Most of the time when
I go back and read the sermon I preached on certain scripture four years earlier,
there’s not much I want to reuse. Too much has changed—mostly, I read myself
four years ago and think, “Man, that’s really not what I feel compelled to say
today,” and sometimes I think, “Boy, was I an idiot.” However, today, I found
some nice notes on Jeremiah 7 and a sermon with three themes from four years
ago, which I am not going to re-use… not completely.
Theme
1: Generational warfare, Theme 2: Who is the alien? and Theme 3: A loss of
monoculture is messy but also good.
I can easily preach on those again today. #1: Generational Warfare. Not a
week goes by that I don’t hear about millennials killing some industry. Yesterday,
it was that millennials are killing the turkey industry by cooking smaller
turkeys. Business Insider is keeping a running tally of things millennials are
killing, including eating out at restaurants, starter homes, beer, and napkins.
Personally, I think half the things millennials are killing deserve to be
killed, but that’s maybe just because I am one. On the other hand, not a week
goes by that I don’t hear fellow millennials complaining about boomers.
Millennials are lazy; boomers are the worst—pretty much the usual stereotypes.
Sometimes, I want to point out to people that generations create the next
generation, ya know? So if one generation is terrible it’s maybe because they
were raised to be that way, but whatever, that’s neither here nor there. Yep,
generational warfare is alive and well, and Jeremiah is low-hanging fruit for a
millennial who might want to point out that God calls the ones who are too
young—or too old. So, I’ll let that be for now.
Oh, and what about the alien?
Scripture is chock full of passages in support of outsiders living in our
midst, and Jeremiah is one of the foremost among them. “For if you truly amend
your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do
not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in
this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will
dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors
forever and ever.” The condition for the people of Israel having God in their
country is that they care for immigrants, orphans, and widows, and put God
before other gods.
Which segues into the last part:
Jeremiah condemns and encourages groups toward actions, not individuals. He is
a prophet to a nation. He is speaking first and foremost to Israel, not as a
collection of individuals but as God’s chosen people. You notice, God chooses a
people, not a person. If we’re going to use anything that Jeremiah says today,
then we need to understand that this is a word for a community and a country long
before it is for us as individuals. Jeremiah tells us that God’s presence with
us is predicated on how we collectively treat the least and the last and the
lowly. It’s not enough for you to care about people individually; the question
is how is your community and your nation doing? Now, we might not like that,
because it is inherently political in a way that divides us and frustrates us,
but there it is.
But Jeremiah’s just an Old Testament
prophet, right? We can just ignore him, because of Jesus, perhaps? Maybe, in
Jesus, the sweeping national proclamations are no more, and we are left with
only individualistic faith—a personal relationship between us and Jesus. Or
maybe not so much. The faith of the Gospels—that Jesus proclaims—is a faith
that is both/and. It’s yours and it’s the community’s. More importantly, as we
head into Advent next week, we join with Mary Magdalene, whose song proclaims
that all the proud will be humbled, and all the hungry will be fed, and the
rich sent away empty. Jeremiah and Mary and Jesus are preaching a Gospel to us
that is bigger than our expectations. Jeremiah is telling you what the kingdom
of God looks like—widows and foreigners; people without any power being lifted
up into power. Mary is telling you the same thing, even more dramatically: The
world is about to change. You might not see it yet. You might, in fact, fight
against it—fight to hold on to power—fight to be great—but that’s not the kind
of kingdom that God is preparing.
Jeremiah finishes with these
potentially ominous words, “I am watching, says the Lord.” It sounds like Santa
Claus, knowing when we are naughty and nice, and in one sense, it is exactly like
that. God is watching, but we know that anyway. Apart from knowing that God knows
that we are pretty miserable people, there is another side to this. God is
watching; God is not ignorant to the plight of the littlest person. When the
nations rage, and the wealthy crush the poor, and the secure beat back the
insecure, and the comfortable steal from the needy, God is there not just
watching the perpetrator with justice in mind but also standing alongside the
beaten. As Jesus says in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor… and blessed are
the persecuted.” As Robert Farrar Capon said, “God is interested in the least, the last, the lowly, the little,
and the dead,” and if you aren’t one of those, God doesn’t have time for
you. Now, that’s not to say God won’t catch you. It’s just that, in order for
God to take any interest in you, you need to become one of those, and for most
of us, we’ll go through life holding on to our greatness, our bigness, our
highness, and our aliveness, until the moment we die and then we finally get
there.
God
is a God of the least. It’s as simple as that. And God will send prophets like
Jeremiah and Mary and Jesus to tell us that, over and over again, and will it
matter? I’m not sure. Almost every time prophets appear in scripture, the
people fail to change their ways. The only prophet who achieves much is Jonah,
and he does it by doing everything wrong. So, will it make much difference to
be a prophet? In one way, probably not. This country is not going to magically
figure out how to care for the most vulnerable. We are not going to solve our
own problems closer to home. And yet, God keeps sending prophets for some
reason. I think about that often, actually. Why bother?
If
I’m to guess, it’s to give us hope, because it does give me hope that God still
cares—even when we don’t. Actually, that’s the one thing that continually gives
me hope: God cares, even though we don’t. So, this isn’t a sermon telling you
to do better; it’s mostly a confession that we too often won’t. Instead, this
is a reminder that through it all God is watching—for good and for bad; for the
perpetrators, yes, but more importantly for the victims—for the least, the
lost, the lowly, and the dead, because those are the ones promised the kingdom
of God. The rest of us will get there. It just might hurt for a while.
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