Sermon – “An Everlasting Love” (Jeremiah 31:2-6)

 

About a third of the way through the letter “J” in my dictionary you will come across the word “jeremiad”. And what, you ask, is a jeremiad? Well, a jeremiad is defined as (and I quote) “a long literary work, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall”.

With a long definition like that, it is clear to anyone who knows their Bible where the word “jeremiad” originates: from the book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament—fifty-two chapters of almost uninterrupted gloom and doom. And if that weren’t enough, Jeremiah wrote an equally doleful sequel: the book of Lamentations—five more chapters of melancholy and woe!

Many years ago, when I was in my late teens, I remember coming across a book entitled, Are You Joking, Jeremiah? I don’t think it was the author’s intention to turn Jeremiah into a kind of seventh-century BC stand-up comedian. A humorist Jeremiah certainly was not. What the author was really trying to do was to ask the question, “Jeremiah, can things really be that bad? Are the circumstances really as dire as you want us to believe?” And I have no doubt that Jeremiah’s answer would have been an unequivocal “Yes”. Or maybe, “Worse!”

For the past few months I’ve been working my way through Jeremiah as a part of my daily quiet time. And it hasn’t been easy reading. Jeremiah lived in the late years of the seventh and the early years of the sixth century BC. He proclaimed the message that the Lord had entrusted to him over a period of forty years, spanning the reigns of the last four of Judah’s kings: Josiah (640-609 BC), Jehoiakim (609-598 BC), Jehoiachin (598-597 BC) and Zedekiah (597-586 BC).

As he wrote, all that was left of the once-great nation of Israel were just two of the original twelve tribes, Benjamin and Judah, clustered around the capital city of Jerusalem. Now their existence too was being threatened with the expansion of the Babylonian Empire to the north and the rapid advance of its seemingly invincible armies. What were the people of Judah to do?

Much of the leadership were urging that they form an alliance with the Egyptian Empire to the south—indeed, if worse came to worst, to abandon Judah altogether and flee to Egypt. Imagine the irony, though, of going back to the very place where their ancestors had escaped from slavery five hundred years before—to the land from which God himself had intervened to rescue them with miracles on a scale never witnessed before or since!

A Message of Warning

To Jeremiah the notion of turning to Egypt was unthinkable. God’s words through him to the people and their leaders were these: “If you will remain in this land, then I will build you up and not pull you down; I will plant you, and not pluck you up” (42:10). Again and again with words like these Jeremiah urged the people of Judah to remain in their land.

Yes, the Babylonian army would attack and enslave them. Yes, those who survived would be lucky to escape with their lives. And all of this, said Jeremiah, was not just that Judah happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, what was unfolding around them was the due punishment that they had brought upon themselves—retribution for the countless ways in which they had blithely abandoned God and his laws, to adopt pagan practices and to oppress the poor.

So it was that Jeremiah went through the streets of Jerusalem, confronting prophets and priests, generals, landowners, leaders, merchants and kings—anyone he could find—with his message of warning. And he didn’t fear to mince his words!

I have seen your abominations,
your adulteries and neighings, your lewd whorings,
on the hills in the field.
Woe to you, Jerusalem!
How long will it be before you are made clean? (13:27)

Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness,
and his upper rooms by injustice,
who makes his neighbour serve him for nothing
and does not give him his wages… (22:13)

Behold, the storm of the Lord!
Wrath has gone forth,
a whirling tempest;
it will burst upon the head of the wicked.
The anger of the Lord will not turn back
 until he has executed and accomplished
 the intents of his heart. (23:19-20)

Needless to say, Jeremiah and his constant warnings of doom did not meet with a positive response. On one occasion his prophecies were cut up and torn to shreds by the king himself. On another he was arrested on charges of treachery and locked away in a dungeon. And on still another he was tossed into a cistern and would have died of starvation in the mud had he not been rescued. Yet none of this halted Jeremiah’s determination to issue the warnings that God had given him.

Their little kingdom was doomed. But the Lord would restore them—if only they would turn from evil and injustice, and be faithful to him once again.

