December 3, 2006

Have Righteousness Spring Up In Your Life
 

by Rev. Dr. Jim Carlson

Jeremiah 33:14-16

I want to begin by telling you about a news story I read this week. A pastor by the name of Dusty Whittaker had both a sermon illustration, and a personal revelation for his church last Sunday. The congregation of Victory Baptist Church in Mount Airy NC found out that their pastor was felon who had been convicted of trafficking cocaine and possession of a firearm.

He had told the congregation prior to hiring him that he worked as a police officer for six years in Montgomery County, Va. The people in the congregation said he also claimed to be a former U.S. Marshall. In September, Whitaker reportedly brought a handgun and a shoulder holster to a service.

Apparently he wanted to make the point that his life as a Christian was very different from the life he used to lead. "He was driving home his point," a parioshioner said. "He said he was no longer a pistol-toting U.S. marshal.' He was a pastor."

Which of course raised the question in my mind, “Why bring the gun to church if you’re trying to show people you’re no longer a gun toting U.S. Marshall? Doesn’t the gun in your holster make the exact opposite point? Or maybe he’s now a gun toting pastor. I’m not sure.

The problem was, as a former felon, he wasn’t allowed to possess a gun. As a result, Whitaker was arrested during church services last Sunday. He was released Monday after posting a $20,000 bond.

So from now on, whenever I use a sermon illustration and it turns out to be a real dud, I just remind myself that I could have done a lot worse. At least my sermon illustrations have never caused me to end up in the big house. Not yet anyway. I guess you never know what’s going to spring up at church on a given Sunday.

Anything that springs up in your life by definition wasn’t there before. And yet somehow, it seed always was present. Otherwise, it couldn’t spring up. That paradox, one which presents itself in all of our lives, is the crux of the passage we read from Jeremiah this morning.

I’m going to give you a visual idea of the timeline involved so you get a sense of the history behind this passage. (Show Slide). This passage in chapter 33 is a reinterpretation of an earlier passage in Jeremiah 23.

The first one is an oracle by Jeremiah in which God tells the people God will raise up a better leader for the people of Judah than the ones they have. At that time, the king, a guy by the name of Zedekiah, was just a puppet ruler who answered to the foreign army who had invaded Judah.

Zedekiah couldn’t and wouldn’t be the kind of leader who God would use to overthrow the occupying force. All he could do was try to keep the peace and avoid being executed by the Babylonian king. He wasn’t successful in either of those endeavors.

Jeremiah was also critical for the religious leaders. He thought the priests running the temple were corrupt, and that they were misleading the people into a false sense of security. Jeremiah was promising that God would send new leadership. But for the time being, Jeremiah told the folks in Judah to accept their fate and cooperate with the people who ruled over them.

The second passage, the one we’re looking at for today, is from a period about 80 years later. During that time the leadership of Judah were forcibly marched off to Babylon and made to live there for about 60 years. Then the Babylonians themselves were destroyed by another army, and eventually the new rulers allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem.

In both passages, God promises that this new leader will spring up from their own people. This leader will rule with fairness and justice. The borders of their nation will be secure. Although Israel and Judah had been divided into two nations in the past, they would be reunited again into one.

In the earlier passage, this leader would be given a name by God, and his name would be “The Lord is Our Righteousness”. In the second passage, which we read this morning, the united kingdoms of Judah and Israel would be called “The Lord is Our Righteousness”. Our passage for today was a reinterpretation and a reminder of that earlier oracle.

The passage we read for today was meant to give hope to the people of Judah as they tried to rebuild their nation. The Babylonians had destroyed everything, including their temple. People described the city of Jerusalem as “a waste without man or beast”.

But more importantly was the question of leadership. If they were still answerable to another country, should they anoint one of their own people to be the next king? They remembered promises God had made to their ancestors about someone from King David’s family always being on the throne of Israel.

This oracle talked about someone who would fulfill that earlier promise. IT also talked about a new high priest who would run the temple the way it was supposed to be run. God promised that nothing could keep God from fulfilling this covenant with Israel to provide a king and a high priest.

Now imagine you’re in the crowd hearing this oracle as it’s being read or spoken. If the prophet is telling you that these people will spring up from your community, don’t you being to look around and say, “Well I wonder who it’s going to be?” If you’re part of David’s family, you start wondering which one of your relatives is going to be king.

Who is going to spring up? Who will be this person, the one who will run things fairly and treat people with justice? Who will rule in such a way that the nation is safe from invaders? Who will govern the country is a way which causes people to refer to their land as “The Lord is Our Righteousness?”

In the New Testament, Christians began talking about Jesus using this image form Jeremiah. They saw him as the one God had raised, being a descendant of David. Of course, they had to talk about him not as a king in the traditional sense, but as the king of a kingdom which is not of this world.

Now before you say to yourself, “What does this matter? It happened 2500 years ago, I want you to ask yourself, “Does this stuff sound familiar?” Do people want a government that governs their nation with justice rather than with corruption?

Do people want a leader who will keep them safe from invading armies? Did anyone in the past election run on the issue of keeping borders secure? Does anyone want to see this nation referred to in godly terms?

The answer to all of those questions is “absolutely”. People today want most of the same things from their government that we want out of ours today. In the case of Israel, they believed that God would raise someone from out of their community to be that kind of leader.

These days we also have people running for office who feel they have a divine calling to accomplish all those things. But the public doesn’t always agree with them about the divine part.

What I really want to focus on today is this idea that a righteous person would just spring up out of the community with God’s blessing and accomplish all those things people hoped for. Is righteousness something that God can just cause to spring up out of nowhere? Or does it always exist, waiting to sprout and accomplish good for the world?

My experience of life tells me that often times there is a righteous branch of some kind within each one of us waiting to spring up. We aren’t always aware of it. Sometimes we’ve ignored it to the point where we’ve forgotten about it. But when it springs up, we know it’s there, and we have a sense of conviction that what we’re choosing to do is godly on many levels.

An illustration for me of this idea was the way in which I thought about children prior to having Emma. When Michelle and I were first married, I really enjoyed the freedom of being able to come and go as I pleased. We didn’t ever have to hire a babysitter or make sure a diaper was changed or take anyone to swimming lessons.

We didn’t get pregnant until we had been married for 10 years. And I take responsibility for that. Mostly it was because I was terrified of having children. I knew many parents and I saw what they went through in trying to care for their children.

I knew what they paid for diapers. I knew how much lives were dictated by the needs of their children. I watched in terror as they tried to discipline their children and teach their children right from wrong. I was horrified when I saw teenagers rebel against their parents and do the very thing their parents told them not to do.

And all the while, the thought going through my head was, “I could never do that.” First of all, I was convinced that if we had a baby, I’d probably drop her on her head or accidentally feed her something poisonous or forget and leave her somewhere. If I can’t even keep track of my car keys, how can I keep track of a child?

I just didn’t think I had it in me. And I had enough respect for life and for other people that I wasn’t going to just go ahead anyway, knowing I didn’t think I would be any good at it.

But that doubt eventually began to fade. I remember watching a TV show, a sitcom actually, in which two of the characters were talking about parenthood. The one who was a parent was also a lawyer in a busy legal firm. The other was also a lawyer, who had now children, and just couldn’t conceive of being a good parent in that situation.

She said to the other lawyer who was a father, “How can you possibly handle your career and parenthood? The demands your child places on you must be more than you can take sometimes.” And the father replied to her, “When you have a child of your own, you are often shocked to find out just what you can do. The love of your child brings out things within you that you never thought existed.”

As a father, I can attest that this statement is true, at least for me. But as a Christian and a person who has given his life to the service of God, I can also attest to the fact that the same thing is true. The thing within us that God asks of us is often something we never even recognized or imagined.

We all know the phrase “I didn’t think you had it in you.” I think the good news of this passage is that we’re always surprised to find out just what we have in us, especially when we’re trying to do something we think God has called us to do.

My experience with God has taught me that whatever I felt called by God to do at any given point in my life, I was always given the resources, the training, and the opportunity to do them. Beyond that, God placed something within me that I never thought I had, something that allowed me to go above and beyond what I thought I could do.

I’m no better and no worse than anyone else. And it’s my belief that the same thing is true for each one of you. This season of Advent is about a child being given to this world. This little child seemed so insignificant at the time. But believe me, when people looked at what Jesus accomplished in his life, I’m sure they said to themselves, “I didn’t think he had it in him.”

I think for some of us the worries and hassles of life are such that we start saying to ourselves, “Maybe I’m just not as good a person as I thought. Maybe I can’t be as righteous as the next person. It just doesn’t come easy to me.”

I remember going through times in my life when I didn’t think the righteousness of could spring up in my life. I thought it depended on me being a good person all the time. And I just didn’t think I had it in me.

The good news for us this morning is that the righteousness of God doesn’t depend on us, just as the people of Judah weren’t responsible for raising up their own leader. God’s righteousness is something God does in us, if we can get out of God’s way for long enough and allow it to happen.

You never know what God has placed inside you until you really stretch your limits and step out in faith and say, “Wherever you lead me, I’ll go.” You may be shocked at the kind of person you’ll find within. You may be awestruck at what happens.

But I’m here to tell you this morning that you shouldn’t be surprised. You shouldn’t be surprised at the righteousness that springs up inside you. Don’t be shocked by the branch goodness which grows up out of the dead stump of fear and sadness and hatred and addiction and greed.

Our God is the one who led this small band of slaves out of slavery in Egypt. Our God is the one who restored the people of Judah back to their land after their exile in Babylon. Our God is the one who changed the world forever through a helpless child born to an unwed teenage mother.

Our God is the one who brought salvation to the world through an executed criminal who just so happened to be the Son of God. Our God is the one who has been with us through all the ups and downs of our lives and has brought us to where we are today.

We should never be surprised at what kind of branch God raises up in our lives. It’s always new, it’s always better than before, it’s always a fresh start, It’s always there, it accepts us for who we are and it springs up to show us what we could be because of God’s grace.

You never knew you had it in you? Well I know you do. And I’d bet that if you had a real honest conversation with people who cared about you, they would tell you the same thing. You might be surprised at what springs up this Christmas season. Then again, when you think of the God who loves us, it might not be all that surprising after all.