With God there is Hope

Based on Jeremiah 31:31-34

This past Wednesday was St. Patrick’s Day. This day has become an excuse for people to drink an excessive amount of alcohol, wear green, and celebrate all things Irish. No Irish person in America back in the 19th century would have any idea how much Irish culture would be celebrated in this country. Back then, Irish people were fleeing Ireland which was being ravaged by the potato famine. For survival, they risked the trip across the Atlantic Ocean to come to America, a place where they hoped they would be able to carve out for themselves a better life.

I am sure that it was better for the Irish over here than it was over there. But that doesn’t mean it was a great life for Irish people. The bigotry they experienced from the English didn’t magically disappear on this side of the Atlantic. The Irish in America were widely discriminated against. I have seen a cartoon from the late 19th century of an Irish character, lanky, wearing a disheveled long coat and a large top hat, an extended nose, hunched over, and his skin tone was dark shaded. Not everyone in America in those days would classify Irish people as white. They were driven into ghettoes, prevented from anything other than menial labor, and stereotyped as drunks, crooks and disease ridden. It was a brutal existence.

But the Irish that came over to America kept carving out a space for themselves. They clung to the hope that one day their children and grandchildren would have a better life. I doubt if anyone told their kids that one day an Irish Catholic would be president, or that the Chicago River would be dyed green, or that there would be parades celebrating Irish culture all over the country and t-shirts that said, “Kiss Me, I’m Irish.” But there was hope that one day the Irish would claim their place in the American experiment. There was hope that future generations would thrive in this land of promise and possibility. Hope is what kept them going during those times of turmoil in 19th century America.

There was a time several years ago when Kim and I were facing financial ruin. We took advantage of access to easy credit, loaded up our credit cards, and then found ourselves struggling just to make the minimum payments. We seriously contemplated filing for bankruptcy. It was stressful. All that debt weighed very heavily on us. But we had hope that eventually we would claw our way out of this mountain of debt. We went through a debt consolidation process. We also got a surprising windfall when my mother’s sister passed away and left me and my sister a sizeable inheritance. As a result, we were able to get out of that deep hole we had dug for ourselves. We hoped that our finances would some day recover. That kept us making the sacrifices necessary to get to a better place.

This is the power of hope. In times of struggle and turmoil, when it seems everything is against you, the obstacles are huge, breaks are not coming your way, when despair is lurking to pull you down into the abyss. But hope…hope is what has the power to lift you up and pull you forward. Hope is what keeps us believing that one day things will be better.

Israel found themselves in a terrible situation. They were in desperate need for hope. Jerusalem was razed to the ground. The Temple, the center of Jewish religion, was demolished. Not one stone left on top of another. The best and brightest of Israel had been force marched to Babylon to live in exile. Everything was in shambles. God’s chosen people had lost the land God had given them. It appeared they were literally a God-forsaken people. It was a time of unspeakable loss.

Israel knew they were to blame. They knew that as a people they had failed in their loyalty to God. They didn’t faithfully keep God’s commandments. They worshipped other gods. They oppressed the widows and orphans in their midst. They knew that God was punishing them for their overall failure to be faithful and obedient to the God who had delivered their ancestors from slavery in Egypt.

As a people, they had been in this situation before. But this was bad. I mean they were decimated. Their future looked really grim. The question that had to have been on many of their minds was, “Has God forsaken us? Do we have a future?” I imagine that there was a real concern that a line had been crossed. Perhaps there was no return. Maybe God was finally through with them. They would all die off in Babylon. God would go choose another people who would be more faithful. It was just a matter of time before Israel would fade away into the dustbin of history.

So, Jeremiah went into action. He offered his people a word of hope, a promise that Israel does have a future. Jeremiah told the people that God has not given up on them. God is faithful. God’s love is steadfast. And this is what God will do at some point in the future. God will write the law, not on tablets of stone but on the tablet of the heart. In that day everyone will know God, not just in their heads but in their hearts. Israel will intuitively know what is the right thing to do. Their hearts will be in the right place. And God will forget the sin of Israel. It will be a fresh start. God will see to it that the people will know God and live the right way. Never again will the people be punished for their rebellious hearts because God will make their hearts right. God is bound and determined to have this people, Israel, be a people who will love, be faithful, and obedient to God’s commandments so that they can be a light to the nations, a vessel to bless the world.

Now, Jeremiah tells them this is what God will do in those days. That’s an open-ended time period. He didn’t give a specific time of when God would do this. And truthfully what Jeremiah said would happen still hasn’t come to pass. God hasn’t written the law on the heart of Israel. The future society that Jeremiah is describing is a vision of utopia, a perfect society that only exists in the imagination. It is aspirational.

