Jeremiah 31:7-14
The Lord proclaims: Sing joyfully for the people of Jacob; shout for the leading nation. Raise your voices with praise and call out: “The Lord has saved his people,[d] the remaining few in Israel!” 8 I’m going to bring them back from the north; I will gather them from the ends of the earth. Among them will be the blind and the disabled, expectant mothers and those in labor; a great throng will return here. 9 With tears of joy they will come; while they pray, I will bring them back. I will lead them by quiet streams and on smooth paths so they don’t stumble. I will be Israel’s father, Ephraim will be my oldest child. 10 Listen to the Lord’s word, you nations, and announce it to the distant islands: The one who scattered Israel will gather them and keep them safe, as a shepherd his flock. 11 The Lord will rescue the people of Jacob and deliver them from the power of those stronger than they are. 12 They will come shouting for joy on the hills of Zion, jubilant over the Lord’s gifts: grain, wine, oil, flocks, and herds. Their lives will be like a lush garden; they will grieve no more. 13 Then the young women will dance for joy; the young and old men will join in. I will turn their mourning into laughter and their sadness into joy; I will comfort them. 14 I will lavish the priests with abundance and shower my people with my gifts, declares the Lord. (Common English Bible)
“Dream Child,” Jeremiah 31:7-14
Though many of y’all
have met my younger sister Katherine, I haven’t really talked about how she and
I started out. But since I just came
back from visiting her and the rents in Kansas City (please, don’t mention the
Chiefs!), the whole history of our sibling-hood is fresh in my mind.
She was born right
before I turned four, and so, like any child of that age, I was thrilled that
my parents were giving me another plaything to goof around with. I’d
arrive home from preschool shouting, “Katherine! I’m home!” and I would
chatter about how when we grew up, we wouldn’t live more than a mile apart from
one another. Needless to say, the novelty wore off fast, and before
too long, I was trying to pawn her off on all my friends—“Hey! You
want a new baby sister? I’ll give you mine for a
dollar!” Unsurprisingly, I found no takers, so I brought my asking
price down, and started offering away for free. And when that didn’t work,
I started offering to pay my friends to take her off my
hands—“Hey! You want a new baby sister? I’ll give you a
dollar if you take mine!” I learned a lot from that, not just about
being a good older brother, but a lot about capitalism, too…especially concepts
like supply and demand.
See, like a lot of
kids, I had this idealized image of what a new sibling would be like—that she
would be this plaything that would eventually turn into a partner in crime with
whom we might torment our unsuspecting parents into eternity. Of
course, Katherine ended up not being exactly what my four-year-old self
expected. It is an experience we have all had—maybe not with a
sibling, but perhaps that dream job you chased for years and years turned out
to not be everything it was cracked up to be. The brand new car you
saved and saved for turned out to be a total lemon. Or…the Messiah
that you hoped and hoped would come…well, sometimes you still wonder where the
heck He is in all of this poverty and violence and abuse of all kinds in the
world. And if you think you had high hopes for the coming of God,
consider the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who proclaimed this lofty poem to a
people most in need of hope.
Now, for reasons of
hope, I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I just
don’t. Studies suggest the majority of resolutions don’t make it
past February. I tell people that it is because as a Chiefs fan, I
already have one endless cycle of failure in my life (see what I did there?),
so why add another? But mostly it is because I’m just cynical enough
to see the concept of New Years’ resolutions as a schlocky excuse for my
24-Hour Fitness Center to sell a bunch of new gym memberships. So I
haven’t made a New Year’s Resolution since I was a teenager. But I
think if I were to make one again, it would be to believe as Jeremiah does in
these passages. I mean, to believe in God, yes, but to also be rid
of all my moments of cynicism and jadedness, to be fully vulnerable to the
world and to God…that I would, as Jeremiah writes, “sing out with gladness for
Jacob.” That’s a New Year’s Resolution worth keeping, because there really
is no denying that even though we may not have hit the dire straits ancient
Israel did when Jeremiah writes—being hauled off to Babylon, living their lives
in exile—there are people (maybe even you) who cannot or will not sing, for
they are in such dire straits—they were laid off, they lost their income—for
even here, in the wealthiest nation of the world, they--we-- are finding, in all its
forms, only poverty.
In the idealization of
the Nativity scene, it is easy to forget that this is the place into which
Jesus is born—first, it’s a stable. And it’s a stable in Bethlehem, which, compared
to the cities of Jerusalem, or Samaria, or Caesarea, was downright
Podunk. And even Jerusalem and Samaria couldn’t hold a candle to the
largest cities of the Roman Empire, like Rome and
Alexandria. Usually, we pastors say this because we want to tell you
that you can spend a lifetime searching for God at earth’s top, only to find
God instead in the deepest of valleys. But there is another
reason—even in this wealthiest of ancient Empires, believe me when I say that
there were still loads of people feeling materially and spiritually
bankrupt. I don’t say this to tell you that misery loves
company. I say it because the poverty of a stable in Bethlehem makes
it all the more astounding that we find ourselves now awaiting the arrival of
the Magi to worship Jesus and to bring Him their lavish and luxurious gifts.
