Based on Jeremiah 31:27-34, 2Timothy 3:16 – 4:4, Luke 18:1-8
We are people who like to plan for what might be coming. We make plans about things that we wish to happen – vacations and other travel, holiday plans, flower gardens for next year with seasonal plantings, investing for our retirement, even what to fix for dinner this coming week. There are even people who make their living trying to discern the future. How will people vote in upcoming elections? What are the financial markets going to do? What sports team will win or lose the next game or the next championship – and people bet their hard-earned money on these prognostications.
The human species spends a lot of time thinking about and planning for the coming days – and especially about trying to make our preferred futures into reality. Yet, we can no more control our futures than we can control what will come next out of another person’s mouth. The decisions that we make today may hold within them unforeseen consequences and the seeds of our own destruction. We currently are living with the consequences of previous generations’ choices for their lives and world that have negative ramifications and are difficult for us to resolve.
Our focus on the coming days, on an unknowable future, leads to a state of anxiety and existential crisis. Jesus taught (as captured in Matthew’s Gospel) about this when he told the disciples and those who followed him not to worry about tomorrow saying, “…Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? ...”
The Bible teaches us how to be truly present to each moment of our lives. It teaches us to trust an unknowable future to a known God – a God who loves us and who never leaves us abandoned…no matter the consequences of our decisions. Our scripture readings for today have much to teach us about how God is in charge of the coming days. The reading from Jeremiah is in a section known as the “Book of Consolation”. These passages are written to the people in exile who are in need of reassurance that God has not abandoned them. Through the prophet, God is telling them that “the days are coming” when God will deliver them from the Babylonians as God delivered their ancestors from the Egyptians. God announces a future to the exiles that is as certain as their current situation; God judged them, but God will also make a way for them to return to and rebuild Jerusalem.
The writer of the letter of 2Timothy has detailed how God had rescued him from all manner of persecutions. The writer tells Timothy that all “who live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted”, but that God will deliver them as of old. Timothy is reminded that the Bible provides everything needed to allow for everyone to do good works in the world with God. Timothy is to be faithful in preaching, teaching, rebuking, exhorting – and is to do this in the coming days with patience and care. For the days are coming when the people will turn to false teachers who only tell them what they want to hear.
Jesus wanted to be certain that his disciples knew the value of persisting in prayer, especially in the face of injustice. He tells them a parable about a widow who had an adversary who was treating her unjustly. We are told that the judge “neither feared God nor cared what people thought” and had not given her relief from her persecutor. So, she did the only thing that was in her purview, she kept advocating for herself and pestering him for a judgement in her favor. Finally, the judge was worn down by her persistence and decided to take care of the situation before she escalated the matter and did him bodily harm. Jesus commends the persistent widow for continuing to seek justice for herself, even in the face of someone who did not seem to care about her or anyone else. Jesus tells the disciples that a caring God will in the coming days act more quickly to answer their fervent prayers. He also wonders aloud if in the coming days anyone will listen to him and be persistently praying when he returns.
We spend a lot of time wondering about the coming days. What will the next election mean for our lives in Virginia? What impact will Supreme Court decisions have on us? What changes will be coming next from the current Administration, and what will that mean for our lives and livelihoods? We have a million concerns about the future and the situation that we are in. In that way, we are no different than the believers who were sent into exile in Babylon or the early followers of Jesus in Ephesus who were being persecuted and mislead.
The reading from Jeremiah brings consolation to the people and hopefully quiets their minds by reminding them that God is in control of all of life and especially the coming days. God will restore the faithful remnant to Jerusalem. They will no longer be paying for the previous generations’ sins (“the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”). Rather, God will oversee a rebuilding and a time of new hearts and a new covenant. God has moved the sins of the past permanently into the past, and they will no longer negatively affect the future. This new covenant will not be chiseled onto stone tablets it will be written on their hearts and placed in their minds – it will become part of who they are. Once that happens, all of the people (from the least to the greatest) will know the LORD. The future of a renewed relationship between God and God’s people is assured, and the people need no longer be anxious about what the coming days will hold for them and their offspring. This promise from God would have been welcome news and would have relieved some of the stress of the exiles’ current reality.
Though God’s promise was made to the Israelite exiles and those of the Northern Kingdom diaspora, in it we can find some hope and help for our day. The days are coming, says the LORD, when God will do a new thing. God brought to reality those days when the exiles returned to Jerusalem and Judah after 70 years. In God’s time it took another 500+ years for Jesus to be born. It has been nearly 2000 years since Jesus was resurrected and ascended. We wonder, like the disciples and the members of the early Jesus movement, when in the coming days will Jesus return? Throughout this time, however, we witness that God has continued to be active in our world and in the lives of believers over these last 2600 years – and God has continued to do new things.
When we review the history of the Judeo-Christian Church, we can see God at work helping those who were persecuted be persistent in spreading the gospel. We see how small groups faithfully persevered during the Dark and Middle Ages. We see how God has helped us navigate mistakes, heresies, oppression, human power struggles, false idols and imperfect human leadership in the Church and in society. God has raised up in every age faithful people – professionals and an uncountable number of laity – who have done their best to bring God’s kingdom closer to earth by sharing their lives and their faith with their neighbors.
It is easy to develop a nihilistic attitude about these current days – the decrease in church attendance and memberships, the closing of churches, the marginalization of religion and the co-opting of the Christian faith by the idol worship of secularism and worldly power to name just a few of the attacks currently mounted against belief in God. Yet what I find in the Bible are scriptures that continue to breathe the power of God the Holy Spirit into me so that I can look at the coming days and see all of us equipped to continue to do good work with God and God’s people. The coming days will have their challenges, but if we make a plan to live into the covenant of God in Jesus Christ with all of our hearts and minds, then we will be able to counteract the attacks on our faith and continue to lead others to salvation in Jesus as did our faithful ancestors. In the coming days, may God make it so for all of us…amen!