“Futures Yet Unfolding”
Jeremiah 31:7-14
John 1:1-18 (9-18)
Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church
Mindy Douglas Adams
Second Sunday after Christmas
January 3, 2010

          It's a New Year, friends.  2010, or twenty-ten as some people call this year, is here.  The calendar has turned its page and we find ourselves looking forward at the year ahead.   At this time of year, in a way we don't do any other time, really (except maybe on our birthdays), we see time ahead of us like a blank sheet of paper, and we wonder what we will write  upon it.  This is the time of New Year's Resolutions, when we think about the things we want to do that we haven't done, and we resolve to do them.  Or when we think about the things we have done that we wish we hadn't and we resolve not to do them anymore.  The blank slate ahead of us signifies opportunity - opportunity to be who we always have dreamed we could be, opportunity to be who God intended for us to be.  We have not forgotten the years past.  No.  For they have shaped us and formed us and made us who we are.  But a New Year gives us hope that this year things will be better, fuller, healthier, happier, and deeper.  The New Year gives us the chance to dream and to plan and to hope for a future which is bright and joyful.  I hope you all have had or will have a chance to dream and plan for a New Year filled with God's grace and guidance and peace.

            Our Jeremiah text is in many ways an ideal text as we enter this New Year.  It is a message of promise and hope and new beginnings for the people of Israel hundreds of years ago and for us now as well.  In this passage historically, Jeremiah, a prophet to the Israelites, is writing to a people who have been exiled from their homeland and held captive in Babylon.

            "The exiles to whom the words of Jeremiah 31 were addressed were scattered, weary and vulnerable."¹  They had been forced out of their homes and into another country where they felt lost and abandoned by God.  Many turned away from God and left their faith back in Jerusalem, others found their faith growing weary and the Lord's song growing fainter and fainter in this foreign land.  In chapters earlier Jeremiah had no patience for the people's excuses and pronounced judgments upon those who turned from God and lived unrighteous lives.  But in our chapter for today, all judgment has turned from condemnation to promise.  The phrases in this text are full of dancing and singing, hope and expectation and joy.  Have you ever heard so many celebratory words and images in one passage?

At this homecoming there will be gladness, praise, proclaiming, shouting, singing aloud.  Those who return will be radiant over the goodness of the Lord.  They will eat and drink and be merry.  Grain, and wine, and oil, and the young of the flock and herd will provide a feast.  The Israelites will live like a watered garden.  They will walk by brooks of water and their paths will be straight and they will not stumble.  They will sing aloud with joy.  The young women will dance and the young men will make merry.

            Their mourning will turn into joy.

They will receive gladness in exchange for their sorrow.

            All that was once sorrow and sadness and fear and loss will be changed in the blink of an eye and the Lord will keep them as a shepherd keeps his flock.  All of God's people will be gathered, from Babylon and every corner of the earth where they have been scattered - the blind and the lame, the parents of young children and the mothers in labor.  They have all been redeemed and they all will stream back to their homeland, weeping in relief, weeping in joy, weeping because what they have hoped for for so long - what many had given up hoping for - is coming to pass, weeping because they finally understand what it meant to be in the arms of grace, as undeserving of such grace and forgiveness as they had been and overwhelmed by the everlasting love of their God who had not forgotten them at all.

            In these words of hope and consolation to a weary people who have been guilty of forgetting their God,

Jeremiah initiates a course correction.  [Pastor Barbara Sholis writes] He is calling those who remember their relationship of blessing with Yahweh back into the living of it.  I am bringing you home, God says.  In contrast to their departure, a journey filled with brute force and destruction, those returning now are part of the procession of the restored. . . .  It is a time pregnant with promise, and a time for noisy tambourines and merry dancing.  All will participate in the spirited homecoming parade.  God will lead everyone to new beginnings filled with new life.²

            New beginnings filled with new life.  Not a bad way to start off the New Year, huh?  New beginnings filled with new life?  And this is, after all the message of the gospel, found right here in the words of a prophet of Yahweh.  Dare we believe that this message might be for us as well?  Dare we believe that the Incarnation of God - God becoming human - might be a message of hope of new beginnings and new life for us all?  Dare we believe that that clean slate might actually be for us, that this celebrating and joy and dancing might actually be possible for us?

