Jerusalem Presbyterian Church

One of my pet peeves is a question asked in the negative. “Are we not going to…?  Did we not…?”  When seeking or giving information, I prefer simple declarative sentences all the way!  Sometimes a question can have so many negatives that I have to go back to my seventh grade math and count them, then remember that an odd number of negatives is still negative, whereas an even number of negatives makes a thing a positive.  Give me a question I can answer either “yes, no, or maybe” and I’m a happy camper.

I tend to think of myself as a pragmatist—that is neither too positive nor too negative, but a practical person who weighs the evidence and comes to a logical conclusion most of the time.  Once I was having the glass-half-full, glass-half-empty discussion with a couple of people and one of the people said, “An engineer looks at the glass and says that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”  I countered with “The minister looks at the glass and says, “I’ve got water.  Who’s thirsty?”  The engineer got a very confused look on his face when he heard that.  The third person in the conversation, who had listened patiently up until this point turned to the engineer and said, “Please don’t ask her to elaborate.  She’ll talk about Jesus for the rest of the day.  It’ll be ‘Jesus this’ and ‘Jesus that’. I tell you, it will be unbearable!”

The risk with being practical, pragmatic and logical most of the time is that it is easy to miss the twist, the surprise, and the gotcha.  As the world becomes more pragmatic, and the transfer of information becomes the hottest commodity, the little hidden gems harder to find.  I read this text from Jeremiah a month ago and dismissed it as just another one of God’s rants against a people who had disobeyed and turned away from Yahweh.  The Old Testament is full of those, you know.  The prophets are pretty consistently reminding the people of God’s intention to ‘kick fannies and take names’.

That particular reading of the Hebrew Scriptures is so common that it is easy to miss the little word “yet” in verse 27.  Hear it again: For thus says the LORD: The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.  Up until that little word yet, all we have heard from the prophet in this chapter is the hot wind of judgement against a people who are stupid, and only good at evil.  The promise before verse 27 is a formerly fruitful land, laid to waste, a desert where there once were cities.  It’s not a pretty picture, but for anybody who spends any time reading the Old Testament it is not utterly unfamiliar.

And yet…the yet changes everything.  So quickly that you can gloss right over it if you aren’t paying attention, God sticks a promise in there—the promise of redemption.  It would have been even harder for the people hearing this for the first time to catch it, and we have a definite advantage.  We read the Hebrew Scriptures with Christian eyes and brains and hearts.  For us, it really is ‘Jesus this’ and ‘Jesus that’.

I don’t imagine there is any one of us who doesn’t need a little “yet” once in a while.  I’m not talking about the cockeyed optimism that believes that God really truly wants our sports team to win.  That is kind of like using—or attempting vainly to use— God’s providence for our own purposes.  I’m also not talking about the kind of desperate logic that brings a person who is needy to spend the family’s last ten dollars on lottery tickets as the way to get out of crushing debt or grinding poverty.  God does not play Powerball with our lives. Nor is God a puppet master, just pulling the strings for God’s own amusement, no matter how tempted we are to think of the Creator that way.

The yet I’m talking about is the tiniest glimmer of hope that cannot be extinguished.  A friend of mine lives in Houston, which was lying in the path of hurricane Humberto this week. Remembering what happened in recent years with the devastation of these powerful storms, and having lived in the hurricane prone gulf region for many years, my friend and her family sprung into action: securing the lawn furniture, bringing in the potted plants and making sure that their emergency provisions were readily available.  As it turned out, the storm veered east, and made landfall near the Louisiana-Texas border.  On the day the storm was expected, the weather in Houston was sunny and slightly cooler.  My friend remarked, ”At least now I know where all my flashlights and lanterns are, and they all have fresh batteries in them.” 

It might be easy to think that they “yet” in this situation is the fact that God turned the storm away from Houston and landed it instead in the yards of their eastern neighbors.  But what if the “yet” is really the fresh batteries?  What if the God of yet is the One who provides the glimmer of light to tiny but so strong that the darkest forces cannot overcome it?

For thus says the LORD: The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.

Those who were hearing this “yet” for the first time were full aware that they were a remnant of what once had been God’s faithful and mighty people.  Written during a tumultuous time, when “nations”  were being overrun,  and whole populations of communities were exiled to Babylonia, it was  a chaotic existence for those left behind. Without the temple to make them secure, it became easier for the ones hearing this prophecy to have turned their backs on God, and to worship other gods.  It is this unfaithfulness that has turned God’s heart.  And yet… it has not turned it completely.   I wonder if they were able to hear the “yet” in Jeremiah’s prophecy?  Sometimes it is nearly impossible to hear or see or taste or feel the yet.

I’ve been thinking his week about all the times that the “yet” was so hard to find, both in my life and in the lives of others.  Six years ago today—September 16, 2001—my family and I walked to church as we had for the previous three years.  I had just ended my internship at the church to which we were walking.  It was my first Sunday not being up in the chancel.  Ever since that Tuesday morning I had been alternately bereft and frightened at what had happened in my country.  I was sick—heartsick and soulsick—at seeing the images of the silver planes against the bright blue September sky, then the ball of bright orange flames, then the smoke black as soot, then the ordinary citizens of Manhattan, running down the streets and avenues, covered in grey ash.    It seemed as if the media outlets kept playing the tape over and over in the hopes that one time the image would change, and that the tragedy wouldn’t have happened.   But that particular hope was not to be our “yet”.

This was my first (or perhaps second) Sunday in about fifteen months to sleep in, but I instinctively went to church.  I couldn’t imagine not being there.  As we walked into the narthex of the building it was clear to me that others had had the same impulse that I’d had.  The sanctuary, normally about one-third to half- full on a typical Sunday morning, was packed.  Some of the faces were familiar to me, as I had looked out at them during my many months leading worship, and had seen them beside me in the pews for the 2 years prior to that.  But many of the faces were of people I had never seen.

The texts that day were the same ones we hear this morning.  I must admit, that in the tremulous uncertainly of that week, the talk of a hot wind of, destruction, of quaking and shaking and desolation a city seemed unnecessarily vivid, and I found myself wishing for a kinder, gentler text.  A nice psalm of lament, perhaps.  But that is not where my friend decided to go that week—no, he stuck with Jeremiah.

I pulled out a copy of that sermon in order to study for today.  I e-mailed my friend to let him know that I was pondering this text and those words this week.  He reminded me of a quote from another friend of his, ”We need only believe what we have always believed.”   Thus the title for his sermon became: ”What We Have Always Believed.”¹

The yet of the gospel, beloved brothers and sisters, is that tragedy and illness and accidents, and acts of evil, and poverty and war, and violence and even death do not have the last word.  The “yet” is that tiny flickering spark in our souls that propels us to church just days after an unthinkable tragedy; it is Jesus-this and Jesus-that in a world where such obsession with incarnation/transformation/salvation hold no social or political sway.  It believes what we have always believed even when we have considered the facts.  It is not “pie in the sky in the sweet by and by” naivete, it is living in the world where evil exists and bad people do bad things and terrible accidents happen, and hoping, looking, praying for the “yet”.  It is having fresh batteries—and reaching for them—even when the storm is headed directly at you.

The God of yet stands in the dust of a city laid to ruin, weeping at the desolation and promising restoration.  The God of yet stands in the hospital, an invisible but crucial support for loved ones facing terrible decisions.  The God of yet is here each Lord’s Day, bidden or unbidden, for those who believe, or those who used to believe, or those who want to believe.

Thanks be to God!