Jeremiah 20:7-13; Psalm 69:7-18; Matthew 10:24-39
Listen to the sermon
An extraordinary and compelling crucifix hangs on the wall of the Cathedral College Chapel at the Washington National Cathedral. The observer can’t help but be drawn to this curious piece of art. The crucifix, sculpted from bronze on wood by Gurdon Brewster, depicts an additional figure on that Celtic cross with Jesus. They hang together, facing one another, their arms lovingly wrapped around each other.(1)
It evokes a number of biblical images. There is the father embracing the wayward, penniless, repentant, younger son on his return home. There is Mary desiring to cling to the risen Christ. There is Thomas, with his fingers in the risen Jesus’ wounds, declaring, “My Lord and my God!”
Farther afield biblically there is Ruth clinging to Naomi declaring that she will go with Naomi to Naomi’s homeland and that Naomi’s God will be Ruth’s God. There is the embrace between the estranged brothers Jacob and Esau when they meet after years of separation following Jacob’s youthful deceit. There is Elisha desiring two measures of Elijah’s spirit as the older prophet is whisked away to heaven in the fiery chariot.
Who is the second person clinging to Jesus on the crucifix? It is you, me, anyone, everyone in need of that embrace. Each of us is there on that cross, timelessly wrapped in the arms of the crucified Christ. The title of this crucifix is “Welcome Home.” Good, solid preaching, at its best, always urges every hearer of the word, beginning with the preacher, to allow the embracing arms and heart of God to enfold them. Pastoral preaching is always about “Welcome Home.”
The 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr gave powerful voice to a 1902 aphorism by a Chicago journalist, Finley Peter Dunne, who described the work of newspapers as “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Niebuhr used the words about the work of preaching. Sermons need to have two purposes: the first is to comfort those who driven to the margins of society by their own sin as well as societal sin; the second is to afflict with a view to bring them to repentance those who are so insensitive to the working of God’s grace in their own lives that they cause others to spin out of control in their own and society’s sin.
The word that afflicts is prophetic preaching. At its best, prophetic preaching exhorts every participant (again, preacher first) to “Leave Home,” to be driven by the Spirit into the wilderness of today’s world, to wrestle with and defiantly to speak God’s counter-cultural word to the monumental injustices that afflict so many of God’s people and which other of God’s people cannot or will not see.
Thus preaching must be pastoral and prophetic. For all of us are sinners in need to be called out for our sinning against God “in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone,” as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer penned so eloquently in the general confession for the original 16th century Book of Common Prayer, words still used today. Yet even in his prayer, Cranmer concluded with pastoral grace: “In your mercy forgive what we have been, amend what we are, and direct what we shall be, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways.”
The prophet is always caught on the prongs of this dual nature of the word. Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh because he knew that God would likely change the divine mind about destroying the people. Oh, how Jonah wanted to revel in that outcome. And when he finally did God’s work, forgiveness was exactly what God provided the sack-clothed and ash-wearing Ninevites. And Jonah was angry.
Jeremiah was as vituperative a prophet as any, yet he too was caught between pastoral grace and prophetic witness. Like Jonah, Jeremiah was angry at God. He prophesied as God commanded and nothing happened. The people didn’t change nor did God smite them. Instead, all his preaching made him a laughingstock, the butt of everyone’s jokes and derision.
Jeremiah had the misfortune of living in a time of great social upheaval. I suspect he would really identify with the events of today’s world. God had given him the unpleasant task of warning the people of Jerusalem that their city will be destroyed. Leading up to today’s reading, Jeremiah has expressed his grief and anger at his task. He doesn’t hold anything back. In very strong language, the prophet accuses God of having conned him into being a prophet. Some translators from the Hebrew temper Jeremiah’s language by using a milder term such as “persuaded” or “enticed.” Either way, the implication here is that Jeremiah found himself helpless before God’s powers of persuasion (or simply God’s power) and he is now suffering the consequences.
Jeremiah is in a no-win situation. He is compelled to speak against Jerusalem and all he gets is abuse. But when he decides to stop speaking, the word of God burns inside of him, and he has no peace then either. To make matters worse, God seems absent, both when Jeremiah speaks and when he remains silent.
The prophet seems so confused that he can’t see straight. In these seven verses he starts with an invocation (which is really a “calling out” of God), follows that with a description of his predicament, a confession of confidence, a petition, and finally a command to praise God. Jeremiah can do this because he has an intimate, personal relationship with God. He also represents the people of God who, whether they realize it or not, are just as confused about how to deal with God.
