Jeremiah 33: 14-15 and 1 Thessalonians 3: 10-12

The Verbs of Advent I

When we look at the Bible, we often see words we are not sure about, that trip us up and make us wonder what the text has to do with us. In our text these are nouns such as House (of) Israel and House  (of) Judah or  combination of an adjective and noun like” righteous Branch” or names like David.  Do we know enough about Israel, Judah and David? Then there is the pronoun “you” in Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians in Northern Greece.  Who are the you?  What is their background?  What is the make-up of their community? What are the forces that impacted them, what are the theological opinions they struggled with?

That’s why, friends, sometimes it is a good idea to take the verbs our of the text. Because, as adjectives and nouns and pronouns can be very specific of a place and time, verbs are universal.  We can all relate to verbs, except if they refer to an activity that people no longer engaged in.  So here are the verbs from our lectionary reading again:” are coming, fulfill, spring up, execute, pray, see, restore, direct, increase and abound.  I would now like to take them and cluster them.  The first set of verbs from the prophet Jeremiah talks about something or someone springing up and acting.  This cluster can be summarized in the verb promising.  Then we go to Thessalonians and there Paul says that they will be seeing and praying. Here the verb is attending, as in being present and mindful.  This is a continuing activity.   Then there is restoring and directing, increasing, and abounding.  These words come together in the verb transforming.  Let’s look at them a little more closely as we enter the season of Advent.

Friends, what role does “promising” play in your life?  To what degree are the promises in your life backed up by the act of attending, paying attention, being mindful of?  Finally, how is the promise that is being paid attention to leading to transformation?  For instance, if someone gets married,  the marriage is begun with a promise,  but that promise can only be kept if the two people attend to it and live it out.  Only when that is done can the loves of the people in the marriage be transformed.   The same goes for a contract you sign or a pledge you keep to a friend or an organization.  Promising, attending to and transforming. Good verbs for Advent, don’t you think?

Friends, let talk some recent movies.   In the movie The Martian Matt Damon is a biochemist who gets left behind on the red planet and must find a way to survive.  His co-workers who thought he was dead have a six month journey back to earth and as they are approaching home, they disobey orders and keep the unspoken promise they made to each other as a team years earlier.  Another six months in space. Knowing they will come back the man on Mars has to find a way to get to the meeting point and stay alive. Friends, the promise Jeremiah belts out is that God will come to earth as a descendant of David and that that descendant, Jesus, will act decisively.

In the movie Learning to Drive, a Sikh immigrant to New York City teaches a Manhattan literary critic whose husband has just left her for the writer she admires most how to drive.  He is taxi driver but moonlights as a driving instructor.  They become each other’s support system.  As her husband disappears, he begins an arranged marriage very badly.  They attend to each other.   They each chase a promise, she of an independent life alone, he of a life without loneliness.   It is because they attend to each other that transformation can take place.  Paul and his helpers attend to the people Saloniki.  They have been given the promise of the new church, but through their letters, through the longing to see their face, through prayer they support them and attend to them so transformation can take place.

Friends, in the movie about Steve Jobs by the same name the transformation that he brought to the world of computing is really only a footnote.  The real story is made up of the relationships,  “the connections and separations that make a  life,” as the cover of the novelist Kent Haruf’s  book Benediction says so beautifully.  This is what really matters.  What you do with the people around you?  The life of Steve Jobs was a story of incredible promise and a story of great attending, of obsessive attending to the details of the dream, but the personal transformation somehow remained an unclear, incomplete  story as told by the fim..   This is perhaps true of us too. Our story is incomplete.  We have the promise of the Bible and our job is to be mindful of it so faith will survive.  The transformation of our world is something that God will bring about, but it can only be done through human love.   Friends, may we make promises, may we attend to them and to the people we make promises to and may God transform the world through our compassion.