Year C. Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany.
Jeremiah 1: 4-19
January 28, 2001
Lord of the Lake Lutheran Church
Web page http://lordofthelake.org
By The Rev. Jerry Morrissey, Esq., Pastor
E-mail pastor@southshore.com
Heavenly Father thank you for Jesus unconditional love. Amen.
Jeremiah 1: 4-19
Title: “Access not success is the goal of life.”
Jeremiah supported the religious reform that began in 629BC under King Josiah. After the king’s death in 609BC, the old idolatry quickly returned and Jeremiah was publicly disgraced and imprisoned for warning of the impending doom of Babylon’s defeating and destroying Jerusalem, which indeed happened in 587BC. Somewhere between 629 and 587, undoubtedly closer to 629, Jeremiah received his call to prophesy. He interpreted the political events differently from his contemporaries, and so was out of sync with them and suffered rejection because of it. He saw everything in the light of God’s sovereign will and attributed Jerusalem’s woes to sin. The only solution according to him was repentance. This text legitimizes Jeremiah’s claim to be a prophet by describing his call by God. His own experience of God’s promise to be with him through adversity is itself a prophecy to the people that the same can be true of them if they are faithful to their call despite the opposition.
In verse 4 the word of the Lord came to me thus: In the most succinct way the role of the prophet is defined. It is an awesome claim and it comes without explanation or justification. The “word of the Lord” is the divine interpretation to the human situation, how God sees things. It is God’s own and definitive say. It reveals human calculations, plans, strategies and interpretations for what they are: human. The Lord’s word does come through a human, however. These “human” words turn out, much to the dismay of many people, to be God’s governing word. This fundamental assumption of the prophet is simply stated, without embarrassment or force to back it up. It lays down God’s claim to order historical events, but in such a way that the “word” seems to the worldly wise and powerful to be weak, having no teeth or visible forces to enforce it.
In verse 5 before I formed you: The verb, yazar, “formed,” primarily describes the modeling of a potter. Under the influence of the Yahwistic account of creation in Gen 2: 7-8 it came to mean “create.” God claims to have created Jeremiah and decided then his role in life.
A prophet to the nations: A prophet was not a seer, looking into a crystal ball, making future predictions. He was to give the divine interpretation to the human situation. Jeremiah was called by God to do this not only as it pertains to Judah, but to the whole world.
In verse 6 I know not how to speak; I am too young: Not in the liturgical text; Jeremiah objects to his lack of qualifications for the job. This is a typical first reaction to God’s call. It was my initial reaction and many ministers that I know have told me the same thing.
In verse 7: Say not: Not in the liturgical text, again, typically, God reassures the one chosen for a task that, though he or she is not up to it, God will provide the necessary means to accomplish it.
In verse 8 have no fear: This element is present in every call and every theophany.
I am with you: God does not promise unmitigated and undeniable success, but access- to him. He only promises what his name, Yahweh, implies: “I will be with you- always.”
In verse 10 to root up and to tear down, to destroy and to demolish, to build and to plant: There are four negatives and two positives, implying that the old ways of interpreting and doing are hard to undo, but they must go if the planting and building are to be effective.
In verses 11-16: God raises questions for Jeremiah by using the watching-tree and the boiling cauldron as metaphors for interpreting the facts on the ground as God sees them, that is, as they really are. Then God provides an interpretation of those facts. In this case Judah will fall to Babylon because she sinned. The prophet is enabled by God’s word to see things others did not see and make connections others missed. God’s intentions, his interpretations, override that of the “kings” who took themselves too seriously and God too lightly. True, the kings in Jerusalem noticed Babylon, but they missed God’s interpretation. In the end they missed everything.
In verses 17-19: These verses return to the point of reassuring Jeremiah of God’s presence. Inevitably the collision with the dominant ideology of both King and Temple will put him at risk. He must bear this unbearable “word” to an unresponsive and, eventually, hostile, people.
