JESUS IS ON THE MOVE
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

November 29, 2009

Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36

I hope you are ready. As our sanctuary decorations are reminding us, Christmas is coming! Since last Sunday's Thanksgiving ingathering, we have carried off this altar over 1,500 pounds of food to MCUM, Monroe County United Ministries. Collectively, I would hate to estimate how many pounds of food all of us ate last Thursday or whatever combination of days marked our Thanksgiving celebrations. Last Sunday evening, about fifty of us gathered here to begin to transform our worship space into its traditional Christmas finery.

But if you were listening to our Scripture lessons from Jeremiah and Luke a few minutes ago, you might say, “Huh, what a disconnect between the stories being read and the decorations around us.” And then, there was last Friday, as in two days ago. When I got up Friday morning and flipped on the television they were doing a helicopter flyover at Castleton Square Mall on the northeast side of Indianapolis. At 6:30 in the dark as night morning, the parking lot was completely full of cars swarming with people heading to Black Friday sales.

Now, incidentally, when the stories of Advent are read on this morning, I think the stories of the coming end of the world match my attitude toward shopping on the days after Thanksgiving. I would rather eat my mother's three-times-boiled green beans that have melted into a green silvery slurry than be at a mall on the day after Thanksgiving. I do love my mother, though her cooking was too often medieval savagery. She believed in boiling everything for a long time. I did not really know food had flavor until I went away to college and ate dorm food.

But I digress from the apocalyptic stories that grip us in the lead up to Christmas. The stories of apocalypse were written for people like me who look at packed mall parking lots and say to themselves, “There is no hope, the end is nearer than we thought.” The stories of despair and violence that mark so many of the end-of-the-world-scenario biblical stories are for people like me that rarely see the glass as half full, but nearly always as nearly empty. People like me need strong visions of hope in order to persevere. We need to know that there is a current of hope that is moving toward wholeness, and that there is a way for us to join with that stream and be able to envision it growing towards a river surging towards justice, fairness, and prosperity for the least of these in our world.

Our reading from Jeremiah, the Hebrew Text, was written late in Jeremiah's career and most likely just after Jerusalem and the southern Kingdom of Judah had fallen to King Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian Empire. It was a time of crushing loss. They were defeated as a nation, with no hope of revival in sight.

Most of you remember with me the immediate aftermath of 9/11/01. New York City 's Twin Trade Towers lay in smoldering ruin. The Pentagon was scorched on one of its five sides. A hole in a Pennsylvania farm field was all that remained of United Flight 93. Yes we were shocked. Yes we were mourning. But, we are not members of a nation that is short on options to respond. We have engaged in war for the last eight years as one very commonly used response.

The people of Judah under the prophet Jeremiah had no options other than to risk running out into the wilderness and hoping to escape an arrow in their back or to stand in line waiting for the exodus beginning as King Nebuchadnezzar forcibly marched the people of Judah across the barren lands into Babylonia, current-day Iraq. Judah, the Israelites, had no remaining army and their capital city lay as heaps of rock.

Do you remember the times of utter gloom and lostness in your life?

In C.S. Lewis's classic tale, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , one scene is most pregnant with hope and anticipation in the midst of what looks like total despair and depression. The four children who had come through the wardrobe were meeting the Beavers for the first time. And Mrs. Beaver whispered conspiratorially to them, “They say Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already landed.”

Lewis then continues, “And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in his inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.”

“Aslan is on the move!” Everything is commencing to start to begin to change! And the sign that indeed Aslan is on the move is the appearance of four unsuspecting and naive and apparently unqualified siblings who have appeared on the scene of a world that seems to be going into a deep freeze of despair and hopelessness. That is what Jeremiah and Advent is all about to us this morning, the unsuspecting, perhaps naive and apparently unqualified world saviors that we are.

The text reads in the NRSV, “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” But the original Hebrew is more dynamic than that. It is better translated “Look! The Days ar e coming,” this is God's word, “when I will fulfill the promise I made.” God is on the move, Jeremiah is declaring! God has made a promise that one is coming who is greater even than King David, who will bring justice and righteousness and peace to th e world. God is on the move. That one will come. You have God's promise.

In verse fourteen, Jeremiah gets serious about where the hope will come from…: the shoot of a tree, a shoot of David's that will bring justice and righteousness in the land.

In my earliest years of canoeing in northern Maine back in the mid-1980's I was always aghast at the lumbering in that great northern wilderness. It was a clear cutting process. They did not replant. In these great forests of timber, with trees forty to fifty feet high, the loggers would leave one tall tree every mile or so. It was an ugly sight. Where once this tree was surrounded by a forest of pine trees, now this funnily bent tree stood alone in a sea of debris from all of its partners, brush stripped from hundreds, thousands of trees, left to rot. Most of the tree production in that area went into the production of disposal diapers. I was most often awash in despair watching the erosion of the forests through the next thirty years.

