Sermon for 22 August 2010 at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon
by Loren D. Crow, Ph.D.
Readings:
Old Testament, Jer 1:4-10
Psalm, Psalm 71:1-6
Epistle, Heb 12:18-29
Gospel, Luke 13:10-17
Imagine yourself as a sixteen-year-old Jeremiah: old enough to start thinking about raising a family. Maybe one of the village girls has caught your eye. Your ancestors have been priests in charge of a little shrine not far north of Jerusalem, but it was closed down a few years ago when the king decided to centralize worship in Jerusalem and destroy the local high places.
A hundred years earlier, Israel’s wealthy northern tribes had been absorbed by the powerful Assyrian empire. Not much was left of ancient Israel, just the part known as Judah. The Babylonians were pretty clearly the inheritors of the floundering Assyrian Empire, but the Egyptians had a king who wanted to restore Egypt’s place as a world superpower. The Persians away to the east had made an alliance with the Medes up in the north and were clearly a force to be reckoned with. The world political scene was chaos. As was ever true, tiny, unimportant Judah was right in the middle of this power struggle between major states because of its geographic placement: The highway between Egypt and Mesopotamia ran straight up through Judah.
As I’m sure you can imagine, this geopolitical situation sparked lots of debate and competition over national policy. Some people thought that the fall of Assyria gave Judah the chance to expand its own territory and regain the fabled glory of the times of David and Solomon. They thought their best defense was a combination of military strength, increased religious fervor in the royal temple, a theology in which the One God would always be on the side of Judah no matter what, and a royal ideology in which the king ruled by divine right. Others thought security would be achieved through alliances with Egypt, essentially denying that God either could or would become involved. Some worshiped Yahweh as the national god, but also other deities. They wanted to hedge their bets, praying to whatever gods and giving their political allegiance to whoever they thought would help them survive and thrive.
All of this was the political maneuvering of the powerful; it affected the common people, but they had no say in how it went. They were either small farmers working family lands or serfs working the landholdings of the wealthy. Even those who owned family lands were losing them to the landholders due to foreclosures and shady legal dealings for which the wealthy paid bribes to the royal establishment. For serfs, life would be hell no matter what happened geopolitically. If Jerusalem taxed the landholders to pay for the huge army and the fortification of cities, the landholders would require that more cash crops be grown, which meant that it would be still harder for commoners to put bread on the table. If the nobles succeeded in organizing an alliance with Egypt, the same thing would happen. When the foreign armies marched through the land, the commoners were defenseless while the wealthy hid out in the fortified cities.
Of course it’s a much more complex picture than this, but I’ve wanted to dwell on it a little bit and tease out some of the political background because this is the stuff of Jeremiah’s book. He does talk about God and religion, but he talks about them in ways that can be disconcerting for modern rationalistic people with a commitment to the separation of church and state. Imagine this young man, thrown by his birth and by God’s call into a time when political and economic realities were in turmoil, when even theological axioms that had seemed obvious in previous decades now seemed impossible, when it seemed that no one knew what anything meant. Jeremiah witnessed the religious reforms of King Josiah in the last quarter of the seventh century. When King Josiah was killed by the Egyptians, it may have seemed to Jeremiah like the death of John F. Kennedy. Barely twelve years later, the Babylonians invaded Judah and set up a puppet king in Jerusalem. Eleven years after that, following a rebellion based on a false belief that Egypt would help in the fight, the Babylonians completely destroyed Jerusalem and its temple. Jeremiah saw all of this. How to understand all of this, in light of God’s promises to his people? Did it mean God’s covenant with his people had ended? The facts of history, the facts on the ground, were undeniable; what were needed were words to explain what those events meant.
