Today's readings are from the book of Genesis, Jeremiah, and Matthew. Then they journeyed from Bethel, and when there was still some distance to go to Ephrath, Rachel began to give birth, and she suffered severe labor. When she was in severe labor, the midwife said to her, do not fear, for now you have another son. It came about as her soul was departing, for she died, that she named him Banyani. But his father called him Benjamin. So Rachel died and was buried on the way to Ephrath, that is Bethlehem. Jacob set up a pillar over her grave that is the pillar of Rachel's grave to this day, Jeremiah 31. Hear the word of the Lord, O nations, and declare in the coastlands afar off and say, he who scattered Israel will gather him and keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock. For the Lord has ransomed Jacob and redeemed him from the hand of him who was stronger than he. They will come and shout for joy on the height of Zion, and they will be radiant over the bounty of the Lord, over the grain and the new wine and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd, and their life will be like a watered garden, and they will never languish again. Then the Virgin will rejoice in the dance and the young men and the old together, for I will turn their mourning into joy and comfort them and give them joy for their sorrow. I will fill the soul of the priests with abundance and my people will be satisfied with my goodness, declares the Lord. Thus says the Lord, a voice is heard in Rama. lamentation, and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children because they are no more. Thus says the Lord, restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded, declares the Lord, and they will return from the land of the enemy. There is hope for your future, declares the Lord, and your children will return to their own territory. Matthew 2 now when they had gone behold an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said get up and take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you for Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him. So Joseph got up and took the child and his mother while it was still night and left for Egypt. He remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet out of Egypt. I called my son. Then when Herod saw that he had been tricked by the Magi, he became very enraged. and sent and slew all the male children who were in Bethlehem and all its vicinity from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the Magi. Then what had been spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled. A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping in great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and she refused to be comforted because they were no more. The word of the Lord. This is the fourth Sunday in Advent. Notice there's only one candle left to be lit, which is the Christ candle on Christmas Eve. And this year's Advent series has us looking at five selected passages from the book of Genesis. Hope from the beginning of the Bible. Five texts that distinctly point to the time of God's incarnation. The time when God would make his advent by the womb of a virgin. Today's passage from the book of Genesis, Genesis 35, isn't so much a straight out prediction of the advent of God in Christ. It's more a description of the backdrop into which God would step when he would be born of a virgin. And this is a kind of description, a kind of prototype experience that we'll all face. And when we face it, We need someone to help us face it. We need a reference point, and we find that reference point in the person of Rachel. The experience that I have in mind is the experience of grief, especially deep, crushing, extreme grief. And the older you get, we all want to live to ripe old ages, but we do realize, I take it, that the older you get, the more of your loved ones you see die. And the older we get, the more possibility that we're going to experience this kind of crushing grief. It may be a grief so deep and so profound that in its aftermath you feel like life is meaningless and you may find yourself saying things that have never come out of your mouth before. Like what's the use or I just can't go on anymore or I give up or you know, my favorite word, whatever, nothing means anything anymore. Or I don't even want to live in a world where these kinds of things could happen. Personally, whenever I think of grief like this, I can't help thinking of a book that I read a couple of years ago by Jerry Sitzer. It's called A Grace Disguised. And the author tells a story that he was driving in a minivan. He had taken his children on a field trip into the Nevada desert. He was driving in a minivan with his wife and his mother and their four children. And a drunk driver came into their lane from the other lane and went head on into their minivan. And in that wreck, his wife, his mother, and two of their four children were killed. And he then reflects on this in a long reflection written by a Christian man, a seminary professor, again, is taking his children on a field trip. And he reflects on loss and dealing with grief and injustice. Later, the drunk driver was taken to court and got off on a technicality and it added just another layer of loss to the whole episode. The subtitle of the book is how the soul grows through loss. And I definitely recommend the book. One of the ways I benefited from it was Sitzer's insistence that it's futile to compare my grief to your grief. And we always do that. We think, who suffered more, you or I? And he says the comparisons of loss are really useless because all loss really, really