Ready or Not? Catching Joy

 December 14 2025

Jeremiah 31:10-14

         It sometimes surprises people when I tell them that I got my start in ministry by doing youth ministry. One thing I could always count on is that when it came time to get serious and have a quiet time of prayer or communion, inevitably someone would break the silence, usually by passing gas or burping. Upon hearing such noises, there would begin this internal struggle as each kid tried really hard to be on their best behavior all the while desperately wanting to burst out laughing.The race was on to see just who will be the first to start snickering under their breath, which sets the whole room laughing. You see, all it takes is to have just one kid begin to lose their composure, and get the giggles and suddenly the room is filled with great silliness.

         What this memory from my days reminds me of is this truth that joy is something that is caught. Joy happens when the snickering of one person sets off this chain reaction of laughter and giggles in the whole group. Perhaps this what makes joy different from happiness, for while joy is caught, happiness is often bought. Our country was founded on the ideal that we desire the right to pursue whatever makes us happy. So for those of us who call themselves the people of God, this ideal should leave us conflicted, for as we learned last week, what we are called to pursue is peace. We are to  be busy working on restoring the relationships around us, helping our neighbors to have a life free of those deep, nagging longings. We are to talk to God about any needs, or struggles that our neighbors are going through. As we pray to God we also must remember that God may even use us to help restore our neighbor to a life of contentment and ease. You see, seeking the rest and peace of our neighbor is the outcome God expects of people living righteous lives.We are to follow the lead of God who rested after creating the world. God was pleased and delighted with all of his labors, saying that thy were indeed, “Very good”. God tells his people in exile that as they wait for the coming king that they were to spend their time working at restoring their relationships so that they too could be people who rested from their labors, looking out upon their world and stating that it was indeed, “Very good”.

         So if we are all gung-ho about pursuing peace as God desires we do as we wait, then what happens to the happiness that the rest of the world believes we should be pursuing? Well, here we must remember that where happiness is often bought, joy, on the other hand is caught. You see, the joy of our God is the flame which sets our souls ablaze with joy. Consider the candles we have lit every week. The candle of hope is lit to witness that the hope we long for has been found through our faith in God and his plans to restore our relationship with us. Then we lit the candle of peace to make the claim that we are going to pursue peace with our neighbors. If God seeks to restore his relationship with us after the way we have treated him then if he desires that we get busy restoring the relationships in our life, how can we refuse to do so? 

Now when we trust God and place our faith in his plans, can you imagine the smile on the face of our God? And when we are working hard to get to know our neighbors and we talk to God about them instead of just making life all about us, can you see the glow on our heavenly Father’s face, as his children are contented and at peace? Of course God bubbles over with joy when his people at last begin to grasp his beautiful vision for all humanity. So when we look into the face of our Heavenly Father and see his joy, how can we not rejoice? We are to experience and know for ourselves the truth declared in Zephaniah, the third chapter, the seventeenth verse, “The Lord your God rejoices over you with gladness, he settles your soul by his love, he exults over you with loud singing…”. This is how God desires to be known by all of his children. The question that we must ask ourselves is, is this how we know God? The laughing, singing, God who overflows with love for all of us?

         In our scripture for today, there is an unusual Hebrew word found in the second half of the tenth verse. There we read, “I will turn their mourning into joy; I will comfort them, I will give them gladness in exchange for their sorrow.” In the phrase, “I will turn their mourning into joy”, the word normally translated as being joy is a Hebrew word which actually means something deeper than the emotion of joy. What is being expressed in this word is the feeling to go from a situation of death and loss and being transported to a time where God is extravagantly blessing his righteous people. This is a joy where our grief is quickly forgotten replaced with an overwhelming sense of the Lord’s goodness.This is what Jeremiah is writing about when he states that the people of God, “…shall come and sing aloud on the hills of Zion. They shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord…”. You see, what brings us to this experience of being overwhelmed by the greatness and goodness of God is for us to simply pause to consider how gracious and good our God is to all of us.

