December 2, 2012 | 4:00 p.m. | First Sunday of Advent

“Jazz at Four” Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Jeremiah 33:14–16

Today we begin the season of Advent in the church: you can tell by the greenery and the banners that are up in the room and the lighting of the wreath. Advent means “beginning,” and it’s kind of New Year’s Day in the church. It’s a time of preparation for the coming of Christ on Christmas, and we repeat it every year. Today I’m going to talk about that repetition, why it’s important to repeat this season of preparation every year, and I’m going to talk about it by following the text assigned for today by the “lectionary,” which is the church’s set of readings for each Sunday of the year. It may seem odd at first to read from one of the prophets who isn’t saying anything directly about Jesus, so I’ll also be talking about what this Old Testament prophet has to do with the coming of Christ, and what it might have to do with our own preparations for that coming.

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I have something of an attention deficit when it comes to reading. My apartment and my office are filled with stacks of books, and I’m never quite sure what I’m going to end up reading when I set aside some time for it. Sometimes I’m frustrated that I can’t seem to stay focused on whatever book I have in my hand and keep wondering about what else is waiting for me in the stack.

This week I stumbled upon a book about Henry David Thoreau, the great transcendentalist. Thoreau, as many of you may know, was an essayist, a surveyor, and a nonconformist, and he spent two years living in a single-room cabin near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where he wrote the famous poetry of Walden and the political essay “Civil Disobedience,” each in their own way a testimony to the importance of wildness and solitude and simplicity that made him one of the most distinctive writers in the history of our country. He was a man who wrote passionately about environmental protection but who also penned the phrase “the government is best which governs least,” and political parties and activist movements always seem to fail in making Thoreau a part of their cause.

I was convicted when I stumbled upon Thoreau this week—for a couple of reasons. First of all, as I stumbled through my regular exercise of wishing I could settle on one thing to read and remembered all of the other tasks that awaited me over the course of the day, I was jealous of this man who had abandoned much of that kind of thing to live in solitude at Walden Pond. Not only did he not have email or the Internet to distract him, relative to someone like me, he probably didn’t have very many books to choose from, and often too many choices can be a curse.

But I was also jealous of the way Thoreau seemed to have a keen awareness of what was most important in life—or at least what was most important for him. He didn’t seem to allow the pressures of the world around him to define those things for him. I think most of us have experienced this longing from time to time: wouldn’t it be nice to be totally unconcerned and at peace with what we are wearing or how we look, how we are perceived by our peers, whether or not we are saying the right things? And wouldn’t it be amazing to not worry about those things, not because we’re lazy or we don’t care, but because we have intentionally chosen values that we know are important to us, regardless of what anyone else thinks.

I’m talking about all of this because historians have called Henry David Thoreau a prophet of modern times, and tonight’s scripture text is from a prophet: Jeremiah. These prophets of the Old Testament—Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel—are often misunderstood to be fortune-tellers or soothsayers, but that is actually quite beside the point. Prophets are individuals who have a keen sense of what is most important and are able to speak about and live according to those priorities, and they often do so with little regard for the objections of their family or culture or government.

Jeremiah was one of these people. He lived during a desperate time in the history of Israel. The glorious kingships of David and Solomon were long gone, replaced by clan warfare, political assassinations, and a revolving door of mostly unremarkable kings who cared more for their own political advancement than for the welfare of the people. The lackluster morality of the leaders had rubbed off on most everyone else. The streets were dangerous; widows and orphans, people without families and homes were at risk more than ever; and they were at risk not least of all because the temple was not helping much of anyone: religion had been reduced mostly to empty rituals and public attempts at piety that resulted in little authentic spirituality or compassion for the needy. If you wanted to get by in this world where Jeremiah lived, you looked out for Number One, and no one bothered to say much about what anyone else was doing. Given this background, you can see how Jeremiah was as offbeat and crazy as many folks perceived Thoreau to be out at Walden Pond; Jeremiah began criticizing the government, calling for a religious revival at the synagogue, talking a lot about the doom he believed awaited his people. But of all things, what may be most surprising about Jeremiah was the way he spoke words of hope, that a new day was dawning and that change was on the way. Those days are surely coming, says Jeremiah.

Hope. What a strange thing to talk about in the midst of the worst of times. You would expect words of hope to come from people who could see signs of it. Hopeful words are the product of witnessing hopeful acts—seeing another person do something profoundly selfless, generous, or courageous.

Well, maybe. But the evidence seems to suggest that isn’t the only way to hope. Often hope arises from someone who has the ability, when surrounded by trouble, to speak not about the way things are, but rather to speak about the way they should be, the way we long for them to be; to live in the present, whatever that present may be, with their eyes on the future.

A world like Jeremiah’s world might not have been that different from ours. Paying attention to the news from Syria, from Israel and Palestine, the hurricane wreckage on the East Coast, the insane level of gun violence in our city this fall, it is hard to imagine anyone speaking of this as a time of hope, and so how irrelevant it must seem to come to church where we invite you to open your Bibles to Jeremiah and read to you of the days that are surely coming . . .

Perhaps the most troubling thing about the tragedies of our world is that they don’t seem to go away. Violence in Afghanistan morphs into a war in Iraq and then a humanitarian crisis in Syria. The unrest between Israelis and Palestinians seems to be little more than a new version of the crisis this time of the year in 2007 and many times before. And we need look no further than our very own lives. It so often seems that one health care problem is followed by another; struggles at work or at home are renewed; we play out the same arguments again and again with our spouses and our partners.

It all begs the question, why continue to hope? Why live through this Advent season talking about the future when we can remember quite clearly that just last year we observed Advent, Christ was born, and still so much seems to be a mess. Why continue to have faith?

Let me tell you a story:

Doris Betts wrote an article once on the topic “Why Believe in God?” and based it on her experience with her husband, who had Parkinson’s disease. It began with shaky hands and difficulty with facial expression but continued to the point when no therapy or medication was of any use to stop his decline, and he eventually lost much of his personality and his selfhood. “Where has he gone?” asked Doris, “my husband of fifty-five years, this father and grandfather, lawyer and judge, this lover and logician, reader and chess player, the durable companion who meant to retire and go world traveling with me?” Answering her own question, Doris wrote: “If there’s no God, there ought to be. I keep deciding to believe in God, even on bad days. In this, my seventh decade, faith seems to me not a certainty, but a commitment, a renewable vow” (Image, no. 55, pp. 63–66).

I keep deciding to believe in God, she said. This time of year—Advent—is strange because we are looking forward to something that happened just a year ago; we are hoping for the birth of Jesus, just like we do every year. There is a reason for that repetition, and the reason is because, for people of faith, hope isn’t a gift given at birth. Hope is a habit.

In our yearly repetition of longing for Christ’s arrival, we live out in our worship the active decision to believe in God. We train ourselves in the habit of being voices of hope in a world where hope is so desperately needed. The same way that Jeremiah speaks to the people of his time, the same way Doris Betts makes her renewable vow, we declare to one another that the days are surely coming when God will keep God’s promises.

This is a season of hope. It is a season of looking to the future, to God’s future in which the savior of the world will come again in the gift of a child. A gift that has been ours before and that we know will come again. Amen.