hurts. And yet when you read the book, you do wonder, about Jerry Sitzer's loss and you do kind of compare it to your loss and you, you wonder what that kind of grief would do to me if I endured what he had endured. Rachel was an infertile wife and a suffering of its own. And she desperately wanted to bear children by the husband who was crazy in love with her. And then after many years of painful infertility in a culture that rewarded infertility with shame, after trying for years, as we say, this couple finally has a child and the child is born Joseph great news. And then. immediately after she became pregnant again great news like her infertility comes to an end and then she carries the child a term great news and while she's on a long journey she goes into labor turns out to be a severe labor and she dies while giving birth never saw her sons grow up in the land that God had promised them it's one of those things that just inspires us to say that is just completely Meaningless she'd been promised children in this promised land and never gets to see them grow up. Kind of reminded me of the movie about Schmidt. I don't know if you saw that movie. Starts off with a camera on a clock looking at the second hand. Jack Nicholson is waiting to retire, I think from a insurance firm or big insurance company, I think in Omaha, as I remember. And he's watching the second hand of the clock approach five o'clock. And then he gets up and picks up his briefcase for the last time. And finally, retirement has come. and they have the party for him with the gold watch. And then he goes home and they buy an RV, a recreational vehicle. And he and his wife plan to set out and go across the country like they've always hoped and planned. And retirement has finally come and they have breakfast in the RV the next day. And then they're planning to leave very soon. And he goes in the house and he hears her vacuuming and he calls her name. And there she is succumbed to a fatal heart attack and right on the edge of retirement, right on the edge of everything happening that this family wanted to happen. And his wife dies. And for Rachel waiting for this moment, which she could see, but not really have. She recognizes while she's in labor, that something is happening. She recognizes that she's dying and she expresses her despair and the absurdity of this moment by naming the child son of sorrow. And then she dies and it's so absurd. It's such a senseless, meaningless happening that later writers would seize on her and would turn her into a kind of a patron saint of mourners, like the ultimate prototype of a griever. And she becomes a kind of symbol for sorrow. Today, I want to look at Rachel, the queen of sorrow, and two other times in the Bible where she's used as a symbol for grief. So three sorrow stories, and then the second point, one imperative, a command word, and how to do it, how to actually carry it out. Three sorrow stories and one command or imperative and how to carry it out. After Rachel expresses her bitter resignation, you know, it's like her dying act of rage, but she realizes how senseless this moment is. And she sort of shakes her fist at fate or God or at the child. And she straps him with the name Ben Yanni, son of sorrow. It's like, like the boy named Sue, you know, It's the worst thing you could ever do to give your child this name. I mean, he's going to be picked on in the playground. I talked about it a few weeks ago and the father sees what's going on. And even though Jacob is grieved, he snatches the birth certificate as it were, and scratches out Ben Yanni and turns it into Ben Yamin, not son of sorrow, but son of my right hand. Then Rachel dies and she is buried near Bethlehem, which of course is very much on our mind at this time of the year. Story number two is a chapter from Jeremiah chapter 31, and it is written to people in exile. Exile was God's way of reclaiming his people. This is of course, many years after Rachel lived. This is when the people of Israel had become a great nation. There was a monarchy. This is after David, after Solomon, the nation splits in two in a kind of civil war. The Northern kingdom goes into exile by the power of Assyria. And the southern kingdom goes into exile by Babylon. And exile was God's way of reclaiming his peoples, like God using the paddles, taking out the defibrillator to shock them back into life. It's God's way of reclaiming his people after centuries of spiritual decline. after the people of Israel had totally forgotten that they were a special people. They had completely conformed to the lives of their pagan neighbors who carried out all kinds of superstitious rituals, even performed child sacrifice, and Israel imitated them in this. And so after many years of warning, God brings in the big, bad, cruel armies of the Babylonians, and they make war against the Israelites, and Judea falls. Jerusalem is destroyed and the people are carried away as prisoners of war and they're forced to march from Jerusalem all the way to Iraq all the way to Babylon and there they become the property of Nebuchadnezzar the Great and in that horrible situation where people are displaced from their own home and carried away as slaves Jeremiah is given these words to speak to the people it's a description of of a new arrangement, a new covenant between God and his people. And the words in this whole chapter, we only included a little bit of chapter 31 today, but read it later. It's just amazing how lavish and extravagant these promises are about God's plans for their future. And even though there's been full-scale domestic meltdown and their national