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You are here: Home / Archives for Jeremiah

4 Epiphany: Jeremiah & Jesus back to back 500 years apart

January 30, 2022 by Cam Miller

Statue of Emmeline Pankhurst.

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You know I am in my happy place
when I get to talk about
both Jeremiah and Jesus
at one and the same time.

We actually have some biographical data
on each of these prophets
and it is interesting
to put them back to back
even though they lived more than
500 years apart.

Jeremiah and Jesus
lived the restless and perhaps
tortured lives
of those immersed in the anger
of their peers
and contemporaries.

I don’t have to tell you
what it is like to be the object
of anger, not only
from one person
but from many of the people
in your close circle of family and friends.

You want to talk about polarized,
try going back to Jeremiah or Jesus’ day.
It was an angry, violent, snarling,
dog-eat-dog world.

But Jeremiah and Jesus
could not have been more different.

Jeremiah came from money –
the small power elite class of his society.
Jesus came from dirt,
as in dirt-poor.

Jeremiah was educated,
and it shows in the exquisite images
and parallelism of his poetry.
Jesus was likely illiterate
and it shows in the pithy, earthy parables
so easily recite-able from memory.

Jeremiah was a priest
before he was a prophet,
and his father was a priest who taught him the trade.
Jesus was a peasant who made doors
and wheels, and tables and ploughs
just as his father taught him to do.

But both of them,
Jeremiah and Jesus,
separated by almost six hundred years,
knew from a very young age
they were in trouble.

Both of them knew
that WHAT they knew
would cause those who loved them
to become very angry.

WHAT they knew
was a word God had given them to speak.

If we want to get right down to it,
both of them were what we would call…preachers.

Now I realize being a preacher
isn’t an elevated position in our day,
nor something most people would aspire to.
But just like the Bible
is more sermon than text,
the main characters of the Bible
and its prophets,
are more preachers than magician or guru.

Whatever magic they had
came from their lips
more than their hands.

But pause on that for a moment.
Because the idea that God speaks on the lips
of an ordinary human being
is not something we believe today.
If someone were to walk into Trinity Place
on a Sunday morning that we were in-person,
and tell us that God had told him or her to come in here
and give us a message,
we would think they were bonkers.
And yet, that is the idea of a prophet or preacher.

In fact, last summer someone did
barge into our tent worship
and makes such a claim,
and we did think they were bonkers.

Figuring out the difference
between a prophet and someone who is bonkers
is more difficult than we might imagine.
But that is the topic for a different sermon.

Back to Jeremiah and Jesus.

A prophet had the unenviable task
of speaking God’s mind to humans,
and sometimes
speaking the mind of humans to God.

If you break that down,
who in their right mind would want that job?

The prophet was a mouthpiece:
not welcomed to speak his or her own mind
but to articulate GOD’s vision
or dream
or judgment.

In poor Jeremiah’s case,
he was given the words of ‘doom and gloom’
to speak to his peers in an affluent society
that was “partying like it was 1999.”
600 BCE in Judah
was like the 1920’s in the USA:
a big party
before the big bust.

So there at the party
was poor old Jeremiah
lobbing stink bombs at everyone’s good time.
Fortunately, at the end of Jeremiah’s life,
when Jerusalem had been torched
and ground down to rubble,
and his peers and contemporaries
brutally carted off into exile,
Jeremiah was given a vision of restoration
to spread among the survivors.

He was given a vision of good news
and how it would be
when God welcomed them back
with open arms.

Jesus was more like the prophet Amos
than he was Jeremiah.
He was peasant
sent into the halls of power
where he did not belong.
He was sent to deliver
both judgment against the status quo
and an alternative vision
for how God wanted us to live.
We all know that never goes well.

But again, let’s pause.

Does God really
touch the lips of some
and give them a vision or critique to articulate?

Well I do not have any incontestable proof
that  God speaks
on the lips of prophets today,
at least not in any scientific sense.
But I do know this –
and so do you.

In 1776 there were numerous people
who spoke against slavery —
Southerners as well as Northerners.

And in 1876
there were citizens
who spoke out against
the genocide of Native peoples.

The vision of equal rights for women
was articulated long before women could vote.

Child labor laws had advocates
a hundred years before they were passed.