         In this season of Advent we are in a season of waiting, a season to remember that the world was once waiting for the promise of God to at last happen. God promised that a new king was coming to bring about justice and righteousness all over the earth. God gave such a promise to his people even though he was sending them into exile, to live as captives of Babylon. In this strange land surrounded by people with different customs and lifestyles, the people of God were called to find hope and pursue peace. Yet, the question on their minds was just how could they be expected to endure such a terrible loss, the death to the life that they once knew? Everywhere they looked they were reminded of the high cost of their sin. Here the people were to remember what God had told them. God promised to take their sorrow and replace it with an experience of being extravagantly blessed by God right here in Babylon. So instead of looking at our circumstances, we are to instead called to gaze upon the goodness of our God. When we begin to focus on what God has blessed us with instead of focusing on what the world has taken from us, this is when we are on our way to catching joy. You see, when we count our blessings instead of counting the days, we will soon behold the one who gives us all of those blessings, and we will see that our God is radiant with goodness. When we bask in this radiance of our God how can we not become radiant people ourselves, joyful in the presence of our joy-filled God?

         During this Advent season when we wait the coming of the Branch, the new king out of the dead stump of King David’s legacy, we must let our joy be the indicator of where our focus lies. If we begin to let the world with all of its wrongs, with all of its sorrow and turmoil, become what we fixate on then it should come as no surprise that we will find the fire of our joy growing cold. So when we realize that our joy is being replaced by ba-humbug grumpiness, then we need to once again draw our attention to the goodness of God. Instead of counting all of our grievances, let us instead count our blessings. Our focus needs to be on what we have been given instead of just what it is we feel we need in our life. As we read today, we should be radiant over all of the goodness God has given to us. And then as we are overwhelmed by the ways God has blessed us we are to realize that God has done so all because he rejoices over us. The face of our Father lights up anytime we take time to meet with him. And there, before the fire the joy of our God, the flame of our joy is set ablaze. So, yes, rejoice and again, I say rejoice! Amen!   

         

Ready, or Not?: Pursuing Peace

 December 7 2025

Jeremiah 29:7-9

         Everybody knows that the weeks before Christmas are the time when people are in pursuit of the perfect gift for all of their special someone’s. Now, this pursuit of the perfect gift seems to be much more difficult for us men than it does for the women in our lives. Perhaps the reason is simply that men just normally do not have a clue so why expect that we will pick up on the clues as to what might make the perfect gift for someone. You see, in order to to be in pursuit of that perfect gift requires that we pay attention to the people in our life so that we might notice just what might make the perfect gift. One of my favorite memories is when the J.C. Penny catalogue would arrive. All of us kids wanted to look at all of the new toys and games which we would soon convince ourselves we just could not live without. How we felt about this perfect gift didn’t really matter though, because the hardest part was to convince someone else that this is the perfect gift that we just could not live without. So, we would make our list and check it twice, and we would anticipate one day holding that perfect gift in our hands. 

         Now, it just makes sense that the perfect gift that we want is something that we can actually hold, and touch, and play with. I mean, no one really wants the present that my mother-in-law would say she wanted, just love, joy and peace; this is what she considered the perfect gift for Christmas. I mean, you just will not find such a gift in the J.C. Penny catalogue. Our scripture for today, though, is of much more help because it does imply that if we are in pursuit of peace, then there is a way for us to obtain this most perfect of gifts. This season in which we are in, the one where we are in pursuit of the perfect gift for that special someone, is called Advent.  Advent simply means, “that which is coming.”, as when God declares that the days are coming when he will raise up a righteous king to bring justice and righteousness. In the season of Advent we remember the time when the world waited for the most perfect gift to be given to us. We remember when the people of God had reached the lowest point in their relationship with God, when they had spurned his love, and refused to know him, then God had no choice but to deliver his people over to the Babylonian army. God allowed his people to be carried off, to a strange land, a thousand miles from their home. There they were to live as strangers and slaves for seventy-years. What God was doing was allowing his people to experience serving the people of the world so that he could then offer them a choice. They could now decide if they would rather serve as slaves to the world and its pursuits or whether they would rather serve God and worship him alone. As we found out last week, to serve God is to accept the plans that God has for all people, plans that he gives to us in order that we might know a living hope, a known future. God offers us his plans in order to give us peace, what the Jewish people know as shalom, the restoring of life to its original goodness. God desires to restore our relationship with him even though we often have spurned his love, and have resisted his grace. Yet God is a God of great love and this is why God pursues us for we are what God considers the perfect gift.

