Jeremiah 33: 14-16 (links validated 11/4/24a)

One of the best Advent texts around is the children’s picture book, Waiting is not Easy by Mo Willems. The book tells the story of friends Gerald (an elephant) and his best friend, Piggie (a pig.) On the occasion, Piggie announces she has a surprise for her friend Gerald. He is excited. But then Piggie says they must wait for their surprise. Gerald goes through all the emotions one might expect for someone eagerly awaiting a surprise: resolve, impatience, deciding the wait, being angry that it seems they have waited too long. Until, at last, the sun sets, the sky becomes dark and Piggie points to the surprise they are to share: a beautiful glimpse of the stars. Consider using this in a children’s message or simply as part of one of your Advent worships service or sermons.

It has been nine years already since people on America’s East Coast experienced Superstorm Sandy. That year, in serious remarks he made at the otherwise silly national ritual of pardoning a turkey, President Obama mentioned a man he had met in a devastated area of New York. Houses everywhere around this man’s house had been smashed by water, trees, or both. This man’s own house had been riven by a falling 30-foot pine tree. But as clean-up crews broke down that tree to remove it, the man saved the top 7 feet of the tree and planted it upright in his front yard as a kind of pre-Christimas Christmas Tree—as a symbol of hope. He dug out a few surviving ornaments from his house. Soon neighbors added symbols of the storm itself—surgical masks, battered coffee cups, and the like. It was a sign of resilience, a sign of hope and of a desire to re-build in the midst of devastation...

There’s a church in the Netherlands that has been holding a worship service for the past 800 hours. Bethel Church in the Hague is trying to protect a family from being deported. Dutch law forbids the police from entering a place of worship while a service is happening. The family fled Armenia in 2010 and have not been granted asylum. They now reside in an apartment within the church. The church has been holding continuous worship since October 26. People from across the country come in to keep the service going around the clock. “There are already more than 450 different priests, pastors, deacons, elders from around the country, every denomination, wanting to be put on the rotation to participate in this service,” Axel Wicke, Bethel’s pastor, said in an interview on Thursday. “Even from abroad we’ve gotten help — there have been sermons held in English, French and German,” he said. “It’s quite moving to us. I often see a pastor handing over the service to another pastor of another denomination who they would ordinarily not have anything to do with, liturgically.”...

When my wife and I moved into our condo 20 years ago, there was a stand of tall verdant trees lining our backyard. Over the years, those trees have died a branch at a time, until there was nothing left but skeletal trunks devoid of all branches and leaves. The last trunk fell in a windstorm last month and now lies across the boundary line. There is no way a new branch will grow out of that dead piece of wood and become the basis of a whole new forest. That’s how dead Israel looked to the false prophets of Jeremiah’s day. Only a prophet in touch with the living God could come up with the impossible promise of our text—“I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line.”

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Anselm Kiefer chose a different mood. His two versions of Wurzel Jesse (Tree of Jesse) offer a visual that seems to speak more to the situation of Jeremiah than do the brightly-colored, often gilded medieval illustrations of this subject. Kiefer uses (above left) palm root fibers and photography on lead to create a composition of neutrals in tones that seem to speak more to the promise of the growth of a branch than actual growth of green leaves and twigs. The version on the right, created more than a decade later, includes several garments made of lead toward the top of the composition. The images do not seem to lend themselves to thoughts of growth...

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In the parable of The Giving Tree, a young boy would gather his favorite tree’s leaves on mild autumn afternoons. He fashioned them into a crown for his head and played king of the forest. The tree was fun to climb, and he loved to eat its delicious apples. The boy enjoyed swinging from the tree’s branches, and discovered a shady resting place beneath those same branches on hot summer days. As the boy became a teenager, he visited the tree less frequently. He did stop by once to carve his initials, along with those of his girlfriend, on the apple tree’s trunk, framing them with a heart. As the boy matured and his interests changed, he found that he needed some spending money. So, he picked the tree’s luscious apples and sold them at the farmers’ market in town. As an adult, he cut off many of the tree’s branches to provide lumber for his young family’s new home. During his middle years, he found himself with leisure time, and cut down the tree’s trunk to fashion a sailboat’s hull. Where a magnificent tree had once stood, spreading its leafy branches toward the heavens, all that remained was a stump. In his final years the boy, now an old man, returned to the remaining stump to sit and rest his weary bones and to reminisce of days gone by...

VBS takes an offering every day for a mission project each year, and this year the offering went to a scholarship fund for children whose parents are prisoners to attend camp. What a perfect connection for a week spent talking about forgiveness! The kids had been talking earlier in the week about Simon Peter, and how he denied even knowing Jesus, who had been his dear friend and teacher, right as Jesus was at his most vulnerable - arrested, on trial, about to be put to death. So I asked them to think about a story they knew - Frozen. How many of you have seen the movie Frozen with Anna and Elsa and the song you can never unlearn, “Let It Go”? At the climax of the movie, Anna is frozen, and a kiss from her beau does not, in fact, save her life as expected. It seems that hope is lost. And that’s where the movie ends, right? That’s what I asked the kids, and they groaned and yelled, “No, that’s not the end!” Of course, in the end, it is Anna’s sister Elsa who saves her with the true love of sisterhood, and they experience, naturally, a happily ever after. That worst part, when it seemed hope was gone, was not the end of the story. And Peter’s denial of Jesus, we learned, was not the end of the story...

("A while ago I participated in the funeral of a little boy who was not quite two years of age when he grew suddenly sick one day and then died two days later. I did not, on this occasion, have the difficult task of bringing the message at the funeral. That duty fell to a colleague of mine who was herself at the time the mother of young children...")

A newly-elected senator showed up at a Senate prayer meeting. The speaker, a senator from the other party, planned to tell of his recent bout with cancer and how it had deepened his faith. Upon seeing his new colleague, however, he changed the subject of his devotional talk. Instead, he told the group of how he had previously hated this new senator and had said derogatory things about her. "Will you forgive me?" he asked. She said she would, and expressed appreciation for his honest apology. Since then, they have worked together on legislation, including a bill to protect refugees fleeing sexual abuse...

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