In 1924 the first public voices were heard
advocating for Gay Rights.

Rachel Carson wrote “Silent Spring”
and warned of Global Warming sixty years ago.

We know about
Ida B. Wells
Sojourner Truth
Emmeline Pankhurst
Dorothy Day
Martin Luther King, Jr.
John Lewis
Nelson Mandela
Thich Nhat Hahn,
Desmond Tutu
Alicia Garza
Malala Yousafzai…

All of them, and literally thousands
of others occupying the space with them
have given voice
to what would take years
or generations
or even centuries
for everyone else to accept.

We can make a case
that all those folks
saw another reality breaking through
the dense matter
that others around them
were stuck inside of.

We can make a case
that God was breaking through
the ordinary
and they heard it
and saw it
and spoke it.

Or how about this?
We could make a case
that you and I have seen and heard
God breaking through the ordinary
and delivering a word
to people we know…even to us.

“We will proclaim by word AND example the Good News of God in Christ.”
In other words, we will be the incarnation
of the Gospel.

That is prophetic.

Or how about this.
“We will seek and serve God in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.”

In other words, we know God is
in ALL persons
and we have been sent to discover it
and serve it
and even name it,
no matter who we discover it in.

That is prophetic.

Or this.

“We will strive for justice and peace among all people,
and respect the dignity of every human being.”
In other words,
our task is to bring about the kingdom
on Earth as it is in heaven.

That is prophetic.

So I do know for a fact
that there are people in this world
who make those promises
and in doing so,
sign up to be prophets of God.

And by the way,
that is how God does stuff
in the world.

Interesting, huh?
Peace be with you.

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Ida B. Wells, Jeremiah, Jesus

16 Pentecost: Hope

September 29, 2019 by Cam Miller

Exif_JPEG_422

This is about hope.

It is about hope in hard times
when hope is hard work
even for people who are by nature optimistic.

It begins with a man
and a story
we might imagine
has absolutely nothing to do with us.
It was, after all,
nearly two-thousand seven-hundred year ago.

It is a story we have the chance to touch on
only every three years
when it comes around in the Sunday Lectionary.
But because many preachers do not focus
on the readings in the Hebrew text,
it is a story that may never get told
in some congregations.

It is the story of Jeremiah,
a prophet in Jerusalem.
He was not a wild-eyed fringe character
like Jesus.
He was not a poor marginalized migrant
like Amos.
Jeremiah was an insider.
He was from one of the ‘good’ families.
He was, as some might say today, “old money.”

According to the story,
God used Jeremiah
to speak to the power-elite of Jerusalem.
It was a time of dangerous international intrigue,
when it was not clear who the king’s real allies were,
or with whom the king’s loyalties were invested.
The Egyptian Pharaoh
was sweet-talking the king of Judah
and coaxing him and Jerusalem
into an alliance with the once powerful,
now faded Egypt.

Pharaoh told the king they had to stick together;
that Egypt and all the surrounding
small nations like Judah had to hold strong
in order to defend against
the big newcomer on the block: Babylon.
Support Egypt,
Pharaoh promised the Judean king,
and together they would defeat Babylon.
That appealed to Zedekiah, the king of Judah,
because he figured
he had a better chance
of holding onto his power
with Pharaoh ruling the region
than if the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar
took over his part of the world.

So, thinking of himself more than his country,
Zedekiah risked the lives
of all the inhabitants of Jerusalem
and the surrounding area of Judea,
in order to keep his throne
for himself and his sons.

Jeremiah watched and listened
to all that was going on in the upper echelons
of his society,
and then told King Zedekiah
it was a bad idea to dance with Pharaoh
against Nebuchadnezzar.
But Jeremiah didn’t just say it was a bad idea,
he said that “God” said it was a bad idea.
And he didn’t just say
that God said it was a bad idea,
he went around told everyone
that God said it was a bad idea.
Jeremiah had a big mouth and knew everyone
who was anyone in Judah.

