worship.html

Trustworthy Speech in a World of Deception
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
October 7, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Jeremiah 7:1-15
Matthew 21:12-17

“Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail.”

This is a sermon on a sermon, the first sermon of the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah is said to have begun his prophecy, reluctantly, during the great reform of King Josiah. With the discovery of the book of the law in the rubble of the temple, the covenant is renewed, idolatrous priests are deposed, the images of Baal shattered and a people chastened…or so the Deuteronomist history reads.

But Jeremiah did not buy it, nor did the Lord God. “Pretense” God said of Josiah’s reform. So we remember from II Kings how “Still the Lord did not turn from the fierceness of his great wrath, by which his anger was kindled against Judah” saying “I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed Israel; and I will reject this city that I have chosen, Jerusalem, and the house of which I said, My name shall be there.” The year was 626 B.C., when the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah and called him to be a prophet to the nations (the gentiles). That is to say on this World Communion Sunday, God set Jeremiah apart to serve God’s international design by way of God’s judgment spoken against Judah.

Before Jeremiah’s life was ended, he would prophecy over the destruction of the Temple and the fall of the house of David. Not only was the nation defeated, a political collapse from which Judah would not recover for centuries; but more critically, Israel’s election as God’s people no longer could be taken as self-evident. Exiled in 587 B.C., God’s people suddenly knew neither who they were nor to whom they belonged.

With these few details to set the scene, we begin this morning at the beginning of Jeremiah’s first sermon. As first sermons go, Jeremiah pulled no punches. No pleasantries at the start. No jokes to get the crowd on his side. God commanded him to stand at the gate of the temple and let God’s people have it…with both barrels, we might say. Jeremiah’s barrels, unlike our own, were loaded only with words, words that told the truth. And the truth was this: God’s people had returned to the ceremonies of religion, to the rites and rituals prescribed by the law; but they apparently continued to oppress the alien, the orphan and the widow, to shed innocent blood, to whore after other gods and so to live as they pleased six days of the week. “Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, go after other gods,” roared Jeremiah, and then slide in to a pew as though you belonged in God’s house saying, “We are safe!”?

It would be as though a preacher, perhaps this preacher, were to say to a congregation, even to this congregation: Will you sit there in your Sunday best, heads bowed in prayer, as aliens are denied basic human rights, children’s health care vetoed, enemy combatants tortured, the earth’s resources ravaged, corporate ethics given a pass, violence sanctioned in the city streets by your silence? There she goes again, you say, quitting religion to meddle in politics: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” But religion without the politics of justice, says Jeremiah, is a sham. Here you are, trusting in deceptive words—the words of government officials and established religion and talk radio to no avail!

No doubt the response of the congregation to Jeremiah’s first sermon would not surprise you; it might even hearten you. In a word, they called for Jeremiah’s death. The scene is revisited in Jeremiah’s 26th chapter where we learn, “When Jeremiah had finished speaking all that the Lord had commanded him to speak to all the people, then the priest and the prophets and all the people laid hold of him, saying, ‘You shall die!’”

Jeremiah’s first sermon has set me to thinking about the power of truthful words and about the authority of trustworthy speech. “Speech about this God that is daringly human and embarrassingly particular,” says Walter Brueggemann, “regularly sounds themes that demand attention” and that send us to re-imagine our sedimented world in relation to God’s purposes in human history. Brueggemann identifies five of these themes spoken again and again by the prophets, themes that might serve as tests for the church’s speech in this time and this place.

The first is a word against “idolatry and its twin, ideology.” Ideology is more familiar to us and can be found in the right, left and center of the political arena. Ideology is that human instinct to absolutize the arrangement of power or to sediment a way of knowing so that everything we encounter or experience is run through an ideological grid for sanction. Religion often becomes ideology because it absolutizes one way of knowing what no human being can ever fully know. Yet what escapes us about Scripture--or supremely about the person of Jesus Christ--is that the truth of the written Word and the Word made flesh resists our paltry attempts to absolutize and fix their meanings. “Against such absolutizing pretense,” says Brueggemann, “the holiness of God critiques, exposes, and assaults every phony absolute since all such absolutes of nation, race, party or sex will end in death.”

The second theme concerns “the God who refuses to absolutize the present, any present.” God is doing a new thing eternally and so calls us into a future which appears to be anything but secure, mostly because it is God’s future instead of our carefully calculated plan. A little later in Jeremiah’s first sermon, he says of Judah that “they walked in their own counsels and looked backward rather than forward.” Inevitably those who absolutize any given present end up looking backward rather than forward! Therefore prophetic speech would keep us from taking the here and now with “excessive seriousness.” Consider, my friends, how excessively serious we have become about terrorism, to the point that the freedom for which we were made and for which we are fighting has been lost in the absolutizing of our threatened present. The words of the prophet are words that mean to yank our imaginations into a future that is in God’s hand, not our own.

In the third place, prophetic speech speaks out of human suffering. Sometimes it is speech that deepens human suffering when that suffering is the result of a people’s unfaithfulness. But finally it will be speech that cries out to God on behalf of those who have suffered at their own hands long enough or who have suffered at the hands of another for but a moment. Prophetic speech, as it is an “utterance of hurt” says Brueggemann, “moves God to newness” and moves God’s people to outrage in the public square. I think of the Buddhist monks in Burma whose prophetic action, at the cost of their lives, has made public the pain of a people oppressed. I remember the prophetic speech dared in the St. Nicholas Kirche in Leipzig that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and ultimately to the end of the Cold War. I will never cease to be astonished at the witness of Black and colored South Africans who, with words, dismantled the apparatus of apartheid. All spoke out of human suffering with words—not guns and bombs but words--whose power finally unmasked the pretense of power.

In the fourth place, “prophetic speech characteristically takes a critical posture over against established power.” Here is where prophetic speech in many a pulpit loses its tongue because the established power, the relatively privileged, the comfortably optimistic inhabit the pews and underwrite the ministry. “Ours is a most co-opted climate for humanness,” roars one modern day Old Testament prophet: “besot as we are with power, arrogant in our greed, confident in our technology, still belatedly determined to work our powerful will in the world….” But with that said, I would say in the reluctant cadences of Jeremiah that we are in a co-opted climate because compared to the totalitarian regime in Myanmar or a theocracy like Iran or a South American dictatorship or Sudanese oppression, we are quite content mote that might be in our eye. Judah likely felt the same way. But compared to the kingdom for which we were made, we surely resemble Jeremiah’s words dared at the temple gates long ago.

Then finally and in the end, God’s end, prophetic speech “is an act of relentless hope that refuses to despair….It dares to assert in any and every circumstance the conviction…that there is a God who can and will make all things new, even in the face of our most closed-down, self-satisfied present tense,” says Brueggemann. Hopeful speech, for the most part, requires a poet who stretches human language to its limit, quitting ideology for the imagination, leaving the present to go out not knowing where she is going, uttering the hurt so that it can be heard and healed, unmasking the pretense of power with the power of metaphor. So the Irish poet Seamus Heaney writes:

Don’t hope
On this side of the grave

What has such speech to do with us, with this congregation, with Christ’s church in the world? Perhaps the question before us is whether we, who have been addressed by the word of the prophet, are willing do the hard, demanding, intellectual, poetic imagining that will read our present world according to the justice and hope revealed in God’s written and incarnate Word? “Can we find tongues and ears and the will to embrace, articulate and enact an odd, particular, scandalous…reality” made known to us supremely around this table, where the prophets words are fulfilled and the weakness of power finally is made to do business with the power of weakness, the power of merely a Word…made flesh? Thanks be to God!

Return to Sermons
Return to Home Page