Over and over again in the book of Jeremiah, we find the prophet speaking precisely to these kinds of questions. Is it true that God will save Jerusalem because his temple is there? No. Consider what happened at Shiloh, when God allowed the Ark of the Covenant to be captured by the Philistines. Should we make an alliance with Egypt to save ourselves from the Babylonian onslaught? No. God saved us from bondage in Egypt and we shouldn’t become dependent on them again. Have we lost to the Babylonians because God has abandoned us? No. He is punishing us for our sins in order to save us, purify us, and make us again into his holy people. Jeremiah addresses the crucial questions of his day, interpreting momentous events in light of Israel’s larger story. It’s an incredibly awesome responsibility, but God seems to think Jeremiah is up to the task.
The text that we read from the first chapter of Jeremiah is the narrative of Jeremiah’s call as a prophet. It’s a wonderful text on so many levels. Here’s a boy from a family of disenfranchised priests — probably put out of business when Jeremiah was a boy by the religious reform of King Josiah. The introduction to the book of Jeremiah is interesting: “The words of Jeremiah...to whom the word of the LORD came.” There’s a recognition here, as Walter Brueggemann says, that the words of this book are not exactly identical with “the word of the LORD.” Jeremiah the real person, Jeremiah the singer and preacher, Jeremiah the hot-tempered kid with a big mouth, Jeremiah the frothing poet who screams at God about the unfairness of the world and God’s part in it; Jeremiah speaker of words. As a political commentator, he’s more like Rush Limbaugh than Chris Uhlmann: he’s angry, outrageous, sarcastic, occasionally funny, and he frequently goes too far. But the insistent claim is that, in this highly personal book that records the words of a distinctive prophetic personality, we hear God speaking. That’s a fascinating idea.
The mystery of this idea, that the speech of a particular man might somehow convey the Word of God, is symbolized by extensions in time and in space. In terms of time, God tells Jeremiah that he had been selected before he was even a twinkle in his father’s eye. In terms of space, God tells Jeremiah that he is to be a “prophet to the nations.” Many Christians have read the first statement as support for a doctrine of predestination, and the second statement as a hint that Jeremiah predicts the replacement of Judaism by Christianity. As interesting as these later readings are, they don’t get the point. What it means is that, like Abraham and Moses before him, Jeremiah must conceive his mission both as global in scope and as part of a long tradition of prophets. He is not the first to be asked to speak the truth to power, nor will he be the last. His call to speak the truth will set him against not only his people’s enemies, but against his own family and people. It’s not going to be fun for him, but it is what’s needed. Some of his words will be words of encouragement and healing, but before that can happen he’ll have to say a lot of things that make people mad. Like a surgeon, he’ll have to cut in order to heal. He is called “to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow,” and finally “to build and to plant.”
In the face of this demand, Jeremiah quite reasonably objects: Wait! I’m too young! I don’t know how to talk! God just quips, Well you’re going to have to talk anyway, but when you do I’ll be with you. This contains an important lesson for young and old, alike. More often than not, God chooses the young to say things that we who aren’t so young can no longer imagine for ourselves. The gifts brought by those who have lived long — things like wisdom and patience — are important in God’s economy, but the young offer unique gifts that we cannot do without. The enthusiasms of youth, a young person’s idealism and willingness to experiment, the tendency of the young to rebel against the status quo, their passionate anger at what’s wrong with the world: these things are very close indeed to God’s heart. God’s passionate love for creation, and for all the peoples God has made to live in it, finds a better mirror in the young (and the young-at-heart) than in those who have been rendered insensitive to the world’s cries, like ears rendered dull by bombs. For some of us, it may be too late to have our hearing restored fully. The young are a promise that our failings are not the end of the story; God continues to be at work among those who come after us.
