God’s Unifying Impulse, January 4 2014
Jeremiah
31:7-14, Psalm
147:12-20, Ephesians
1:3-14, John 1:1-18 at
“God’s
Unifying Impulse”
God of justice, you do not forget your people. You long to be in relationship
with us, but there are times when we erect barriers that prevent that
closeness. Break through that, and open our hearts to you and others. May the
words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your
sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Here we are about 10 days into Christmastide—the
season from Christmas day to the Day of Epiphany. This time when we celebrate
the presence of Christ particularly as the Word of God incarnate, enfleshed in
the living body and presence of Jesus as a baby boy, an adolescent boy, and as
an adult male human. We are called by the scriptures this morning to notice—not
only that Jesus is the very word of God, but that through the presence of the
Christ, we are reminded that God wants to be father and mother to us, to be in
close familial relationship with us, with each and every human being. And that
God wants us to be in relationship together, as one, one with Christ and one
with each other. God wants us to be one with all God’s children everywhere and
“everywhen” and one with each other in the here and the now.
There are moments we do this better than
others—and in this Christmas time, I hope that we do it especially well in the
midst of the beautiful stories of hope, peace, love and joy that surround us
because of the presence of Christ within each of us and especially within all
of us together.
A friend of mine, Sandhya Jha wrote in her 12 days of
Christmas values series recently about the hope we find in Christmas. She
writes that even though we sometimes joke about the things that trouble us—and
get a little sceptical and sarcastic—as Christians, we are all about hope.
Our skepticism and sarcasm may stem from a
defense mechanism—we’ve seen the difficulties of the world, shrinking churches,
budgets, etc.—and don’t want to raise our hopes to high. But Christianity is
truly no place to be cynical. And Christmastide is the time when we can stand
and say that we celebrate the birth of a baby we are promised will always be
with us—one we can call Emmanuel. We celebrate this baby even though we know
that through his actions and call to justice for the hungry, the lame ones, the
blind ones, the poor ones, and the imprisoned ones, he met a violent
death—murdered brutally by a police state. And yet we always welcome him with
hope, because in the face of things unseen, we believe that is not the end of
the story.[1]
The truth is that God’s continuing and
continuous—eternal and ever-present—as in it happened in Jesus and even before
that—impulse is toward relationship with us and for us, human beings, to be in
relationship with one another. And, this is important, for those relationships,
all of them to be characterized by love: equity, mercy, justice, grace,
forgiveness, and community connection. And within that community, there will be
intimate relationships between couples and in families—and all of those
relationships are or can be reflections of the love and connection God has for
us.
In Jeremiah 31, the word of the Lord, came in a
time of exile. The people of God—Israel or Jacob or Ephraim (all are used in
this particular passage)—are scattered, calling themselves a remnant because
that’s what they’ve become. Historically speaking, when the people of northern
kingdom of the divided kingdom of what had been David’s and Solomon’s one
kingdom of Israel, were taken away from Israel, they never were returned there
as a body of people. I’m sure that people whose ancestry hailed from there
trickled in and out, I’m sure that a few communities were restarted quietly,
but Israel as an entity was gone. The word that came to Jeremiah, though is one
of hope for who does come stumbling back.
The
homecoming described by Jeremiah is a humble thing for Israel, because a
triumphant reappearance of a whole Israel never happened. Instead, as the text
describes, there was a slow emergence of a few: pregnant women and those who
would soon give birth. These aren’t victorious armies, but are slow, patient
pedestrians who stop to rest frequently, who need one another and anyone who
can help.
And along
the way, the shepherd becomes father, as God calls Ephraim/Jacob/Israel God’s
firstborn, redeeming him or ransoming him from “hands too strong for him.” The
hope of this new birth of Israel is not the strong land of warriors under a
King David, like they’d been in a previous age. This people contains a quiet
hope for home: grain, wine, oil, flocks and herd, and watered gardens. The
picture of life is one where the young dance and people of all ages laugh,
where mourning can become joy, where comfort exists and where there is bounty
so that all will have enough and more.
This hope is
for home and belonging—for relationship with God and with one another so that
all needs are fulfilled. The hope is for a simple and joyful life—nothing
ostentatious, but a life that is sustainable.
God said,
“My people shall be satisfied with my bounty.”
God’s child . . . God’s Word . . . God’s Son . . . comes bringing hope, love, peace, joy and God’s very own
self to us and we can be satisfied with the abundance of creation that God
has already provided. God’s word comes to us so that we can know and understand
how to live within creation and live in relationship with God and one another.
God’s word—sometimes law, sometimes example, always relationship—reveals creation
in all its diversity: snow like wool, frost like ashes, hail like crumbs and
the cold. Then the warm winds blow and the waters flow. The wheat grows and
fills us. All of it a source of God’s blessing—even when our broken tendency is
toward disbelief and pessimism, even when we regularly insist on looking only
at our neighbor or our neighbor church’s comparable wealth or high attendance.
It may be
naïve to think that our hope can change the world, but I can guarantee that
pessimism and lack of passion for the presence of Christ will never change the
world. That kind of cynicism never has and never will.
God’s
impulse continuously pursues us for the sake of connection—for us to know God
and for God’s connection to unite us to one another in community, in the purpose of justice, love,
hope, and growing faith.
When we know that’s what God’s intentions are
for—for the sake of love, for the sake of relationship what can we do but live
it and praise the Lord in that tiny child and in the wonders of God’s presence
in all of our lives.
To the glory of God. Amen.
