Hope and a Future

Hope and a Future

Jeremiah 29:10-14

September 15, 2019 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Video Opener

Sermon Study Guide

I have learned that, in my life as a United Methodist pastor that, as soon as I arrive at a new church, people start asking how long I’m going to stay. I remember the first time this reality really hit me. It was pretty early in my second appointment, within the first few months, and we were having a planning meeting for some future things coming up. Suddenly, in the discussion, I heard these words: “Well, what happens when you’re gone and all of this falls apart?” I remember soon after we arrived here—almost four and a half years ago, believe it or not—and people started asking, “Well, how long are you going to stay here in Terre Haute?” My standard answer, as it has been everywhere we have been appointed, is this: I plan to stay here the rest of my life. Now, God and the Bishop might have other ideas, but my plan is to stay, and my history is that I have been at appointments for a long time. So apparently I’m hard to get rid of!

It’s also a part of life for United Methodist pastors that, in every place we are sent, there comes a moment when that place becomes “home.” Rarely do I know or can I anticipate the exact moment, but it always happens, just a short time into the new location when I start talking about “home.” The new place becomes comfortable, known, familiar and we feel settled. That’s sort of the way I relate to the exiles Jeremiah is writing to in the chapter we read this morning. Unlike a United Methodist pastor, however, at least most of the time, the Hebrews had no choice. They were forcibly taken away from their homeland and resettled in a foreign land. Even as that was happening, however, there were self-proclaimed prophets wandering among them, saying, “Don’t get too comfortable, we’ll be going home soon! It won’t be long! God won’t leave us alone here!” In other words, these so-called prophets were saying what the people wanted to hear, what they wanted to believe. But they weren’t saying the truth. So Jeremiah speaks against the self-appointed prophets and tells the people, “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters…Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you will prosper” (29:5-7). It’s going to be a long time—seventy years, in fact, Jeremiah says (29:10). So make this place your home. Hearing that message had to be hard for the people whose identity in this place was “conquered people.” And so Jeremiah also assures them that, despite how it looks, God still had a plan for them. And God’s plan was good. It was to give them “hope and a future” (29:11).

This morning, we’re going to wrap up our series called, “I Love My Church,” and we’ve been looking at six characteristics of a church you can love. I hope you remember the five we’ve talked about so far: community, prayer, witness, service, and love. This morning, we come to the last, but certainly not the least, word, and that is “vision.” While this text and this promise was most certainly given to the exiles in Babylon in the sixth century B.C., I believe there is also a word here for us this morning.

The first thing we need to understand about this text is how horrible exile was. The Hebrew people had, for centuries, had their own nation, their own kingdom. It had been torn in two, and in fact the northern nation had been destroyed a few decades before. But the southern kingdom believed God would protect Jerusalem. That is, until Babylon came rushing in. Now, Jerusalem and its surroundings lay in ruin. Their nation had been defeated, and standard practice in that part of the world at that time is that you would uproot the inhabitants and resettle them somewhere else. Babylon liked to “mix it up” by moving people around. So, let’s say Indiana had been conquered. You might move the Hoosiers to the far off land of California, you’d relocate the Californians to Mississippi, and move those southerners to Indiana. The idea was to keep the people off balance so that they wouldn’t try to rebel again. In a time like ours where people move around a lot, that might not sound so bad, but you also have to remember how important the land was to the people of God. Long ago, God had promised this land to his people. He had told Abraham, his friend and the patriarch of the whole Jewish people, that this land would belong to his descendants forever. He reiterated that promise to others like Moses and David. This land was not just their home; it was their inheritance, given to them by none other than Almighty God. To have it forcibly taken away from them, to be denied the right to live there, to basically lose their inheritance—everything that defined who they were up to that point—was a horrible situation to be in. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Believing the false prophets that exile might not last long made it easier to take, and then along comes Jeremiah, who basically says this exile is actually from God and they had better get used to it.

And yet God’s people have always been people of exile. We are citizens of another kingdom and our homeland is far away. As the old gospel song says, “This world is not my home, I’m only passin’ through.” Or, as the book of Hebrews says, people of faith “were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them” (Hebrews 11:16). John Bunyan’s classic book The Pilgrim’s Progress calls our true home the “Celestial City,” and it is the place where Christian, the main character, is determined to arrive, no matter what obstacles come his way. It is his true home. We have always been people of exile; we are not home yet, and though like those exiles in Jeremiah’s time, we’re called to settle down, build, plant, and make our life here, this is still not our home. We are people of exile.

