The Promise of Truth

Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Thanks. Thanks firstborn kid, appreciate you. Uh, well, happy Advent everybody. Question for you: how many of you, um, are really familiar with this season of Advent? Maybe you grew up celebrating Advent. Did anyone have one of these, um, one of these wreaths? Patti, can you put that picture up? Where you light the candle every day, not just like every week in church, but a daily candle? Did anybody do that? My husband did. Okay.

My family celebrated Advent, but in a very, like, small way. So my mom handmade a green Christmas tree out of green felt, and it had little felt, um, symbols. And we would read a Bible story corresponding to the symbol, and then we would press it, you know, felt unfelt, like the storyboards of old, we'd press it onto the tree and, and we would kind of read these Old Testament and New Testament stories over the course of Advent.

But Advent wasn't something that I grew up, um, observing in a church setting. No readings, no candle lighting on Sunday. And so, uh, when I became an adult and I joined the Presbyterian tradition, that was when I learned a little bit more about Advent as a season. And I discovered, and maybe you didn't know this, like I didn't know it, that advent is actually the start of the church calendar. It's the beginning. It's not a countdown to Christmas, but those of us who celebrate the church seasons, we are, um, we're counting forward. We get our beginnings in Advent. And I don't know about you, but maybe you need a fresh beginning this advent.

Uh, so like I mentioned, I was new to celebrating Advent. I didn't really get it. I, I didn't know how to participate. I didn't know how to, how to do the practice or observe it, you know, kind of properly. I knew how to do Lent, right? I knew how to give something up for Lent. But how do you practice Advent?

And so I knew that Advent was supposed to stand in stark contrast to Christmas, right? It's not the same, it's not the same feeling, it's not the same, you know, kind of sense. Uh, maybe it was supposed to feel like waiting or anticipation. And, um, and so maybe you feel the same.

So I have a little advent gift for you. You can get out your phone. So if you want, um, so I made a soundtrack this a couple years ago. If you need a soundtrack for the season of Advent, I got you. And so this, this soundtrack is gonna sound very different from the playlists that you will hear in literally any store that you walk into in the month of December. Um, this is not Holly Jolly, this is, um, full of longing and waiting and grief and a lot of minor keys if you're musically inclined. Um, so I just wanna warn you, give you fair heads up. 

But so a couple years ago I made this playlist and I was really trying to be faithful. I really wanted to practice Advent well, and so I refused to listen to anything but advent music. So no Christmas music. We would get in the car and the kids would be like, let's listen to Christmas on one oh seven point nine. And I'd be like, “No Christmas. We have to do waiting. We have to long, I have to practice Advent and I have to do it really well.” Leave it to me to fall totally into legalism when it comes to celebrating Advent! Anyways, but I have to tell you what happened. We got all the way through Advent and Christmas came and it went in twenty-four hours, like it always does. And I was, I was devastated. I was like, “I didn't get to listen to any of my favorite Christmas songs because I was so busy, like grieving and mourning and sitting in Advent.”

And my husband is over here saying, that's why we celebrate the twelve days of Christmas, starting with Christmas Day. But I just, I couldn't do it, honey. I couldn't, couldn't get on the train. Anyways, so as the years have, you know, furthered, I don't just listen to advent songs. Now in Advent, I mix in some Christmas music, as Christian hinted at earlier. I do love Christmas songs, but I have a deep love for the season of Advent.

And here's the reason why: I think that Advent is the season that most embodies what it feels like to be human. It is, you know, all about the human experience and, and it's about waiting and waiting is a universal experience, right? Think about all of the waiting that you do. Uh, think about the waiting we're doing in this community together. We, uh, we wait in line at the DMV, we wait for a new job. There's some people in our community waiting on new jobs. We wait for test results. We wait for a baby. We wait for the sales to close. Uh, we wait kids, we wait to open presents on Christmas morning, right? We wait to form new friendships at school, right? All kinds of waiting.

And the stories of Advent are stories of struggle. They are stories of injustice, of dashed dreams. And the major theme of advent is that two things can be true at the same time. Have you experienced this? Two things can be true, right? Advent says that the world around us is full of injustice and evil and struggle, and also beauty and goodness. Two truths: this is not the way it's meant to be, and also, it won't always be like this. We were made for living in right relationship with God and others, and often we just don't.

 And so it's no wonder then, no wonder that Advent is being ushered in by the prophet Jeremiah. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, why are we going to the Old Testament prophets instead of Luke 1, Bill Wright? I know that's what you're thinking. Why are we in Jeremiah tonight? But the truth is that nobody embodies a spirit of advent like the Old Testament Israelites. And tonight we're gonna look at a passage from the book of Jeremiah. 

