“I
wish he knew the Lord.”
Have
you ever heard somebody say that? Or some variation on that? It usually comes
with a hint of disdain. She doesn’t know the Lord… tsk-tsk. Often this is the
kind of thing mourned at funerals: “It’s just too bad he didn’t know the Lord.”
And OK, I get it. We are reassured when others believe as strongly as us in the
same God as us, and that reassurance has a lot to do with our assurance about
their salvation, but let’s not go crazy here. Do any of us really know the
Lord?
Well…
no… and yes. The prophet Jeremiah tells us that we know the Lord. All of Israel
knew the Lord, because they were His people and He was their God. This is the new covenant that God speaks
through Jeremiah. Earlier in the Bible God gave Moses a covenant, but it had a
teensy-weensy little problem which was that it required Israel to obey, and Israel was really awful at obeying.
Seriously, it was about ten minutes after they were freed from Egypt when they
started worshiping golden calves and asking to go back into slavery. The new
covenant that Jeremiah brings, however, had nothing to do with the capability
of the people to obey. God says, “I will be their God, and they shall be my
people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other ‘Know the
Lord,’ for they shall all know me.”
(Jer 31:33b).
In
the New Testament this covenant is expanded in Paul’s writings to include not
just Jews but we-Gentiles as well, and so the promise for each and every one of
you is that you will know the Lord. We are all a chosen people—not a choosing people. Maybe the most
insidious evil in the Christian Church—and believe me, there are a few—is this
whole dividing of in and out, deciding who is worthy of God’s
kingdom and who is not. Guess what? You’re not worthy. Jeremiah makes the
fretting over whether a person knows the Lord moot, because what matters is not
that we know the Lord but that God knows us. Only in God knowing us will we
know God in return, and that will have nothing to do with our faithfulness or
godliness.
Martin
Luther got this. Some of you had to memorize the explanations to the Apostles’
Creed when you went through Confirmation—and for those of you who did, you
might want to remind our Confirmation kids how lucky they are to not
have to do that—but for those of you who did, you might even remember the
explanation to the 3rd article. OK, it might be
expecting a bit much to remember something from thirty or forty or sixty years
ago when you often don’t remember where you left your car keys, so I’ll refresh
you. Martin Luther explains that the 3rd Article of the Apostles’
Creed (the one that begins “I believe in the Holy Spirit”) means this: “I
believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in
Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him…”
He goes on to say that belief comes from the Holy Spirit; you cannot believe on
your own. You cannot know the Lord and follow the law of your own will-power
and strength. The nay-sayers who grumble about so-and-so not knowing the Lord
are not only judging their neighbors; they are putting themselves in a place
where only God can be.
This
is about more than judgment. There’s that little proverb we all know—“Judge not
lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1). (You can tell it’s good because we still
quote it in Old English) But Jeremiah’s message and Martin Luther’s explanation
provoke a deeper question than whether we should judge; they ask us:
Why should we not judge? Not only
because God is the only judge that counts, but also because nobody comes to know
the Lord by their own wisdom. Jeremiah wants to make this perfectly clear:
this is not about you.
This
thread can be traced throughout the whole book of Jeremiah. In today’s other
readings King Jehoiakim is burning the letters of the scroll from Jeremiah’s
prophecy, which is a little surreal because we can only assume that he is burning
the very book of Jeremiah from which we are reading, and if it is the book of
Jeremiah that the king is burning then we can understand why he doesn’t care
for the prophecy, because so much of it is judgment. Of the fifty-two chapters
in the book of Jeremiah only four (ch. 30-33) talk primarily about hope for the
future. Jeremiah’s primary message is judgment against the kingdom that has abandoned
God’s laws.
So,
this is a strange juxtaposition. Jeremiah brought a message of judgment because
the people forgot God, but he also came with this fantastic message of a new
covenant that does not depend on our godliness. Either Jeremiah is
schizophrenic, which you realize--if you read all of Jeremiah--may be a
possibility, or God’s rules simply do not look like human rules.
Personally,
I think Jeremiah is a pretty darn good prophet for our era in history, because our
world is obsessed with knowing God. In religious circles, we have people who
want to know when you were saved—like literally the moment—as if we convert
from sinfulness to sainthood in a blink. There is this train of thought among
some Christians that if you cannot give an exact date and time of your
salvation then how will you know that it happened at all? They parse who knows
God and who doesn’t as if the effort is ours to make rather than God’s to give. On
the other side of the coin we have people in anti-religious circles who
write off Christians—and peoples of all faiths—until they meet academic
criteria; until, for example, they publish a peer reviewed scientific article
proving God’s existence. They, too, set guidelines for what is in and
what is out.
Friends,
this world needs Jeremiah. We need someone to tell us that God knows us, warts and
all, and so, we know God. It doesn’t need to be in a moment of conversion. It certainly
isn’t because of our intense study of God. It is that Holy Spirit and it is
Jesus Christ who are the reason for our knowledge of God, and that is what we
celebrate this Christ the King Sunday.
Yeah, but prove it, says the world. Prove it!
says Newsweek and the scientific
journals. Prove it! say Christians to one another, because apparently in
God’s eyes it matters more whether you are Lutheran or Catholic or Covenant or Pentecostal than
it does whether you are sharing the good news. Prove it! we say. And God
says, “OK, you really don’t get it, do you? This is not a true/false test. You
will be my people. I will be your God. End of story. The rest of your
lives are simply responses to that reality.” You see, part of the reason why
judgment is such a big deal for Jeremiah is because we inevitably ignore the
truth that is in us, and when we ignore that truth we ask the question behind
all our misgivings: “Prove it!”
We
become like Pontius Pilate, who represents the powers of this world, when he
asks Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38) in that iconic passage from the Gospel of John.
The
irony of the question is staring Pilate in the face. John’s Gospel doesn’t even
do the courtesy of giving Pilate an answer because it is so obvious. Truth is
Jesus. Not a concept, as Pilate believes, but a person—the very person standing
in front of him. He cannot recognize truth when it is staring him in the face. Moreover,
truth is not knowing Christ, as people today would have you believe; it is
Christ. All we can ever do is respond, like the centurion in Mark’s Gospel who
points to the cross and says, “Surely this man is the Son of God” (Mark 15:39).
He knew the truth. It wasn’t because he accepted Jesus into his heart; it was because
he experienced truth in the flesh. He knew God because God knew him. So we know
God—the God who has chosen us to be his people—because God has written it on
our hearts. Your acceptance of that promise is almost irrelevant.
Our job, then, starts
with not judging, but not just because it is something that fits on a bumper
sticker. Our task is to move from judgment to proclamation. Stop parsing who is
in or out. Stop looking at our neighbor and wondering, “Does she know God?”
Instead, talk to that person and say, “God knows you.” Our task is to get off
of our thrones and admit that it’s not because we are so smart or so brilliant
or so worthy or so perfect that we know God; we know God because in spite of
our unworthiness, in spite of the pain we often cause, and in spite of our lack
of knowledge, God knows us.
There is no in and out. There is only Christ the King.
Thanks be to God.
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