In verse 17 gird your loins: This is a metaphor for preparation for a task. Because God’s governance interferes with human governance, the prophet’s word is never welcomed. It puts his well-being and even life in jeopardy.
Tell them all I command you: It is not the prophet’s word or interpretation, but God’s.
In verse 18 I have made you a fortified city: Jerusalem is supposed to be that fortified city, but her sins, which built up walls between her and Yahweh, have weakened her walls of defense against the enemy. Jeremiah will be that city. To the question, “How can you be so sure you are right?” the prophets respond, “How can you be so blind?” The prophet is not so much sure of himself, certainly Jeremiah was not, as he was sure of God and his word.
A pillar of iron: Against all odds and opposition God promises him strength, a strength that seems so weak to the observer. Where are Jeremiah’s human forces to back him up? It is of the nature of prophecy that there are none. God assures Jeremiah, but he does not assure the people by giving him force to back up his words. The time for reassuring the people is over. They have gone beyond the limit. It is too late.
In verse 19 they will fight against you: Jeremiah is really trying to save them, like Jesus in the gospel, but to no avail. The people are so bent on self-sabotage and self-destruction that they are beyond listening. More than that they will try to kill the messenger in the hope of killing the message.
I am with you: On one level it looks like they did prevail over Jeremiah. However, he was effective in the end. He did deliver the message. It was their lack of credence and response that was the real failure, as subsequent history would show. Yet, all God really promises Jeremiah is solidarity with him. He promises to save him from destruction, but not from suffering. We need to remember that when we ask why do bad things happen to good people, especially believers.
We live in a world, an environment, a culture, where success is valued as the main goal in life. That means accomplishing, achieving, arriving, being the envy of others, enjoying a level of self-esteem far above the ordinary, all as a result of being successful. God, of course, sees it otherwise and he reveals to us in this text that it is access not success that is the goal of this life. Access to what? To him. If we are to be successful it means being successful in sniffing out the divine presence amidst all the other aromas of daily life. It means picking out from a whole variety of goods, the one really valuable article, hidden amidst the others. It means being successful at actually seeing the invisible. It means living in the present by the light of the future.
Access, easy access, unbridled and unrehearsed conversation with God is both the goal of this life and the means to achieving, to arriving, to accomplishing that goal. What could be better than to always be in the presence of God and always be aware of his awesome presence? Always aware of his presence means our mouths are always open in awe, our ears always open in hope of hearing more, our hearts always open to receiving his love and giving it away to others, given its inexhaustible supply and constant replenishing.
Success, at least as the world defines it, depends on circumstances and on being on top of whatever game is being played. Access simply means being available to one who is equally available to you. Circumstances have little or nothing to do with it. It is a matter of attitude.
Jeremiah mistakenly thought he was supposed to be successful, to return to God with proof that everyone was listening to his word and had changed their lives for the better. He had to learn through those mistakes and through the incontrovertible facts that it was not success that God had promised him. He promised to be with him though thick and thin, no matter what. Before anyone would truly listen to what Jeremiah was saying, Jeremiah had to truly listen to what God was saying and what he was not saying. We all confuse our hopes with God’s dreams. We all erroneously think that what we would like to be the case should be the case and that it is what God himself wants to be the case. The only one who changed in this situation was Jeremiah. The king did not. The people did not. The priests did not. Jeremiah got to know God better and thus himself better. He started out pretty good. He admitted right up front that he was not qualified or worthy to carry God’s message to others. He had himself down pretty pat. But, oh how he misunderstood God! When they came against him to imprison him and then finally to do him in, he complained to God that God was not keeping up his end of the bargain, that God had promised to protect him but was not doing so.