life has completely collapsed, Jeremiah in this chapter is saying what you see all around you is not the end and there's going to be a new beginning a new covenant you fail to keep the covenant of the law and So God will make a new covenant with you God himself Will keep his own law. God will not only do his part of the arrangement, but God will also do your part of the arrangement and he will obey for us. And then he will, as it were, reach right into our hearts and he will take away that famous passage, you know, take away the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And he will write his law on your hearts so that what you have to do will be what you want to do. And in the middle reading today, all these over-the-top promises are just stacked one on top of another. God will gather you. God will tenderly shepherd you. God will ransom you. God will fill you with joy. God will make your faces shine with joy. There will be new wine and oil. like not even what you need, but also what you want. Luxury items. Your inner lives will be like a watered garden. You will never languish again. All depression, all loneliness, all inner psychic scatteredness will evaporate. And instead there'll be rejoicing, there'll be dancing, there'll be comfort. Your clergymen will be consistent. What a blessing that would be, huh? They will have deep, rich experience with God to share with the people. And you will all, says Jeremiah, you will all be deeply satisfied in God. And then right in the middle of all these crazy, huge promises, it's like the Sesame Street song, you know? One of these things just doesn't belong. Crazy promises. And then right in the middle of it, there's this dismal, very sad reminder that whatever Jeremiah is promising is definitely not now. And that we are not living in this place of abundance and joy, but just the opposite. Because now there's this inexpressible pain and sorrow and grief so devastating that we don't even know how to put it. We don't even know how to voice a kind of inner sense of loss and grief that is this deep. We need help expressing our sorrow. We call on the ghost of Rachel. And Rachel, the queen of sorrow, is called upon, as it were. A voice is heard in Rama, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children because they are no more. Ramah. Ramah was a town about six miles to the north of Jerusalem. And after Jerusalem fell, Ramah became a kind of depot. They would herd out large groups of people and in Ramah they would divide them all up, men here, women here. and like they did at the concentration camps. And they would split and separate families from one another in order to demoralize and weaken the people. And then they would rip them out of the land of promise and they would force march them all the way to Babylon. And Rama was about the same distance north of Jerusalem that Bethlehem was to the south of Jerusalem. Bethlehem where Rachel died and that's why the writer thinks evidently of Rachel in Bethlehem and where Jesus Christ would be born and where the slaughter of the innocents would take place. And Jeremiah's prophecy, this very dismal speck of darkness in the midst of all these bright promises, pictures Rachel, the queen of sorrow, like a ghost, as it were, looking on from the grave and still moaning and weeping for her children with these words of indescribable sorrow, sorrow that never seems to go away. And then the third story. Third story is the Christmas story. And it takes place probably a year or maybe even two years after the actual birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem. And if you read Luke's account, Luke focuses primarily on Mary, but Matthew focuses primarily on Joseph. And it turns out that Mary's fiance, Joseph, is Joseph the Dreamer, which we've met, right? Joseph the Dreamer. We met a Joseph the Dreamer from the book of Genesis, and this is like a second, like a new iteration of Joseph the dreamer. And this Joseph, not from Genesis, but from Matthew, the fiance of Mary, is warned in four dreams. We pick up on the second of the four dreams. Now when the Magi had gone, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, get up, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you for Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him. And Joseph, the dreamer does exactly what the dream says. He gets up, takes his little family down to Egypt, just like the other Joseph. Here's a dream and goes to Egypt and They stay there until God calls him out of Egypt in a kind of new exodus. I will call my son out of Egypt. Jesus Christ is the new Israel, the embodiment, the fulfillment of Israel, and he will undergo a new exodus out of Egypt. And then when those astronomers, those astrologers, wise men, Magi from the East, maybe from Persia, when they realized that Herod, the horrible The insecure paranoid king has tried to enlist them to find this child so that he'll put the child to death and they realize that they're being used as part of his nefarious plan. They decide not to go back through Jerusalem and to tell him the whereabouts of the child. They do not want to cooperate. They want to spare the holy child of Bethlehem and they go back to Persia. by a detour. And when Herod finds out that they didn't cooperate with his plan and that he's been tricked by them, he's been duped, he gets murderously angry and he dispatches his soldiers, his thugs to Bethlehem, place where Rachel was buried, by the way, sends them to Bethlehem. and says, I'm not going to stand for anyone to be called king of the Jews on my watch. I'm the only king of the Jews. And if the wise men said the king of