Sunday, November 24,
2019
Driving around town, I’ve been
listening to a book on CD in my car, My
Reading Life. Pat Conroy tells his
life story through the lens of the great books that have shaped him. He begins with Gone with the Wind. I am not
from the South. I never read that book
or saw the movie.
Have
I just spoken a sacrilege? Why was this
book formative for Conroy? His mother
prided herself as a southern woman, a southern lady. Gone with the Wind was her story.
Writer Margaret Mitchell she did not have Peggy Conroy in mind. She didn’t know who Peggy Conroy was.
Once
the book came to life, Gone with the Wind
no longer belonged to Margaret Mitchell.
It became the setting for all who entered. Pat Conroy’s mom found herself in this
story. She inhabited it.
When
we read the Bible, we need to enter and inhabit it. Jeremiah wrote his prophecy at the end of the
7th and beginning of the 6th centuries BC. God was going to punish Judah for her sins by
allowing her to be completely overrun by the powerful Babylonians. Jeremiah had to say this even though his
countrymen didn’t listen, and, in fact, punished him for saying it.
Jeremiah
wasn’t thinking about you or me when he wrote.
But, we can find ourselves in his story.
He wasn’t speaking to or for us, but through him, God speaks to us. Inhabit the story. Find out what God has to say to you.
“[You shepherds of Israel] have scattered my flock,
and driven them away. You have not
attended to them. So I will attend to
you.” Attend. The leaders fail to care for the people
the Lord told them to watch. The Lord,
will watch those negligent leaders. The
Lord sees their evil. When we fail to
care for those God entrusts to our care, that is evil and the Lord sees
it.
Jeremiah
describes a coming calamity – exile!
But, that’s not all he says. In
chapter 23, God promises a reversal. God
will undo the damage of the wicked, self-serving shepherds.
“I
myself with gather the remnant,” God says in verse 3. “I will bring them back.” Exile is going to end with the negligent
rulers wallowing in poverty in Babylon and the scattered sheep brought back
home to God. God gathers hurting, broken
people into a divine embrace.
“I
will bring them back; … they shall be fruitful and multiply.” God gathers and frees us up to live out His purpose
for us. “Fruitful and multiply;” hear
the echo of Eden? Genesis 1:28, the very
highpoint of creation. God creates human
beings in God’s image and gives them their life’s mission. “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and
subdue it.” Human beings obeyed God and
then disobeyed so massively that God started over. God washed all the sin out
of the world with the flood and began again, because the plan had not changed.
Noah
is just off the ark, the ground still muddy.
God sees our propensity to sin, yet again declare humans to be His image
bearers (Genesis 9:6). Nothing in all of
creation matters to God the way humans do.
After the flood, God repeats the command because the plan has not
changed. “You be fruitful and multiply.
Abound on the earth and multiply in it” (Genesis 6:7).
God
stays committed to His own vision. In Jeremiah 23, God goes right back to it. “I will bring them back and they shall be
fruitful and multiply.” Adam and Eve in
Eden; Noah and his family after the flood; the returning exiles foreseen in
Jeremiah 23; be fruitful and multiply.
Human beings, the pinnacle of creation, fill the earth with God’s
goodness.
Now,
consider Jesus speaking to his disciples after the resurrection in Acts
1:8. “You will be my witnesses in
Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (v.8b). Do you
hear the command? Be fruitful. Grow in Christ and grow the church by leading
the people of the world to follow Christ.
We are to fill the earth with the knowledge of God by drawing the world
to Jesus.
After
noticing the evil shepherds, in Jeremiah 23:4 God promises new, better
shepherds, true leaders, and the people “will not fear any longer, or be
dismayed, nor shall any be missing.”
Surely Jesus was thinking of this promise of God from Jeremiah when, in
the opening verses of Luke 15, he told the parable of the shepherd who leaves
99 sheep to seek out and save the one that is lost. Under the protection of the Good Shepherd,
our Lord, none are lost.
Finally,
God promises, “I will raise up … a righteous branch, and he shall reign as king
and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness” (v.5). In God’s earth made new, the Righteous
Branch, King Jesus, executes justice, but then, He exceeds the demands of justice. With justice everyone is treated fairly. Righteousness means everyone gets what he or
she needs in order to thrive.
When
we inhabit the story, it gets in us. Filled
with the Holy Spirit, we follow our master.
We work for justice and then reach beyond to strive for
righteousness. As we stand in the middle of the layers of moral
decay coating society’s walls, we insist on and fight for justice and then take
the next step. Following our righteous
Lord, we work for equity and inclusion so that everyone in the flock of the
Good Shepherd, every person Jesus died for has the opportunity to thrive.
Inhabiting
the story, we give ourselves to working for God’s righteousness just as Jesus
did. He leaves the 99 to find the one
who is lost even when it is that one’s fault that he’s lost. For love’s sake,
we do the same.
We’re
sitting in Jeremiah seeing our own story told in the words and story of a
Jewish prophet in ancient Israel. Our
lives make sense as we learn who we are through Jeremiah’s words. As Christians we enter this story through one
door – the cross. Jesus is the heartbeat
of this story written 600 years before his birth. Jesus is the heartbeat of my story, and
yours.
Jeremiah’s
story comes as one of this week’s lectionary readings. The lectionary is a schedule of readings on a
three-year cycle. Each Sunday usually
includes an Old Testament reading, a Psalm, Gospel reading, and a New Testament
reading. Jeremiah, whether he fully knew
it or now, anticipated the coming of Christ when he wrote God’s promise. “I will raise up … a Righteous Branch.” He anticipated Christ at a distance. In our story, with great longing we wait for
the new thing God will do.
Today’s
Psalm, Psalm 46, like a blockbuster movie trailer, whets our appetite. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present
help in trouble. … We will not fear,
though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the
sea; though its waters roar and foam” (46:1-3a). Because God is raising a Righteous Branch, we
will not fear.
The
distant anticipation grows closer in the Gospel reading, Luke 1, the speech of
Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist.
This is the new trailer, out just a few weeks before the show’s big
release. “Blessed be the Lord God. … He
has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. He has raised up a might savior for us in the
house of David as he spoke through the prophets of old” (v.68-70). Rescued as we are, we are freed to serve
God.
Every
promise Jeremiah spoke, every great blessing the Psalm sings, every truth
Zechariah sees points to the coming of Jesus.
And Colossians 1, the New Testament reading, fills out the picture with
bigger colors, a cosmic backdrop. Jesus,
the baby born in a manger, is God in the flesh.
“He is the image of
the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all thing in
heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones
or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and
before him and in him all things hold together.
He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the
firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in
everything. For in him all the fullness
of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to
himself all things whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the
blood of his cross.
We, Jesus’ church, beat with Jesus’
heart. Working through us, he executes
justice, brings righteousness – peace and thriving for all – and defines who we
are. When we point the world to his
cross, his resurrection, and to life lived following him, we know we that we
have inhabited the story and are living the story. When we work for good in the world, the story
of the Psalm, of Jeremiah, of Luke, or Colossians, and of Hillside is all one
story.
That’s the church at work in the
world. Narrow the focus. Zoom in so closely, it’s you, staring into
the mirror of your soul. What do you
see? In the very depths of my own heart,
I see a sinner who can be petty and short tempered and selfish. The worst victims of my relational crimes are
the people I love most, my wife and my three kids. And I am the victim of their sins against
God.
That’s not all I see. I also see Jesus – right there in the deepest
parts of me. It’s not because my faith
is perfect, so mature and developed.
It’s because God is love, the good shepherd who repeatedly goes out to
find me when I wander and brings me back.
It’s because when I am at my very best, in those moments, God is
actually speaking through me. So people
look at me and see Him.
In my best moments, in my worst
moments, and in my banal, boring, non-descript-Tuesday-in-February moments; in
all the frozen seconds of time of my life, my life only makes sense when seen
in light of who Jesus. All who find
themselves in Him would say what I must say.
He is the heartbeat of my story.
AMEN
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