Jeremiah was defining “protection” in human terms, not divine ones. By “protection” God meant more what we mean by “accompaniment,” by “being with.” God would go to prison with Jeremiah rather than keep him out of prison. That is access, but maybe not success. In truth, Jeremiah did outlast the king, the priests, and even the people. After all, we are still listening to his words, really God’s word, today. But even then, in those days of old, it could be said that Jeremiah was successful in some sense. Yet, that is not the point. He maintained access, communication with God, when others had long since lost it. And we believe that he still has that access today, long after the Babylonian Exile has passed into the recesses of history. Jeremiah left us the monument of his life, faithful to the Voice through all adversity.
When we walk through life listening to the Voice that others either do not or cannot hear, we will appear to others as odd, as eccentric, as Jeremiah appeared to his fellows. We will give answers to questions that others will not like, respond to situations that others will not understand, provoke resentment that we are not like others and do not march to the beat of the conventional drum. But, if we have access, constant access to the divine, we will also provide for those same others the opportunity to see things from the eternal perspective as they see how one who live in that perspective lives out his or her life. Jeremiah did not do the popular thing, but the right thing, because it has the ring of truth and the look of love. What others do or did is their choice, not Jeremiah’s failure to succeed.
The Weakness of the Word: Many folks who rely on weapons, muscle, technology and other forms of strength tend to think of words, mere words, as inherently weak. Such an attitude most often spells the “defeat” or “failure” of the strongman. It is so ironic that a dictator rises to power by giving rousing speeches long before he accumulates a powerful army and an arsenal of weaponry. Yet, how quickly he forgets about the power of words and uses force, physical force to enforce his will. Having long since stopped trying to change the minds of the people he dominates, his tenure is usually shortened as his speeches become shorter and less frequent. Yet, words, yes words, have proven to be the most powerful force on earth, when they are backed up by faith, be it faith in false premises or faith in true ones. Words are really not weak at all. Look how easily they wound us. No wonder God chose words, even over and above wonders and works, in order to demonstrate his power. Yes, words and belief in them have ruled the world from the beginning of speech. They start wars and end them. They express love and hate. They can be beautiful and ugly. And we will find the accumulated wisdom and folly of human kind stored in words- in books, libraries, on tapes, disks, etc. Foolishly, the dictator or the control freak disdains words and their power. They laughed at Jeremiah, and all the prophets, because all he had to show was words, whereas his opponents had weapons, position, power. As Jesus said in Matthew 11: 19: “Time will prove where wisdom lies.”
Fear of failure: Once we get past the fear of failure we are free or freed to try, even to try things that seem doomed to fail. If we do not fear the stigma society places upon failure, we can usually learn something valuable even if we do fail. Yet, once we have actually experienced failure and discovered that we still live, we wonder just what it was we feared. In most cases failure is just not that bad. The negative feelings that accompany failure will go away, unless we bury them along with shame. Shame is the hardest feeling to shake and any feeling that gets attached to it will have a shelf life a lot longer than the feeling deserves to have. Once Jeremiah and we learn that most failures are really the result of our expectations rather than our inherent weaknesses, we learn to revise the expectations rather than revile ourselves for being defective. Failure, no matter how we define it, properly belongs in the “doing” column of our lives, not the “being” column. We do fail, but we are not failures. The latter evokes shame and shame is the most crippling emotion we humans can have.
Expectations: It is easy to read God’s word and his promises and turn them into something they are not. We need to learn to hear what God actually says through his word, not what we would like him to say. Jeremiah was a good and holy person, yet even he got God wrong at first. He imposed his expectations on God and had to learn through experience that God is not going to change his mind or his definitions of what is really real, just to suit the conceits of his children, no matter how good those children may be like Jeremiah. If we are to enjoy comfortable access to God we have to accept him on his terms, not try to change him, but let him change us. Once we realize, really realize, that God is always with us, what is there left to expect? What remains is to simply enjoy the experience and relax. God will take care of everything because he cares. His caring leaves us carefree, but not careless. We still need to practice the daily, indeed moment-by-moment, discipline of reminding ourselves that he is indeed there. Amen.