         So, when we know of God’s amazing love for us, we trust that he is a God who is able to bring life out of death, the God who can make something exist where nothing once was. This is the true substance of our hope, a future where life has defeated death, where there is something instead of the dreaded nothingness that drives our fear. We are given a glimpse of this future in the new king God is raising up from the dead end of Davids descendants. This king who brings forth justice and righteousness and those who follow him, these are God’s glorious future. So in order for us to be ready for this coming king, we must be people of faith, people who believe that our God can indeed bring forth life, who can make there be a future where one previously had not existed. God promises us that he does hear us and all God asks from us is that we desire him. We are to give God all of our hearts for we now know that he alone is the treasure we are willing to give everything for, the perfect gift that we pursue.

         So when we find our hope in the promises of God, then God calls us to be people who pursue peace. We are to seek after the creation of shalom, just as God had said his plans would create shalomfor us. In our scripture, we hear God tell his people that during their waiting, they were to keep themselves busy seeking the peace of the city where they find themselves. They were to pray to God on behalf of the people that they lived with in the city of Babylon. Only as peace, what is known as being shalom, is found in this city would the people of God then experience peace.The short version is this: if you want peace in your life, seek peace for your neighbor. Now, if such ideas cause us to have some serious hesitation, imagine how these orders from God went over for those exiled to Babylon. We really need to walk a mile in the shoes of the people of Israel at this time. Imagine witnessing the Babylonian army tearing across your country with their fast horses and chariots destroying everything as they go. Then this army arrives at Jerusalem, and they surround the city and lay siege to it, so that the people of Jerusalem are slowly starved into submission. Then as death and disease ravage the people of Jerusalem, defeat is announced and the city gates are at last opened. The vast horde of Babylonian warriors rush in, destroying everything as they tear through Jerusalem. The beautiful Temple is vandalized, the enemy burns its structure and the gold fixtures are loaded up and hauled back to Babylon. Then they enslave those healthy enough to make the long journey back to Babylon. The pain and anger and the hurt of their loss is captured in a song, Psalm 137, where the song writer ponders aloud how they will be able to sing a song to God while living in a foreign land. The songwriter shouts that blessed will be the one who repays Babylon for the evil they have done. And then he goes farther and desires that one day the Babylonians witness the same horrors that the people of Jerusalem simply can not forget.

         What the Psalmist writes about in the 137^th Psalm seems fairly relatable, doesn’t it? I mean, most people who face the same situation as the people of Jerusalem had gone through would state that revenge is not only acceptable but it may even feel necessary in order to even the score. We need to understand their need for justice so that we too can be confounded by what God calls his people to do while they waited in captivity in Babylon. This expectation God desires is found in the Hebrew word for peace, this “shalom’. Shalom, is a much deeper concept than what we normally consider to be peace. You see, shalom is the restoration of a situation to its original goodness. Shalom is founded on the belief that in the beginning everything was just as it should be, nothing, including our relationships, were out of order. So when God calls his people, the very people who had witnessed atrocities at the hand of the Babylonian army, to seek to restore their relationships with the very people who had captured and enslaved them, well, it becomes obvious God is asking for something quite impossible. Almost immediately when we hear this big ask that God gives to his people, we begin to wonder just why God would ask his people to do something so difficult. And then we may recall that, as we heard last week, God tells us that he has plans for us, plans for peace, for the restoration of the relationship God has with each of us, and not for evil. You see, the people of Israel, who are just like us, walked away from God; God never walked away from them. They were the ones who had destroyed all that God had put in place so that his people might live in peace. In doing so they had damaged the very reputation of God, bringing shame upon the very name and character of God. So God had every right to seek revenge upon his people for their damage and destruction of all of who God is and what he is creating. God could have just let the Babylonians have his people and then walked away. Yet, God did nothing of the sort. No, God called out to his people and told them that he has a plan that will restore the relationship he has with them, a plan to give them a hope and a future, with God, not apart from him.

