Jeremiah was never known as the life of the party. He was
one of those folks who not only saw the glass as half empty; he would take a
close look and announce that a dead fly was floating in the water! He has
become known as “the weeping prophet,” because he was always predicting
disaster for his fellow Israelites. Jeremiah was the prophet who stood outside
the Jerusalem Temple on the Sabbath hollering that just going to church doesn’t
make God happy, even if it’s the biggest church in town. He warned the people
that if they thought they were better than their neighbors just because God had
chosen them… well, they had another think coming! He finally told them that God
was so tired of their behavior that God was going to take drastic action to get
their attention once and for all! That made people so mad at him that they
threw him into a well just to shut him up!
But it turned out that Jeremiah was right! The Babylonians swooped
down on Israel from the north and conquered the whole lot of them; and they
dragged all the nobles, the soldiers, and the merchants off into exile. They
took the golden candlesticks from the Temple, too, and stripped the ivory beds and
purple curtains from the royal palace. You can read about it in II Kings 24. After
the Babylonians were finished with Israel, the only ones left there were the
very poorest people. Then the Babylonians set up Zedekiah as the king of
Israel, telling him that he’d better toe the line or things would get a lot
worse! Now, you would think that Jeremiah would rub their noses in it at that point. After
all, he had been right all along. God was
tired of the Israelites and their talk-a-lot-but-do-nothing religion; and the
exile was proof of it. You would think that Jeremiah would have said, “See, I told
you so! You got what you deserve!” But he didn’t say that at all. Instead, he
sent a word of hope to all those frightened exiles saying, “Don’t despair! Hang
on! God has plans for you; plans to bring you back to your own land and get you
going in the right direction again. This isn’t the end!” (Jeremiah 29:1-3, 10-14, 20) Old doom-and-gloom
Jeremiah turned out to be the one who encouraged the exiled Israelites to
believe that doom and gloom might not be the last word, after all!
Does Jeremiah have a word of hope for us today? There seems
to be precious little hope to go around these days. Wherever we turn, we hear people
predicting disaster just like Jeremiah did over 2500 years ago. Global warming
is causing climate changes all over the world; and scientists predict that
drought, wildfires, and category 5 hurricanes will become common. The worldwide
inequality of wealth keeps billions of people in grinding poverty. Will wars,
famines, and epidemics be the result? Some people think so. Even here in our
own little church, things don’t look good. We are small and getting smaller,
with few visitors and even fewer new members joining our congregation. Are we
going to have to close our doors in the future? Oh, yes, things are bad all
over! But Jeremiah, in the middle of situations that could lead to despair,
offers a word of hope. He says that conflict and oppression and suffering won’t
get the last word. God’s unfailing love, says Jeremiah, has the last word! The
end won’t be disaster, but renewal.
Now, we need to be careful when we talk about hope. There’s
plenty of wishful thinking around today that calls itself hope; but it really
isn’t hope at all. We hear it all the time. “I hope that the weather will be
nice tomorrow.” “I hope that I lose some weight so I can fit into this dress
again.” “I hope that I win the lottery.” But although those statements may use
the word “hope,” when we look closely at them, they aren’t really about hope at
all. They’re just wishes that we make when things aren’t the way that we want
them to be. Hope is something very different. Hope isn’t a wish; it’s a
certainty: the certainty that God’s love, wisdom, and power will transform any
situation into something good, even if we don’t see any evidence of it right
now! Hope doesn’t deny that things are bad; but hope believes that the good
will ultimately triumph. When the night is darkest, hope bravely declares,
“This will not last forever. Even though I may never see the light, I believe
that in the end, the darkness will be conquered.”
One of my favorite descriptions of hope is a poem that was
written by the great American poet Emily Dickinson. It begins this way:
“Hope is the thing
with feathers
that perches in the
soul
and sings the tune
without the words,
and never stops at
all.”
Hope is like the birds that come to my feeder in all kinds
of weather. Sun, rain, or snow, little feathered bits of hope arrive every day
to gobble up sunflower seeds or peanuts and to peck at cakes of suet. They sing
their songs even in the most dreadful weather! On some days those songs are
very quiet. But sing they do; just as we proclaim our hope whether times are
good or bad.
“But,” some folks ask, “how can you possibly have hope? I
see no evidence at all that things are going to get better!” And if we’re
honest with ourselves, lots of times we have to agree with them. Many situations
in our world bring us to despair; all we see is a long, dark tunnel with no
light at the end of it. But, you see, that’s why hope is hope. Hope springs
from our faith that believes that God can and will redeem any situation, no
matter how bad things might be. And there’s no way to prove that. No scientist
can find God’s love in a test tube or in a Petri dish or under a microscope. We
need faith to believe it. But if we do
believe it, then we need not lose hope, not in any situation that we may
encounter.
People who have hope are like the boy who always found an
opportunity for good no matter what happened to him. When the weather was
rainy, he reminded his family that the rain helps the flowers to grow. When he
got a low grade on a test, he declared that his mistakes helped him know what
to study so that he could improve. When a fellow classmate was rude to him, he
said that the experience helped him to learn patience. His neighbor was a grumpy fellow who was annoyed by the child’s
unfailing optimism. “That kid needs to grow up,” he declared one day. “I’ll
show him that not everything turns out well in the end.” So he ordered a huge
pile of horse manure one day, and he had it dumped right in the middle of the
boy’s front yard. When the child came home from school that day, his neighbor
called to him. “Hey, I’ve got a present for you!” and showed him the enormous
manure pile. The boy ran right to the pile of manure and began to dig into it
happily. “What in the world are you doing?” the neighbor asked. The boy looked
up with a shining face and answered, “Well, with a pile of manure this big, I
know there must be a pony in here somewhere!”
Hope believes that the sun will rise no matter how dark the
night has been. Hope refuses to surrender to despair. Hope believes that God
will redeem everything in his own time.
“Hope is the thing
with feathers
that perches in the
soul
and sings the tune
without the words,
and never stops at
all.”
May you hear that word of hope today – and believe it!
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