April 14, 2019 - Palm Sunday -Jeremiah 5 - Unexpected Reversals

April 14, 2019 The smaller groups in our church community are inside our homes where we go deeper, build friendships, and walk out the Christian life with each other. HOME CHURCH GUIDE + “Breaking the Ice” question (group facilitator) + CHECK-INS: Introduce, check-in + CARE: Needs in the group + COMPASSION: What is the group planning? Are you inviting your neighbours to join in? + GROUP ANNOUNCEMENTS Church-wide, group-only + DIG IN: Discuss questions as a group + END AND HOMEWORK: Final questions, prayer huddles for personal requests. Consider breaking into small groups (huddles) of 2-4, by gender, if large enough. DISCUSSION questions: (R. Laha) Note: These are “big picture” questions, but this passage was very real to people in a desperate situation. If you can, think of desperate situations for people that would help you “hear” the text better. + What situations do you see as hopeless? Why? + The text implies God can and does change his mind. Is there other evidence in the Bible that support this claim? How do you feel about the idea? Is there something God cannot or will not change? + How do you understand God to be the initiator in creating new things, in his relationships with us, in the act of saving? + The prophet’s use of poetry should tell us something about the Holy Spirit using and inspiring art to communicate truth. Talk about the “play” of art and beauty and sports and how the Spirit might communicate through these? OVERVIEW OF THIS PART OF JEREMIAH + The Book of Consolation (30-33) + Four chapters are the pivotal centre of the whole book + Jeremiah 1-25 The old world order dismantled + Israel and Judah deserved total abandonment by God because of their rejection of Him and His past miracles. YET v.16 God does not give them totally to destruction by the powers. What does this tell us about God’s ultimate character and concerns? + Jeremiah 30-33 The new world order envisioned + This passage seems to indicate that God still has love not only for broken churches but also for the Jewish people. Christians have debated various interpretations of how Jesus modifies this. What do you think of God’s relationship with ethnic Israel? + The new world is not simply a renewal of the old, but a radical break from Prayer Requests: the old structures for fresh and bold arrangements. “The community that lives through the wreckage will no longer depend upon the temple and monarchic structures of authority as God’s primary vehicle of blessing. Those who survive the sword will enjoy alternative forms of worship, government, and community life” (Stulman, 262). Two-fold task 1:10 “to pluck up and to tear down, to build and to plant.” The “build and plant” is the focus of ch. 30-33. THREE TYPES OF PROMISE MATERIAL: 1. Jewishness was not destroyed by exile, but in Babylon developed an “intentional and intense” self-consciousness as a faithful community in exile. A community in waiting. A resiliency through exile is discovered and created. 2. Passages function as comfort, consolation, assurances and hope for exiles. God was not done with them. This was to give courage and energy. 3. These texts are concerned with and for the character of God. The character and resolve of God to have a people who witness to His person. God is granting an imagination to people that will subvert and destabilizing the absolute claims of the world around us, that He might bring forth new life in us and through us and beyond us. “These chapters bear witness to that which the empire dismisses as impossible. The community of this text is insistently urged not to trust in what the world calls possible, for that way leads to despair, conformity, anxiety, and finally death. This community trusts instead in the impossibilities which exist first on God’s lips”(269 Brueggemann). THROUGH THE TEXT: An Outline 1. Comfort, Restoration and New Covenant 30.1-31.40 a. Days of restoration are coming 30:1-3 b. Great trouble, greater deliverance, and glorious restoration for Jacob 30:4-11 c. Healing for Judah’s (incurable) wounds 30:12-17 d. Jacob’s miraculous restoration as the Lord’s covenantal people 30:18-31:1 Vv. 4-11 three units: 4-7 fear and unrest, 8-9 rescued, 10-11 poetic promise “fear not”. 4-7 fear and unrest. 8-9 Different kind of affirmation 10-11 a poetic promise. “Fear Not” 12-17 God Heals Judah’s Incurable Disease BUT/Therefore v. 16 v17 The nations start to hate them and fail to see that though punished or disciplined by God, they miss that Zion is still loved by God. Tough love does not mean “no love”. 18-24 Joy and Honour Restored vv.1-3: Preamble to the Book of Comfort/Consolation “The oddness of this lyrical discourse in the ancient as in the contemporary world is that it moves in and through and beyond the very power arrangements which seek to silence it. And wherever it moves, it transforms and rehabilitates. This poetry is a means whereby the God of the Jeremiah tradition does indeed “plant and build” out of the very ruins of betrayed covenant (Brueggemann, Jeremiah, 271).” Remember/Take Out: