Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost: October 19, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings - Jeremiah 31:27-34 | Psalm 119:97-104 | 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 | Luke 18:1-8

The days are surely coming, says the Lord. 

               We hear these words repeated throughout our reading from Jeremiah, this morning. For many of us, I suspect that the promised coming days and new covenant bring to mind a particularly Christian reading of this passage. We think about Jesus, about the Christian scriptures, about the Church. In doing so, we tend to lose the connection between the promises proclaimed in this passage and the experience of those to whom these promises were first uttered. In order to understand the “days that are coming,” we need to first understand the days in which these promises were made.

                Jeremiah’s prophecy was given during the time of exile. Israel had been divided between the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Those in the south had watched the destruction of their northern siblings at the hands of the Assyrians and now they faced destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. Jerusalem was laid waste, and the religious, political, and social elite faced execution or exile, decimating the people of the land. Those left behind were considered unimportant or unworthy of assimilating into Babylonian territory. The land itself, the crops and the animals, were destroyed; homes, businesses, and livelihoods were plundered of all that held value. Those with authority or skill who weren’t executed were exiled and forced into Babylonian colonies, stripped of their sense of national identity and forced to live and work among their captors. In the chapters that precede our reading today, Jeremiah explains with a sharp tongue why this has all happened: the destruction of Judah was God’s judgment against the sin of injustice.

                The total devastation of Jeremiah’s context is utterly foreign to many of us today. Though we might know and share experiences of exclusion, the destruction of life and land and identity that accompany exile are not ones we can claim, at least not in its totality. And so, we must be cautious in our interpretation of such passages as we have before us today. We mustn’t be too quick to see in the consolation offered by Jeremiah the promises of the New Testament because this would leave the prophecy without a context and without application to its original hearers, thereby leaving those promises empty. At the heart of Jeremiah’s consolation is a promise of God’s faithfulness even as God’s people experience what they interpreted as God’s judgment. The people are given hope in a hopeless situation: that which has been destroyed will be rebuilt; that which has been devastated will be replanted. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when the People will be remade.

                This is a prophecy of renewal, a promise that God intends to reset the relationship between God and God’s people. It will be a time of new beginning, a time in which God’s law will be engraved upon the heart of God’s people, enabling them to live more faithfully according to the covenant God made with them. And in this time of new beginning, God offers the exiled community a promise desperately needed to fan the flame of hope – their sins would be forgiven, they would be re-created, they would be embraced once again.

                When we lose sight of the original circumstances and context into which Jeremiah spoke, it becomes easy to take the promises we heard in our reading in ways unintended. In worse case scenarios, these words become the basis for supersessionism, for the belief that the Church has replaced Israel as God’s chosen people. This notion has haunted the Church through millennia, undergirding antisemitism and violence against the Jewish people. We must reject any interpretation of this passage that lends itself to such harmful ideologies. But this doesn’t leave this passage without relevance for us today. Quite to the contrary, when we see the promises given in this passage within the context of exile, we are better equipped to see how these promises are given to us as well because at the heart of it all is not really something new at all. Rather, at the heart of this passage is a promise the transcends circumstance without obliterating its connection to the live experiences of those who receive it. And the part of this promise that transcends circumstance is God’s steadfast faithfulness. God is the one who does and who will uphold the covenant that God makes with God’s people.

                 While we may not share the history of ancient Israel and Judah, we can find resonances in their story. We may not know the experience of loss and grief that comes from imperial destruction, but we know the weight of injustice. Much of what is happening in our world, in our country, right now, leaves many of us feeling beleaguered, weary, and wary. We see the sin of the world crashing through our streets, bombing innocent communities, starving perceived enemies. We know the wounds of collective trauma and the labor that it takes to break the cycles of violence and harm. We know what it is like to wonder if we’ve been forgotten, if God has turned away from us and left us without the help we need to endure. And in this knowing, God invites us today to hear once more the promise of coming days, the promise of renewed relationship and restoration.

                And this invitation draws us into a new way of being, a way of being in the world that is oriented to the faithful God who establishes us as God’s people, who became incarnate in Jesus Christ and showed us what love is and how to embody it. Like the persistent widow in our Gospel story this morning, we can be persistent in our pursuit of justice because we are given the promises and hope of the coming days first spoken of by Jeremiah. Our own faithfulness in these dark and dreary times is fueled not by grit or determination but by the faithfulness of God in Christ. We give voice to this truth every time we renew our baptismal covenant when we name our reliance on God’s help to all that we promise. And at the heart of all this is an invitation to relationship. It is not enough to simply learn about God, to listen to nice things about Jesus. God wants to be your God. God wants to be our God and for us to be God’s people. The promises spoken by Jeremiah are ones that underscore God’s desire to be in relationship with us, for us to know God even as we are known. To trust that God is with us, that God is guiding us, that God has not left us to face the world alone. Amen.