Well, like all the kings of Judah,
Zedekiah had a stable of yes-men
clergy & prophets who argued against Jeremiah
and promised the king
that God would rescue Jerusalem,
and that God would use Pharaoh to do it.
But against all those voices,
Jeremiah kept telling anyone who would listen
that Zedekiah was making a big mistake
and his foolish clergy and prophets
were just telling the idiot-king
what he wanted to hear.
Then, when the Babylonian army arrived
and support from Pharaoh did not arrive,
people started listening to Jeremiah.
But it became even harder to listen to Jeremiah
because he was now predicting
the demise of Jerusalem
and the death of Zedekiah.
Even though no one really wanted to hear that,
the citizens of Jerusalem began to disappearing
like deserters from the Alamo.
People were sneaking out at night
to surrender to the Babylonian army
that was now surrounding the city.
The siege of Jerusalem
would last for 18 months and 27 days.
That is a long time to sweat.

So with the Babylonian army surrounding them
and Pharaoh’s army nowhere to be seen,
King Zedekiah could nor stand to listen any more to Jeremiah’s rants.
The king blamed the steady stream of
escaping citizens on Jeremiah.
So, someone conveniently accused Jeremiah
of trying to escape, which allowed the king
to arrest the prophet.

Still, it was complicated for King Zedekiah.
He couldn’t just imprison Jeremiah
because he was from one of the ‘good’ families,
and he was recognized as prophet after all.
So instead of prison,
Jeremiah was removed
to the courtyard of the guard,
and shackled – one step up
from a prison cell.

But Jeremiah, if not pleasant
was persistent.
He just kept declaring his message
even while shackled:
“Don’t believe government’s lies;
don’t listen to self-serving fantasies
from religious preachers;
don’t be fooled by the guise of patriotism;
trust what you see and hear;
get out now because the Babylonians will win
and everything and everyone left behind
will be destroyed.”

An unknown, low class prophet
from out of town,
someone like Amos for example,
could be managed by removal or execution.
But an annoying prophet
from one of the old-line families
who won’t shut up?
That is a headache Advil won’t fix.

Eventually,
and it is not clear whether by order of the king
or an exasperated captain of the guard
who couldn’t stand to listen anymore,
Jeremiah was thrown into an empty well.
He was left in a deep hole in the ground
from which no one could hear him,
and where he would eventually be forgotten
and starve to death.
They couldn’t execute Jeremiah
but they could allow him to die.

But alas, I have gotten well ahead of myself.

In Chapter 32 of Jeremiah,
the point in the story that we heard this morning,
Jeremiah is still shackled in the courtyard
ranting and raving about the doom of Jerusalem.
That is where his cousin finds him,
and the piece of the story we heard today.

Under ancient Israelite law,
spelled out in the Book of Leviticus,
there is a statute called, “the right of go-el.”
My Hebrew is even worse than my English,
so I don’t know if I am pronouncing it correctly.

Go-el, as a legal statute,
stipulates that if someone is forced to sell
a piece of property
that has been in the family,
then the first right of refusal must go
to the next of kin.
As it turned out, Jeremiah’s cousin
wanted to sell some property.
Of course he did.

Think about the housing bubble in Jerusalem:
With the Babylonian Empire camped at your door
waiting for you to weaken from a lack
of food and water,
there would be a glut in the real estate market.

So Jeremiah’s cousin can’t sell his property
until he offers it first to Jeremiah –
who, remember, is shackled in the courtyard.
To the cousin’s utter amazement,
Jeremiah agrees to buy it.
“Sure,” Jeremiah says,
“not only do I want to purchase the land
but I knew before you even asked,
that you would offer it to me.

So as the story unfolds,
Jeremiah’s cousin gathers a host of witnesses,
Jeremiah signs the deed,
and gives it to his chief disciple, Baruch.
In front of everyone,
Jeremiah charges Baruch
with protecting the deed
by hiding it in an earthen jar
to be uncovered in the future.
Talk about a bullish act of hope –
it was pugnacious, even aggressive hope.
Surrounded by certain doom,
the very prophet of doom
declares the future is worth investing in.

Jeremiah was investing in the future
with a dramatic, physical,
concrete and highly personal
act of trust.
It was trust in God,
trust in the future,
and trust in the inevitability
of justice and mercy.

Everything around them spoke of destruction.
Everything seemed futile.
It not only looked bad, it was bad.
In the face of sure and certain doom
Jeremiah embodied hope
by investing in the future.