We can often identify with the prophet. We can’t understand what God is doing. We wonder why God isn’t doing something more. We wonder when God is going to act. We think that God should be doing something different than what we perceive God is doing. We don’t see honest and sincere prayers being answered. God doesn’t seem to be explaining very well what God is doing. God has deceived us with both talk of punishment and talk of grace. We are frustrated to say the least, and upset bordering on anger.
We can’t write Jeremiah off as being a nut case. He is very human. We can’t psychoanalyze him into a nice padded pew in an out of the way chapel. He is front and center at the chancel. He is as earnest as he can get. His lament, his outcry, his harsh words leveled at God, is really an expression of faith! He is being spiritual to the deepest recesses of his soul.
Lament, and even anger at God, is not the opposite of faith in God. Doubt and struggle in the face of vocation do not negate his vocation. The prophet mightily struggles with the realities of his life of faith, but his railing, his questioning, his crying out is not blasphemy. There must be room for that struggle in the life of faith. True faith seethes at times, runs smack up against knotty issues, gets perplexed at the seeming incongruities of faith. A placid, unruffled, unquestioning, unchallenged faith is suspect.
The life of faith is not always serene. It is not quiet submission to the will of God. A faithful life struggles with God and God’s will, as surely as Jacob wrestled with God at Bethel and as Elijah fled in lonely fear following the defeat of Jezebel’s prophets of Baal at Mt. Carmel. It is only through the struggle that we get reassurance that God’s grace is, when all is said and done, truly all sufficient. When Jeremiah is uttering his lament, God does not come to him in a thundercloud, a burning bush, or the rich silence of a morning meditation. God does not seem to respond to Jeremiah at all. Nevertheless, Jeremiah’s lament turns to praise. Even in the midst of his despair and anger, Jeremiah knows that the God who has overpowered him is the sovereign God whose grace is sufficient.
Sing to the Lord,
praise the Lord,
for he has rescued the needy
from the clutches of evildoers.
The trials of faith can be like the hound of heaven thundering down on us, chasing us for all that grace is worth. If we aren’t being chased by questions, doubts, pain, raucous lament, then our faith may be beyond resuscitation. 20th century theologian Paul Tillich, a contemporary of Niebuhr, wrote that grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness, when we walk though the “dark valley of a meaningless and empty life,” when despair destroys all joy and courage.(2)
Jeremiah's prophetic task takes him to the edge of despair. He experiences the silence of God and the derision of his fellow countrymen, even to the point of feeling violated by that same prophetic calling. But when he expresses his pain, he does so in the faith language of his people. His response to pain reminds us that there is room for lament in faith, and indeed for public expression of pain in worship, for the grace of God is sufficient. Welcome home!
General resource: Rachel Sophia Baard, “Proper 7: Jeremiah 20:7-13: Theological Perspective” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), Year A, vol. 3, 146-150.
(1) Cited by Douglass M. Bailey, “Proper 7: Jeremiah 20:7-13: Homiletical Perspective” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), Year A, vol. 3, 147.
(2) Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons 1948) 153ff.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Matthew 9:35-10:23; Genesis 19:2-8a; Psalm 100
Listen to the sermon
Years ago a board game was introduced which was call “Oregon Trail.” Players drew cards which gave them events and situations which happened along the 2,170 mile trail during the decades from 1840 to 1870: broken wheels and axles, flooded rivers, extreme temperatures, drought, ambushes, cholera and scurvy, drowning, being run- over, being mauled by wild animals, other accidents, loss of horses, excess weight, loss of food and water.
The people didn’t know what they were getting into. They only knew that they had to do it, that going into the unknown was likely better than remaining in the known. Of the some 400,000 persons that traveled west, an estimated six percent never made it. They were buried in unmarked graves along or under the wagon track.
We have never done anything like that, but each of us embarked on radically new paths of living during our lifetimes: going away to college, getting the first job, getting married, changing employers or careers, finding a retirement location. None of them were as threatening or intense as the Oregon Trail experience, even though the changes may have felt that way. But we went ahead and we survived to tell the tales.
Last December America saluted John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, the oldest American to go in to space, and the last living original Project Mercury astronaut. Those seven were tapped to go where no human being had ever gone, to break the bonds of earth’s atmosphere. They had close calls, but they made it. The ultimate dangers were fully realized during Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle missions.
