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!
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