The Message of God’s Love

Now it’s not as though Jeremiah was just an angry old man (or an angry young man for that matter!). Beneath all his words of woe and retribution and judgement (as with all the prophets) was the unquenchable conviction of God’s undying love for his people.

So it is that in today’s passage we come across some of the most beautiful and moving words in all of Scripture. There through Jeremiah God addresses his wayward people: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”

Now this was not some new-fangled idea that Jeremiah had come up with. He was not inventing anything. The everlasting, undying love of God is a thread that weaves its way through the whole of the Bible, from beginning to end.

It takes us all the way back to that unforgettable scene in the Garden of Eden, where God takes the creature that he has created in his own image—that he has formed from the dust of the ground—and tenderly breathes into him the breath of life. We witness it as Adam and Eve are banished from the garden for their disobedience. Yet in his fatherly care for them the Lord will not see them go cold and naked, but caringly provides them with garments of animal skins.

It thunders from Mount Sinai as the mighty God proclaims to Moses, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…” (Exodus 34:6-7). Later on, as they near the Promised Land, Moses proclaims once again the Lord’s message to the people of Israel, “The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession… It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you…” (Deuteronomy 7:6-8a)

As we move farther through the Bible, the chorus of God’s love rings through the psalms as well. Psalm 33, for example, reminds us that, “the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord” (5b). But most notably it is in Psalm 136, where we are invited to sing, “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his love endures forever.” But not just once! In each of the twenty-five verses that follow, the psalmist calls upon us to repeat the chorus, “for his steadfast love endures forever.”

But one of the most moving pictures of God’s inexhaustible love comes to us in the book of Hosea. I suspect many of you are familiar with Hosea’s unrelenting devotion to his wife Gomer. Perhaps we could blame Hosea for making a poor choice of a wife in the first place, since Gomer already had a reputation for promiscuity long before he took her in marriage. Yet God had a plan in it all. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Gomer has not given up her adulterous lifestyle. Although forced to divorce her, Hosea continues to love Gomer in spite of her unfaithfulness, to the point where later he finds her living as a slave and purchases her freedom, giving us in the process a profound, real-life parable of God’s love for his people.

The Message Made Flesh

So it is that God could instruct Jeremiah to write, even to a people who had rejected him, “I have loved you with an everlasting love…” That love is a theme that weaves its way through the whole of Scripture (as I’ve attempted to point out) from the beginning to the end. And so it is on this fourth Sunday in Advent, with Christmas just around the corner, that we focus on God’s love.

The poet Christina Rossetti put it to rhyme in a little poem that later became a Christmas carol:

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, love divine;
Love was born at Christmas;
Star and angels gave the sign.

The only problem is that, with all the charming pictures of sheep and oxen and shepherds, we run the risk of romanticizing that love—turning it into something that is cute and cuddly like the little baby gazing innocently up from the manger. (Let’s not forget the smell of the sheep and the oxen! And let’s not forget that those crusty shepherds were terrified—scared out of their wits—at the sight of the angels!)

No, the love that entered the world at Christmas was a fierce love, a costly love. And it would be forty days after that first Christmas that old Simeon would draw attention to that truth, when Mary and Joseph brought their newborn son to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem. As he stared down on the little infant, Simeon’s words to Mary were bone-chilling: “This child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed, and a sword will pierce through your own soul also...” (Luke 2:34-35)

Simeon could not have been aware of it. But with the advantage of hindsight we know that what he was pointing to would ultimately lead to the cross. And looking back on it years later from the other side, the apostle John could write, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:10) If we want to catch a vision of the love of God in all its fullness, it is not to the manger that we must look, but past the manger, to Calvary, to the one who, in the Apostle Paul’s words, loved us and gave himself for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (Ephesians 5:2).

And so today you and I come together on this final Sunday in Advent, this Sunday of love. In a few minutes that fourth candle, the love candle, will be extinguished. But let us never lose sight of the fact that the love that you and I celebrate this Christmas season is a love that will never falter or fail. For we come together in the presence of the God who says to us, as he said to Jeremiah centuries ago, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”