We get so comfortable in the culture we live in that sometimes we don’t even notice that we are in exile. We find ourselves looking just like everyone around us, and we can forget who we actually are: strangers in a strange land. But then, every once in a while, we remember. When we lose friends because of a belief we have or a stance we take for our faith, we remember we are exiles. When we face challenges to our faith, people who say that a God like “that” could not be loving, we remember we are exiles. When we are told that we are out of step with the times or “on the wrong side of history,” we remember that we are exiles. When an NFL quarterback is ridiculed because he encouraged students to take their Bibles to school with them, when calls come for him to be shunned or even fired because of the organizations he supports, we remember we are exiles. And still, those things are all minor compared to what some of our brothers and sisters are going through in other parts of the world. When we see them suffering, even killed, because of their faith in Jesus, we remember and they remember we are all exiles. This world is not our home; this place is not as familiar as we like to pretend it is. it’s not as friendly as we think it should be.

We are exiles, strangers in a strange land, but we are never, have never been and will never be out of God’s sight. That’s a big part of the message Jeremiah has for the exiles. In a world where it was believed that the “god” of the people was tied to a particular geographical location, Jeremiah tells the people that their God, the God of the universe, is not tied down. He is with them, even in exile—even in the exile to which he sent them! Yes, this exile is part of their punishment, but even in the punishment, God has not abandoned them. He’s like the father who tells the child to go to their room and think about what they have done, then comes and sits with them through the time of their punishment. God through Jeremiah has this message for the people in Babylon: “I know the plans I have for you…plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (29:11).

This is the vision God wants the people in exile to have. A vision is simply an image of a desired or preferred future, and even though exile is going to last seventy years, God wants the people to keep looking toward this promise, this vision he has placed in front of them. He plans to prosper them instead of harming them (and they already would have thought exile was God’s way of harming them). And he plans to give them hope and a future. So what does that look like? What would these original exiles have understood when they heard these words? The word the NIV translates as “prosper” is the word shalom (Dearman, NIV Application Commentary: Jeremiah/Lamentations, pg. 262), which you may have heard before. Jews to this day use it as a greeting and a farewell. Most often it is translated “peace,” but it doesn’t refer just to an absence of war or conflict. It would probably better be translated as “well-being.” When you greet someone with shalom, you wish them contentment, health, safety, the best life has to offer. You wish them God’s blessings. Shalom is a greeting, and it’s a prayer. So in this vision for the people, God plans for them to have a good life which is not about wealth or material things (that’s what we think prosperity is). Rather, it’s about being whole, living and enjoying life the way God intended it to be lived. “I have plans for you, plans that you will have a good life,” God says.

The second half of this vision for the people is a sort of compound desire which most translations divide into two words: “hope and a future.” Literally, God says he wishes “an end and a hope” or maybe more accurately “a hopeful end” (cf. Feinberg, “Jeremiah,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 6, pg. 555) for his people. We would tend to translate that as “they all lived happily ever after,” but that’s not what the prophet is saying. This promise, this vision, is intended to remind the people that God has not forgotten them, that he is still with them, even here in exile. We might say—especially here in exile. God tells them, “You are not alone,” and even though seventy years seems like a long time (although any seventy-year-old will tell you how quickly the years fly by)—God will walk with them through it all and will be there still when they get to the end. Whether that end is the end of exile and a return to their land, or if it’s the end of their life, God will be there with them. Exile is not the end. Exile is never the end. There is always hope. We might say it this way: “The worst thing is never the last thing.”

I need to take a brief detour here because this past week, the headlines read, “A pastor dies by suicide.” Pastor Jarrid Wilson of Harvest Christian Fellowship in California, took his own life on Suicide Prevention Day. Just the day before he had officiated a funeral for a woman who had taken her own life, and throughout his life and ministry he had been honest about his struggle with depression while being an advocate for mental health. No one knows or can know what happened in Pastor Wilson’s heart and mind last Tuesday that caused him to end his life, but his life and death remind us just how easy it is to slide from hope to hopelessness. I’m going to tell you, contrary to some parts of the Christian tradition, that I don’t believe and I don’t find anywhere in Scripture where it says that suicide is the unforgivable sin. I don’t believe in a God who judges us for eternity based on our weakest moment. But every time I read a headline like that, I’m reminded that we need to be people of hope. This is part of why what I was saying last Sunday is so important. We can come here to worship and put on a brave face and no one may even suspect that we’re struggling inside. But you can’t do that as well in a small group where people know you and love you and see right through you. That’s why this whole series has been so important: we need to be in community where they love us, where we can receive hope through others—stretcher bearers—when we don’t have the strength to find it ourselves. We need real people who can do for us what social media and online relationships can’t. And we need to always be people of hope, reminding those around us that the worst thing is never the last thing. Let me just say one more thing on this: if you’re struggling in this area, you don’t have to do it alone. Reach out to someone; you may think no one cares but I guarantee you they do. We do. Look around; this is your community and even if they don’t know you, they already love you. We want you (and more importantly, God wants you) to have hope and a future.

Two more notes on Jeremiah’s word. First, Jeremiah does not promise a “quick fix” in his time or ours. He calls us to “take the long view” (Goldingay, Jeremiah for Everyone, pg. 145). From now to the end of exile, it might take seventy years. And the really difficult realization is that some of the folks who heard Jeremiah’s word never saw the end of exile. Sometimes we don’t see the hope we’ve believed in come to pass. And still we hope. We are people of the long view. Abraham never saw his people become “a great nation” like God had promised. Moses, as we’ll talk about in a few weeks, did not get to walk the sands of the Promised Land. Jeremiah himself did not see the end of exile; he was sort of kidnapped and taken to Egypt. The early church longed to see Jesus’ return, but they died before it happened, as have countless believers throughout history. Here’s my point: even though hope may not be fulfilled when and where and how we want it to, we remain people of hope. Jeremiah calls us to take the long view. There is no quick fix for the struggles of this world; there is trust and holding on to God’s unchanging hand.

It’s also important to remember that Jeremiah’s word is first and foremost directed to the community (not the individual). As one scholar puts it, “My individual hope comes from being a part of the project with God’s people that God is committed to completing, even if I see little progress in my time” (Goldingay 146). Here, we come full circle to community. “Hope and a future” is promised to the community of God’s people. My hope comes as I participate with God’s people on God’s mission. And what is that mission? It’s the same for every body of believers, though we may say it differently. Around here, we state our mission this way: “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” I hope, if you’ve been here for very long, you’ve heard that often enough it just rolls right off your tongue. We make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Our vision is to see our community transformed by the love of Jesus to a place where hope abounds, faith spreads and love is shared. We might say it this way: we want people in Terre Haute and Vigo County to love God, love others and love life. And we believe when people are fully following Jesus, all of those things will happen.

So what does it take for us to live by such a vision? What would it look like for Mount Pleasant Church to be mission and vision-driven? First of all, notice that this promise, this vision, is contingent upon the people’s response. God doesn’t say, “No matter what, in seventy years you’ll go home.” Instead, he says the “hope and a future” will come when the people “seek me with all your heart” (29:13). The promises have a prerequisite (cf. Feinberg 555). And so, the first thing we need to be able to move toward our own “hope and a future” is to be seeking God with all our heart, with everything we are. In fact, in the verse just before that, verse 12, God calls the people to do that through prayer. “You will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you” (29:12). This is a deeper call to prayer than what we usually experience. It’s more than presenting our requests and our needs to God. Certainly, there is Biblical precedent for doing that—Paul said, “In every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6)—but that’s not all prayer is meant to be. First and foremost, prayer is about getting to know God. It’s about conversation with the creator of the universe. How do you get to know another person? You talk to them, you listen, you share life. That’s the kind of prayer God through Jeremiah is envisioning here. It’s about far more than saying, “God, please heal me” or “God, I need a good parking spot today.” It’s a prayer that comes from somewhere deep inside us and says, “God, I want to know you. I want you to be enough.” It’s about not just singing the songs in our services, but allowing the words and the music to focus you and connect you with the one who loves you more than you can imagine. To be people with “hope and a future” asks more of us spiritually than we are usually willing to give. It’s being connected to God on more than a “superficial” level, a prayer life that is about more than just asking for things. We’re continuing to work on creating that kind of culture here at Mount Pleasant; every Sunday, 15 minutes before each service, there is a group praying in the Upper Room, seeking the heart of God. We’re also encouraging you to not only share a prayer request on the cards here at the front, but also to take one and pray for someone else during the week. A culture of prayer will get us beyond ourselves and closer to becoming the people God wants us to be. So the first thing we need to be vision-driven is to know God.