Did Jeremiah give false hope? Remember that Jeremiah didn’t make this up. He is a prophet who speaks on God’s behalf. Who is to say that this prophecy won’t come true some day? Whether or when this God inspired, utopian vision ever becomes reality, maybe the more important point is that God will not give up on Israel. This is what Israel needed to hear in their time of turmoil, that all was not lost, that God still loved them and was committed to them. Israel needed to hear a word of hope so that they would not fall into the depths of despair. And God, through Jeremiah, gave them that word of hope. They did have a future. Things will get better. God will make a way for them.

Skipping ahead about 500 years, Paul was writing his letters to his churches. Some of those letters he wrote while sitting in a jail cell with chains wrapped around his legs. He wrote about faith, hope, and love. Faith and love are super important. But sometimes what we really need is hope, especially when times are tough and the future uncertain.

In life we sometimes find ourselves in terrible situations and wonder if there is any hope. All the options are bad. The goal you set for yourself appears to be way out of reach. As you lay awake in the middle of the night and run through your mind all the conceivable possibilities to get you out of the jam you’re in, nothing seems to work. The problem is so big, so much out of your hands, that there is nothing you can do to fix it. All appears hopeless.

Maybe there are times when we are in hopeless situations. Last spring, graduating seniors hoped to walk across the stage at their graduation or have fun at the senior prom. That didn’t happen. Maybe you had planned to take a cruise last summer. Didn’t happen. If you have a D in English and your only shot of getting an A is how well you do on a final exam…pretty hopeless. Toys R’Us discovered that in the era of online shopping, having huge big box stores filled with toys is not a good business model. If your favorite team in March Madness is down by 30 points with one minute to go in the game…that’s a hopeless situation.

But just because we find ourselves in hopeless situations does not mean there is no hope at all. God is known by many names. And one of those names for God is hope. God is a god of hope. As Paul wrote in Romans 15, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in faith so that you overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Hope is not determined by circumstances but is something that flows within us by the power of the Spirit. We can possess hope even in hopeless situations. With God there is always hope.

When Jeremiah gave to Israel that vision of hope, he didn’t tell them that everything would go back to the way things used to be. He didn’t say there would be a rebuilt Temple and a restored Jerusalem. He said that what God was up to was establishing a new covenant. Now in some ways the covenant is the same. God is the one who initiates it, like all the other covenants we have been reviewing these past few weeks. God is still committed to Israel. God still has commandments that God wants followed. But in other ways this covenant is different. The law will be written on their hearts. All their sins will be forgiven and forgotten. No one will have to teach them to know God because everyone will intuitively know God. God will still be their God. They will still be God’s people. But it will not be like it was. God is establishing something better. God is establishing greater possibilities for covenant faithfulness. This is where their hope rested, not in repeating the past but in the establishment of something different, something new, something better.

This is what hope is about. Hope is about trusting that things will be better some day. Being better means they won’t be the same. Things will be different. Not a copy of the past. Not the realization of a utopian fantasy. But things will be better. Somehow God is going to work it out, open up new possibilities that bring about better outcomes, life that is more flourishing, community that is more aligned with God’s desires. This is what hope is about, trusting that tomorrow will be better than today.

As we emerge from the pandemic, I am here to tell you that there is hope. God has been at work through this season, establishing new possibilities for a future that is better than the past. One big example is how we as a church share the gospel. Before the pandemic, if someone wanted to be engaged in worship with us and hear a message from God’s word, they would have to show up on Sunday morning in a building. But now, because many of our churches were closed for the sake of public health, churches were forced to take worship and the sermon to the digital space. All of a sudden, access to worship and the hearing of sermons blew wide open. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection could participate. And as churches are returning to in person worship, online worship is not going away. The potential to reach more people who for whatever reason would never go to a church building or simply could not worship on Sunday morning now have opportunities to be inspired by worship and grow in their understanding. Through the Facebook platform discipleship groups can be formed where people can share their thoughts and questions, where prayer requests can be made, where planning can happen for outreach events. Meeting platforms like Zoom allow people from across the country, even the world, to come together for worship, for education, or strategizing without the expense of travel. These modes of connection that came to the fore during this pandemic is generating new possibilities for bringing people together, sharing the gospel, and growth in discipleship. The barriers of distance and buildings are dissolving. The Spirit of God is at work. With God things can be better. We do have a future with hope. It will be different. Because it will be better.

This is our hope, that God never gives up on us. No matter what we go through in life, God never forsakes us. We don’t know how things will work out. We don’t know when things will return to normal, whatever that means. And I’m wondering if we want things to go back exactly to the way they were before the pandemic. But if we trust in God, trust that God is with us, then we have hope. And hope is not a small thing when everything around us is changing, things are falling apart and the losses pile up. Loss is part of the process of restoration, the bringing to pass of something better, of something closer to what God has desired all along.