“Beginnings Are Hard”
A sermon by Sid Burgess
for Edgewood PC, Birmingham, AL
2d Sunday of Advent, December 3, 2006
Text: Jeremiah 33:14-16
Today we begin a new church year. We start once again the annual retelling of our Lord’s life story. We will be reminded throughout the season of Advent-- that it was a very difficult beginning—hard times for the people of Israel, hard decisions for Mary and for Joseph, the hard journey to Bethlehem, “no room in the inn,” the terror unleashed by Herod, and the flight into Egypt as homeless refugees. Each and every Church year Advent comes before Christmas. Advent comes to remind the Church that Jesus, fully divine, experiences the hard beginning of everyone, fully human.
When you get right down to it, all beginnings are hard. Whether it’s a mother giving birth, a youth trying to establish his or her identity, a newly married couple trying to sort out tangled family relationships, or seniors timing their move into a retirement community, all beginnings are hard.
“All beginnings are hard,” writes Chaim Potok in his novel, IN THE BEGINNING.
All beginnings are hard. I can remember my mother murmuring those
words
while I lay in bed with a fever. ‘Children are often sick, darling.
That is the way it is with children. All beginnings are hard. You’ll
be all right soon.’
Some of us may have forgotten how hard it is to start something new. It may have been so long since we have tried anything new that we have forgotten just how hard beginnings can be. But—here at church—we have friends. We have sisters and brothers here in the community of faith who can remind us, who can help us remember.
We can turn to the children. They will tell us that beginnings are hard. Learning to read and write and calculate. Learning the skills of the game, the techniques of the dance, these things do not come easily. But the children also show us what a thrill it can be to encounter something entirely new, perhaps even unexpected, a surprise!
All beginnings are hard because they require letting go of the past. “Holding on, versus letting go”—This is one of the great challenges early childhood, and a struggle we continue for the rest of our lives. To learn to walk, the child must release the helping hand. To learn to navigate in the adult world, the youth must leave the security of home. In old age the journey is reversed—we must surrender some of our independence in order to protect our safety and well-being with interdependence. Such transitions, such beginnings are never, ever easy because they require letting go, turning lose of what once was but never again will be.
In the time of Jeremiah, our Hebrew ancestors were holding on to irrelevant religious practices and nationalistic pipe dreams. Though the great Temple had been destroyed many said, ‘Let just pretend it’s still there.’ Though the ‘best and the brightest’ had been exiled to Babylon, some said, ‘A a new king will solve all our problems.’ The reality of the situation, according Jeremiah is this:
Your hurt is incurable, your wound is grievous.
There is no one to uphold your cause,
no medicine for your wound, no healing for you (30:12-13).
Harsh words for a harsh reality. But, that’s what prophets do. They make us face what we would rather ignore. The prophet Jeremiah says the way forward it to face the facts-- and grieve our losses. For individuals in transition . . . .
Now that is an interesting category: “people in transition.” Let’s think for a minute about whom that might include: children who are growing; and youth who are maturing; seniors who are aging—all people in transition. Plus, younger families expanding, older families contracting; people who’ve lost a job or found a job— the newly married, the recently divorced, the widows and widowers; workers facing retirement; those confronting a disease or recovering from injury; those trying to break an addiction, to lose weight or —there is no shortage of people in transition.
And that means that we are all eligible to grieve our losses. Life as we know it—both the good and the bad— will never be the same. From this day forward, for everyone, life will never be the same. And sometimes, some days, that can really hurt. But—but, always the most important word in faith—but what hurts us, if we acknowledge it, can also heal us.
The temptation is to mask the pain, to ignore the loss. Cover it up with work or play or sleep, with food or alcohol or drugs. Deaden the pain with television or shopping or surfing the Internet. Jeremiah will have none of it: He advises us to grieve our losses, for only acknowledging our grief permits newness. Pretend it never happened, pretend the losses never occurred, and they become permanent, heavy burdens. The proverbial “elephant in the room” nobody wants to talk about. Grieve the losses openly, admit the hurts honestly, and see them slowly, quietly fade into the background, making room for God’s new creation.
All beginnings are hard because, then as now, there are many false prophets about in the land. Beginnings are made all the harder by the abundance of bogus mystics. They cry, "Peace, peace," when there is no peace. They treat the wounds of the people too lightly, and the wounds won’t heal. The false prophets jump on Jeremiah’s case. They say he’s too negative, too critical. They call him a crank, a crybaby, and finally a traitor. For those people, there can be no newness, because they are incapable of acknowledging the losses, and then . . .letting go. But for those who see the truth about themselves-- the hurts, the disappointments, even the failures--who enter into mourning over these losses, suddenly they are enabled to see God turning toward them.
To his false prophets and to ours, Jeremiah proclaims that it is God--and not us--who is about to do a new thing. “The days are surely coming, when I (the Lord) will make a new covenant” (with my people). In other words, God will have a new way of interacting within the restored family of humankind. Among Christians, this new covenant passage is perhaps the most well-known and misunderstood text in Jeremiah. The new covenant does not cancel God’s covenant with Judaism in favor of future Christians. Rather, when Jeremiah speaks of the new covenant, he is speaking of renewed relationship between God and Israel. And this is good news for us, because we are beneficiaries-- not replacements for--but beneficiaries of this renewed relationship. The renewed relationship with God for both Jews and Christians will be stronger than the old bond because God will inscribe divine instructions upon our hearts.
All beginnings are hard, but help is on the way. “The days are surely coming ... 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.”
The church has always seen the fulfillment of this hope in Jesus, the Messiah, the good shepherd, who gathers his sheep together by laying down his life for them. Just as God's own grieving makes it possible for Israel to hope, so the good shepherd gives us life by dying. That is the paradox of faith, the paradox of Advent. We, too, must die in order to live. This is an extraordinary, incomparable assurance for the dying. But it is also the ultimate Good News for us, the living. For here, at the beginning of Advent, the start of a new Christian year, we are invited, we are encouraged to let go— to surrender our “death grip” on the past, grieve our losses, and embrace the hope God gives us for “more than we have yet seen.”
“Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.”
Now to the One
who by the power at work within us
is able to do far more abundantly
than all we ask or imagine,
to God be the glory in the church
and in Christ Jesus
to all generations, forever and ever. Ephesians 3:20, 21