the Jews is born in Bethlehem and we don't know who he is, we're just going to kill them all. And so he sends his thugs and they kill every male child under the age of two, they all must go. And that's what they did. And the scholars, figure probably 15 to 40 boys were torn from the arms of their parents and killed. It's a kind of grief that I can't even imagine. I mean, there's like a pounding on the door and the door gets kicked in and the thugs come in and they take the mother's baby and they right there go out and kill the child. It's inexpressible. How do you even put something like that into words? In fact, they can't. So Matthew calls again on the queen of sorrow who haunts Bethlehem because she's buried there. The ghost of Rachel, the weeping prophet, as he described her, Rachel weeping for her children because they are not. The ghost of Rachel still cries. She cries because the world is a place where babies are torn from their mother's arms. Still a place where babies die and mothers die in childbirth. The world is not the way it's supposed to be. And the despair of Rachel, who with her dying breath named her child, that bitter name, son of sorrow, like she's looking for someone to punish, her despair is something that we all feel at certain times in our lives. You may be feeling it acutely lately. You may read the newspapers and learn about some senseless act of violence. We had the recent killing of the little boy in the Nail salon and then again a stray bullet struck a child in Miami gardens this last week. A senseless act of violence. And by the way, when is any act of violence not a senseless act of violence? Or you may feel the sense of despair when you hear me tell the story about Jerry Sitzer Why would God allow that to happen? One of God's people, uh, by all accounts, a good man, a seminary professor taking his kids on a field trip. Why would God allow that to happen? And then no justice to come out of that. The drunk driver walks away, Scott free, or we may learn, you know, if we're informed about the condition of the world, we may learn something about the child soldiers. Have you heard about the child soldiers? In many of the nations in Africa, where there's civil war, children are taken out of these camps, out of these villages, and 10-year-old boys, 12-year-old boys are taught how to use an AK-47 machine gun, and they're turned into just little war machines. What would that do to a child's psyche for the rest of his life? They call them the lost boys. Or little girls who are kidnapped or taken away, sold into the sex trade. and human trafficking. I can't think of anything more evil or sinister than that. And we live in a world where that kind of thing happens. Or as you think about your own life, you may be aware of some grief, some horrible abuse in your own life, in your own family. And as you think about that, you may hear the ghost of Rachel weeping. And what do we do with that kind of loss and pain? Maybe this is the time of the year that you feel it most acutely when everyone is supposed to be, you know, holly jolly. And maybe you even feel guilty for hurting because maybe you tell yourself I've had a lot of pains, but I'm not a slave in some sweatshop in Calcutta. How dare I feel sorry for myself at a moment like this? What do these sorrow stories tell us about what to do with the weeping of the world and our own weeping? Well, there's one imperative, there's one command, there's one directive. In all that long reading that I just read, there's only one place where it tells you what to do. It's in the middle reading at verse 16 and it says this, restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears. And you can read that and think, really? Like that's all we get. Cause it sounds to me, TJ, you, you know, you're the, you're the pastor here. Tell me, does it say what I think it says? It sounds like Jeremiah is saying, quit crying. That's really what he's saying. Is that all we get? I mean, is that the Bible's answer to all the weeping mothers and the ghost of Rachel? Are we just to kind of, you know, get John Wayne and man up. and quit our crying and our sniveling? And are we just to hear, hey, it could be a lot worse. Well, thankfully, it's not what it's saying at all. If you look at it in the whole context, the whole focus of this central text is, is God saying to us, whatever the pain of the world, whatever anyone may be enduring now, and from whatever the source, whether it's a self inflicted kind of pain, like The world hurting itself through dictators and unjust officials like Herod or whether it's what we call acts of nature, natural occurrences like women dying in childbirth or birth defects or typhoons. Or whether it's senseless acts of violence or whether in your life it's some act of personal abuse or personal failure, a self-inflicted grief. This passage is saying in light of all these things, the one reason why we can keep ourselves from despair in the present and in light of the painful past, the one reason is because of the future. And this text from Jeremiah is screaming to us. God is screaming to us. Look what I have in store for those who enter into relationship with me. There's all these descriptions of deep human flourishing and satisfaction and deepest joy and fulfillment. And God is saying, let the thought of what is coming in the future, overwhelm the past and the present, because God is saying in the end, you'll see that I am the Lord of the past, the present and the future. I'm the Lord of time. See, this is not a call where it says, restrain your eyes from weeping. It's not a call to be stoic or hard or to be in