A new class of astronauts was announced recently. They will go to the International Space Station and maybe farther. In the 2015 movie, The Martian, Matt Damon plays a scientist who gets stranded on Mars during the first manned mission to the red planet. He uses his training, his wits, and a lot of perseverance to survive while his friends work to bring him back to Earth.
Imagine, however, if the mission had been to go to Mars with no intention of ever coming back. Imagine leaving behind everything and everyone you’ve ever known, much as the Oregon Trail pioneers did 175 years ago, to go to a planet where you’ll spend the rest of your life (and surely death) in a hostile environment with nothing but red rocks and dust to look at.
That idea has been proposed by a Dutch nonprofit organization called Mars One. The idea is to put four people on Mars as an initial colony in the year 2030, followed by new crews every two years. Mars will be their permanent home where they’ll live, work, and study the planet.
You would think it would be tough to get people to sign up for such a one-way mission, but when the search for astronauts began in 2013, more than 200,000 applicants expressed their desire to go where no one has gone and from where no one will return.
Mars One has culled the applicants down to 100 people, split evenly between male and female, and they range from doctors to unemployed people in their 20s. The most important qualification for candidates is their perceived ability to handle living on a big planet with just a few other people and their acceptance of the fact that they will never return to Earth. Mars One can teach them skills like engineering, farming and medicine, but it can’t teach determination, perseverance, and the ability to risk. As one the lucky 100 says, “I would probably die on Earth if I stayed here, too.” I doubt if any of us would sign up for Mars One, even in our reckless, carefree, younger days.
We should be careful saying, “No way.” Jesus offers us a very similar sort of one-way mission, not to leave this world behind, but rather to venture into it for the purpose of colonizing it as citizens of the kingdom of God. We don’t leave inner space, but infiltrate it fully. But like a one-way ticket to Mars, it’s also an extremely dangerous mission from which there may be no return. It’s a mission that could cost us everything.
Like SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Jesus is the visionary for this mission and demonstrates to his potential crew how it would work. Matthew reported that “Jesus traveled among all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, announcing the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every sickness.” The crowds who came to Jesus were living in an unsustainable environment, “troubled and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Israel's rulers, both kings and religious leaders, had failed them, leaving them longing for a new spiritual home.
Jesus pointed to this new future home — a home that was breaking into the present even as he spoke his teaching on the kingdom of God. He called this home the rule of God on the earth. God would “harvest” the faithful and enroll them within the realm of God’s Rule. But while the “harvest” was plentiful and the people ripe for this new world to break in, the number of initial crew members available for the journey would be small. Jesus put out a call to “plead with the Lord of the harvest to send out workers for his harvest.” It was, and is, a prayer and a call that can lead to receiving a one-way ticket.
Matthew lists the “Kingdom Twelve,” a ragtag group including simple fishermen, a tax collector, a revolutionary, a loudmouth, and a shifty betrayer. Matthew uses the word “apostles” for them, meaning that they are sent, dispatched, commissioned, charged with the responsibility to share the same news Jesus has been spreading: God’s rule is near now!
Yes, they will need further training, and they will get it. Who of us ever knew everything we needed to know for job we were tasked to do. On-the-job training is the rule, not the exception. They are not free-lancers. They have a specific target: “the lost sheep, the people of Israel,” not Gentiles or Samaritans. Others will see to them later. And they have a specific mission: announce that “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” They were to do that not only through words, but also through the specific actions that Jesus himself had demonstrated and given them authority to do themselves: curing the sick and casting out demons.
NASA plans, plans, and plans again for the sustainability of every mission they do. Jesus told the apostles up front that they will live off of whatever is provided for them. Unlike the Oregon Trail folks who took too much, they are to take nothing but the clothes on their backs. Being completely dependent on strangers is Jesus’ way of saying that they will be fully dependent on God to supply their needs. They will enter both welcoming and hostile environments and need to deal with both.
The sent ones will also need a realistic picture of their future: their mission will be dangerous. Accompanying Jesus will give them a taste of that danger. They will go as “sheep among wolves.” They will face hostility from both religious and civil authorities, alienation and separation from their families, and presumed guilt by being associated with Jesus. But they are not to fear because God will be with them.
