Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church

June 20, 2020

 Oh, Not to Be a Prophet  

Jeremiah 20:7-13
Psalm 69:8-20

Romans 6:1b-11

Matthew 10:24-39

                ⁷O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. … ⁹If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.…¹¹But the Lord is with me like a dread warrior; …. ¹³Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.

            Jeremiah, son of a priest, is a reluctant prophet. The Word of the Lord had come to him, 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.” Jeremiah tried to get out of it. “I’m not a very good speaker… I’m too young…”

            Jeremiah is a pre-exilic, Kingdom of Israel prophet. Called at age 20 (626 BC) to prophesy the fall of the southern kingdom, his book in the Bible is written by his secretary Baruch. The events of the book cover 40 years (626-585 BC), under Kings Josiah, Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, until the fall of Jerusalem to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in 586 B.C. and Jeremiah’s flight to Egypt. This is a political book. Judah is being squeezed by Egypt to the southwest, Assyria in the north, and Babylon to the east. It is an anxious time.  Judah’s king is rashly aligning himself with neighboring vassal states, enlisting Egyptian aid, and fomenting rebellion against their Babylonian overlords.  Jeremiah is counseling against it, not a popular opinion.  The upshot is, however, that Israel is obliterated.  The land promised to Abraham and conquered by Moses and Joshua over six centuries earlier is no longer theirs.  The land of milk and honey is for the Israelites desolation.

            Jeremiah did not seek friends.  His denunciations of the king, political leaders and the clergy were harsh and pointed.  He denounced extramarital affairs. He denounced the rich for exploiting the poor.  He denounced the people’s love for chasing after the newest god, and newest religion.  He denounced the religion of the Temple, saying that if they thought all that mumbo jumbo would get them closer to God, they had another thing coming.  When some of them started indulging in human sacrifice, he took a clay pot and smashed it to smithereens, telling them that was what God was going to do to them if they kept it up.  He told them that the Babylonians were going to come and rip them to shreds, which they did in 586 B.C.  He told them if they were so crazy about circumcision, they ought to think above their navels, and try circumcising their hearts.  The only hope he saw for them is that someday God would put the Law in their hearts instead of in books.  We heard this at Easter.     

            Jeremiah is taking heat. His jeremiads have struck home.  What we hear in this text is Jeremiah’s lament.  No one is listening.  He’s saying, “I am a laughingstock. God, you got me into this. I didn’t ask for this. You enticed me. You overpowered me.”  The Temple prefect, its chief of police, has had Jeremiah smote with 39 lashes and held in the public pillory overnight, literally hogtied.  Jeremiah considers abandoning his prophetic vocation, but when he tries, there is something like a burning fire in his bones.  He tries to hold it in but cannot.  One recalls similar words from the Apostle Paul: “An obligation has been placed upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.” (1 Corinthians 9:16)

            Pastors often find themselves in this bind.  God has placed a word on our hearts that the congregation does not want to hear, but they pay the salary.  As one bishop quipped, “If you sense that you are called to be a prophet, you might check to see if it comes with dental.”        Too often pastors keep their mouths shut about the controversies around them; they never speak or preach about the difficult things in the culture; they have made being pleasant and “harmless” an art form.  Too many systematically avoid ruffling feathers.  They smile pleasantly and lead no one away from hell and certainly no one toward the cross.  Challenge, exhortation, call to repentance, confession of sin, brokenness before a Holy God are simply absent from their preaching.   God is on their lips but nowhere else.

            In the words of one commentator, “God save me and all church planters and pastors from such drivel.” The world needs the word of the living God, unadulterated, uncompromised and undiluted. It ministers who are more afraid of one day standing before a Holy God to give an account of their lives than they are of standing before a congregation today. The world needs more like Jeremiah.

            The opening of the Book of Jeremiah reveals that he was from a clergy family living in the small town of Anathoth, just a few miles north of Jerusalem. Born around 645 BC, Jeremiah was about 20 when he was called to be a prophet in the thirteenth year of King Josiah's administration.  This was the same year that the Emperor Assurbanapal died, signaling that the days of Assyrian empire were numbered.  The end came for Assyria with the fall of Nineveh to the Medes and Babylonians in 612 BC.  By 596 BC, Babylon ruled the Middle Eastern world of the Fertile Crescent, including Judah. The prophet lived through these tumultuous times. He witnessed the end of Assyria, the beginning of Babylonian rule, and the downfall of his ownnation Judah, as the ill-advised and arrogant leaders brought the roof down on their heads. Jerusalem was burned, and the majority of the citizens were taken into exile in chains to Babylon in 586.

            The end of the Davidic kingdom.  No event in the Old Testament, except the Exodus, rivals the Babylonian Exile in significance as a landmark in Jewish history.  Jeremiah saw the collapse under the Babylonian onslaught of Solomon’s temple and destruction of Jerusalem, the murder of King Zedekiah’s sons and the blinding of the grieving father, and the forced march over hundreds of miles of the rebellious but utterly defeated people of Judah to Babylon.  The raw emotions of the Exile are captured in Psalm 137: 

By the rivers of Babylon—
    there we sat down and there we wept
    when we remembered Zion.
² On the willows there
    we hung up our harps.
³ For there our captors
    asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How could we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land?
⁵ If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
    let my right hand wither!
⁶ Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
    above my highest joy.

⁷ Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
    the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
    Down to its foundations!”
⁸ O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
    Happy shall they be who pay you back
    what you have done to us!
⁹ Happy shall they be who take your little ones
    and dash them against the rock!