denial about the pain of this world and our own pain. It's saying, God is saying, I see the incredible loss and grief of this world. And I see your impulse in the face of it to give up and to give in and to be lost in despair as you live in a world where these unthinkable things not only happen, but they seem to be common. But I will, in the end, I will overwhelm the loss and I will make even your worst losses seem what the Apostle Paul called light and momentary. In the meantime, I want to empower you says God to speak to your loss and to speak to your weeping and to speak to Rachel's ghost and tell her one is coming who will redeem us. Another son will come out of Bethlehem where Rachel is buried. And this imperative is actually a two part imperative. It started in verse one of the middle reading where it says here the word of the Lord and then all these promises and then the second part of the imperative because of these promises restrain your voice from weeping and we know that he has come. You know sometimes when you endure really really like about Schmidt kind of grief or Rachel kind of grief Sometimes you may get into your mind that God must be like a cruel sadistic little boy who sits outside of a fish tank and pokes at the fish so that the fish gets scared or worse that God is a cruel boy who holds an ant farm, you know an ant farm and That God goes at your sketch on the ant farm and just we get something built and then God destroys it but that would be a terrible terrible hope depleting mistake because the picture of God we get here in Jesus Christ is a God who came into the ant farm a God who came into our tragic world and became an exile for us he comes right in Comes right into the world the way we come into the world, through the trauma, through the labor of a birth. The word is made flesh. And he became our Benyani, the son of sorrow. And through his obedient life, sacrificial death, and victorious resurrection, he has now become our Benyamin. the son of the right hand, the son who sits in the place of ultimate authority, the son who has the right to open up the seals and to unleash God's future on the world. He is the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. born to obey in our place, born to die, born to absorb our sins and our sorrows. And He is born to voice the deepest human anguish that even Rachel herself couldn't voice when He, on the cross, takes all of our questions and all of our issues and all of our rage And he condenses them down to one quotation from the cross, one question that he screams out for all of us. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He is forsaken so we could be received, so that we could know a future that's so overwhelmingly and unimaginably rich that the thought of it can actually buoy us, can actually support us when we begin to sink in the waters of grief and loss. You know, I thought a lot about that, again, God the Lord over the past, present, and future. God, the Lord of time. I thought a lot about that verse from Ephesians chapter five, which says, redeem the time because the days are evil. And I've heard Westerners use that verse to kind of accuse those who come from other cultures who aren't so punctual as we are. And who are more interested in relationship than they are in punctuality. And I've heard people say, you know, these people need to learn that verse. They need to redeem the time. They need to be punctual. Or I've heard it used in the service of efficiency. Maybe it's not, though, a call to be more efficient, better machines who produce more goods and services. Maybe redeem the time because the days are evil is a call to live in hope because God is the Lord of time. That despite what we see in a world that oftentimes looks absurd and crushing loss, maybe redeem the time because the days are evil means to buy back the time, our past and our present. Because of the capital that Jesus Christ puts in our hand, we can say, while I weep over my losses and the losses of others, and blessed are those who mourn, but I will not be consumed by despair. I will live in hope and I will seek, even now, the joy and the fullness that are laid up for me. I will seek for the fruit of the covenant keeper to show up in my life. And I will anticipate in my own life that transformation that he promised, that he will give me a new heart and write his law on it so that what I have to do, little by little, becomes what I want to do. An obedience that comes not from fear, but from a sense of fullness and anticipation of the future that God has already sealed. Let's pray together. Father in heaven, if the Christian gospel is not true, if this future is only in our dreams, then the Bible says we are of all people most deceived and of all people most to be pitied. And I'm the worst among us because I've been doing the deceiving. But because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have seen the future begun to break in. And because our Benyani, the man of sorrow, became the Benyamin, the resurrected man on your right hand, because the new creation has begun to dawn, we are bolstered in our hope. And we pray, Father, that we would be messengers of hope, that we would not grieve as those who have no hope, but that we would joyfully anticipate, even in the midst of real loss, real sorrow, real pain, that we would joyfully anticipate a future that will literally overwhelm even our deepest pains. Father, please instill that hope in us, and may we be, this Christmas season and beyond, may we be the people of hope to a world that is desperately in need of hope. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.