         So when God calls his people to restore their relationship they had with the Babylonian people, all he was doing was merely asking his people to follow his lead. God told his people that if they trusted in his plan, then they would be able to call on him, and pray to him for he would indeed hear their cries. Yet this promise was not just for them alone for God states that his people were to pray even for the people they lived with there in captivity. Once again, we must pause and consider just what is involved in order to pray for these strange neighbors who are so very different in their customs and beliefs. You see such a situation is much like figuring out just what might be the perfect gift for someone. In order to pray to God for someone you have to have some clue about who they are, what their needs are and just what they are longing for. You see, when God told his people to be those who sought to restore their relationship with these strangers they lived with, praying to God for them, he was implying that his people had to be actively looking for ways to care for their neighbors life. So, think about it; they had to go from thinking of ways that they could seek revenge and instead they were to be looking for ways to do good for their neighbors. God then, take this exercise one step further because after the needs of these neighbors had been lifted up to God, then God tells his people they must be willing to be given by God to be the answer to the longings of their neighbors. We can understand that what God is asking in this situation is unbelievably difficult. We are right to wonder just why God would demand so much out of his people who have found themselves far from home living among strangers who they want consider their enemies in the worst kind of way. Yet, the word of God stands. God’s plan seems to founded on an awkward wisdom that rubs against the grain of common sense. Yet, perhaps God is on to something when he tells his people that they must take upon themselves the task of restoring the relationship with those who had taken them captive. I believe the reason why God is so insistent that this is the way his people should deal with their new neighbors is that through the seeking of peace with their neighbors, the people of God will find the peace that they are pursuing. They longed to live in that original goodness first experienced by human beings, as we find in the first chapter of Genesis, the goodness simply described as being, rest. Originally, we were people who were content, satisfied, knowing that every longing is met by our loving God. God’s goal is to have all people return to this state of rest, this state of utter contentment, where no longings or strivings exist. What God understands is that unless everyone is at rest than no one can really be said to be at rest. We probably see this best in the places we work, where the turmoil someone is dealing with at home is brought with them to their place at work and it quite naturally affects how they are able to do what is expected of them. And of course when this person is troubled at work then their co-workers are also affected. There is simply is no way for us to live in our own little bubble hoping to plug our ears and put our blinders on so that we can remain calm while ignoring the turmoil going on outside of our little shell. This, as God tells his people quite often, is a false peace. This is why that right after God tells his people to get busy working on making their new world a peaceful one, God also tells them to stop listening to the prophets and the fortune tellers for answers. No, they would not be going home anytime soon, there would be no rush to get back to their little safe spot to hole up so that they can pretend that peace is found by forgetting the rest of the people around you. To do so would be to miss the very reason for the people of God to even exist in the first place. We must remember that we are in waiting, people who know that days are coming when a righteous branch will suddenly appear out of the dead stump of David’s legacy. This king is going to be the king who at last will bring justice and righteousness to the whole earth, not just some small part of it. What justice and righteousness looks like is every person seeking to bring into the life of their neighbor a measure of peace, a bit of that original rest for which they were created. 

         So in this time of waiting for our righteous king to arrive, God is telling his people to prepare themselves to live in that new age which he is going to bring forth through the rule of our new king. If our king is going to bring forth justice and righteousness then we must get busy today, working at bringing forth justice and righteousness right now. God is telling his people that they are to begin to be the very people the king can count on to follow his lead. In doing so, God promises that we will discover something quite incredible about our life for there will be a real sense of rest and contentment that is now very present in us. This is the strange truth that God lays out for us, that the only way we can have peace in our life is by first by seeking the peace of the lives of our neighbors.

