Sermon for February 11, 2007
JEREMIAH STANDING UP AND SPEAKING OUT FOR
WHAT IS RIGHT
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Scripture: Jeremiah 2:4-9 4 Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel. 5 Thus says the Lord: What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves? 6 They did not say, "Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits, in a land of drought and deep darkness, in a land that no one passes through, where no one lives?" 7 I brought you into a plentiful land to eat its fruits and its good things. But when you entered you defiled my land, and made my heritage an abomination. 8 The priests did not say, "Where is the Lord?" Those who handle the law did not know me; the rulers transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal, and went after things that do not profit. 9 Therefore once more I accuse you, says the Lord, and I accuse your children's children. We are almost at the end of a sermon series on CHARACTER and I hope that you have been thinking about and even talking about that topic of character with some family members and friends. I heard one of our members mention a few days ago how concerned he is about the absence of character education and formation particularly for people who will become leaders in our country in the future. And we talked about how first of all character is formed in our families and by us parents and grandparents over a long period of time, and how it is formed and taught, of course, not by what we say but by how we act and what we do. After that conversation I remembered a small example of seeing one of our church members a few months ago pull into the grocery store parking lot just as I was leaving. He parked in the handicapped space even though he has no handicap sticker. His children were with him and they went on into the store. I made a judgment and perhaps I did not have all the information but I wondered if he did what all of us do at times about similar issues—say to ourselves that we are only going to be a minute and it won’t matter if we break the law or the rule just this one time. I particularly wondered, assuming I had all the information, what his kids would learn about following the law and being considerate of others. Christy Boyle told in her wonderful children’s sermon a couple of weeks ago about a parent who was teaching her daughter that the rules only apply to other people—they surely don’t apply to us!! Character formation and character education is happening for good or for ill and most of us including me can take a look at how we are setting examples for others who look to us. What makes for good character? How do you describe a person of character? We are going to look at the prophet Jeremiah today and his example of speaking for what is right even though it was unpopular and costly to him, but before we do that I want to lift up some stories about character from the news the past week. Perhaps you saw the quote from Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy who said it was good to win the game and good to be the first African American NFL coach to win the Super Bowl, but he was more proud, he said, “of the content of his team’s character”. He also said he was proud of the character displayed by the Bears team and by Bears coach Lovie Smith. He said he was proud of the chance to show that “you can win doing it the Lord’s way, that you can win professionally, that win or lose, you can do it with class,” and that the game had no ugly incidents that reflected badly on either team. What do you think is meant when coach Dungy talks about feeling good about the “character” shown by players on both teams? The second news story is from a New York City cab driver who, last week, when a jeweler left a bag in his cab containing 31 diamond rings, went to great effort to track her down and return the rings untouched. The driver, a native of Bangladesh, told the newspaper that he did not once consider keeping the rings. He said, “I work hard, I enjoy my life, I’m satisfied. I am not going to take someone else’s money or property to make me rich. I don’t want it that way.” Hours after he dropped the passenger off after her $11 ride and her thirty cent tip, he managed to track her down and return the bag of diamond rings. She gave him a reward of $100 which he gladly accepted because he had lost other customers in the time to find the jeweler, but I believe the greatest reward was the one he felt inside from knowing he had done the right thing, the honest thing. That might help us as we think about what goes into good character, Christian character. And so might the definition of character from the person who said “Character is about what we do and who we are when we think no one else is looking.” One more example from the recent news articles: in a time when we look to sports figures as some of our role models we are often disappointed by some sports figures. One athlete left many of us feeling very sad a few days ago when he died. Did you feel surprisingly sad when Barbaro had to be put down after a long courageous struggle? I did. And one writer told us why we might have felt that way. One sports writer said this about why we connected to Barbaro: He didn’t trash talk, taunt, or hang on the rim. Down the stretch of the Kentucky Derby, he didn’t turn and point at the (nearest competitor) Bluegrass Cat and he didn’t somersault over the finish line… He never tried to renegotiate his contract or turn down an eight figure offer by saying, ‘I’ve got a family to feed, man.’ His only tattoo was discreetly hidden. He did no commercials for cell phone plans, credit cards, fast food chains or time shares… He never appeared before a congressional committee and lied about his steroid use. He never dated Paris Hilton. …He never claimed he was misquoted in his autobiography. He trained, ate and slept. He ran his races, gave his best effort, accepted plaudits graciously, went back to his stall and prepared to do it again the next time out. He never fathered multiple offspring out of wedlock. Alas. (Jeff Neuman in the New York Times) What is it in that description of Barbaro that strikes chords about character for us and reminds us of what disturbs us about the character of other “stars”? I hope you will add that to your discussion questions today. The Bible hero we hope to learn from today is one of the major prophets whose name was Jeremiah and who did all the things that prophets like Isaiah and Amos and Micah did also: he reminded people of God’s character and God’s concern for justice and compassion and for the least and the last and the vulnerable. He reminded people of the covenant between God and God’s people and about what it means to live up to being God’s people. He told the truth to people in power and felt the heat. He was able to see things more clearly than most. And he talked about what would happen if people stayed on the same destructive path they were on. That is what a prophet does. That is the role of prophets—to stand for and speak out for