            We have been through our own exiles in many ways.  For those of us in this place, these have not been literal exiles to other countries, though many of God's children in Africa and Thailand have been, even in the last month, sent away from their homes and have become refugees in a foreign land.  Those people know all too well what it is like to be exiled and lost and in the wilderness and I imagine these words from Jeremiah have a totally different meaning for them then they will for us.  Our exiles are not so literal, but we have all been in dark places where we have felt lost and far away from home.  Some have felt abandoned by God.  Some have decided God doesn't care.  Some have stopped singing the Lord's song in such a foreign land and given up in despair, shrugged their shoulders and said, "What's the point?" and moved away from their Lord who loves them.  But God, who did not forget his children in Babylon has not forgotten us, either.  In the first few verses of this chapter, which we didn't read this morning, we hear the promise clearly:

            "The people who have survived the sword . . ." (in other words, the people who have lived through major difficulties in life). . . . "found grace in the wilderness."  Grace in the wilderness.  The Lord said, "I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you." 

The message of God's continuing faithfulness to us and everlasting love for us is not a message we can afford to forget.  For it is this message which brings us grace in the wilderness.  It is this message which allows us to feel joy, even in during tough times.  There is grace even in the wilderness.  There is light even in the darkness.  The prophet Isaiah knew it:  "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.  Those who have lived in a land of deep darkness, on them light has shined" (9:2).  The gospel writer John knew it when he wrote the words we read this morning.  "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it."   There is grace in the wilderness!  There is joy in the morning!  There is God, who loves us with everlasting love and who continues in faithfulness with us, even when we are unfaithful.

            Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite authors, in his book, The Longing for Home, shares a story which I believe fits in with the message of Jeremiah's passage today.   He writes,

            Several winters ago my wife and I and our then twenty-year-old daughter, Sharmy, went to that great tourist extravaganza near Orlando, Florida, called Sea World.  There is a lot of hoopla to it - crowds of people, loud music, Mickey Mouse T-shirts, and so on, but the main attraction makes it all worthwhile.  It takes place in a huge tank of crystal clear, turquoise water with a platform projecting out . . . .  It was a gorgeous day when we were there, with bright Florida sunlight reflected in the shimmering water and a cloudless blue sky over our heads.  The bleachers where we sat were packed.

            The way the show began was that at a given signal they released into the tank five or six killer whales, as we call them . . . . and no creatures under heaven could have looked less killerlike as they went racing around and around in circles.  What with the dazzle of sky and sun, the beautiful young people on the platform, the soft southern air, and the crowds all around us watching the performance with a delight matched only by what seemed the delight of the performing whales, it was as if the whole creation - men and women and beasts and sun and water and earth and sky and, for all I know, God himself - was caught up in one great, jubilant dance of unimaginable beauty.  And then, right in the midst of it, I was astonished to find that my eyes were filled with tears. 

            When the show was over and I turned to my wife and daughter beside me to tell them what had happened, their answer was to say that there had been tears also in their eyes.

[Buechner continues . . .]

. . . We shed tears because we had caught a glimpse of the Peaceable Kingdom, and it had almost broken our heart.  For a few moments we had seen Eden and been part of the great dance that goes on at the heart of creation.  We shed tears because we were given a glimpse of the way life was created to be and is not.  We had seen why it was that "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons (sic) of God shouted for joy" when the world was first made, as the book of Job describes it, and of what it was that made Saint Paul write, even when he was in prison and on his way to execution, "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice."  We had had glimpse of a part at least of what Jesus meant when he said, "Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh."

            The world is full of darkness, but what I think we caught sight of in that tourist trap in Orlando, Florida, of all places, was that at the heart of darkness - whoever would have believed it? - there is joy unimaginable.  The world does bad things to us all, and we do bad things to the world and to each other and maybe most of all to ourselves, but in that dazzle of bright water as the glittering whales hurled themselves into the sun, I believe what we saw was that joy is what we belong to.  Joy is home, and I believe the tears that came to our eyes were more than anything else homesick tears.  God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by him, his mark is deep within us.  We have God's joy in our blood.³

            May your New Year be filled with such assurances.  May your New Year be filled with such joy.  Amen.

¹ Christine Pohl, "Homeward Bound," The Christian Century, (December 27, 2005), p. 19.

² Barbara Sholis, "Course Correction (Jeremiah 31:7-14)," The Christian Century, December 18-31, 2002, p. 18. 

³ Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home, (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), pp. 126-8.