Scripture: Jeremiah 1:4-19
Back when summer was young, a month or so ago, at one of the regular meetings of the worship committee I asked the group if they had any suggestions for me regarding possible preaching topics during the summer months. I explained that summer often seems to me like a good time to pick a book of the Bible and do a series of sermons. During the summer there are no seasons of the church year to deal with, such as Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, and although various topics may come along and suggest themselves, there are often some weeks during the summer when it seems easy to take a book of the Bible and spend some time with it. In the past I’ve done this with the great stories from the book of Genesis, the stories about Elijah from 1Kings, Jonah, and Job, to name a few. I asked the committee if they had any thoughts about possibilities for this summer. Just in case. I didn’t really expect them to come up with anything right on the spot, but in fact, they did.
The first suggestion was Proverbs—my reaction to which is not repeatable. I didn’t want to preach on Proverbs. I could go into the reasons why I didn’t want to preach on Proverbs, but since I’m not preaching on Proverbs, no need to spend too much time on that. Suffice it to say that I’ve tried once or twice in the past to preach on Proverbs—notice I say once or twice—and the result was not a happy one, that is, it didn’t make me happy regardless of how anyone else felt about it. So, although I did take a quick look at Proverbs to see if maybe my bad attitude might change, in the end I stuck with my initial reaction.
But the folks on the worship committee did have an alternate suggestion for me. Jeremiah. We aren’t that far away from all the fussing over some things that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said in sermons, and in fact the famous (or infamous) “God damn America” sermon had some references to Jeremiah in it as I recall, or at least there were people who made that connection. Why not go back to the original Jeremiah, spend a little time looking at what he had to say?
That idea appealed more to me, partly I guess because of the Jeremiah Wright connection, but more importantly because, Jeremiah Wright or no Jeremiah Wright, the prophet Jeremiah is worth our attention. And my sense is that he doesn’t get much of our attention, with the exception of a few often-quoted verses such as “Is there no balm in Gilead?” This in spite of the fact that Jeremiah the book is certainly a major part of the Hebrew scriptures, a book of roughly a hundred pages and fifty chapters, and in spite of the fact that a good portion of his inner life lies strewn all over the pages of the book and so there are both personal and social issues that one could reflect on if one chose to do so. Given all that, I think you would have to say that Jeremiah is not preached on nearly as much as you might expect. I know I haven’t preached on him very much. I certainly haven’t given him any sustained attention, and so I thought maybe it would be good to do that.
I say maybe because there are some reasons why Jeremiah is not preached on very often, and since, in contrast to Proverbs, I am preaching on Jeremiah, it may be appropriate to mention what I see as some of the reasons why people don’t preach on Jeremiah so much, at least why I haven’t preached on Jeremiah so much. I should say, by the way, that I’m not sure at this point just how many Jeremiah sermons there are going to be this time either. It may be that after a couple I’ll decide I’ve had enough and probably you have too. I’ve already said it was the worship committee’s idea, so I can just blame it on them—the nameless them—and move on to something else.
I should also warn you that this sermon will be unsatisfying—intentionally unsatisfying. Sermons of course can always be unintentionally unsatisfying. In this case, I mean it to be that way. It will be incomplete. There will be at least one or two other sermons on Jeremiah and what I say today will be more like just some introductory remarks that will really need to be followed up by commenting on some of the specific material in the book. As I say, how much of that I will do I don’t know at this point—but some at least. Also any sermon on Jeremiah ought to be unsatisfying because he was just—well, to put it the way people tell me it is often put in the south—Jeremiah was just, bless his heart, pretty much of an unsatisfying person.
Which brings me to the question of why people, including myself, might tend to avoid him, if they can. For one thing, this is one of those Biblical books that can make some people glassy-eyed. It has, for instance, way more than its fair share of those dreaded names people always ask me about when I ask them to read scripture. The very first paragraph, which I didn’t include in the reading for today, goes: “The words of Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of King Josiah son of Amon of Judah… It came also in the days of King Jehoiakim, son of Josiah and until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah…until the captivity of Jerusalem…” Not only are names like that a bit of a challenge just to say (and there are lots more where they came from) but they are really meaningless to the ordinary reader. We don’t have a clue who those kings are without some study—whether they are the Abraham Lincolns of their day, the George Bushes of their day or the Millard Fillmores of their day. They come from a foreign culture and a culture of some 2600 years ago at that.
You read just a few verses of Jeremiah and you know this is not going to be easy going. Of course with a little practice you can learn to just skip over those pesky names, but even so this writing comes from a time and place that is very unfamiliar. If you really want to get into Jeremiah, begin to understand where he was coming from, as the saying goes, you would need to do some historical study, just as (if you’ll excuse the modern day reference) if you want to understand where Jeremiah Wright was coming from, you would need to understand what terms like Tuskegee experiments and Emmet Till symbolized in his historical context. There are some substantial hurdles to get over if a modern reader is going to get into this text; it requires more than a little effort. This is one of those substantial chunks of the Bible that are not really reader-friendly. This may be one of the least reader-friendly, though I admit there is a fair amount of competition on that score.
But there is a more serious problem for modern readers, for this modern reader, in relating to the book of Jeremiah, and this is really the only issue I want to leave us with for today. It’s suggested in the opening verses we heard earlier. “Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.’ Then I said, ‘Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.’ But the Lord said to me, ‘Do not say, ‘I am only a only a boy’, for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you…I have put my words in your mouth.’”
One thing we can see pretty clearly from this initial exchange between Jeremiah and God is that for Jeremiah prophecy was not a career choice. It was not a choice at all. This was not something Jeremiah decided he would do. It was something God decided he would do, and God didn’t want to hear any excuses about how Jeremiah was just a boy or any other excuses for that matter. God had Jeremiah picked out to be a prophet since forever, since before he was born, since he was in his mother’s womb, in fact even before that, God says to emphasize the point. You’re not getting out of this, God says. This not an opportunity I am offering you. This is not optional.
