The Rev. Ann R. Lougee December 3, 2006 The Days Are Coming Jeremiah 33:14-16 Much as I would have liked to avoid it, I had to go to several stores on Friday on an errand for our World AIDS Day service that night. As I was walking through one store, I saw several people greeting each other, obviously not having seen each other for some time, and the way they greeted each other was with "Merry Christmas." I'm happy, of course, to see friendly people having pleasant relationships. But I was a bit put off by the easy assumption that, just because Thanksgiving is over, it's now Christmas. This is Advent, not Christmas. Advent is a time of waiting, pregnant with hope, for the One who is to come. I can hear some of you thinking: Oh, come on, Ann, get with the holiday spirit; Advent is really about shopping for Christmas, isn't it? Well, one might think so. The stores have been full of Christmas decorations and songs since before Halloween. The reason for this, of course, is their hope that forcing phony, premature celebration will entice their customers into earlier and more shopping and spending. But nonetheless the church observes Advent as a time of waiting, as in the dark of night, for the breaking forth of God's light in the coming of the One who embodies compassion and healing and righteousness, for Jesus who will lay down his life in self-giving. That's hard for us to comprehend, but Advent is the time for us to try. That's what the scriptures and songs of Advent encourage us to do. Most of us have lived our lives in relative safety, individually and communally. Our nation did not suffer wars or even attacks on our mainland for many decades, and we hadn't known, until September 11, 2001, what it felt like to see a city of our homeland in ruin and to feel our spirits wounded. Now, many Americans seem to live in the shadow of fear, and we sense a common anxiety about terrorists, crime and violence, climate change and the effects of technology gone wrong. Yet, for most of us, life goes on in relative calm, and the condition of desolation from which Jeremiah writes doesn't really describe our own situation. We have to stretch to relate to the people of ancient Israel, whose king was no more, whose glory was only a memory, whose hopes appeared to be dashed, whose society was being torn apart by exile imposed by their conquerors. In the midst of such despair, the prophet Jeremiah arises, with an imagination and a deep sense of call to proclaim even then, even in desolation, destruction, and loss, the promise of God's future taking shape beneath and behind it all. In any age and any situation of great suffering, despair and depression is a hazard visited upon those whose pain and loss are so great that they cannot imagine a future. Why look to the future, after all, if life holds only the possibility of so much pain? Think of those refugees in the Darfur region of Chad, for example, driven from their homes to bare, inadequate refugee camps, suffering from disease and starvation, and vulnerable to attacks by government forces who want them wiped out. Can you imagine what must be in the hearts of mothers giving birth in that circumstance. Do they have any hope for those new lives entering the world there? And yet, in the midst of just such a despairing situation in the sixth century before the common era, the prophet Jeremiah speaks a word of hope for what is yet to be. The prophet doesn't say that things might get better, or could be better, or that they should be optimistic about the future possibilities. The prophet says that the days are surely coming – and that you can count on God's promises, rooted in justice and righteousness. No wonder the people of Jesus' time, suffering under Roman oppression, looked back to Jeremiah for a word of hope. However, this promised day would not be a day of vindication and triumph so that those who were suffering could do their own damage to their own victims, but a day of justice, when the cities would not be ruined and when all of God's children could live in safety and peace. Everyone would have enough to eat, shelter and safety, the goods of life provided generously by a loving God. The one who was yet to come, the one awaited, the Messiah or Christ, would bring this justice and righteousness. People leaned toward this future. They lived and breathed hope because of it. They ordered their lives differently in light of its approach. The scriptures of Advent begin with this reading from a time long ago, when a king like David was the hope of the people of Israel. But we Christians read it as people who identify Jesus as the righteous Branch, the one who preached justice and lived righteousness. In doing so, of course, he didn't become a king like David but lost his life. But after his death, people realized that he had embodied all the qualities they attributed to God, that in him they saw what a life full of God would look like. So Advent begins for us with a reading from Jeremiah that expressed the hope of people six centuries before the birth of Jesus, that had meaning for the people of Jesus' time too. The news is good, the promise is hopeful, and yet there is judgment, too. If there were not judgment, why would anything we do, matter? The rightness and wrongness, the good and the evil content of our lives and our choices give them moral weight, and cause them to matter even more. And our accumulated choices, great and small, shape our communities and our nation into centers of greed and self-interest or radiant centers of hope and love and peace. If we would stop during this Advent, not Christmas, season, and look around at our world, would we see justice and righteousness? How easy would it be to miss the people who awaken each day not in safety but in fear for their lives? When we are too preoccupied with our own prosperity and anxious about possible violence against ourselves from terrorists, we overlook the slow-motion violence of economic injustice both in this country and all over the globe. The grasping of the world's resources by so-called "first world nations," of which we are the foremost one, visits warfare and oppression upon the millions of our fellow human beings who are suffering the far-ranging effects of our greed and negligence. So in this time of Advent, when we focus on waiting for a new birth of Christ, what is it that we are waiting for? Are we too caught up in holiday getting and spending, and on making our wish lists, to really enter into Advent? What are our dearest hopes? What is the deepest longing of our hearts? Are those hopes and longings in line with the longings of the heart of God as we see them in the life of Jesus, who never turned away from the sufferings of others? These are appropriate questions to ask ourselves during the season of Advent. No wonder some people would rather skip over Advent and get right to Merry Christmas! I hope we in the church, though, might engage in real Advent reflection, even as we prepare in more material ways for the joy of Christmas. May it be so. Amen.