The rage and lamentation are palpable.  Smashing children’s heads against rocks.   Rough stuff indeed.

            The lectionary texts for this Sunday indicate that there will be troubles enough for believers. Psalm 69 is an individual lament, designed for one who is drowning in sorrows and trouble (69:1-3), insulted by enemies and relatives (7-8), the subject of gossip (12), crying to God for rescue (13-18).  Matthew 10:24-39 is a portion of one of Jesus' missionary discourses. Jesus assumes those whom he is addressing will face death (28), and strong opposition (34). He declares that discipleship comes with a cost, a cross (37-39).  No doubt, people will hear “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” They will also hear, “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law…” We need to hear these sentences in the context of the larger paragraph and message that Jesus is presenting in Matthew.  Not everyone will love what they have to say.  With its emphasis on trials and troubles, Jeremiah 20:7-13 fits in with its companion lectionary texts for the day.  

            As intimidating as his listeners may be, the pastor must beware lest he jump from the frying pan of their opposition into the fire of God’s humiliation.  When a preacher seeks peace with humankind, he or she can find him- or herself at war with God.  Yet how many pastors are determined to avoid “controversial issues?” How many have measured their success by how few people they have offended with their preaching, as if it were a virtue to be more conciliatory than Jesus?  Pastors who ignore biblical truth on “controversial issues” may think they serve kindness and unity, but fear may be their lord.

One such minister who remained true to his calling was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor, who clearly preached his faith.  A thorn in the Nazis’ side over the course of the Third Reich, he was hanged for his part in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler’s life a few weeks before the war’s end.  In a very autobiographical sermon delivered in London in 1934. Bonhoeffer was confronting a deeper call to the battles back home.

Jeremiah 20:7: O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed.  Bonhoeffer saw that Jeremiah was not eager to become a prophet of God.  When the call came to him all of a sudden, he shrank back, he resisted, he tried to get away. But as he was running away, he was seized by the word, by God’s call.  It comes over a person from the outside, not from the longings of one’s own heart; it does not rise up out of one’s most unseen wishes and hopes.  It is no good trying to resist, for God’s answer is: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.  You are mine.  Fear not!  I am your God, I will uphold you.  So the person, said Bonhoeffer, is now a captive and must simply follow the path ordained for him or her.  It is the path of someone whom God will not let go anymore, who will never again be without God.  This means that the path of someone who will never again, come good or evil, be Godless.

Jeremiah was no longer his own master, no longer in control of himself.  Someone else had power over him and possessed him; he was possessed by another, by God. And Jeremiah was just as much flesh and blood as we are, a human being like ourselves. He felt the pain of being continually humiliated and mocked, of the violence and brutality others used against him. After one episode of agonizing torture that had lasted a whole night, Jeremiah burst out in prayer: “O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed.”  A footnote in the Harpers-Collins Study Bible states that this ‘complaint is the most blasphemous passage in the entire Bible.”  A closer translation of the ancient Hebrew might read, “O Lord, thou hast seduced me, and I am seduced.  Thou hast raped me and I am overcome.”    Boenhoffer continues, “I cannot get away from you anymore; you have carried me off as your booty.  You have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. When the thought of you grew strong in me, I became weak. When you won me over, I lost; my will was broken; I had too little power; I had to follow the way of suffering.”  When called, one cannot not do so.

Now, you might be asking, was I called out as a child to be a prophet?  I have no idea.  What possessed me at age 10 to undertake to read the entire Bible?  I don’t know.  The Unitarian minister who officiated at my Aunt Briggie’s wedding in 1960 told me that I would become a very good priest.  What did he know?  About that time, my father had me read Sinclair Lewis’ classic Elmer Gantry, a story in the 1920s of a philandering Midwestern preacher.  So much for the plan of reading the Bible in its entirety.

The closest that I came to punishment for my beliefs was opposition to the Vietnam War.  Had it been during the First World War, I could have found myself confined in a military stockade.  But by 1969, conscientious objection was a legally valid option.  When God called me to seek ordination to the clergy a few years ago, the overt impetus was not to summon people to repentance, not to announce that the tally of injustices was too high.

However, rest assured, I will not ply you with platitudes, nor will I regard my ministry a success if I have not angered or alarmed some for a call to the cross.  In our world today, the pain is so evident, the injustices so manifest, and the absence of tempered, informed moral leadership so patent, it requires no special courage to call them out. 

A return to Jesus, to hearken to God’s call, however, is sorely needed.  At this point in our history, a prophet such as Amos, or Isaiah, or Jeremiah would too find a rude welcome, but should be heard – and heeded.  But Jeremiah also has a vision of hope to follow the trauma of exile, self-inflicted or otherwise.  That Jeremiah could live through such a time and retain the hope of a future with God can teach us much in our own perilous, fraught times.  He declaims on behalf of God at 33:8, 10-11,

I will cleanse them from all the guilt of their sin against me, and I will forgive all the guilt of their sin and rebellion against me. … There shall more be heard the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voices of those who sing, as they bring thanks offerings to the house of the Lord:

“Give thanks to the Lord of hosts, for the Lord is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!”

It was part of our Easter day lections this year.

God’s nearness, God’s faithfulness, God’s strength become our comfort and our help. Then we finally, truly recognize God and the meaning of our lives as Christians.  Not being able to get away from God means that we will experience plenty of fear and despair, that we will have our troubles, but it also means that in good times and in bad, we can no longer be Godless.  “Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit."  “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.”

And, oh by the way, happy Father’s Day and the onset of summer!

In the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.  Amen.