The Promise is Hope
Jeremiah 33:14-16 and Luke 21:25-36
The first Sunday of Advent remembers God’s promise of both coming of the Messiah and his return to judge the living and the dead… it anticipates the celebration and remembering of the in breaking of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ as well as the anticipation of his second coming… so the first Sunday in Advent communicates God’s past faithfulness, present faithfulness and future faithfulness…
Because God is faithful to God’s promise we have hope.
Some History from our passages
~ What situations did they speak to?
The passage from Jeremiah spoke to the people of Judah as they were in exile in Babylon… they were cut off from their identification as God’s people (Jerusalem and more specifically the temple… in fact it had been destroyed) and so they had lost the physical manifestation of God’s promise to them… the land or physical location of their nation (if you will be my people and obey my word I will give to you a land flowing with milk and honey and I will establish you as my people). So this was a time of great loss emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. It was also a time where they questioned God’s faithfulness to God’s promise because they applied the promise in ways that suited their purpose… in other words of the 60’s song The Boxer… they heard what they wanted to hear and they disregarded the rest…
Jeremiah was reaffirming God’s promise to them… that God had not forgotten God’s promise and that God had not forgotten them
The passage from Luke spoke to a similar situation where the country had come under the control of the Roman empire (and before that the Greek, the Persian, and the Assyrian empires) and they were again looking to God’s promise of an anointed one… a Messiah… to reestablish them as a political power. Jesus in his preaching had been saying; repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand or close. In other words he was restating God’s promise through the prophets (like Jeremiah)… which again was understood two ways… political kingdom and eternal kingdom AND that he was the fulfillment of God’s promise (think back to the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry when in the synagogue in Nazareth… when he read the prophecy—promise of God—from Isaiah Luke 4:18 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
~ What is God’s promise of hope? (Specifically in these passages and in general)
That God has not forgotten God’s promise to his people that was first given to Abraham and then Isaac and Jacob, to Joseph, to David and Solomon. God’s promise is to make them a holy and special people; to be their God and one day re-establish God’s people as a light to the nations as representatives of God’s Kingdom on earth… a kingdom where justice and mercy are to be lived out in the lives of the people under the leadership of God’s anointed… and this was to be an everlasting or eternal kingdom… this promise was understood two ways; that there would be an earthly political or human kingdom and there would come a time when God would re-create the world through God’s anointed one—The Son of Man which Jesus in citing passages from Daniel who speaks of the Messiah (anointed one) as the Ancient of Days (a descriptive name for God)… is proclaiming that God will in fact establish an eternal divine Kingdom where justice and mercy will be finally realized by all. The gospels make clear that Jesus is the Son of Man
Hope is grounded in God’s promise to be Immanuel – “God with us” that is the basis of all of God’s other promises… peace, love, joy; the promises of healing, restoration
What God promises us is that God will always be with us (hence the promise of Immanuel—God with us) so the promise is relationally based… the kingdom of God is not so much a physical reality (meaning a political one) but a spiritual and relational one (God affirms this through Jeremiah earlier—chapter 31—when he says, 31:31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
~ Is God’s Promise still good… is it still valid? Can we still trust God? How has God fulfilled promises in your life?
We may not experience or see the completion of the secondary promises but we can always experience the first… it is based upon our trust or faith in God… not having to follow laws or rules… the laws or rules are there to help point us toward God and to help us keep and live out our faith… they do guarantee us the fulfillment of the promise… they help us to appreciate it more…
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things unseen. Hebrews 11:1
One of the things that we need to remember is that God’s Promise is eternal in scope or range… God’s concern is not only for what we are experiencing now but for God’s concern for all humankind in the present but also the future…
That’s why I place so much emphasis on the God’s promise to be Immanuel… “God with us”
~ How did God fulfill God’s promise?
Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise of hope
And God fulfilled that promise in Jesus… his incarnation/birth as God the Son; his ministry and teaching; his self-giving on the cross; his resurrection; and his self-giving in the Person of the Holy Spirit…
Jesus is the Giver of the Promise and the Promise… and so is the source and object of our Hope
That’s what we celebrate on this first Sunday of Advent as we proclaim his coming in the celebration of his birth… as he comes to us continually in the Word and in the Person of the Holy Spirit, and whose return as the Son of Man we anticipate to complete our hope.
Leads me to some questions
~ So do we accept God’s promise of hope?
Individually? As the church?
~ How do we experience hope? Through our relationship with God lived out through our relationships with God’s people
~ If we have accepted and experienced God’s promise of hope;
Have we shared it? How do we share it?
~ How do we fulfill the promises we’ve made to God?
God has made promises to us but in response we have made promises to God… so how do we keep those promises? This is a way of asking, how are we living out our faith and our hope?
OR
~ How do our acts of faith help in executing God’s promise of Hope to humanity?
On the front of the bulletin there is the passage from Acts 2 where Peter in his preaching on the day of Pentecost…
“For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who
are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him." Acts 2:39
~ How can our congregation promote acts of compassion to actively live this message of hope in our community?
Being prepared and ready does not mean to be passive… to not be active in who Jesus has called us to be and what Jesus has called us to do…
Who are the ones out there who need this… who can we identify… who needs to hear God’s promise and know the giver and the keeper of the promise
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