June 28th Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Jeremiah 28: 5–9
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen

Thursday afternoon, someone sent me a wonderful photograph of a church sign that read:

            Thou shalt wear a mask in public.  . .  . . Hygenesis 3:16

And, of course, I laughed – because if God commands something in the Bible some people, at least, are likely to do it. ‘God said it; I believe it – and that settles it,’ they say. No questions asked. And clearly, that’s what whoever posted that sign outside the church was hoping for –– divine authority for a worldly command.
But the Bible is not nearly so simple. It’s neither simple to understand nor easy to follow. Scripture has a wonderful way of arguing with itself, correcting itself, one witness giving counter testimony to another. So even believers reading the holy Word of God have to discern which of two competing voices represents the true voice of God. For always –– there are people claiming to speak for God who are talking through their hats. Or even lying through their teeth.
That’s our problem today as we read the Old Testament passage from Jeremiah. In that passage two prophets, each one claiming to be sent by God, are arguing over what God is saying to the people of Jerusalem. The year is 594 BC. Four years earlier Babylonian armies under Nebuchadnezzar had swept through the holy city and sent King Jehoiachin into exile with a large group of Judean nobles, warriors and artisans.
But not everyone in Judah had been sent away. Some were left in Jerusalem and warned to stay obedient to Nebuchadnezzar. In fact, Nebuchadnezzar had placed 21–year–old Zedekiah, a brother of Jehoiachin, on the throne of Judah as his vassal. So it’s in his court where the two prophets are arguing, each claiming to have heard from the Lord about what is to happen to those exiles in Babylon.
Hananiah is something of a politician. He knows a thing or two about pleasing people. And he proclaims that the God of Israel will break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar off the back of Judah – if only the people will rise up and revolt against him. It’s the only way, he says, those exiles will ever come home, bringing with them the gold vessels stolen from the Temple. It’s a plausible message, with a promise of peace and prosperity to follow – and it sounds good to the priests, the scribes, the people assembled in the court.
But Jeremiah has heard something different from the Lord. He too believes that the Lord will bring the exiles home one day – but only after the people of Judah repent of the sins that caused the Lord to use Nebuchadnezzar as his agent. Unfortunately, that repentance hasn’t happened yet, despite the Lord’s efforts, despite the Lord’s warnings that they change their ways and care more for the poor among them. Time after time, Yahweh has spelled out to them their sin, their failure to take seriously his warnings:

“From the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain,” the Lord warns. “From prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; and yet they were not ashamed. They did not know how to blush.” [Jeremiah 6:15 and 8:12]

So far, though, the priests and nobles have refused to heed the Lord’s warnings, to apply them to themselves. And now, Jeremiah knows, they are courting an even greater disaster if they rise up and revolt against Nebuchadnezzar. So he doesn’t say much to Hananiah. He simply reminds the man that the proof of any prophet’s words will be whether those words actually come true. And unfortunately we know, from the history of Israel, that Jeremiah’s warnings were the true words of the Lord. So when the people did rise up in revolt, following the wrong prophet, the Lord finally made good on his warnings. And ten tribes of Israel were never heard from again.
Why would we bother to read such a sad story this morning? Here on a sunny June weekend in Georgia, why would the Church insist we hear such a grim chronicle? Well, we too are living in a time of competing truths and deep divisions. We too are surrounded by people who want us to imagine that we are a chosen nation, a nation God would never allow to fall, no matter how poorly we are treating some of our own. We too live in a society of untold wealth and abject poverty, of social privilege and social injustice, of people living in McMansions and people with no home at all. And, unfortunately, the very people who can do something to right those wrongs aren’t any more ashamed of their indifference to the poor among us than the well–off people of Judah were to their poor and disadvantaged.
Nowadays, it seems, the Lord does not send prophets to his people so much as he sends the Church – to remind us all that our lives are not our own –– so much as they are a gracious gift from God. We in the Church are the ones who must tell the cautionary tales – the true cautionary tales – of those who have come before us.
And it’s not just the Church that has noticed these competing truths, these deep divisions, these lines between haves and have–nots. In recent weeks our young people have taken to the streets by the thousands to raise their voices against racism, injustice, insufficient health care, substandard housing, unequal education – the list goes on and on. And I can’t, for the life of me, see how that’s any different from the warnings the Lord gave to Judah.
So this morning we have a chance – just as the people of Judah had a chance in the year 594 –– to say, “Yes. There’s something here that the Lord is trying to get us to see.”
Amen

 
 
 
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