And now, the rest of the story.
For about eighteen months
the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem,
weakening the will of the walled city
before a devastating onslaught.
Eventually the Babylonians
broke down the walls and invaded.
They sacked the city,
stole everything they could carry away –
including the giant bronze pillars of temple.
The temple itself they reduced to rubble.
They killed every officer and leader of the guard.
They mercilessly killed
all three of King Zedekiah’s sons
right in front of the king’s eyes.
And then, they cut out the king’s eyes out
so that the deaths of his sons
would be the last thing he saw.

Jeremiah survived the devastation
because the Babylonians mistakenly thought
his prophecies meant he was on their side.
But Jeremiah was not in favor
of the Babylonians;
he was in favor of trusting God
to have the last word.

Legend has it, that Jeremiah died in Egypt.
But we do not know for certain.

We do know, and this is an important part
of the story,
that an Ethiopian slave,
likely one of the eunuchs that guarded
the royal harem,
saved Jeremiah’s life.
He got Jeremiah released from the well
before the city fell to the invaders.
The slave somehow convinced King Zedekiah
to allow Jeremiah’s freedom.

So there is the great irony
we should be used to by now,
and always looking for, in a Biblical story:
The foreigner in their midst,
and their slave,
could recognize God spoke through Jeremiah
even when those who knew him best could not.

This strange and ancient story
is pregnant with great insights about us,
and about our moment in history,
and about what you and I could be doing
in the midst of our families and friends
who do not yet recognize what time it is.

Jeremiah, the prophet of doom,
committed a devastatingly bold act of hope
by investing in land
at the very moment he knew
it would be ravaged and occupied
in the short run.
He trusted God for the long run
and embodied hope in the short run.

That is the punch line.
Our days, yours and mine, are numbered.
We know that.
But what happens to us,
is the not the final word
or the last act of the story.

So if we are capable of seeing
beyond the little universe in our own head,
then we can see that our own heartbeat
is only the short-term.
If we can see that,
it opens us to seeing that the long-term
may be influenced by us
even if it is not about us.
“The long-term can be influenced by us
even if it is not about us.”

So if the future is not about us,
we can start looking past our own particular
fears and anxieties to see the unexpected.
In this present moment, the one you and I live in,
hope is hard to come by – even for those of us who are optimistic.

I have had so many conversations with folks
about our fears and anger, and the
the seemingly overwhelming nature
of our problems.
I hear from people,
and from within my own heart,
about how difficult it is
to muster hope for the future
because we are surrounded by
deep and pervasive crisis
in the environment,
among nations,
and within our own nation.
There seems to be a pervasive crisis
in every institution of society
whether education, medicine,
law, the economy, or religion.

We are like Judah and Jerusalem
under the reign of Zedekiah,
when tomorrow seems to end in shadows.
We cannot see beyond the darkness
and what we imagine beyond
what we can see
is too disconcerting to entertain.

As in Jeremiah’s day, false prophets surround us.
They smile and promise a gospel of prosperity
for anyone who believes
their theological propaganda.
They promise that faith
and the love of God
will solve all the problems of the world
and act as a talisman
against danger.

Our royalty –
the political, corporate, and religious elite –
would have us be quiet,
and stop naming the grotesque imbalances
within our economy.
They want to hush us
and claim that we only know counterfeit truths –
they castigate the eloquent voices of our youth
who are now irrepressible
and out of their control.

Our royalty and their prophets,
who are broadcast loudly
by their media corporations,
eat away at the foundations of our future
like termites beneath the floor.

To the efforts of our royalty to shut us up
we can be silenced
or we can engage in acts of hope.
We may not have loud voices,
but our lives speak loudly.

For us, the question we must ask
is what are the acts of hope
available to us in our particular moment?
As individuals,
as households,
as a spiritual community –
what acts of hope
can we engage in now,
today, tomorrow
and the next day?
What would it mean
for us to act like Jeremiah
who bought property
even at the darkest moment in his city?

Not surprisingly,
I don’t have an immediate answer for us
and I can’t answer for you anyway.
But given the choice,
why wouldn’t we engage in acts of hope
and refuse to be silenced?

 

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Go-el, Hope, Jeremiah

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