Scripture: Jeremiah 20:3-18
I’ve been taking what has turned out to be a series of sermons on Jeremiah, if you will pardon what sounds like a sports cliché, one week at a time. No looking ahead. No planning what I want to say three weeks from now. Just a week at a time, and after each sermon decide if I want to stick with Jeremiah for another week or not. That turned into several sermons based on Jeremiah, and I decided as I was leaving for vacation that there is at least one more sermon I want to give on Jeremiah. It’s about the words of God, the ways God speaks to us, or doesn’t speak to us as the case may be, and the thoughts those notions arouse in me.
I decided I couldn’t quit Jeremiah without addressing some of those issues. You can’t read very far in Jeremiah, any part of Jeremiah, without repeatedly encountering a phrase something like: “The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah…” or “…says the Lord”, as in “yada, yada, yada…says the Lord”. In fact, I decided to count, just for fun, how many times phrases like that occur in Jeremiah, how many times the text says directly that the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah or that Jeremiah ends something he says by attributing it to the Lord, thus says the Lord. It turned out to be a bit tedious, so I just took some samples, about ten chapters from various parts of the book and found that phrases like these occur on average about 8 times per chapter, which would add up to about 400 times that the text tells us that the Lord spoke directly to Jeremiah. That works out to about once every three and a half verses that a phrase like “says the Lord” appears in the book. The book of Jeremiah wants us to be very clear that God is speaking here. The words we read in Jeremiah are not the mere opinions of human beings. They are, we are told quite clearly, the words of God.
Since Jeremiah, the book of Jeremiah, never lets me read very far without reminding me of the claim that God spoke directly and repeatedly to Jeremiah, as I say I didn’t feel I could let all those claims pass unnoticed or uncommented upon. And, as often happens with me in relation to the Bible, the first reactions I have are not necessarily accepting or believing ones; they are often more skeptical or questioning in nature. I don’t know about you, but in dealing with the words of the Bible, I often find there are some hurdles I need to clear before I can get to the place where I can hear what the scriptures may have to say to me, before I can hear what I may need to hear in the scriptures.
In the case of Jeremiah, I’ve already mentioned that I have some real difficulty with the kind of theology that surfaces so often in Jeremiah’s words, that portray the destruction of Jerusalem and the killing and capture of the Jewish people as the work of God and God’s punishment on the people of Judah for their sins. That’s one hurdle I’ve already said I need to get over as I read Jeremiah. Another has to do precisely with this business of God speaking to and through Jeremiah in such clear and frequent ways. Actually there are several hurdles connected with this for me. I’ll just focus on one this morning.
If you are like me, you are instinctively suspicious of anyone who thinks his words are the words of God or who thinks that her voice is the voice of God. If you are like me you are suspicious of anyone who speaks about God with the clarity and certainty of Jeremiah, much less anyone who implies he is speaking on behalf of God—even if the person is expressing values I’m in sympathy with, as Jeremiah often does. When Jeremiah talks this way, maybe he doesn’t sound so threatening. After all, he lived a long time ago. He’s not threatening our world. But in the world we live in, people who speak as though they know the voice of God can be downright dangerous, and we would be suspicious of anyone who spoke that way; we ought to be suspicious of anyone who speaks that way. Maybe terrorists come to mind. People who think God has commanded them to carry out some terrible act of murderous violence. But that’s just one extreme example.
I think the sin that troubles me most of all these days, and it is a sin that religious folks may be particularly susceptible to, is the sin of arrogance, and arrogance is by no means limited to people who are willing to do violence in the name of their truth. Arrogance is a problem anytime anyone slips over from trying to say the truth as he sees it to speaking as though his truth is the truth, the whole truth, and the only possible truth. Arrogance is a problem anytime anyone confuses her way of expressing the truth with truth itself.
I do believe that religion in general suffers because of the arrogant attitudes that so often accompany it. It’s understandable in a way. Religion is based, at least in part, on a set of beliefs that people hold to be true. If they didn’t believe them to be true, they wouldn’t hold that set of beliefs. If they didn’t believe that at some level their beliefs were better or truer or more profound than other beliefs, they wouldn’t hold on to them. If they thought their beliefs were debatable, or merely interesting, they wouldn’t be beliefs that would guide a person’s life and see a person through hard times. From a certain perspective to have some beliefs that a person considers true and certain is what religion is all about, and yet if a person does hold that kind of certain, rock solid belief, it can be a very short step from there to arrogance. I’m saved; you’re not. Because of my beliefs, I’m going to heaven; because you don’t have the same beliefs I do, you’re not. I’m right; you’re wrong. My beliefs, if everyone would adopt them, would save the world. Your beliefs are ruining the world, or at least aren’t as good for the world as mine are.
Of course no one, or almost no one, actually says things like that in so many words, but I think attitudes like that are implied whenever people become convinced that they have come into possession of the Truth with a capital T. And wherever that kind of arrogance creeps into our souls, it is dangerous, if not literally dangerous to life and limb and to the idea of living peaceably with your neighbor, then dangerous to the idea of human community, dangerous to the hope of human understanding, dangerous to the value of people treating each other with respect, and I might say, dangerous to the image of religious faith, making it seem like religion is about the arrogance of being right much more than about loving. I’m afraid I hear that kind of arrogance coming through in the pages of Jeremiah and it echoes ominously in the world we live in. Thus says…the LORD. It is certainly one of my fervent prayers that we can find a way to have believing hearts, deeply believing hearts, without becoming arrogant in our belief.
At the same time—(some of you tease me for doing this, saying “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”, “there’s this but there’s also this”, but oh well, I can’t help myself)—at the same time although Jeremiah’s confidence that he is speaking the words of the Lord is troubling to me, on the other hand I also don’t want us to come to the point where we feel like we have to qualify anything we have to say, where instead of adding on a “thus says the Lord” after every other sentence, we feel like we have to say, “remember now, this is just my opinion.” I don’t want us to come to the point where we think that God’s voice cannot be heard among us, where all we have to guide us are a gaggle of very human, very fallible voices.
To take an example of one of the issues that Jeremiah speaks passionately about, the gap between rich and poor, the unconscionable gap between rich and poor, but unconscionable not because my conscience and your conscience says so, but because God says so. Isn’t the fact that some people live in extreme poverty while others live in extreme wealth, isn’t that an offense not just to me but to God? Isn’t the gap between rich and poor not just unseemly but unholy? Don’t we have a right to say this is not right, this is not the way things are supposed to be, “SAYS THE LORD”? Or are we supposed to say, this is not right, but that’s just my opinion. Do we really want a world in which there is no voice from the heart of creation that cries out against the suffering of the poor, especially in the face of the luxuries of the rich? And if someone has the conviction and the courage, as Jeremiah did, to raise his voice and say this is not right, not because I say it is not right, but because God says it is not right, should we not listen?
It’s been a long time now, but I still remember when a member of a church I served in Chicago told me that she had never liked Martin Luther King. He was arrogant, she said. The word took me back. Arrogant? Why? Because he spoke about justice, thought that people being treated as children of God was the will of God? Why? Because he spoke with a clear sense of what was right in the eyes of God, not only what was right in terms of fulfilling the promise of democracy, but in terms of the promise of creation itself? Arrogant? Why? Because when he spoke it was as though he knew he had been called by God to speak the words that needed to be spoken, and he couldn’t not do it?
The woman’s accusation left me speechless really. I didn’t know what to say. It had honestly never occurred to me to think of Dr. King as arrogant. After I thought about it some, I began to sense a little bit of where she was coming from and began to understand at least a little bit why she might use that word, arrogant, with regard to Dr. King. He didn’t use the exact language of Jeremiah, but he did speak as though the word of the Lord had come to him, had possessed him. He could have said, after every other sentence, says the Lord. That’s what the woman heard, I suspect: a man who spoke and acted like he knew what was the will of God. What I heard were words that did indeed come from the Lord in some sense, in the sense that we couldn’t do without them and had been missing them for so long until he spoke them. What I heard were words that had to do with a lot more than one man’s opinion, one man’s agenda, or even one man’s dream. What I heard were words that had in them the ring of truth, as true as if they came from the heart of God.
So how do we tell the difference between true and false prophets? Even in Jeremiah it says (chapter 23, verse 31) “See, I am against the prophets, says the Lord, who use their own tongues and say ‘says the Lord’”. So here we have the false prophets saying “says the Lord” and we have Jeremiah saying “says the Lord”. We know now that Jeremiah is the true prophet. He’s the one in the Bible after all. But if we had been living at that time, how would we be expected to know the difference between this person going around saying “says the Lord” and that person going around saying “says the Lord”? How do we avoid the arrogance of sounding like we know what the word of God is without giving up on the word of God altogether?
I don’t have answers for those questions this morning. I wish I did, but I don’t and I never will. I don’t think anyone has answers to those questions. But then that is nothing new for the life of faith. Part of what the life of faith is all about is learning to live with questions that have no final or definitive answers. In this case, I am reminded by Jeremiah in a negative sense that arrogance can be a real problem for believers and we need to do all in our power to avoid it in every way we can. At the same time, Jeremiah reminds me in a positive way that there are words from the Lord, and I need to do all that is in my power to hear them, understand them, speak them, and take them to heart. May God help us to attend well to both of those tasks. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 24, 2008