what is right, and to do that even when it will be unpopular and uncomfortable. The common misunderstanding of a prophet is that they predict the future. That is only a minor part of their role and it has to do with telling folks what is going to happen if we stay on the wrong path. Jeremiah lived in a time of major upheaval in the kingdom of Judah. He lived just a few years before the city of Jerusalem was conquered and destroyed, the temple was destroyed and most of the people were taken away into exile into the city of Babylon. It was one of the darkest times in Jewish history. There were danger signs before the Babylonians killed and captured people. Jeremiah was trying to warn the people and the leaders about the consequences of their arrogance and their greed. He said that God hates bribery and God cares for the poor and vulnerable. He called for people to repent—to change their direction and to return to God and to the ways of God. He saw that the Israelites had become smug. They thought that God would protect them no matter what they did. They thought that God would never let the temple be destroyed or let God’s chosen people be disgraced. They had become conceited and arrogant and self absorbed. And Jeremiah saw all that, and Jeremiah wept over the city of Jerusalem because of that arrogance and sin. Do you remember anyone else in the Bible who looked over the city of Jerusalem and wept over it because of how unlike God, how forgetful the people had become? Jesus did the same thing as he was about to enter the city on Palm Sunday. He wept over the blindness and pride of the people and said that they will be destroyed because they did not recognize the time when God came to save them. Jeremiah tried to put people back on a track to God and the reward he got was to be placed into stocks in Jerusalem so that people could walk by and laugh at him and spit in his face. His message was a discouraging message. We say today that if someone is delivering a sad or discouraging message it is a jeremiad. But he was right. He said what needed to be said even though it got him into trouble and was controversial and made people ridicule him and hate him. Someone said that the role of the prophet is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. We saw that same courageous role prophets filled in the 1960’s in our country during the civil rights movement. We saw persons exhibiting great courage standing against bigotry and racism and doing so at great risk. My minister friend Jerry Trigg, retired now from active ministry, was a new pastor in Mississippi in the 1960’s in the struggle for equal rights for all persons. He spoke out for that in his church and the result was that, because he said what the Bible tells us about us all being equal under God, he was asked to leave his church. He did what Jeremiah did and he suffered the same consequences. We still see people filling the role that Jeremiah filled—being courageous in telling the truth and in letting the chips fall where they may. It is always a controversial role and sometimes we don’t see the importance of what they have done until much later. I think of one voice in our country from someone who did that was silenced a few days ago by her untimely death. Let me preface my point by saying that I try to read very widely in newsmagazines and newspapers. I try to get balance by reading columnists from the political right and left. I read regularly commentators on the right like George Will and Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks. I read commentators on the left like E. J. Dionne and Tom Friedman. One of those liberal voices that I looked forward to reading was Molly Ivins who loved to reveal what she saw as hypocrisy and self absorption particularly in Texas political leaders. She wrote a while back about a member of the Texas House of Representatives who had been quite ineffective and in the upcoming election was about to lose badly, so to gain a sympathy vote, had a relative shoot him in the arm with a shotgun so people would feel bad for him being assaulted and re elect him. That was his plan until Molly Ivins and others told the truth about what happened and the plan didn’t work. She did other things that prophets do in regard to the conflicted feelings and painful feelings—anguished feelings—that most of us have about the war in Iraq. Many of us, including me, thought it was right to launch a pre emptive war in 2003. She felt differently and wrote four months before the invasion that the greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself so much as what happens after we win. And then six months after we invaded Iraq, she wrote, “It is a good thing we won the war because the peace sure looks like a quagmire.” She has been joined recently by conservative columnist George Will who says that the Iraq war is perhaps the worst foreign policy mistake in all of American history. Will is a respected and thoughtful Republican who reminds us that our feelings about this tragic war have long since moved beyond partisanship. I don’t know how it is with you but I get more and more discouraged when I see the TV news and read the papers and I pray for the best possible outcome for this tragedy, and we all feel the pain and sadness when we hear reports like the one this week that the past four months has seen more American deaths in Iraq than in any other four month period in all of this war: 334 American service persons killed—and that does not tally the number of wounded to add to the 23,000 already wounded and that does not begin to count the thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed and wounded in what has been described in last week’s intelligence estimate as not just a civil war but worse and more complicated than a civil war. We all pray for the right course and the best solution to prevail and we ask for God to show our leaders and all of us perhaps some direction that has not been pursued yet. And I believe we all feel more and more pain and sadness about this war. That is the last point I want to make about Jeremiah and the character of Jeremiah. Not only did he do what prophets are supposed to do and show the way for others who are called to say what they see even when that is uncomfortable and unpopular, he also gave us a role model for sharing all of our feelings—ALL of our feelings with God. One scholar says it this way: Jeremiah and the prophets as well as the Psalmists themselves, dared to confess their fears, their doubts, their hostilities to God, even when they felt that God was responsible for those sufferings. They were honest. They were fearlessly honest with God. And that was part of the close and intimate relationship they had with God, the kind of relationship that they invite us to as well!! Who are persons of character that you want to imitate and emulate? We will meet two others next week in the personages of Job and the author of Ecclesiastes who told us there is a time for every purpose under God’s heaven. Be with us for that last sermon in this series. |