Another way to say this that has a little different meaning is that the word of God didn’t just come to Jeremiah. It took him over. I don’t know Hebrew, so I don’t know whether that would be a more accurate translation of what the text says, but that is undeniably the meaning of the text. The word of God overwhelmed Jeremiah. It gave him no choice. This is suggested in our passage for this morning, but the full meaning of it doesn’t begin to come clear until you read further into the book, and it’s a little bit hard to communicate without reading the whole book.
Jeremiah is a man possessed, possessed by the word and the spirit of God. He is relentless. I mean he is relentless, and while you can get a sense of the kinds of things he says by reading a few passages here and there, you can’t get a sense of the relentlessness of it without reading chapter after chapter after chapter of his scathing commentary and anguished appeals. Here are some words chosen pretty much at random:
“Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and look around. Search its square and see if there is one person who acts justly and seeks the truth—so that I may pardon Jerusalem…scoundrels are found among my people; they take over the goods of others, therefore they have become great and rich…they know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy. Shall I not punish them for these things, says the Lord?…everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wounds of my people carelessly, saying peace, peace when there is no peace. They acted shamefully, yet they were not ashamed. They have forgotten how to blush. ..I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins, says the Lord, a land of jackals…Like the partridge hatching what it did not lay, so are all who amass wealth unjustly…”
I could go on. Believe me I could go on, because Jeremiah goes on…and on…and on. You could get real tired of hearing about what the Lord says and about social justice way before Jeremiah runs out of words. What I have read is maybe a quarter of a page worth of text but this continues, what Jeremiah and God have to say, sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart, what they have to say continues for page after page and chapter after chapter. Eyes indeed may start to glaze over, and not just because of the names.
Just a few points, or several, that I want to make about this for today. First of all, Biblically speaking, a prophet is not a seer. A prophet is not someone who can see into the future. In everyday language, we often talk that way. A prophecy is a prediction about what’s coming, and it’s true that Jeremiah has some predictions to make about the disasters that are in store for his country. But Jeremiah, like the rest of the Hebrew prophets, is not primarily someone who foresees the future but who sees the present in a different way. And it’s a way that he has not chosen but that he been afflicted with by God.
There’s a quote from the author E.B. White I have always liked. He is reported to have said: “I wake up in the morning every day torn between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy it. It makes it hard to know how to plan the day.” But Jeremiah wasn’t torn, thanks to the Lord. He didn’t have a hard time planning his day. God had it all laid out for him, and it didn’t include any just enjoying life. When Jeremiah woke up in the morning what he saw, first thing, were leaders, people, an entire society with its priorities all messed up. What he saw first thing was the gap between rich and poor. What Jeremiah saw every day when he woke up was a society that thought its biggest problem was military security and was all wrapped up in how to win wars and not all wrapped up in how to feed the hungry. What he saw every morning and all the time, because God had taken him over body and spirit and caused him to see things this way, what he saw was a society that thought it was the chosen people and God wouldn’t let anything happen to it, and he saw how wrong that was going to be. If we are to believe the book of Jeremiah, it is not likely he ever woke up hearing the songs of birds and giving thanks for another day to be alive, but woke up instead envisioning a Jerusalem that lay in ruins and where there were no birds (one of his images) a Jerusalem where you could no longer hear the songs of birds.
If you don’t pay too much attention to what it feels like to read the book of Jeremiah or think too much about what it might have felt like to be Jeremiah, then it’s possible to think that he’s one of us. That is, he’s a man of faith who cares about social issues and social justice, who cares about the poor, who protests against war and the idea that God is on our side, who thinks that churches don’t exist for the sake of their rituals and so on. If we don’t get too close to him, we modern religious progressives might think that Jeremiah is like us, and when modern day religious folks who care about social justice want to find someone in the Bible who supports their point of view, they will often turn to Jeremiah or one of the other prophets. We think we’ll find an ally in Jeremiah.
But although Jeremiah may be in some respects an ally for those concerned about social justice, he is not as comfortable a figure as one might think. On the contrary. In our world, people who are as consumed by the religion as Jeremiah seems to be, whose lives have been taken over by God the way Jeremiah’s was, in our world such people are considered fanatics and are thought of as dangerous, with good reason. We may agree with Jeremiah on a few specifics, such as the need for faith to be concerned about poverty and militarism. But he is not a comfortable figure. His is not a voice we can all just nicely nod our heads in agreement to. It is an alien voice. It stands at the edge of our consciousness and our faith. And it challenges us. And it presents us with some questions, which I will put like this. How willing are we, how willing am I, to be as relentless as Jeremiah is in his hammering away at injustice and his efforts to bring humans to an awareness of how deeply troubled God might be at what goes on in God’s world. How willing are we to treat the injustices of the world as non-optional to the extent Jeremiah did, to be consumed by them? What would it mean for us, for you or for me, to have our religious faith be as all consuming as it was for Jeremiah? Is that something we can stand? Is it even something God wants from us?
I don’t raise those questions today because I want to urge us all to follow the example of Jeremiah. I don’t think any of us are ready to do that. I know I’m not. Although I appreciate some of what he has to say, his voice is not an easy one to hear. In all honesty, I don’t know what do with his voice, and I don’t have a nice neat conclusion for this sermon. But I do know that although I’m not ready to go out and try to imitate Jeremiah, I’m also not willing to dismiss him either. I know that without Jeremiah’s voice troubling me from out there at the edge, my own faith would be smaller and less faithful. I don’t know what to do with his voice, but I think I will do well to listen. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 20, 2008