And as far as the
gifts of the Magi were concerned—we will talk about them more next week, on
Epiphany Sunday itself, but the gold, and the incense, and the myrrh…do you
think that maybe the Wise Men weren’t entirely on the same page about who
exactly Jesus was? I mean, the Bible doesn’t really say, but I could
see one of them saying, “This Baby Jesus is a king!” And the next
one would say, “You know what? No, he’s a GOD.” And then
the third guy, who is the punchline because that is always how jokes go, the
third guy always supplies the punchline, he’s a total killjoy and brings them
back to earth when he says, “Yeah, well, I think he’s just a man…just like
us.”
If the Magi were all
only hoping to see what they had expected to see, then they may well have ended
up disappointed with the Jesus that did end up doing ministry as our
Messiah. Of course, the Bible doesn’t really say about that,
either. But it is a pretty common feeling—we put blinders on
ourselves, and all of the sudden we look through these narrower lenses and if
the world does not fulfill our expectations, however justified those
expectations might be, we end up crushed. And sometimes, we try to
put those blinders on God as well—we do so when, over and over again, we decide
to search for God only at earth’s top.
Carrie Doehring is a professor
of pastoral counseling, and she has written about what she calls “dream
children.” If an unborn child dies in utero, she says that the
mother is suffering not only from the loss of her own child, but from the loss
of her dream child as well, the images and senses and thoughts of what her
child-to-be would be like. And the more vividly this dream child
exists, the greater the immediate loss for the mother is as
well. But it isn’t only the mother who can give birth to a dream
child—if the father, or the grandparents, the aunts, the uncles, the friends,
imagined a dream child, then their dream children, too, will be a source of
pain and grief and sorrow.
It is all too easy to
see Jesus as a dream child—not because He died too soon, although at thirty-something,
it often feels as though He did. No, it is easy to see Him as a
dream child because he probably didn’t turn out to be anything like what anyone
expected…and if He were in person here today, He would probably be unlike
anything we expect now. The Christian author Anne Lamott came up
with this gem—“You know that you have created God in your image when God has
the exact same enemies as you.” The Zealots expected Jesus to hate
the Romans as much as they did, but He didn’t. Paul the Apostle expected
Jesus to come back to earth immediately, and He hasn’t. Under
ordinary circumstances, we might call this a disappointment. And I
have to think there are times in our lives when we worry that God hasn’t turned
out to be the God we want or the God we expect, and we are
disappointed. But that does not mean that there is no God.
One of my childhood
idols was the late actor Christopher Reeve. Before breaking his C2
vertebrae, Reeve was best known for playing Superman in the
movies. Of course, nobody expects Superman to be a quadriplegic in a
motorized wheelchair, breathing off of machines and living off of an all-liquid
diet. And Reeve, to his immense credit, saw that what the world
needed from him was not the Superman of old, but a man willing to speak
compassion on behalf of the disabled. There was a time when he was
asked to speak at one of those gimmicky, vaguely pop-psychology success
seminars, and Reeve accepted.
There, he took the
stage and said, “I’ve had to leave the physical world. By the time I
was twenty-four, I was making millions. I was pretty pleased with
myself. I was selfish and neglected my family. Since my
accident, I’ve been realizing that success means something quite
different. I see people who achieve these conventional
goals. None of it matters.” The journalist and writer
Eric Schlosser, who was there, wrote afterwards, saying:
Everybody in the arena, no matter how eager
for promotion, know deep in their hearts that what Reeve has just said is
true—too true…Men and women up and down the aisles wipe away tears, touched not
only by what this famous man has been through but also by a sudden awareness of
something hollow about their own lives, something gnawing and
unfulfilled.
Oh, to search for your
God at earth’s top, only to find hollowness instead!
May God come to you in
the deepest moments of hollowness, of the gnawing feeling that there is
something in your life left unfulfilled and unfinished. For when God
came to earth, it was in the rawest of forms, a little baby boy who had to grow
and mature into the finished version of the adult Messiah we read about in the
Gospels. And it is that Messiah who promises all things that the
prophet Jeremiah writes of. That Messiah may not be the
Messiah you wanted, or expected, or feel that you deserved, but it is the
Messiah that we have all received nevertheless by right of your status as a
child of God.
And if you were to do
something as ridiculously optimistic as to make a New Year’s Resolution for
2014, might I humbly ask that you tack this onto your resolution—to hear what
the newborn Messiah is calling you to do this year. Not what you
want Him to call you to do, or wish He were calling you to do, or what He might
have been calling you to do in 2013, or 2012, or 2011…what are you being called
to do here, now? Because the future of this baby boy we call Jesus
is for Him to be our Messiah, but for the moment, he is still a
baby. And so, for now, may we all be as the Wise Men, as the
shepherds, as the ox and lamb who gathered around that manger one night in
Bethlehem, all to ask the same question:
“Newborn Christ, here
I am. What is it that you want me to do?”
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
January 5, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment