk about who they are, and you show some interest in them. You show them that they have something interesting in their lives. They’re people.”

She said, “Before I pass back their first graded paper, I give them a little speech: ‘This grade is not for you. This grade is for a piece of work you turned in.’ Then I ask them if they want to know what I think of them, and usually they want to. So I continue, ‘I think you’re made in the image of God and are of inestimable worth. There’s no way that anything I could put in my grade book could ever begin to estimate you or limit you.’”

Mollenkott learned to do that after she read Flannery O’Connor’s story about a boy who went up in the attic and drew a circle with a big “F” in the middle because he hadn’t been doing well in school, and hanged himself over the “F.” He didn’t distinguish between the grade he was getting and who he was. Mollenkott says, “For me, the meaning of life is to share with people the wonderful news that we are the daughters and sons of God.”[4]

Advent calls us to be people who speak words of hope even when things seem hopeless. We do that because God is not done with us nor with our world quite yet. Speaking hope takes courage and the capacity for courage can come from Advent, from living between God’s “already” and God’s “not yet.” We can lose our courage at this time of year, lose it in sentiment or in despair. Instead we need to let Advent help us call home our lost powers of courage and hope. This is what Macrina Wiederkehr, one of my favorite poets, writes about in a poem for calling home our lost powers.

Dear friends, Advent calls us to call home our powers because they are really God’s gifts to us. And then we can bring blessing and hope to others. We are called, I think, as the church of Jesus Christ to be the town crier of the global village. Too often, unfortunately, we act more like the town cricket of the global village, producing a sometimes soothing, sometimes annoying, yet constant chirp somewhere in the background of “real life.”[6] But let us be people who even amidst the often grim realities of this world cry out hope. Cry out hope in the name of the Christ who came and who will come again.

[1] Charles B. Cousar, Beverly R. Gaventa, J. Clinton McCann, Jr., James D. Newsome, Texts For Preaching, Year C (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1994) 2.

[2] David Grossman, The Yellow Wind, trans. by Haim Watzman (New York: Picador USA, 2002) 9.

[3] Grossman, 75.

[4] Virginia Mollenkott, Questions of Faith (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), 88.

[5] Macrina Wiederkehr, “A Prayer for Calling Home My Scattered Powers,” Seasons of Your Heart: Prayers and Reflections (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991) 187-188. This poem was also used in S-990321.

[6] The image of the crier/cricket is from Stan Purdum, ed., “Nothing In This World Is Too Bad To Happen,” Homiletics 3.4 (1991): 23.