In today’s reading, we enter the world of the prophet Jeremiah on a note of great hopefulness and anticipation.  “The days are surely coming, says the Lord” – and we are given a vision of a brighter future.  This is a good text to read on the first Sunday of Advent.

But the problem with reading this text is that it’s a little like reading the end of a novel first, to make sure that everything comes out alright in the end.  We miss the first part of the story, the difficult part of the story that makes these words of hope all the more meaningful.  So let’s back up a little, and hear these words from early on in Jeremiah’s book.

Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, for my people have committed two evils:  they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water  (Jeremiah 2:12-13, NRSV).

It’s only by understanding this grief and indignation that we’re able to appreciate the sense of hope that Jeremiah has at the end of the book.  Jeremiah lived in a time when the people of Israel and Judah had strayed from the covenant that God had made with them when they were brought out of slavery in Egypt.  Although God had told them how to live with one another, they had failed to build a community of justice and peace, a community that showed compassion to the lowly and the weak.  The kings of Israel had failed to be faithful to God.  And, Jeremiah tells them, exile will be the result.  If they cannot live in the promised land as God intended them to live, then they will not live there at all.  What was worse, according to Jeremiah, was that the people couldn’t even acknowledge what was happening around them.  Things were falling apart, and exile was at hand, and Jeremiah couldn’t even get the people to admit that there was a problem.

We’ll return to this text from Jeremiah, but first let’s jump ahead a few thousand years to one of the great American writers of the 20^th century, Flannery O’Connor.  She wrote a short story entitled “Revelation.”  We are not told exactly when or where the story takes place, but it’s clearly set somewhere in the rural south, likely in the 1940’s or 1950’s.  The central character is a white woman named Mrs. Turpin.  Now, Mrs. Turpin is not rich, but she has enough money that she feels entitled to make judgments about those whom she considers to be “white trash.”  When the story opens, Mrs. Turpin is sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office.  She proceeds to make all kinds of judgments about the other people sitting around her.  She comments about those whom she deems to be ugly, or trashy, or lazy.  Indeed there is only one other woman in the room who meets with her approval – not surprisingly, it’s a woman who looks quite a bit like Mrs. Turpin.  This woman’s bigotry clouds every aspect of her life, including her religious life.  She sits in that doctor’s office, and thanks Jesus that he didn’t make her poor, or indecent, or ugly, or black.  She counts it a blessing that she is not one of “them.” 

Like the people of Israel, who lived at the expense of others but were blind to their own cruelty and injustice, Mrs. Turpin has no idea that she is anything but a good, church-going, upstanding member of the community.  But all that changes in the middle of the story.  About the time that Mrs. Turpin’s comments have become utterly intolerable, a teenage girl who has been sitting in the waiting room gets fed up.  She takes the hard-cover book that she has been reading, and she hurls that book at Mrs. Turpin’s head, striking her just above the eye, breaking the skin and leaving a nasty bruise.  She looks at Mrs. Turpin and tells here, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”[1]  This girl’s actions – although immensely satisfying to the reader – were clearly rude, and inexcusable.  And yet, as so often happens in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, this inexcusable action provides an opportunity for change. 

In thinking about Mrs. Turpin, and the ways that she regarded other people, I’m struck by how easy it is to think well of ourselves at the expense of others.  I rather suspect that this is something that we all have done, at one point or another.  We see others as bad, in order to make ourselves feel good.  When we do this, we’re unable to welcome the stranger on their own terms.  We see other people as the people that we want them to be, and not as the people that God created them to be.

Jeremiah’s people had disregarded others, which is why they could continue to treat others with such injustice and unrighteousness.  And, as Jeremiah had predicted, they eventually found themselves exiled in Babylon, their homeland of Jerusalem destroyed.  We may not be able to relate to political exile, but there are so many ways in which we are estranged from the lives that we should be living.  Like the people of Israel, we are separated from many of God’s blessings because we do not live as the people that God called us to be.  We shut ourselves off from the grace that God promises by separating ourselves form others, or by denying the blessings that God has given us.

Living apart form God’s blessings – living in a spiritual sort of exile, if you will – is a painful experience.  And it is in the midst of this sort of painfulness that we stumble into this season of Advent, and these words of hope from Jeremiah.  Having reflected on the painfulness of exile, hear these words again:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.  In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.  And this is the name by which it will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness”  (Jeremiah 33:14-16, NRSV).

