Advent #1 Jeremiah 33:14-16 “Righteous”

I remember once when I was a kid in Sunday School, way back when, that the teacher, Mrs. Casjens, asked the children, “Who was Jeremiah?” One of the other students in the class then started singing that Three Dog Night song “Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Uh, uh, uh!” “Joy to the world, all the girls and boys.. . “ He sang the whole blasted song. We could not get him to stop. So, that song actually connects Jeremiah to “Joy to the World,” the Christmas Carol. One might think that was the one and only connection, right?

Jeremiah, as prophets go, was really quite an eccentric sort. He starts his prophecy kind of with a recipe that includes a pot boiling over. He decides to show the ancient world that he is yoked to the will of God by wearing an actual yoke that one would use to yoke oxen. Then, when everybody else was selling his or her property to get away from the advancing Babylonian army, Jeremiah was out there buying up land cheaply, believing in the word of God that the Israelites would be released from captivity and allowed to come back home to Israel again. This was true, but the Israelites were in captivity for over 70 years actually. That is then that he made the investment for his future progeny–for generations that would come after him.

Jeremiah’s prophecy seems to be about his own time, some six hundred years before Jesus was born. How can this be a Christmas text? Ah, but it is. So, the wonderful and mysterious thing about prophecy is that it is about the current time, but it is also about the future, and it is about the past all at the same time. In the past, the prophecy was about how God was going to intervene in human history by causing the collapse of the Babylonian Empire. The Israelites were to be set free and allowed to come back to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple once more. The text mentions the “promise.” That is it.

The present day understanding is that Jesus came to release us as the captives, intervening once more in history. The new Empire is the Kingdom of God on Earth that was established through Christ.

The future is the Second Coming with Jesus ushering in the New Jerusalem. So, Jeremiah was about reestablishing the old Jerusalem and Jesus is about the New. Past, present, and future! God is about to intervene in our lives.

According to Jeremiah, this prophecy of God’s intervention is all about creating righteousness in the world again. Jeremiah was a very righteous kind of guy. When he started wearing the yoke of an animal on his shoulders and going around town with it, this was a self-deprecating scene indeed. It was just to show everybody “I am right and you are wrong.”

Don’t you just love it when you are proving other people wrong? Now, let us be honest! It kind of feels good. So, we must be careful! What is being called for is not our being “self-righteous,” which we might enjoy ourselves but everyone else despises, but rather our being washed in the Godly righteousness through Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

I am going to mimic our dear brother-in-Christ Lee Miller, God rest his soul. If you remember his words and the way he spoke, he liked to end his sentences always with “right?” It was as if he was not quite sure about his own righteousness. Right? He wanted the other person, the listener, to affirm what he was saying, Right? We should do that in prayer with God when we are unsure about our own lives, right? Am I right, God? Right? In that way we seek God’s righteousness and not just our own. Right?

I wanted to just point out an interesting thing about the audience to the original time period when Jeremiah was writing this. I do this because we have an analogue in our own time here on the island of Kauai. It was January 13th, 2018, when all of our cell phones went off with a warning. No, it was not a tsunami or flood. The warning was that there was an incoming missile that was going to take Kauai off the map.

As with most of those warnings, we were not really sure. We get flood warnings all the time here on the westside when there is not a rain cloud in sight. The people in the time of Jeremiah really were sure that their enemy was going to take them off the map. You see, the kings in Judah before had made a deal with the Egyptian army, a mutual defence pact, that the Egyptians would defend Judah against the rising Baylonian threat from the north east. To appease the Egyptians powers the previous kings of Judah allowed Egyptian idols into the temple in Jerusalem. Yes, they desecrated the holiest of holies with idols. They broke the second of the Ten Commandments.

Now, I must point out that there were a lot of kings in Judah that worshipped the false idols, so it is hard to pinpoint one name and lay the blame on him. Some say the trouble started with Rehoboam. Some say Jeroboam. Then, there was King Ahab who was married to Jezebel. The list goes on. However, in our scripture for today we have one king who is mentioned. His name is Zedekiah. He was the king who was on the throne when Jerusalem actually fell. You see the sentence in quotation marks: “The Lord is Our Righteousness.” That is in quotes because in Hebrew it is actually the name “Zedekiah.” Zedekiah as the king got rid of the idols and false worship and dedicated his reign to God Almighty. This must have been too little too late. Just the same, Zedekiah knew and believed that at that point only God could save Judah.

And there is the truth of the matter: Only God can save us. “The Lord is our righteousness.” We can try to undo our own sins and get rid of all the false gods in our lives, but that is not enough. We must accept the full righteousness of God over our lives. We must accept God’s justice over the planet. God sends the new King down in the form of a small baby to establish the New Kingdom, the New Jerusalem.

When Jesus comes into the world, we have now a chance to be redeemed and made right with God again. When we pray to Jesus to make our lives right again, we know that he came to show us the way once more back to the Father in Heaven. So, we celebrate the righteousness of God in the person of Jesus Christ for the first Sunday leading to Christmas.

Amen.