Based on Jermiah 23:1-6, Colossians 1:11-20, Luke 23:33-43
I’m wondering this morning how you feel about promises? We have just come through an election season – a season which is always chock full of promises. We have all heard many promises from politicians about how things will change for the better, but many of those promises are never fulfilled. Broken promises are all too common, I’m certain you can think of a number of promises that have been made to you and been broken – I suspect that if you are being painfully honest, you can remember a time that you broke a promise. How did you feel in either case and what did it do to your relationships? Now I’d like you to think and the promises that you have made and kept. How did those make you feel and how did those affect your relationships?
I’ve been thinking about promises a lot lately as two weeks ago I officiated a wedding where two people promised in front of family and friends to love and care for each other from that day forward. I’m always hopeful on wedding days that the couple will be able to commit every day to fulfill the promises they make to one another. Because it’s not just the act of promising – it is the commitment to live into the promise every day that confer the blessings contained in the promise. Just on Friday I celebrated the 38th anniversary of giving my promise to Lucinda to love, honor and cherish her in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, forsaking all others, until death do us part AND every day to be nicer to her than she is to me. All of you who are married know that it is easy to promise, but it can be challenging to fulfill those promises over months, years and decades!
Promises kept are an important part of our understanding of God and the basis of our trusting relationship with God. God promised Noah to never again destroy the creatures that God had made. God made covenant promises to Abram to make him the father of many nations. To Moses, God made a promise to be with him and to give him the ability to lead God’s people from slavery in Egypt to God’s Holy Mountain and then on to the land that God had promised to Abraham. God promised that the dispersed tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel would one day be brought back, and that those exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon would be released after 70 years. Along the way, God made the promise through the prophets to raise up from the lineage of King David the “Anointed One” or “Messiah” who would fulfill all the promises of God. Christians believe that Jesus is the fulfillment of all that God had promised to our spiritual ancestors.
Our scripture readings for today speak to us of the promise of the coming Messiah – the promise of Jesus. The prophet Jeremiah has spent the previous few chapters proclaiming God’s condemnation on the leadership of the Temple and of the people of Jerusalem and Judah. In our reading, God speaks of how poorly the people have been shepherded by those in charge. God promises to replace these evil shepherds with a righteous shepherd from the lineage of David. A shepherd who will fulfill God’s promise to reign in wisdom, justice and righteousness so that “Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety”.
Paul’s letter to the believers in Colossae opens with a prayer of thanksgiving and then speaks of the Supreme nature of God’s Son, Jesus. Paul details the blessings that come from the promise of Jesus – a shared inheritance of God’s kingdom with God’s chosen people, the forgiveness of our sins, that in Jesus all of creation holds together, that he is the head of the Church and of all believers, and that through his blood sacrifice for us we can know shalom.
The reading we have from the Gospel according to Luke (our final reading from this Gospel for the year) has Jesus hanging on a cross between two other convicted criminals. Jesus has asked God to forgive those who are killing him because they do not know what they are doing. The crowd, the Roman soldiers and even one of the criminals hanging beside him mock Jesus and ask for him to prove he is the Messiah by saving himself (one criminal wants to be saved as well). The other criminal does not want a spectacle or to be physically saved, he just asks for Jesus to remember him when he comes into his kingdom. The promise of Jesus is fulfilled for him as Jesus tells him that he will be with Jesus in the kingdom that day.
I want to loop back to a question that I asked in the opening of this reflection – how do you feel when you or someone else keeps a promise? You might feel joy, amazement, happiness, a sense of peace, a sense that there is still good in the world, that you or someone else can be trusted. Promises kept bring with them a strong jolt of altruism to continue to work with and for others; that there is a reason to keep on striving against the forces of evil, wickedness, ego-maniacal self-interest and greed. Perhaps you even feel a sense of hope? Hope that all is not lost in you or in those in community around and with you.
Mennonite pastor Richard A. Kauffman writes of God’s fulfilled promises and the hope we find in the promise of Jesus. He notes, “…The prophet Jeremiah knew about hard times. When the Babylonians ransacked Jerusalem and took some of the elites into exile, life as people then knew it was turned upside down. In the midst of this doom and gloom, Jeremiah offered hope for the future: a righteous branch would spring up out of the ruin, and it would bring about justice and righteousness in the land. Christians, of course, have often associated this text with Jesus. Though we, like Jeremiah, live in challenging times, we are not a people without hope. Although it’s become a cliche, there is truth in the saying: The darkest night is right before dawn. Christian hope is not naive. It is quite aware of the darkness around us. It doesn’t flinch from or try to escape the darkness - it is not wishful thinking or mere optimism. Nor is Christian hope passive.
On the contrary, Christian hope is positive. It entails the confidence that we have a God who is with us through hard times, a God who can make good come out of evil, a God who will one day make all things new. Christian hope is active. We live into the hope that Christ promises. Because Christ is our peace, we engage in acts of peacemaking. Because Christ is our righteousness, we live righteous lives empowered by God’s Spirit. Because Christ is our justice and our mercy, we engage in acts of justice and mercy.
Christian hope is also patient. Patience was a key theme in the early church, though it’s often been overlooked by the church since then…We are patient because God is patient with us. ‘God is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love’ is a repeated refrain in the Old Testament. Because God is patient, we should be patient with others. ‘Love is patient, love is kind,’ Paul says famously in his so-called love hymn, 1Corinthians 13. We don’t try to force outcomes or coerce people into doing what we wish they’d do. Doing so can lead to unfortunate, unintended consequences. Patience is closely linked to peace: people often resort to violence because they’ve lost patience, or they lack imagination to find nonviolent ways to work at conflict resolution. Patience is possible because of hope….”
We believe that God kept God’s promises in Jesus. The promise of Jesus our King is that not only did he heal the sick and the possessed, cure the lame and the blind, allow the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak, and forgave sinners, but that he made it possible for us to do the same. Jesus promised the first Disciples that the Holy Spirit would come and empower them to do all kinds of signs and wonders in his name. Promises were made at our baptisms and when we took membership vows to serve Jesus as our Lord and to be empowered by God to resist evil, oppression and injustice in all forms. It is time to keep those promises.
When we work against social injustices and evil in any form, then we keep the promises we made. When we embody and share with our hurting world the hope of Jesus - hope that is patient, active, positive, peace-filled, just, merciful and reality based, then the promise of Jesus is fulfilled in us and through us. The world needs us to put the promise of Jesus to work – let us begin today. Amen!