The single trees left were not present to remind those of us who came by what used to exist on the land. They were seed trees. The seed trees were left to do the planting of the next generation of forest trees. Within two years the former barren landscape had one foot saplings coming up through the brush. The last time I was there in the same area, there is today a full forest of thirty-foot pine trees complete with forest critters of every variety. Despite my disgust with clear cutting, it is a very well managed forest, though the chemicals sprayed to block the growth of weeds and such have now leached into the waterway, poisoning an entire waterway and all who use it.

I couldn't tell you that story without including the problem with chemical contamination, but please still envision with me hope growing out of the chaos of despair I saw thirty years ago in that one decimated forest. This is what Jeremiah is trying to help us focus on in his metaphor of the shoot of David taking root in the midst of the carnage that was left behind.

Jeremiah is suggesting that even in the days immediately following those epic days of greatest despair, whether individually, as a congregation, as a nation or as a group of nations, ours is a God who is already planting the seeds that will call us out of whatever exile we are in and will build God's people faithfully seeking to create a society, a world as God has always intended it to be. God is on the move!

Forgive me for spending this much time on one section, but it is worth noting. Verse 33:15 is particularly startling as Jeremiah tells us what the true shoot of David is to do. The expected work of any king is the building up of his kingdom, to enhance the military it will take to protect his land, to have enough security and wealth to keep a country prosperous. It is what nation building is about. But that is not the task that is being assigned by God to the “true Shoot of David.” This new start, this new shoot is to “execute justice and righteousness in the land.”

I love the balance of church and government separation we have in this country. Because of the balance between our courts and our legislative branch of government there is a living tension as each generation seeks balance in light of the needs of our nation and our world, while maintaining that each reality, church and state, should remain separate and distinct. It is the job, for instance of the churches and mosques and synagogues to inform our government what it means to be righteous and just. It has never easily worked out for the ones with the guns to get to decide what righteousness and justice means. Jeremiah had a vision from God that the Messiah would bring righteousness but it means something a little different than how we use that word today.

The meaning of the term righteousness has changed since it first got placed in this Hebrew text some three to four thousand years ago. Words do change meaning. You and I are acutely aware of that. I have a book in my library from about the year 1940 entitled, How to Throw a Gay Party . How that word has changed in a mere fifty years.

Today the word righteous means free from guilt or sin, being genuine. When considering this text of Jeremiah in its context one needs to know the meaning of the Hebrew word that was first translated into an old English word back in the late 1500's and early 1600's when the texts were translated. The Hebrew word is closer to the original English word “rightwise ,” which meant acting rightly, acting in accord with divine or moral law on behalf of the poor. Thus a righteous person was one who was committed to the empowering and liberatio n of the poor.

God is moving, Jeremiah said. The true Shoot will be the one or ones who practice authentic justice and rightwise practice toward the people. Those who are of this shoot will seek always to bring equitable distribution of wealth and relationship with God. The activities of those who come from the shoot of David will be nationalistic in a most unique fashion. For this group will always be about favoring the cause of the poor, the marginalized, the exploited and the oppressed so that the benefit of the doubt will consistently be given to them and not to those who are the possessors of wealth, power or position, including the king or the president, in contemporary terms. Jeremiah and the prophets knew that only by practicing an intentional preference toward the poor would the king and those who support the king be able to resist the self-serving interest the king and the king's government would normally represent. This is not specific to one group of believers in God. It is God in the flesh of human beings. It is God working for justice and righteousness through human hands. God is on the move.

This story is pulled forward in Luke's story this morning, where Jesus says that “there will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars and on the earth distress among the nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.”

Remember that in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, no matter that Aslan was on the move, it took bravery, courage, dedication, being pushed beyond normal, life on the verge of ending in order for the evil ways to be beaten back and for the world of Narnia finally to be brought to the wholeness, the shalom, that we know the world should have.

Evil happens easily. For long lasting good to happen, it takes a lifetime of dedicated work. We should not assume that in following the ways of Jesus, a shoot that has taken root from the Jewish messianic tradition, we shall be welcomed in the world for our insistence on justice and righteousness—first and foremost for the poor.

Here near the end of 2009 the earth is shaking, the ice caps are melting, the sea is choked full of carbon dioxide, the weather patterns are changing, population demands are increasing and we remain embroiled in wars that seem to have no end. Here we sit and stand in Bloomington, Indiana and I want you know one thing more than any other this first Sunday of Advent, “They say that Jesus is on the move.”