This homily was delivered by this blogger on Sunday, September 29, 2019 at Christ Episcopal Church in Yankton, South Dakota.
If
they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced is some
one should rise from the dead.” Luke 16:
31
+In the Name of our loving God+
For
the past several Sundays we have been reading selections from the Book of
Jeremiah. It would do us well to spend a
little time getting to know him better because his prophecies are relevant in
every age and seem particularly relevant in our own.
To
understand the Book of Jeremiah, one has to understand what led God to call him
to be a prophet. In particular, it is
important to understand the time of King Manasseh[1] who,
by worldly standards, might be considered the most successful king of Judah,
reigning some fifty-five years in what would be considered a relatively
peaceful and prosperous time in Judah’s history.
In
the Hebrew Scripture, however, Manasseh is vilified as being the most corrupt king
of Judah , who promoted the worship of the Canaanite Baals, the goddess Asherah,
and the god Molech; a god who required human sacrifice in the form of throwing
living children into the fiery belly of Molech’s idol.
The
Kingdom of Judah stood at the crossroad of powerful empires; Egypt to the south
and Assyria
and Babylonia to the north. Keeping the
Kingdom of Judah intact required forming alliances with other kingdoms in the
area which led kings, like Manasseh to adopt or permit the religious practices
of these Canaanite kingdoms that became popular with the inhabitants of Judah,
forsaking the God of Abraham who their ancestors were in a covenantal relationship
with.[2]
As
a result, Jeremiah was compelled by God to deliver a very troubling message to
the kings of Judah and the people of Jerusalem about the imminent destruction
of Jerusalem by the Babylonians who would take a large portion of its
inhabitants back to Babylonia; a captivity which would last for seventy years.
I
think of Jeremiah as “the reluctant prophet” – a person burdened with a message
he did not want to deliver but had no choice but to deliver it.
If
you want to know what it feels like to be a prophet, study Jeremiah. For example, in Jeremiah 4, he says, ‘My
anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain!
Oh, the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly, I cannot keep silent,
for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war!”[3] In Jeremiah 20 he says, “For the word of the
Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, ‘I will not mention him (the Lord),
or speak any more in his name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire
shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”[4]
The
Book of Jeremiah is also a study in the proclivity of us humans to hold on to
our concretized, ideological beliefs no matter what reality is starring us in
the face. Studying Jeremiah taught me
that prophesy basically boils down to seeing thing for what they are and
stating the ignored obvious; especially, to those who are in positions of
authority and power.
To
add to Jeremiahs’ troubles is the fact there were other prophet living in
Jerusalem at the time who told its kings and those in authority what they
wanted to hear. While Jeremiah was
saying, “The city will be laid to waste, your people killed; your inhabitants
and the king taken captive by the Babylonians,” they were saying, “Jeremiah is
a liar. Peace will reign.” Which is easier to believe, a group of people
who tell you peace is around the corner or a person who says you’re going to
war and will lose that war and will be taken captive?
There
is good news in Jeremiah, but it is not the type of good news the people at the
time wanted or were willing to hear.
Jeremiah said that their captivity would come to an end; that they would
return home as renewed people of God. In
fact, the religion we know as Judaism today was created during the Babylonian
Captivity; that much of the Hebrew Scripture, what we call the Old Testament,
was written during that time and in the years following their captivity.
It
is hard to listen to those voices who deliver uncomfortable messages about our
behavior and the effect it is having on our world, our nation, and ourselves
even as we are experiencing the truth of those messages. It is hard for any of us to override, in our
minds, what we want to believe as truth, even when faced with undeniable facts
that challenge its veracity. It is so much easier to listen to those who tell
us what we want to hear; especially, if their message is, “There’s nothing
wrong. Everything is fine. No need to
worry.”
We
attempt to mitigate our anxieties over what is happening today by referencing
the past, saying “Things like this has happened before. We’ll get through it. You think this is bad? You should have lived at such and such time.” There is truth and fact in making such
statement, but there is little comfort in them and no incentive to address
current difficulties; to turn things around and cause us to repent of our
contributions to what is wrong with the world we live in.
This
is even more pressing in a democracy; in a democratic nation like ours where
there is no king to blame, where what is done by its elected leaders is a
reflection of and on its electorate.
This is the reason why some Episcopal churches, during the confession of
Sins, confess the sins of our nation; the sins committed on our behalf through
the actions or the inactions by the leaders we elected.
Jeremiah
was never killed as other prophets were, but he was publicly humiliated and
beat up, placed in stocks by the chief priest of the Temple; threatened with
death by those in high places and, at one point, lowered into a cistern
becoming stuck in the deep, thick mud at its base; rendering him motionless and
left to die only to be saved by an Ethiopian eunuch at the king’s request.
As
in the days of Jeremiah; as in every age, there are prophets telling us
differing things, and the question becomes, “Who should we pay attention to?
If
the story of Jeremiah offers any indication who to listen to, it is those who
have no power of their own, who are compelled to tell us things they don’t want
to say and we don’t want to hear, warning us that our actions or lack of action
is resulting in harm done to ourselves and others. More to the point listen to the voices of the
persecuted, the vulnerable, the ridiculed, the intimidated, the scorned, and
the threatened; especially, when such things are done by those who have
authority and weal political power. For in
the consistency of their messages, we can discern the voice of God speaking
things we need to listen to over the voices of those who would have us turn a
deaf ear to such messages and a blind eye to what they are exposing.
It
is hard for some in this world to hear such messages because they imply a need
for dependence on a power that is not divided, that cannot be manipulated, which
favors no one in particular, but rather loves all. How hard the world must seem for those who
see no need for a God who watches over the sparrow, the lilies of the field,
the alien immigrant, the poor, and the homeless in our midst; who see
themselves reliant solely on their own power, who have no time to listen to the
prophetic voices of the day, who turn a blind eye to what the risen Christ can
bring to their lives and the lives of all living beings.
Why
we read and listen to the voices of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures,
is because they are relevant. They wake
us up by their accusations to who we are and whose we are. They awaken us to the only hope there is
found in a loving God. They expose us to
the closeness of God, who works with what we present; who lets us be who we are
and loves us no matter what we do or don’t do, who remains faithful in spite of
our lack of faith, who has promised to redeem, restore, and renew all creation.
They
tell us that we are in a sympathetic and synchronized relationship with a God[5]
who is always near, always ready to forgive, always ready to treat with
compassion; attributes that are readily transmitted throughout the world when
we are forgiving, when we are compassionate, and when we engage in doing the
redemptive and restorative work of the resurrected Christ.
God
has no desire to keep us captive by our sinful inclinations. As he said to Jeremiah, “I will put my law
within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people. And no
longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know
the Lord’ for they shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest, say
the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sins no
more.”[6]
* * * * * * * * * *
Until next time, stay faithful.
[1]
Manasseh reigned for 55 years and died approximately ten years before Jeremiah
was born in the 7th century BCE.
[2]
See Joshua 24:16-24.
[3]
Jeremiah 4:20
[4]
Jeremiah 20:8b-9.
[5] See
Jeremiah 17:10
[6]
Jeremiah 31:34
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