The text also contains an important challenge to the young: Speak the truth. Do the truth. Resist the temptation to think that you can’t accomplish good in the world simply because you’re young. Of course, any of us might fall victim to this temptation, but the young are particularly susceptible. The truth is that it’s precisely when you’re young that you still have the capacity really to make changes, because that’s when you’re most pliable yourself. Resist the claim that your life is meaningless. God calls us to uproot and to tear down what is evil and false, and to build and to plant what is good. In doing this, you will make some mistakes. You’ll go too far in rejecting the past and instituting the new. You’ll reject some things that you ought to retain and keep some things that you ought to reject. When you do that, recognize your mistake and move on. Keep crying out against what’s wrong and working for what’s right. Believe that God is with you and that your good efforts are part of a million-year history of God’s love and care for the world. You don’t have to save the world, but you’re invited to be part of God saving the world. You can do this with your words.
Sometimes I think we may underestimate the power of words. We think that talk is cheap, that actions are what matter. And in some ways that’s true. Talk is cheap when it has no integrity, when it isn’t backed up by sincere effort. On the other hand, action is meaningless without words. Words have the power to frame actions and make them part of a larger narrative. An act of kindness is meaningful not when it’s random, but when it partakes of a larger program of kindness. Words are what make that program. Loving your neighbor means something very different if you just happen to be in love with your neighbor than it does if it emerges out of a conviction of God’s commandment. Your life may indeed be meaningless if the world is meaningless, but what if it’s true that God is, that God speaks meaning into chaos, and that the meaning of God’s speech is love? In that case, your words have the power to bear the love of God and make it present in a chaotic world.
This point is driven home powerfully in Luke’s story about Jesus’ healing the woman on the Sabbath. Here Jesus takes on the prophetic role of challenging the religious establishment in favor of simple human kindness and decency. He’s in the synagogue teaching, which means that he’s sitting among men with women cordoned off in a separate area. Following standard Rabbinical practice, he may have been giving a lesson on what the Sabbath means. He looks, and there among the women is one whose eighteen-year debilitating illness has resulted in an a bent, frail form. I imagine someone deformed by lupus or arthritis or osteoporosis, though it’s hard to be sure. It’s a perfect chance not only to heal but to provide an object lesson in what the Sabbath means: “Woman, you have been freed from your disability.” The Greek verb form here indicates that her freedom is already accomplished when he says the words, before he ever puts hands on her and works the miracle. Jesus pronounces what the Sabbath has already accomplished, her freedom from bondage. After these words are spoken, it’s the most natural thing in the world for him to approach her and continue the creative, restful work of Sabbath by healing her body.
What’s natural for God, though, is sometimes misunderstood by some who honor the Sabbath but misconstrue what it means. Jesus apparently walks over to the women’s area (already pretty odd behavior) and lays his hands on her (odd again), so that she she straightens out and begins praising God. Interestingly, the “synagogue ruler” scolds, not Jesus, but the people: they shouldn’t have come looking for healing on the Sabbath, which is a reasonable interpretation of the Sabbath provision in some of its forms. But Jesus appeals to another Sabbath tradition in which God has instituted the Sabbath primarily out of concern for slaves and animals, who might otherwise have no rest from their labors. The point is this: neither Luke nor Jesus questions the importance of Sabbath. What they question is the prioritization of Sabbath over concern for the helpless. The argument is over biblical interpretation, how to understand the Sabbath as part of an overall narrative of what God is up to. The synagogue ruler’s understanding is that Sabbath is simply a matter of obedience to a rule; Jesus argues that Sabbath is about the life-giving grace of God.
The tension between the words of grace and freedom that Jesus speaks to the woman and the words of judgment that he speaks to the synagogue ruler is the same tension that we find in Jeremiah. He’s required to speak both words that will tear down and words that will build, words that will uproot and those that will plant. But we mustn’t think of these as contradictory; they’re complementary. Words that announce the liberation of the poor and weak cannot help but threaten the downfall of those who would oppress them. Words that declare God’s love for all creatures condemn, by their very nature, the opposing narratives that teach hatred. We are called to declare with our words, and reinforce with our lives, the basic truth: that history has a goal, that humanity is being moved inexorably toward that goal through Christ, that the name of that goal is the Kingdom of God. I don’t believe that this is just a way of speaking; I believe it really is true, thank God!