         Now what history has shown to us is that not many of those who went into exile actually followed this command of God to seek first the peace of their Gentile neighbors in order that they might have a measure of peace in their own life. We know this because when that king arrived he discovered that the people of God wanted nothing to do with being the peacemakers God wanted them to be. This king found that the very people that he had been sent to save wanted nothing to do with him, simply because he refused to seek revenge on their enemies. This king followed the rule that peace can only be found in our life when we are willing to seek the peace of our neighbors. When this promised king came to Jerusalem to create peace on earth, as we hear in the nineteenth chapter of Luke, he wept over this city because the people who lived there refused to seek the ways of peace and so his true identity was hidden from their eyes. So their tragedy was not only that they would never experience the rest that God desires all people to know, but they also missed the arrival of the king promised to them hundreds of years before, the king who came to bring justice and righteousness to the world. So in our time of waiting once again for the arrival of our king, I wonder, will we be able to see this king who is the righteous branch given to us by God or will he be hidden from our eyes because we have refused to seek the peace of the people around us? We have time to avoid this tragedy, so let us begin today. Let us listen in love to those around us, and lift their longings up to God, so that they might experience a measure of the rest and contentment God created them to know. And then let us rest, and there behold our king. Amen!

                 

         

Ready or Not?: Finding Hope

 November 30 2025

Jeremiah 23:5-6, 29:10-14

         Today marks the beginning of the season which the church calls Advent. The church, over time, created a church calendar marked by various seasons to help us to enter into the story of Jesus so that we might become part of his story. We may have heard the story of Jesus quite often, I imagine, yet I wonder, how many can say that they are actually a part of this story that is known so well? So where we begin is right here at the first Sunday in Advent. This Sunday marks the first day of the new church year. Now, you might remember that last Sunday was Christ the King Sunday. This is when the church recognizes that the end of time will be when Christ is acknowledged by all that he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. This is the glorious ending to the story of Jesus of which we want to be a part of. Today, then, we marks where all people enter into that story, here in a season called Advent. This strange word, “Advent”, simply means, “arrival” or, “coming”. We hear this same idea in the beginning of our first scripture for today, from the twenty-third chapter of Jeremiah where God tells us, “Behold, the days are coming…” So the four weeks of Advent represent the time when the world, and especially God’s people were waiting for those days to come, for the time to be the right time for the fulfillment of the promises of God.

         Well, what God promised his people is that in the days to come he was going to raise up for King David what is called, a righteous Branch. This one who is considered to be like a righteous branch is a coming king who will deal judge and rule with wisdom. This king is one who shall at last bring forth justice and righteousness. Now there is a lot to unpack in this short, little announcement. We can start by understanding that this statement is given as a response to what God has just said about the kings that previously ruled over the people of Israel. God’s expectation for the kings of Judah is that they would be like a shepherd who watched over the flock of God’s people. So at the beginning of the twenty-third chapter of Jeremiah, God issues his warning, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! God continues by exposing the evil actions of the king, “You have scattered my flock and driven them away. You have not tended to them.” What is clear and obvious is that the kings who were supposed to watch over the people of God were absolutely horrible at their job. Instead of gathering the flock, as a shepherd should do, they instead scattered them all over the country side. Instead of leading the sheep to green pastures and still waters, these guys drive the flock away, out to the ends of the earth. Instead of keeping a watchful eye over the flock, keeping them safe from wolves and lions, they are chasing after other pursuits. 

         So God has made a great case for sending these, so called, “shepherds”, packing. They would be sent to live far away, in Babylon, never to see Jerusalem ever again. There was only one little problem with this dire situation. God had made a promise to his servant David. We hear of this covenant God made with David in Second Samuel, the seventh chapter where God tells David that he was going to build David a house, an everlasting legacy, so that the kingdom of the throne of David will be established forever. So, we fast-forward to the days of Jeremiah, and we witness the descendants of David being shipped off to Babylon, and all of God’s people wonder, just what has happened to the claim that the house of David was going to be established forever? The image that was used to describe the lineage of David after this tragedy was that of a stump, a sad reminder of a once glorious tree that has been cut down, end of story. The great days of the reign of King David have come to a sad end for God simply had no choice but to put an end to those evil and wicked shepherds. 