You and I also have been called into this one-way mission. That’s what being the church of Jesus Christ is all about. Unfortunately it is too easy for us to see the church as a safe and secure place from which to see the world and its darkness from a distance. Jesus has given us the church as a training ground and launching pad for his mission in the world. We have to wrestle with the same questions as the first apostles did.
Who is our target? Who are the specific people in our community to whom Jesus is sending us? What are we willing to risk in order to reach them?
What is our goal? Are we proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom, both present and future, through both our words and our actions? Where are we working to confront evil in our community? How are we participating in the healing of the bodies and souls of our neighbors?
What is our sustainability plan? Are we hoarding resources as a means of sustaining the church as an institution, or are we depending on God for our daily bread while sharing our resources with others in need? Are we offering peace to our neighbors and to the strangers we encounter, or are we offering condemnation and fear?
What are we willing to risk? Are we willing to be at odds with the culture around us because of our faith in Christ? Are we willing to risk ridicule and persecution because we proclaim Christ and minister in ways that reflect his kingdom? Are we willing to stand for what is right, what is just, and what is true when the world seeks to conform us to its evil ways?
Accepting the Jesus mission is a one-way ticket. Jesus only promised his disciples a cross, which was and is the one-way journey from which the only return is resurrection. As Jesus put it, “Those who don’t pick up their crosses and follow me aren’t worthy of me. Those who find their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives because of me will find them” (Matthew 10:38-39).
There is no risk more worth it than the mission of the kingdom! Will you accept the one-way ticket Jesus offers? Will you come and follow him?
General Resource: Homiletics, June 18, 2017
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Numbers 11:24-29; John 7:37-39; Acts 2:1-21
Listen to the Sermon
Many believers think of the Spirit as a late arrival, an afterthought, or perhaps, to use a movie metaphor, a sequel to the original story. It’s easy enough to do. The Spirit doesn’t arrive until chapter two of Acts, after all the goings and comings, dyings and risings of the gospels. Jesus mentions the Spirit, usually with a code-worded alias: comforter, advocate, companion, counselor. But there were no real guarantees that the Spirit would actually show up.
In John’s great gospel prologue, it’s a two-person show. Word and God. There is no mention of a Spirit. Light is a significant image, but that is synonymous with Word. Word is Light. Still no report of the Spirit.
In the opening verses of Genesis, we have a mention of the Spirit. The Spirit of God – or “wind of God,” as our sanctuary Bibles and the New Revised Standard Version translate it – is right there with God in the beginning, seeming to be the same kind of co-agent of creation as John describes the Word. But in Genesis it is again a two-person operation. There is no mention of the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Human One, Christ, Messiah, or Anointed One.
This could be the lead-in to a sermon on the Holy Trinity, but that’s the topic for next week. Today – the Holy Spirit’s day – is focused on the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a Johnny or Janie come lately. The Spirit is as old as scripture, as old as creation. And if we didn’t have John’s attestation about the Word and creation, we could think of Jesus as the newbie in God’s group. Just so you don’t get that impression, remember that Jesus was born of flesh and Spirit in the fullness of time, God’s time. When the need was the greatest, then God sent the Son, as John says, “not to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).
The Spirit lurks through much of the Hebrew scriptures. One of the places where its presence is more evident is the episode I just read from the Book of Numbers.
The movement of all the Hebrews out of Egypt must have been a logistical nightmare. If the numbers which scripture gives are accurate and not just story-telling methods of saying there were a “lot of people,” moving that many people over long distances would have made the D-Day invasion of France look simple, which it wasn’t. Moving people and herds would have been akin to rush hour in Los Angeles or Chicago or Washington DC. You know how traffic moves when there is a tie up. You move a car length or two for no apparent reason other than the space opens up. It is a chain of movings. Everyone doesn’t move at the same time. First one, then the next all down the line. It’s like the rippling of waves.
So it would have been with the Hebrews leaving the edge of the Reed Sea and moving through the years of wandering in Sinai. When the front of the line got to a stopping place, the back may not have started yet.
No wonder the people were cranky and cantankerous. And that didn’t put Moses in the best of humor when he was dealing with God. Just before the account I read earlier, Moses tells God,
“The people I’m with are six hundred thousand on foot and you’re saying, ‘I will give them meat, and they will eat for a month.’ Can flocks and herds be found and slaughtered for them? Or can all the fish in the sea be found and caught for them?” The Lord said to Moses, “Is the Lord’s power too weak? Now you will see whether my word will come true for you or not.” (Numbers 11:21-23)
At God’s direction Moses assembles a cadre of seventy men to encircle the Tent of Meeting which contained the Ark or Covenant Chest. The Lord descended in the cloud distributed to the seventy some of the Spirit which he had previously placed on Moses. And they all prophesied at once for one time only.
