Advent Hope in the Night Sky - Jeremiah 33:14-16

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. My family and I had the good fortune of spending the holiday at a relative’s cabin in the Ozarks. It’s not too far from Gilbert, but the dirt road to get there makes it feel pretty remote. As does the amount of land in between neighbors. The cabin is up on a hill, and it’s quiet enough that you can hear the waters of Tomahawk Creek making their way to the Buffalo down below. It is also lovely to be past tick season. But the most extraordinary thing about being there is the night sky. Thanksgiving night was clear and cold, and we sat around a campfire looking to the heavens in absolute awe. With a new moon, we could see the Milky Way. We did our best to name constellations and pointed out satellites. The young amateur astronomers in the group worked hard to find Jupiter in their telescopes, and once they did, we could see its moons that sailors have navigated by since the seventeenth century. It was an amazing evening.

I think everyone who sees a night sky like that becomes a theologian. Our usual sense of time and space radically expands, and we begin to contemplate our place in the universe. Seeing a sky like that puts human endeavors into perspective. It’s like zooming out for a moment. Whatever occupies us seems suddenly less pressing from the larger frame of God’s universe. Busyness feels almost laughable when framed by age of the stars. Joy has a place, but despair not as much. And looking up at the stars, the very worst of human activities, like wars and destruction, seem like utter foolishness. One can imagine the stars looking down on us, as we race run around, wondering why we make such a mess of things. When we see the night sky in all of its timeless splendor, human sin and finitude have a way of coming into sharper focus like tiny moons in a telescope.

That kind of zooming out is a way of understanding the season of Advent. This is a big picture season. Today is the beginning of that season and the church year, and while we are preparing for the birth of Jesus, we are also waiting for his coming again in power and great glory. We are waiting with hope for the arrival of a big picture future, in which God will have restored all things in a new creation. That’s why we hear Jesus in the Gospel of Luke today talking about the coming of the Son of Man. We are waiting on a future we can hardly bring into focus yet.

In its wisdom, the Church begins this day with an even older text from the prophet Jeremiah. About 600 years before the birth of Christ, he proclaimed these extraordinary words: “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.” The days are surely coming, says Jeremiah, when God will fulfill God’s promise of a new creation. Unlike the world we experience now, there will be peace and justice and righteousness and safety. What is broken will be mended. What has worn down will be restored. What is lost will be found. This is our hope as people of faith. Advent invites us to zoom out to see the big picture future which God has promised, and to rekindle our hope.

Jeremiah would not see those days in his lifetime. Also known as the weeping prophet, he wrote those words from prison in the aftermath of Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem. I think he experienced the world much like we do - knowing that the world is not as it could be or should be. And yet his hope was steadfast, even through his tears. N.T Wright has said that Jeremiah reminds him of Mary Magdalene in John’s Gospel, whom we find weeping outside of Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning. It is through her tears that she manages to see angels, and then Jesus himself, though she confuses him for the gardener. Somehow our tears and confusion are part of being able to see God’s new creation, begun in the resurrected Jesus but still a work in progress (N.T. Wright). That, too, is what the Advent perspective is all about, the already-but-not-yet time we find ourselves in. We see the mess of the world, and we have faith that God is doing a new thing. The days are surely coming. We have hope in God’s unfolding future.

In addition to the telescopes at the cabin, someone brought a camera with special lenses. He experimented with taking photos of the night sky using longer exposure times. The results were incredible. What we thought was a sky full of stars was much more crowded than our eyes could see. The camera caught so many points of light that the photos almost look like daytime. That sounds like an Advent perspective to me, that there is more than we can see. And then we brought that long exposure technology to a more human level. We grabbed a flashlight and made shapes and squiggles in light, captured by the lens. And because everyone who sees a night sky like that becomes a theologian, we started to write words in light, words like peace, joy, and hope. Hope was my favorite word in light, written against the night, capturing a perfect Advent moment.

Once we made our way inside for the night, there was a hard freeze. In the morning we woke up to a field of frost flowers on the tall grasses. There had been enough dew in the air for ice crystals to form into beautiful swirly creations. They felt like a reminder that God is indeed making this world into a new creation. That is the heart of Advent, the big picture view. It’s just as the ancient prophet promised: The days are surely coming, says the Lord.