If you are not super familiar with the story of the Israelites, let me give you an eight-second version, okay? God's people get rescued by God over and over again, and then they mess up because they are imperfect humans and they suffer, you know, consequences to their actions. And then God rescues them again. And around and around we go.

In the time of Jeremiah, the kingdom of Israel was actually divided into two kingdoms. You can see there the green one on the top, that's a northern kingdom of Israel. And the orange on the bottom is the southern kingdom of Judah. And Jeremiah was a, a priest in the city of Jerusalem, which is right smack dab in the middle of that map right there. And Jeremiah had, he was a, he was a major prophet and he had a really, uh, crappy job. It was, it was tough, right? His job was to warn God's people for years and years and years that they were headed down the wrong path. There will be devastating consequences if you do not make a U-turn, if you cannot mend your ways and begin living in right relationship with God. It was a tough job, okay? 

And the book of Jeremiah itself is very long. And I learned this week that it's actually an anthology. That means it's a collection. We've got stories, we've got poems, we've got essays, we have stories that Jeremiah wrote. And we have stories written about Jeremiah, and it's all in this big anthology. And you can see here it's pretty much divided into three sections. We've got the beginning section, which is all those warnings, like twenty years that Jeremiah spent warning Israel and begging them to change. And then at the end, we've got chapters thirty-four to fifty-two. And that is, um, uh, that is what I like to call, mess around and find out, are you with me? Okay. Uh, it details the siege of Jerusalem. It details the destruction of the temple and the exile of God's people. And also it talks about what happened to Babylon because they also messed around and found out.

But right there in the middle is this little tiny section called the Book of Consolation, or the book of comfort. And it gives a glimmer of hope in the middle of a lot of despair. And so our reading today is taken from that middle part from the Book of Consolation. It's Jeremiah chapter 33:14-16: The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah in those days. And at that time, I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days, Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: the Lord is our righteousness.

Just like the season of Advent right here in Jeremiah, two things are true. Reality is devastating, and also it will be made all right. The promise is that the Messiah is coming. Jesus is the branch that will spring up and will bring justice and righteousness. They're on the way. And this is why that matters, because the people of Jeremiah's time looked around in their world and justice and righteousness were nowhere to be found. It was a really dark time at that time.

I don't wanna mince words about it, okay? God's people had lost the plot. They had actually adopted habits and practices of the people around them, the Canaanite people. Right outside the temple in Jerusalem, there were idols set up to the Canaanite gods, and God's people were worshiping those idols as well. And furthermore, they were participating in the absolutely horrifying practice of child sacrifice, which was something that the Canaanites did at that time, and they were also participating in it. Furthermore, the leaders were super corrupt. There was systemic injustice, and it trickled down mostly to the vulnerable population. So we're talking about immigrants, widows, and orphans.

I wonder if we can draw some parallels here. What do you think? Can we draw any parallels between the time that Jeremiah was living and working and trying to deliver a message in our own? The corruption, maybe the social injustice? I think in our context, what we might be able to take from Jeremiah, I see two invitations here, and I'm going to share them with you tonight. The first is to become truth tellers like Jeremiah was. And the second is to practice radical imagination.

For the first invitation, Kate Bowler writes that God has made you for truth telling. When you look around you, whether we're talking about work, school kids, your neighborhood, or inner government, where can you identify where righteousness is missing? Can you name traditions or systems that deny justice to the vulnerable?

So I had a colleague a few years back, her name's Laura Mulliken. You all might know who she is. She had what she called, she gave me the language for this and I love it. It's called the justice gene. It's that part inside of you that when you hear that something is not right, your justice gene activates and you know, you need to work in order to make that broken thing. Right? Again, Lori, I'm looking right at you, right? Your justice gene is activated when it comes to ALS, you know, fundraising and, and, and making that no more, not part of our reality.

So for Laura, the injustice that she saw was, um, the reality of human trafficking. And now she, um, is the director of this organization called Trafficking Justice. And it's a beautiful like hub and spoke model. So they do all kinds of outreach. They work in education, they work in prevention, they work in, uh, legal advocacy, and they also work in restoration of victims.

And so the question I wanna ask you is, what about you? What activates your justice gene? What is the thing that's keeping you up at night that you need to speak the truth about in order for the rest of us to join you in hoping for the future?