         To this rather bleak outcome to David’s legacy, God speaks a word, telling Jeremiah, “I will raise up for David a righteous branch.” God is saying that out of that rather dead end, out of that stump, the remains of the great tree that was the house of King David, God was going to do what only God can do, he was going to make life shoot forth from the most dead of outcomes. What God expects from those who hear these outrageous words, is faith, the faith that can believe that God can bring forth something out of nothing. This is the very faith that Abraham demonstrated to God, as Paul writes at the end of the fourth chapter of the book of Romans. Paul says, that the Abraham believed that our God is a God “…who gives life to the dead and calls into existence that which does not exist.” So God calls us to believe that even though the line of David had been cut off, so that it no longer existed, even so, our God is able to cause a king to come forth to fulfill the promise he made to King David. You see, it is obvious that the only way that a living branch could come out of the nothingness of that old, dead stump of David’s legacy is for God and God alone to cause it to happen. You see, Jeremiah also believed like Abraham because he knew of the story of creation, as we find in the fourth chapter of Jeremiah. There Jeremiah remembered the words found in Genesis, how there was once an emptiness that was without form or void, utter nothingness. Yet, as Jeremiah recalls, out of that nothingness, God brought forth the order and wonder of creation, something where nothing once was. This is the faith God calls his people to hold on to as they watch as the last of the line of David is placed in chains and hauled off to Babylon.

         So when we hear of this good news that God is going to do by raising up for David a righteous branch, we must remember that such a prophecy must be received in faith, the faith that God alone can make something exist where nothing once was. God was going to raise up a king to reign in righteousness in a new way as only God can do. This is important for us to remember when we hear the scripture found in the twenty-ninth chapter of Jeremiah. It seems that this is one of the most oft quoted verses from the Bible. Yet, I wonder if people really understand what God is telling Jeremiah in this verse. The first thing that has to be taken into consideration when we hear about God’s plan to give us a hope and a future, is that this was spoken to people who have been forcibly removed from their homeland and made to march a thousand miles to a place called Babylon. God told his people that only after they had lived there for seventy years, only then God tells them, will he come and visit them. So the expectation of God to those he has promised to visit is that they will have realized how very hopeless their situation is. The question that lingers in the air when we read this is, is had the people of Israel remembered the promise of God? Did they keep the memory of home alive in their hearts or had they given up and decided that Babylon was their final destination? You see, God made a promise to his people that he would indeed visit them, so what God was searching for after his people had lived for seventy years in captivity was faith. Had his people kept the faith, this is what God hoped he would find. God desired to find the same faith as he found in his servant Abraham, the forefather of all of God’s people. The people of God were in desperate need of faith for their experience was much like the experience of the kings who used to rule over them.You see, the people of God had also experienced a death of their own. The life they once knew had died when they were torn and uprooted from the land God had promised to them. Now God’s promise to them had become broken, not because of any unfaithfulness on the part of God but rather because of the continued unfaithfulness of God’s people. So the people of God witnessed the death of the life they once knew all because they refused to return and come back to the God whose love for them had never wavered.

         Well, the people of God then, were told by God that they had to be expelled from their home for seventy years. We are right, I believe, to wonder why God decided on seventy years as the right length of time for them to remain in Babylon. Perhaps this was the length of time required for his people to come to the end of themselves, to realize that there was absolutely nothing they could do to change their current situation. Only when God’s people knew the depths of their hopeless situation would they be at last to consider the hope that God had to offer to them. Clearly, these people who found themselves in Babylon, now being forced to work at the rule of strangers, surely such a situation had to make them forget any thoughts about the future, for what future did they have there in exile? 

         So when we read of God having a plan that would give his people a future and a hope, perhaps this meant something quite different for those who first heard it said than it does for us. What God calls his people to accept is his plans, to trust once again in his guidance. When we stop for a moment and consider what God is saying here it should perhaps shake us a bit. I say this because everyone is someone who makes a lot of plans. I mean consider just how much planning is required each year just to pull off yet another Christmas. Over time, we hope that we get good at all of this planning, and we even might have a little pride at how we are able to schedule everything so that our life runs like a well oiled machine. And this machine runs along pretty well right up until God comes along and throws a monkey wrench into the works. God insists that it is his plans, and not our plans, that will open up the future so that we might have hope. Now, when God brings up the future in his declaration of his plans, we have to admit that this is where all of our planning gets all messed up. I mean listen to what James tells us at the end of the fourth chapter of his letter. James writes, “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make some real money- yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? You are nothing but a mist that appears for a time then disappears.” What James writes here is a truth that all of us know deep within us, this uncertainty of our lives. This is the underlying reason for all of our anxiety and worry, this lack of knowing what the future holds, for any of us. So when God tells us that he alone has a plan to give us a hope and a future we are right to be intrigued. 

