Last week, we turned to the book of the Prophet Jeremiah. He was a prophet who was called to preach and proclaim the Word of God to the people of Judah....he tried to advise kings and prepare the people for the Babylonian exile. The king of Judah didn’t heed Jeremiah’s warnings, and Babylon conquered the land of Judah and took many people to Babylon as exile.
Jeremiah’s prophesizes were not only about things that would happen in his lifetime.... he also told the people that their time of exile would end, and a Messiah would be sent by God to change the world for the better. Listen now to Jeremiah’s prophesy about the coming Savior of the world:
The Scripture Jeremiah 33:14-16
“‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will fulfill the good promise I made to the people of Israel and Judah.
15 “‘In those days and at that time
I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line;
he will do what is just and right in the land.
16 In those days Judah will be saved
and Jerusalem will live in safety.
This is the name by which it will be called:
The Lord Our Righteous Savior.’
Here ends this reading of the Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Let us pray...
The Message The Promise of Truth
This morning, we light the first candle on our Advent wreath, the Candle of Hope. We always start the Advent season focusing on HOPE. The Prophets who longed for the birth of the Messiah emphasized hope for a better future. They lived in difficult and unpredictable times, just as we do many thousands of years later. They hoped for a better tomorrow, a better future, when God would break into the world and put things in order.
During the Advent season, we read the prophesies that were told about Jesus’ birth long before he was born. Jeremiah lived six centuries before Jesus’s miraculous birth. In the prophesy we read this morning, Jeremiah’s hopeful prophesy for the future, was said to the remaining people of Judah after Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians. Their city, the capital of their country, the home of their ancestors, where God’s temple once stood, had been pillaged and burned. God’s Temple was knocked down. Jerusalem was destroyed and the rulers and leaders of Judah were forcefully put in chains and marched hundreds of miles to Babylon.
The people of Judah probably felt great despair when Jeremiah shared this vision of hope for the future. They looked around and only saw death, destruction, and failure. Yet, Jeremiah prophesied about the Messiah who would come to them. A Messiah would come and put everything back to right.
The people of Israel and Judah, the people of the Holy Land, waited a long, long time for the Messiah to come. And, while they waited, the people of their countries and of the Jewish faith had to contend with exile, foreign rule, natural disasters, drought, chaotic kings and rulers, and times when practicing their faith was outlawed. Calamity after calamity.... When things were bad, really bad, they hung onto hope that the messiah would come and save them.
Jeremiah’s predictions about the Messiah did come true – his words quoted God who said: “I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line; he will do what is just and right in the land.” Jesus was descended from the family of David. If DNA tests existed 2000 years ago, they would have shown Jesus to be descended from David through his mother. His stepfather, Joseph, was also a descendant of David, so Jesus was doubly descended from David...through biology and through adoption.
God proclaimed that Jesus: “...will do what is just and right in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.” When Jesus came to earth, not only were Judah and the people of Jerusalem saved, but all humanity was saved. All people are invited to have a relationship with Jesus and receive the saving grace of God. In his letter to the church at Galatia, Paul wrote: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” So, Jewish people and non-Jewish people; slaves, poor people, middle class, and wealthy people; male or female people; all people are one in Jesus and are saved through him.
Jesus came to save us all. Our passage from Jeremiah concludes with this line: This is the name by which it will be called: “The Lord Our Righteous Savior.’ When you study the origins of the name Jesus, it is “Yahweh, the Lord, saves.” So, Jesus’ name means...”The Lord, Yahweh, saves us.” Jesus is the source of our salvation.
We go through seasons of our life when have difficulty staying positive. We struggle to “hope” for the best, to trust that things will work out well in our futures. We worry about our children or our parents or our health or our community. We struggle to have faith in the future.
When we turn our attention towards God, it seems that our faith anticipates that we will sometimes struggle to hope. In the darkest month of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere), we remember the birth of the savior of the world. We remember the birth of Jesus, the light of the world. And we focus on the story of Jesus – born to a poor family in the middle of occupied territory, birthed by a teenaged mom and her young groom, born in a stable because no one cared enough to invite his incredibly pregnant mother into their home, who had to flee his homeland and became a refugee in a foreign country....this hapless baby became the Savior of the World. Jesus became the savior of the world even though when you look at his life, everything was stacked against him.
Our hope is in Jesus.
In the forth verse of “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” we Invite Jesus, the branch of Jesse’s stem, to come and rescue us. We invite Jesus to save use from the depths of hell, from our sins, and give us victory over the grave – eternal life with God. Our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.
So, no matter how dark things feel, how hard things become, how worried we may be, this season reminds us that our hope is in Jesus. Jesus who came to earth many years ago as a little baby in Bethlehem, and Jesus who will come again. We have hope for tomorrow, for a better future, because Jesus loves us, guides us, and saves us. Through our faith in Jesus, we receive redemption, salvation, and a promise of a better tomorrow.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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