Our Hope

Jeremiah 33:14-16

December 3, 2006: David Jones: Harpeth Presbyterian

Jeremiah 33: ¹⁴The 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. ¹⁵In 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. ¹⁶In 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.”

          Today we lit the candle of hope. The prophets candle. We read this passage, a hope passage, from the prophet Jeremiah.

          To begin with, I should confess, there are times when I am not Jeremiah. Times when I am not a voice of hope, but gloom and doom. I am often more like Eyore in A.A. Milne’s Winne the Pooh than I am like Jeremiah.

          Last Sunday afternoon was one of those days.

          I had been tuning into the Titans game off and on. They were down 21-0. My expectation was loss and only loss. It was late afternoon. I had been as productive as I was going to be that afternoon. I decided to relax. I turned on the television.     The Titans were losing 21 to nothing toward the end of the third quarter.

          I had checked with the game off and on to see what the score was, now I was resolved to lie upon my bed and watch them lose.

          I did not expect the Titans to come back. I did not expect them to win. I did not even expect them to score any more than the late game field goal. Not only was their loss what I expected, it was what I hoped for. I wanted to take a nap. There is nothing that can ease you to sleep better than a lack luster offense.

          Then the game changed. The Titans changed. An interception. Vince Young started to play… differently. He played as a man with… hope. Vince had hope. It was obvious he felt they could win. At 21-7, he started lifting his hands to the crowd. He had hope. He obviously felt that not only could they score again… they could win.

          He was… Jeremiah of today’s passage. He embodied the hope of the team.

          So, with Jeremiah and Vince Young before us, let’s look at what we know about hope.

          Hope is powerful.

          Robin Williams starred in the movie Jakob the Liar. In the movie, Williams played a Jew living in the Warsaw ghetto. It's a pretty gloomy place. There is at least one suicide each night. One day in the German headquarters he hears a radio telling where a battle is going on only a few hundred km away. When he relates this to a friend to keep him from doing something stupid, it becomes assumed that Jakob has a hidden radio. He is then pressed to tell more news. As long as there is news, there are no suicides in the ghetto. Here is the quote from the movie, "Sometimes hope is more important than food."

          Hope is powerful. The hope of ONE is powerful.

          Vince Young had hope. Fourth down and ten yards to go. He was sacked. He didn’t fall down. He faked a pass and the defender let go. Then he ran. First down! Touch down followed!

          Hope can shape the future. The prophets weren’t fortune tellers or palm readers they were voices of hope.

          Have a dark expectation of the future and likely you’ll get it. Have a hopeful one and likely you’ll get that.

          At the Titan’s game, you could sense when the tide turned. The Giants thought, “We could lose this one!” The Giants expected to lose. The Titan’s thought, “We could win this one!” The Titan’s expected to win. Look what happened.

          Hope is powerful. But where does the power of hope come from?

          The power of hope is in action.

          To get a handle on this passage, we must understand the times in Israel. Times were bad. When I say bad, I don’t mean fender bender bad, I mean car wreck bad. Israel as a nation could hear the brakes squealing – there was about to be a big crash.

          The city of Jerusalem was under siege by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar was about to carry away much of the people of Israel into exile. (Jer. 32:1-6).

          The people were about to lose everything that gave meaning to their lives – temple, city, king, priesthood, their homes, family etc.

          God seemed to be silent, absent, off in his heaven. If God cared at all, it seemed to be only about the sins they had committed.

          But here, in this passage, God speaks hope, and Jeremiah is God’s voice of hope.

¹⁴The 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.

          Jeremiah didn’t just speak hope, he enacted hope. Jeremiah did something that was hopeful. He bought property. He knew the future would be bad, Babylon would take over Israel. However, Jeremiah was also confident, hopeful, that one day, the land would be valuable again. He bought land. He bought land to encourage the hope of others around them.

          You can’t really be a voice of hope, effectively, without action. After they scored the first touchdown last Sunday, Vince Young started lifting his hands to the crowd. He shouted, “Come on!” to the crowd and his team-mates.

          He acted. Because of his action, he could be a voice of hope.

          No one from the stands at the beginning of the fourth quarter could stand and yell to the crowd, “Come on. We can win this.” There is no “we” in winning the game. That person is a spectator. Vince Young could say, “We can win” because he was doing something.

          The power of hope is in action.

          The power of hope is in the group.

          Rudyard Kipling wrote about the power of the group in Second Jungle Book,

Now this is the Law of the Jungle –

as old and as true as the sky;

And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,

but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk,

the Law runneth forward and back –

For the strength of the Pak is the Wolf,

and the strength of the Wolf is the pack.

          When times are tough in a church, we see the strength of the pack.

          There are often times when a church believes for a member. After a tragedy, car wreck, cancer, “I don’t know if I can believe in God.”

          “That’s okay,” congregations reply. “We’ll believe for you.”

          We believe for each other. We hope for each other.

          Through the stewardship campaign, there were many times I wasn’t sure we’d make it.

          Ooney said something to me, “It’s good you have faith.”
          “Don’t be silly, I don’t have that much faith.”

          She, Dana, the rest of the committee became the spirit of Mary Gorman. I could hear her saying, “Don’t be silly. Of course you do.”

          Time and again I’d ask David Hill, “How are we?”

          “We’re okay.” Was David’s constant response.

          The power of hope for me has always been in the community.

          John Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts bay Colony,. In 1630 speaking to his fellow colonists shortly before they set foot on land, he urged, We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body.

          For the Titans, it wasn’t when one person hope but when the whole team had hope that hope had power.

          “You could feel the energy,” fullback Ahmard Hall said. “We believed.”

          Brandon Jones said, “When the light switch finally came on for us everything changed. Guys kept saying, ‘This game ain’t over. It’s not over.”

          Kyle Bosch, “You can’t control a lot of things that happen n games, but heart and believing in each other, you can control that.”

          The Titans couldn’t win on Vince Young’s hope along. It had to spread through the team.

          At the end of World War II, Winston Churchill was at a dinner and a man stood up and said, “At the Battle of the Bulge we had evidence that the British soldiers were braver than the Nazi soldiers. The Battle of the Bulge proved that.” When Churchill got up to speak, he said, “That's not true. The Nazi soldiers were just as brave as the British soldiers. But the British soldiers were brave for five minutes longer.”

          The power of hope is not just in action or in the community but comes from God who calls the community together.

          I’ve told several of you, when I drove into Harpeth, I looked for a cemetery. Older church buildings often have cemeteries. It wasn’t until I walked into the building, until I met with the search committee, that I said, “There is life!”

          My expectations had to be put aside until I saw what God was doing in me, for me.

          Hope expects the unexpected.

          Hope has nothing to do with certainty.

          God’s voice of hope in Jeremiah gives an image… “¹⁵In 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.

          Branch from David – okay, a descendant of King David. No one thought, I’ll bet it will be a divine baby born to an impoverished couple staying in Bethlehem who are so poor they have to use a manger for a crib.

          Right, and they’ll be visited by a motley group of shepherds who were themselves visited by angels.

          Yes, and then some astrologers will show up with three gifts.

          No, no one expected that.

          Why is hope expecting the unexpected? Because… as people of faith… like Jeremiah in today’s passage… we are defined by hope.

          Jurgen Moltmann has reminded us of this active notion by a vivid metaphor of religious life. He suggests that some Christians are fossils, located properly in museums, locked into the past. Other Christians are chameleons, located in nature, changing colors with the changing environment. But Christians, according to Moltmann, are those whose lives are conditioned neither by history nor environment alone, but are lived out in active hope, the "great experiment" that places its confidence in the promises of God in Jesus Christ.

          Hope is perhaps the defining characteristic of the faithful.

          So what do we know about Hope? Hope is powerful. Hope unites. The power of hope is in community. Hope is expecting the unexpected. Hope is rooted in the action of God.

          So here is the What? So what? and Now what? of the sermon.

          What? Jeremiah embodied hope in an uncertain time in Israel.

          So what? From Jeremiah (with a little help from Vince Young) we see the power of hope. The power of hope is in action. The power of hope is in the community. The power of hope comes from God.

          Now what? Hold onto hope.

          Grab hold of your piece of this community of faith and hold on.

          Let me give you a story. Harpeth is a lot like the small pebbles in this story.

          One night a group of nomads were preparing to retire for the evening when suddenly they were surrounded by a great light. They knew they were in the presence of a celestial being. With great anticipation, they awaited a heavenly message of great importance that they knew must be especially for them.

          Finally, the voice spoke, "Gather as many pebbles as you can. Put them in your saddle bags. Travel a day's journey and tomorrow night will find you glad and it will find you sad." After having departed, the nomads shared their disappointment and anger with each other. They had expected the revelation of a great universal truth that would enable them to create wealth, health and purpose for the world. But instead they were given a menial task that made no sense to them at all. However, the memory of the brilliance of their visitor caused each one to pick up a few pebbles and deposit them in their saddle bags while voicing their displeasure.

          They traveled a day's journey and that night while making camp, they reached into their saddle bags and discovered every pebble they had gathered had become a diamond. They were glad they had diamonds. They were sad they had not gathered more pebbles.

          Grab hold of as much of this community of faith as you can… and hope.