I do think it's something that The Table's trying to practice. I think of last month, uh, when Cody invited us to, to join him and other interfaith leaders at this prayer vigil at the ice detention center right here in, in I guess it's the border of Minneapolis and St. Paul. But that is telling the truth as well. We have broken systems of immigration that are denying justice to asylum seekers. And when we show up and we stand in solidarity with people who have, uh, been detained, we are embodying that we are speaking the truth, right? Speaking the truth about an injustice that exists and something that we want changed. So what's your truth to tell? What would it look like for you to name an injustice and hold accountable people who are in power? 

The second invitation for us tonight in Jeremiah is this, um, hard, holy work of imagination. We are human beings created in the image of God. And that means that we have the capacity to imagine a future of justice and righteousness, a future that doesn't exist yet. And our imagination is rooted in truth, the truth of who God is and how God provides. And then when we step out of that solid foundation, we can imagine what does it look like for God to keep God's promises and we can join God in working toward that future?

I've been practicing this kind of imagination over the last couple of months. I'm about to finish my very first seminary class. Um, it's called New Missional Ministries. And it's basically new ways of doing and being the church. It's been a great class to be in, especially when I think about all of the opportunities facing our community here at The Table. And at the start of the semester, our professor asked all of us, you know, you all have lots of ideas. What's the idea that won't let you go?

And so, uh, my classmates and I have been, you know, practicing this hard holy work. And for me, I have been rooted in the truth that God is present to each of us, present in your highs, present in your lows, present in your ups and your downs, in your times of deep faith. And God is present to you in your intense doubt. God is Emmanuel with us no matter what your relationship is to God or spirituality or even the church.

And so my imagination has been captured by this idea of a future in which the concept of deconstruction, right? By that I mean like the picking a part of the faith you once held, where that doesn't feel threatening, where it doesn't get a bad rap in the Christian evangelical community. And where it isn't demonized as being sinful, right? But rather that deconstruction would one day be seen as a normal part of our spiritual life cycle.

And so on Wednesday, um, so our final exam for this class is that we have to pitch new ministry ideas. And so on Wednesday, I'm going to pitch an idea for, uh, a ministry that I'm calling Reconstruct. And the idea is coming alongside people either in the church or outside the church who are deconstructing their faith and helping them reconstruct something new, something meaningful, something that, um, that resonates for them. I don't know if this is ever gonna become a real ministry, but I do feel called to partner with God in working so that that future, the future in which deconstruction is not something to be feared, but welcomed, becomes actually a reality. 

And that future might feel far off. It might feel out of reach, but that was true for Jeremiah too. Jeremiah wrote the book of consolation for the people who were in exile. And that exile lasted for 70 years. But the fulfillment of the promise, the birth of Jesus was still another 600 years away. 

And in many ways, we're still waiting. I've heard it described as the already and not yet. If you heard this too, or the now and the not yet. Jesus has already come to earth in fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. But the, the world is not yet made right. We're waiting for Jesus to come back and the waiting that is what advent's all about my friends. 

I I do describe advent as a little bit of a time warp, right? It's these days that we are waiting for the birth of a baby who actually has already been born and lived and died and raised again, and now we're waiting for that baby to come back. It's, uh, it's a little bit of like living in the in between. Do you know what I mean? 

So I don't know about you, but um, sometimes I feel really outta sync with the seasons. Um, this week, this Thanksgiving, um, like all of our family got sick, all of our plans had to change. And on Thursday I didn't feel this like really intense sense of gratitude. I just felt sad. I was really bummed out. And there have been, um, some Christmas mornings, right? Where I am not feeling the magic of the season. And maybe it's because, you know, I spent a lot of time worried about the logistics of making said magic and looking at all of the mothers in this room. And maybe it was just 'cause I listened to my advent playlist and I didn't listen to Christmas songs. Could be that too. But you know what? I always feel like I'm in sync with Advent. I'm always ready for the waiting, for the longing, for the grief.

There's an author and a pastor that I follow. Her name is Meredith Miller. And last year she wrote this poem for people who weren't in the Christmas spirit. And I think for our purposes, we could use the phrase, the advent spirit:

Weary? That's the advent spirit.
Desperate? That's the advent spirit.
Unsure if God will ever really show up? That is the advent spirit.
Are you afraid of the way that the powerful might act? That is the advent spirit.
Longing? That's the advent spirit too. 

She writes, “You don't have to do anything or be anything different this Christmas God comes.” So this advent come as you are with your longing, with your weariness, with your desperation. Name the truth of the grief and the injustice that you see around you. And remember the truth that Jesus did come and Jesus will come.

One of my very favorite verses in the Message translation is from John's gospel. And it goes like this: “The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” I love that idea that Jesus shows up every Christmas because he is Emmanuel God with us. So this advent, I invite you to practice this holy waiting on a God who can be trusted to come. Oh, come. Oh, come Emmanuel.