         So here we come to the very beginning of our Advent journey. In order to be ready for Advent, we must begin by making a choice. The choice is this: Will we choose to continue to place our faith in the plans we make, plans that can be upset by so many situations? Or will we choose, instead, the plans God makes for us, those plans that will give us a hope and a future? As the author, Henry Blackaby, often wrote, “You can’t go with God and stay where you are at!” When God offers us his plans we must make a choice, a choice to choose the wisdom of God over our own, a choice to scuttle our own plans because we have found something far better in the word of God. The choice to follow the plans of God requires faith, the same faith of Abraham, the one who believed that God can indeed bring life out of death, that God alone can bring forth something where nothing used to be. You see, there is a direct connection between what we hope for and what we believe in. Faith, as we hear at the beginning of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, makes what we hope for a reality, convincing us of what we cannot see. The plans God has will give us hope, yet this hope only becomes real to us through our faith. Only as we believe in God will we become convinced of our unseen hope.   

         So when God asks us to choose his plans over our own, he desires we choose his plan because his plans offer us a glimpse of what lies in our future. You see if what we hope for becomes certain through the faith we have in God, then at last we can glimpse the future God has in store for us. If we know that our faith is founded on the ability of God bring life where there is death and that God alone can make something exist where nothing used to be, then we have a certain hope for the future. By faith we can be certain that our future is one where life has defeated death, a future where there is indeed something instead of that dreaded nothingness that causes us to fear. Now there is also one more piece to the puzzle we call our future. We also know that our future will be one that will be ruled over by the branch, a new living shoot that will rise old dead stump that was the legacy of King David. It is this new king who will lead us into a future, a future where God causes life to spring forth from death, a future where God will make something exist where nothing once was; this is our hope. This is the future where those who follow the rule of God’s new king will all live in righteousness.

         The question that remains, then, is just how we can muster up this kind of faith, this outrageous belief that God seems to expect from us? The answer is found in God’s description of the plans he has for us because he tells us that his plans are for our peace, our shalom. The Hebrew understanding of peace, what they call, shalom, is a restoring of our situation to its original goodness. You see, God is saying that even after people reject him and refuse to listen to him, God nonetheless shows up with an offer of, “Let’s begin again”. Such love that forgives our failures and offers us a future seems to demand from us to a response of faith. We sense that this is what God expects because he says when our faith in him is at last restored, then this is when we will call out to God, when we will fall on our knees and pour out our hearts to God. It is in this moment that we will discover that we do indeed have the certainty in the God who hears us. Sadly though, God also knows that if our hearts become divided, if we are no longer loyal to God alone, then our hope is in jeopardy.. As the prophet Habakkuk wrote in the second chapter, “The righteous shall live by faith but God declares, that if they shrink back he has no pleasure in such a person” When we hear of how God offers to us plans, plans for the restoration of our relationship with him, plans which will give to us a future that we hope for, then God is right to wonder just why such a promise is not received by us as being a treasure which we would give everything to obtain. 

         Here at the beginning of a new church year, at the beginning of our waiting for the day to arrive when the branch shall at last be raised up by God, we are called to consider just what are we hoping for? Just what is the future that you long for? And just who is it that will give to you what you this future that you hope for? I mean, just who is it that is going to deliver you to that future you are looking forward to? If you can say that it is God, that you have chosen his plans to give you your hope and your future, then are you certain that God alone is the one who can bring the dead to life, that God alone can make something exist where there was once nothing? If this is not our faith then let us use this Advent to come back to God with a heart undivided in our faith in God, for our  hope and our future depend upon it. Amen!