Now, I’m going to get very practical and maybe step on a few toes as well this morning, but the reality is that pursuing this vision in today’s world takes money. Let me be very transparent today. Marshall Boyle, our Leadership Council chair, is going to share more information in a couple of weeks, but we’ve had to cut back this year. As you can read in the bulletin each week, we’re behind budget and not able to pay everything we need to pay. We don’t want to cut out the vital ministries that make Mount Pleasant who it is, but as our finance folks remind us, there are only so many places where we can make cuts. Duke Energy and Spectrum seem to want their bills paid in full on time! As I said, I’m trying to be honest and transparent here this morning, but if we don’t see some sort of increased giving, there are hard choices ahead of us as to who we want to be as a church. We have no other way to move forward but through the support of God’s people. Paul says God loves a cheerful giver (cf. 2 Corinthians 9:7), and while we often focus on the “cheerful” part, we can’t overlook the reality that we’re also called to be givers. If we believe in the message, if we want to see this vision, this “hope and a future,” come to pass, it’s going to take all of us, together, supporting that vision. So, that’s enough on that for today. As I said, Marshall will be sharing some in a couple of weeks, and I’ll be sharing a few weeks after that about a biblical model for vision-driven giving. It’s uncomfortable, I know, at least as much (maybe more) for me as for you, but it’s a reality for the vision-driven church.

Then, the third thing being vision-driven requires is priority—a commitment to point people toward Jesus no matter what. Everything we do, everything we say, everything we post online—all that and more we run through the filter of whether it will point people toward Jesus or away from him. Our mission is not to make church members or Mount Pleasant aficionados. It’s to make disciples of who? Jesus Christ. Everything we do and everything we are should point toward him. I may have told this story before, but honestly I only have so many stories to tell, so you’ll just have to have patience with me! Several years ago, I was in the grocery store on my day off and, honestly, I wasn’t feeling very pastoral. I was in a rather crabby mood, to be honest, and so of course I got one of those check-out people who wanted to talk and comment on everything I was purchasing. Why do some folks feel the need to do that? Anyway, I had kind of tuned it all out when I heard her say, “I really like your sweatshirt, by the way.” I looked down, not remembering what I was wearing, and saw that my shirt said, “Have you seen Jesus my Lord?” And I realized I wasn’t representing Jesus very well at that moment; she was likely not seeing Jesus my Lord through me that day. So I mumbled, “Thanks,” and left the store, humbled and reminded that in everything, I must represent Jesus and point people to him. That’s not saying we can’t have bad days; I do, my family will attest to that. But it does mean that the only Jesus some people may ever encounter is the Jesus they see in you. And if we’re going to be vision-driven, then every moment of every day is a moment when we are pointing people toward him. In every moment, we are a community who is making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. That is our priority.

So we have six words, six characteristics of the church, six reasons to love the church. Why don’t we say these six words together: community, prayer, witness, service, love and vision. I hope now, at the end of these six weeks, that you can see how these six words really are intertwined, and in many ways all part of one big thing: I love my church because it helps me know Jesus better. I love my church because here I encounter the grace of God. I love my church because here I am strengthened to be able to share that grace with people around me, the everyday folks I meet out there. Maybe most of all, I love my church because here I am reminded that no matter how bad things are—say it with me—the worst thing is never the last thing. God always has a hope and a future for me, for us. Friends, I love my church, and I tell you this often: God has done some amazing things through the life of this church. This church has a strong history. We may be facing some challenges right now, but I continue to believe that the best days are yet ahead for Mount Pleasant. God is not done with us yet. I believe that with all my heart, and for that reason and so many others, I love my church. Let’s pray.