Jeremiah gave these words to the people once they were in exile.  Before the destruction of Jerusalem, the people were never able to admit their failure to be who God wanted them to be.  But once they found themselves in exile, they were given the words of hope that they surely must have needed.  This is the good news for us in today’s text: though we are often far away from where God wants us to be, God is still with us, and God promises us that better things are possible. 

This text expresses the fierce hope that God’s reign comes not only beyond this life, beyond this world, but also within our world, within our history.  This righteous Branch, the one who has been anointed by God, comes in human form into a human world.  This is the hope of ancient Israel, and the Christian hope of Advent as well. 

After Mrs. Turpin is hit in the head with a book and called a wart hog, things begin to change for her.  She goes home from the doctor’s office, and tries to return to her normal routines.  But she is haunted by her experience.  Why was she, a good person, treated so poorly?  There were plenty of people in that waiting room who deserved such treatment more than she, or so she thought.  Why had this humiliation come to her?

Later that night, she was walking around outside her house.  As she watched the sun set over the little farm that she and her husband owned, she had a vision.  Here is that vision, as described in the end of the story “Revelation:”

…A visionary light settled in her eyes.  She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.  Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.  There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.  And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and [her husband], had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.  She leaned forward to observe them closer.  They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior.  They alone were on key.  Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.  She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead.  In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.

            At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house.  In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.[2]

Mrs. Turpin is given a new vision.  It’s a hopeful vision – after all, even she is being welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven, even with all of her bigotry.  But it’s a challenging vision, because she is forced to see that God is active in the lives of others in ways that she hadn’t previously imagined.  She is forced to see that these people whom she had disregarded were not disregarded by God.  Rowan Williams suggests that when we see others for who they are, we leave the suffocating world of self-concern and competition, and we create some breathing space – room for living lives of grace and compassion. 

I wonder if Jeremiah senses that his own people have been living in the suffocating world of selfishness, faithlessness, and self-deception.  Just as Mrs. Turpin had blinded herself to her own sinfulness, the people of Israel just couldn’t see that they’d forsaken God’s living water.  I suspect that Jeremiah longed for his people to leave their unjust, self-serving, suffocating world, and come into the breathing space of God’s justice, and God’s mercy.  This is why he gives them words of hope – they need to know that it is possible to live differently.

When Jeremiah gives the people these words of hope, he pushes them to imagine a world, that is different than the world they know.  He pushes them to open their minds in a way that will allow for a new possibility to come in.  He challenges them to imagine that God will be a part of their world, and that exile is not the end of the story.  These words from Jeremiah tell us to be on the lookout for the one who will lead us in the ways of justice and righteousness. 

In the Christian tradition, we believe that it is Jesus who is this leader of whom Jeremiah speaks.  As Christians, we believe that God’s rule on earth began or was expressed in an new way in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.  Of course, we know that this reign is not complete; watching the evening news will tell you that.  And yet, the church believes that Jesus teaches us and leads us and restores us in a way that begins to bring us out of exile.  Jesus gives us a glimpse of how changing our relationships with other people might help us to experience and participate in the Kingdom of God. 

Jesus was born in a stable – surrounded by animals, by humble shepherds, by parents who couldn’t find decent shelter, by wise men who were not part of Israel – and in all of this we see a God who moves beyond our expectations.  God becomes a bit of a stranger to us when he comes as a vulnerable, homeless infant.  And, yet, we can begin to imagine – that is, we begin to open ourselves to the possibility – that God could be with us in a child. 

The people of Israel learned to disregard one another, and so they could treat one another unjustly.  This is why Jeremiah challenges them.  Mrs. Turpin’s bigotry blinds her to God’s love for all people, but a new vision of the Kingdom gives her a chance at a new start.  And in the coming of Jesus, we are challenged to see God incarnate in our world, and to treat every person in a way that reflects our faith that God is already present in their lives.

Advent is a time to wait, but it is not a time for passive waiting.  It is, rather, a time to prepare, as one might prepare for a guest.  It is a time to imagine God incarnate in our world – for it is only then that we can treat others with the justice and compassion that God requires of us.  It is only then that we are able to move from exile toward home, a home where even our virtues are burned away, and we are able to say with Jeremiah: “the Lord is our righteousness.”