But were there were seventy men surrounding the Meeting Tent? The text is not absolutely clear. At first it suggests that all seventy were there, but then it goes on to say that two had stayed home, Eldad and Medad. Assuming that they were numbered in the seventy, we don’t know why they weren’t there. Had they not gotten the memo? Did they not know they were short-listed for this particular activity? Or did they know about it and didn’t care about it or wanted no part of it? Were they hiding? Were they trying to avoid the Spirit?
It didn’t work. The Spirit found them and they went to prophesying inside the camp rather than beyond it at the Meeting Tent. And not only did the Spirit catch and start them prophesying, they didn’t stop, like the others did. They kept it up.
We wouldn’t know about this episode if someone hadn’t been so taken aback by the activity of the two. They ran and told Moses. Joshua, Moses’ assistant, was so upset at the report that he wanted Moses to stop Eldad and Medad. He may have thought that the two were stealing Moses’ power, that they had caught the Spirit without authorization. After all, they hadn’t been to the gathering at the Meeting Tent.
For someone who would later blow trumpets to bring down a walled fortress at Jericho, it seems like this younger Joshua was trying to build a wall to keep God’s Spirit from getting into too many people without an orderly process. After all the gift of the Spirit on the men encircling the Meeting Tent was of limited duration for a set number of people. If Eldad and Medad were supposed to be there and weren’t, then it was their loss. The Spirit shouldn’t have gone and found them.
If all seventy men were standing around the Meeting Tent, then the Spirit got to seventy plus two. Can God’s Spirit do that? Does the Spirit only come in limited quantities? I think we know the answer to that. “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Is the Lord’s power too weak? Now you will see whether my word will come true for you or not.’”
A lot of us battle with the same queasiness that inflicted Joshua when he thought about the Lord giving out more Spirit than has been promised, particularly when that Spirit is given to cantankerous, unpredictable, and often ungrateful people. How can we control such gifts if we cannot count and register them or, at least, their recipients? And while the sixty-eight or seventy got the prescribed 15 minutes of Spirit time, Eldad and Medad got more. It’s unfair. Whoever put this story down in ink or edited it is worried about an oversupply of the Spirit.
I think that Moses would be upset if he thought that people were thinking that the Spirit should be given in limited amounts to elite groups of people. He said as much to Joshua, “If only all the Lord’s people were prophets with the Lord placing his spirit on them!”
There are lots of threads in this story.
1. We can’t tell God to whom to give or not give the Spirit.
2. We can’t tell God how long the Spirit should rest on anyone who receives it.
3. We can’t tell God where or when to give the Spirit.
4. God has more than enough Spirit to go around.
5. We can run from the Spirit, but we can’t hide.
While all these take-aways are valuable, I think that last one is the most practical for us. Yes, we wrestle with the tendency to tell God what to do and how to do it. That’s part of our humanness handed down from the first parents once they took on God’s word and doubted it.
Not being able to hide from the Spirit is what really messes us up. Except when life is going sour, we would really rather have God stay away from us. We are afraid of being found. Being found limits us, we think. We want freedom but no responsibility. We want God’s largess, but we don’t want to be obligated. We don’t want to hear God’s clarion call to serve in ways that challenge life-long behaviors and thinking, We don’t want to have to leave our zones of comfort – physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual. We want Christ’s salvation, but we don’t want the purpose for which we were saved, that is to share it with others and to give it away to others who respond to different pictures, words, music, ideas than we do.
So we try to dodge the Spirit, perhaps like Eldad and Medad may have, They didn’t get a little bit of Spirit, they got a lot. And a lot is what we are afraid of. God can have all the Spirit God wants and give it out anyway God wants. Just don’t give us too much. Pentecost is about God giving us more Spirit than we either want or know what to do with. That’s God’s pleasure.
This table tells us of God’s lavish gift of grace. Jesus didn’t die a little for us, a breadcrumb’s worth and thimbleful’s amount. He died all the way. He rose all the way. He reigns all the way. He pours out the Spirit all the way. So don’t dodge the Spirit.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
