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 137th 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!
No comments:
Post a Comment