Brunswick Baptist Church
Sermon – 3 January 2010
Bible readings: Jeremiah 31:7-14; John 1:1-9
A Happy New Year everyone. To a Scot that means, ‘I hope you had a terrific time on New Year’s Eve’. New Year does not have the religious and cultural significance that Christmas does, and the only identifiable New Year’s Eve carol I can think of is ‘Auld Lang Syne’. It literally means ‘old long since’ and is a plea to remember old friends at New Year – ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind’. Of course it does have a sacramental allusion; ‘We’ll take a cup of kindness yet for the sake of auld lang syne’ – I like that, and when they sing it at the end of the Edinburgh tattoo it stirs some primal emotions deep within me.
Of course New Year is also a time to look forward; a time to make resolutions that we would like to keep but know that we most likely won’t. Making resolutions is imagining a future that is better than the present, a future as we would like it to be and which we can help create through willpower, e.g. ‘I’m going to give up eating chocolates and heaping salt on my food because I know I will feel better and live longer’. My problem is not that I don’t have enough ‘will power’, it’s that I don’t have enough ‘won’t power’. Romans chapter 7 describes me perfectly; ‘I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate’.
So, a time to remember what is old, a time to critically evaluate what is present, and a time to imagine a new future. For the prophet Jeremiah, remembering the past, evaluating the present and imagining the future were what his life and ministry were all about. He lived in perhaps the most tumultuous times ever experienced by the ancient Kingdom of David. He lived around six hundred years before the time of Jesus; in our time scale that would take us back to around the time of Henry VIII in England, or when Leonardo was painting the Mona Lisa, or when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg to begin the Reformation. In Jeremiah’s time, the nation of Israel which had once been united under King David and King Solomon was now two kingdoms mainly because their descendants couldn’t get on with each other; the northern kingdom of Israel which was overrun by the Assyrian armies in the 8th Century BCE; and the southern kingdom of Judah.
Both kingdoms were pretty much helpless in the struggle for supremacy between the superpowers Assyria, Babylon and Egypt.
The Assyrian Empire
Successive kings of Judah tried to protect the tiny kingdom by aligning themselves with whichever superpower they thought would win the titanic struggle. A bit like Australia trying to be friends with the US and with China so that, regardless of which one becomes the dominant world superpower in the 21st Century, we will still prosper. The only problem is, the kings of Judah didn’t always make wise choices, and in 587 BCE Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonian army of King Nebuchadnezzar. Perhaps there is an object lesson here for our political leaders, that political expediency is never a substitute for righteousness – for doing what is right rather than what will increase our GDP or our good standing with the world’s superpowers. The current debate about the treatment of asylum seekers is a case in point. Inhumane policies can never be justified by the fact that they reduce the number of people arriving on our shores in leaky, unseaworthy fishing boats.
Jeremiah had seen clearly what was going to happen to Judah. He was a man of intense prophetic and political insight and he had warned the kings and princes that the tragedy that was to come was a consequence of their corrupt behaviour. But it was also somehow part of a much greater reality that involved all the nations surrounding Judah; and God, said Jeremiah, was going to allow all this to happen. Babylonia would become the great world power and King Nebuchadnezzar would become the ruler of all the minor nations of Palestine and what we today call the Near East. Jeremiah was a realist and he urged the leaders and people of Judah to live and work within the Babylonian empire even though it, too, would be overtaken by the Persian empire in the not too distant future. Whilst Jeremiah was no friend of the superpowers, he did see their struggles for domination taking place under the sovereign will of God – God was the ultimate superpower, not Assyria or Babylon or Persia, nor America, China or India.
The Persian Empire
The book of Jeremiah is a gripping read and a wonderful introduction to his world six hundred years before the birth of Jesus. He has been called ‘the prophet of doom’, or ‘the weeping prophet’, because he unrelentingly pronounced judgement on the princes and priests of Judah because of their corruption, and on the superpowers because of their violence and oppression. And yet, right in the heart of this litany of past, present and impending disasters, Jeremiah proclaims a promise of redemption and restoration:
See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth,
among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labour, together; a great company, they shall return here.
With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble;
Hear the word of the LORD, O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.”
They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion,
and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the LORD,
over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd;
their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.
Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.
I will give the priests their fill of fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty, says the LORD.
In the midst of national and international insecurity and turmoil; in a time when the very survival of Judah as a nation that had come to understand itself as the people of God was in doubt; when the political and religious institutions and leadership were disintegrating, this prophet of doom assured the people that the Lord was not finished with them – that they had a future because the grace of God would restore and redeem them. All of the harsh prophecies and all of the national suffering Jeremiah predicted were not a sign that God hated Judah, its leaders and its people, but a sign that God loved them and was calling them back to live in justice and peace.
Jeremiah’s pessimistic prophecies might have been the educated guesses of an astute political commentator, but this prophecy of hope required what Walter Brueggemann describes as the ‘prophetic imagination’. The task of the prophet is to ‘express a future that none think imaginable’ and ‘to bring to public expression … [the] hopes and yearnings [of the people] that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there’.
- What are your hopes and yearnings at the start of 2010?
- What are your hopes and yearnings for yourself and your family?
- What are our hopes and yearnings for this church?
- What are our hopes and yearnings for our nation?
- What are our hopes and yearnings for our world?
Like Jeremiah, we are living in times of great change, and those changes could so easily lead to despair or cynicism. The apparent failure of the Copenhagen talks on climate change have had that impact on many of the modern prophets who have been able to see more clearly than the rest of us the danger our planet is in from carbon emissions. In a much smaller way we know that as a church community we face a year of change in this beloved place that we gather, and that process of change will challenge our faith, our hope, and our love. We can learn from Jeremiah. He could proclaim a message of hope because he could see beyond the turmoil of the present to the much greater reality of God in the world. And have we not already proclaimed that reality this morning? And will we not again celebrate that reality as we share the bread and the wine?
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.