The Days Are Coming… Keeping Promises 

“The days are surely coming…when I will fulfill the promise I made…justice and righteousness in the land…” -  Jeremiah 33:14

Advent begins with this hope-filled promise.  It is from the mouth of the Lord.  Jeremiah recorded and voiced it 450 years before Jesus’ natal star. If nothing else it conveys that God’s people have been waiting and longing for ages.

I am impatient and growing more so.  I hang in there with church, and affirm MFSA especially, because, more than others, they hold out, lift up and work for “justice and righteousness in the land.”  After all, what reason is there for me to think that my time and my life should be other than the faithful, hopeful waiting of God’s people since Jeremiah – the ones who said to their contemporary skeptics, cynics and deniers, “You’ll see…the days are surely coming…”

A decade ago the self proclaimed evangelical community birthed a movement of men dubbed “Promise Keepers.”   The stadium rallies that turned out tee shirt-wearing Promise Keepers by the zillions were not holding up the same set of affirmations I would have selected.  But those men were being called, in a faith context, to make promises and keep them…for a lifetime.

I wished at the time that I had thought of that “Promise Keeper” title.  It is what I like to think I am.  It is what the Advent season brings to mind.  It is what the scriptures declare God is. It is what our times need – people who see beyond the moment, people who understand the power for good which promise-keeping is, people who keep promises as a way of maintaining partnership with the Holy.

So I wait, and read Jeremiah, and stifle my impatience with my church and my nation and this world, as well as with my personal tendency to give in and give up to what is.  One more day, a promise keeper I am. 

“The days are surely coming…”