A right Jeremiah!

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 
3 December 2023
First Sunday of Advent

Jeremiah 33.10-11, 14-18

Have you ever heard the expression,

            where someone is described as being ‘a right Jeremiah’?

 

As someone who has a generally sunny and optimistic disposition,

            I don’t think it is something that’s usually said of me,

but I’ve occasionally thought it about others!

 

If you’re not familiar with the phrase,

            calling someone ‘a Jeremiah’ is saying that they’re, to put it kindly,

            a ‘glass-half-empty’ kind of person.

 

A ‘Jeremiah’ is someone who is pessimistic about the present,

            and foresees a calamitous future.

 

A bit like Eeyore, you might say,

            or Marvin the Paranoid Android,

            or Kreacher the House Elf.

 

One of the things about someone who’s a ‘Jeremiah’,

            is that they can often annoy those around them,

            often because they are right!

 

I mean, you only have to look at the way Greta Thunberg

            has been vilified in certain strands of the media

to see how little people like to be told

            that the climate crisis is real and imminent.

 

And certainly, the Jewish prophet of doom

            from the 7^th Century BCE, Jeremiah himself,

made something of a career

            of annoying people with his dire predictions.

 

Like Private James Frazer in Dad’s Army,

            Jeremiah spent years telling his fellow citizens of Jerusalem

            that they were all doomed.

 

Their good life under King Zedekiah wasn’t going to last,

            because the Babylonians were coming.

 

At one level, Jeremiah’s predictions of Jerusalem’s downfall to the Babylonian army

            could have been simply a case of him reading the political landscape,

                        and seeing something in the wind

                        that was going to turn into a whirlwind of destruction.

 

And if that had been all there was to it,

            he might not have made himself quite so unpopular.

 

I mean, saying,

            ‘Look, there’s a large and powerful army getting closer,

                        I think we should be prepared for the worst’

            is not hugely controversial.

 

But what Jeremiah did that annoyed everyone so much

            was that he pointed to the large Babylonian army

                        gathering on the distant horizon,

            and then told King Zedekiah of Jerusalem

                        that it was his fault the disaster was coming.

 

Jeremiah wasn’t just a prophet of doom,

            and he wasn’t just right in his predictions,

he was also annoying

            because he firmly pointed his finger at the king as the one responsible.

By Jeremiah’s understanding, Zedekiah had led his country

            in a way that had taken it away from where God wanted it to be.

He had prioritised war over peace,

            nationalism over cooperation,

                        and he was about to reap the consequences of his actions - said Jeremiah.

 

So, by the time we get to the passage that is our reading this morning,

            Jeremiah is languishing in the palace dungeon in Jerusalem,

            where Zedekiah has dumped him in an attempt to shut him up.

 

And it’s so often the case, isn’t it,

            that those who hold political power

            will go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who critique their power.

 

And yet the prophetic voice refuses to be silenced.

 

Eventually, truth will out.

            Oppression, bigotry, and powerful vested interests

            don’t get to silence the uncomfortable voices of the prophets forever.

 

One of my favourite Paul Simon songs, and I have many,

            is called ‘The Sound of Silence’,

and I don’t know whether Paul Simon had Jeremiah in his prison cell in mind

            when he wrote this song, but he certainly could have done.

 

I’ll read the words of the last verse now,

            and my invitation is to hear this as the cry of the silenced prophet in any age:

 

"Fools" said I, "You do not know

            Silence like a cancer grows.

Hear my words that I might teach you

            Take my arms that I might reach you"

But my words like silent raindrops fell

            And echoed

            In the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed

            To the neon god they made.

And the sign flashed out its warning

            In the words that it was forming,

And the sign said, "The words of the prophets

            Are written on the subway walls

            And tenement halls"

And whispered in the sounds of silence.

 

My apologies if that’s just planted an ear-worm

            that you’re going to be stuck with all day.

 

But Jeremiah, and those like him, will not be silenced,

            despite the fact that they are rejected

                        for proclaiming a message

            that is not only pessimistic,

                        but which requires a change to society’s destructive patterns of behaviour

                        if the disaster is to be averted.

 

The thing is, the masses hate a Jeremiah,

            and we all love an optimist.

 

It’s so much easier to vote for the confident sunny disposition

            of the person promising easy answers to complex questions,

than it is to admit that reducing geopolitical and economic complexities

            to binary options is dangerously simplistic.

 

And those who offer optimism in place of realism,

            denying the warnings of the prophets,

            and silencing the voices of concern,

too often resort to the easy option of placing Jeremiah back in his dungeon,

            and hoping desperately that it will all work out OK.

 

But Jeremiah and those like him will not be silenced.

            And denying the problems they proclaim

            doesn’t make them go away.

 

And so Jeremiah continues to speak,

            from his dungeon beneath the palace.

 

But what is so interesting,

            is that the words he issues from his confinement

            contain a surprising message of hope.

 

Sometimes, I find myself almost in despair at the world,

            I worry about global warming,

                        I worry about the rise of the far right in Europe,

            I worry about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,

                        and I worry about terrorism,

                                    about mass migration,

                                                and about oppression and injustice around the world.

 

Sometimes, even sunny optimistic Simon,

            can find himself becoming a bit of a Jeremiah.

 

How about you?

 

So what does Jeremiah say next?

            Does he continue with his message that ‘we’re all doomed’?

 

Well, yes and no.

 

There’s no escape for Jerusalem from the Babylonian army on the horizon,

            the city will be besieged, overthrown, and the people taken into exile.

 

But nonetheless Jeremiah explores a sense of what hope might look like

            in the face of the depressing message of imminent destruction.

 

Jeremiah’s message is both deeply troubled,

            and deeply hopeful.

 

At the time of his imprisonment,

            where we meet him in chapter 33 of the book that bears his name,

            there are no obvious signs of hope.

 

The Babylonians are coming,

            and despair and destruction are coming to his beloved city.

 

But still he speaks of hope,

            which comes not from a denial of the realities before him,

            but from a deep grappling with despair.

 

And I find myself thinking here about a depth of spirituality

            that can embrace both hope and despair.

 

Too often my experience of church life over the years,

            has been that we are converted from despair to hope,

as if despair were some kind of sinful or shameful state,

            from which we need salvation.

 

Well, Jeremiah offers us a more integrated model here,

            as he holds hope and despair together before God.

 

The hope he proclaims from the depths of despair,

            is something that challenges the realities of the present;

something which alters the way in which one lives in the here and now,

            by articulating a new, transformative, way of being.

 

So, he says, one day… one day that is surely coming…

            God will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David.

 

Understanding quite what he means by this

            requires us to know a bit about the Jewish story.

 

For the Jews of Jeremiah’s time, their security was tied up deeply

            with their monarchy was a gift from God.

 

So the stories of David, their archetypical king of ancient times,

            defined their nation,

                        their understanding of who they were,

                        and who they were called by God to be.

 

For the Jews the time of the Babylonian invasion,

            the stories of King David functioned a bit like the way

            the stories of King Arthur functioned for Victorian England.

 

Just as the legend of Arthur, Merlin, and Uther Pendragon,

            forged the mythology that sustained the English Empire,

So the tales of Saul, David, and Solomon

            undergirded the ideology of Israel as God’s chosen people.

 

And in the face of the Babylonian invasion,

            that ideology was being shaken to its core.

 

If Zedekiah was to be killed, if Israel was to lose its king,

            then all God’s promises would be questioned.

 

This wasn’t just a political crisis that Jeremiah was living through,

            it was a crisis of faith.

 

And so, he says, just as a new branch can spring from the stump of a felled tree:

            even if Israel is toppled by the Babylonians,

                        God has not forgotten the promises made in olden days,

            and a new branch will spring up for David.

 

Jeremiah wasn’t the only prophet to use this image

            of a branch of David arising from the roots of a felled tree;

we find it in Isaiah as well,

            who uses the name of Jesse, King David’s father, and says:

 

Isaiah 11.1, 10

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

            and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples;

            the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

 

And this passage from Isaiah, together with our reading from Jeremiah,

            stayed with the people of Israel through their time of exile,

            and sustained their hope through the years of despair.

 

And then something interesting happened,

            because even though the exile eventually came to an end,

                        and the exiles were restored to Jerusalem, with their monarchy re-established,

            the hope that a better time, a better leader, was coming,

                        didn’t go away.

 

What we are seeing here, in our reading from Jeremiah,

            and it’s parallel in Isaiah,

is the birth of what became the Jewish hope for a coming messiah.

 

You see, even though the end of the exile marked a partial restoration,

            the extent of Israel’s borders never got back

                        to where the stories said they had been in the time of King David;

            their kings never had the political strength and autonomy

                        that the stories of David eulogised and lauded,

            and instead the restored Israel existed as a puppet nation,

                        ruled by puppet kings,

            controlled and at the mercy of whatever empire was dominant,

                        from the Babylonians to the Greeks to the Romans.

 

So the seed of hope for a righteous branch for David,

            planted by Jeremiah and nurtured through the despair of exile,

grew into the hope for a coming messiah

            a son of David who would restore Israel’s faith and dignity before God.

 

But I’m jumping too far….

 

Let’s stay with Jeremiah for a few moments longer,

            and re-join him in his dungeon in the palace in Jerusalem,

            with the Babylonian army on the horizon.

 

Because Jeremiah tells us, from the literal pits of despair,

            what this hope will look like.

 

For Jeremiah, hope looks like justice, and righteousness,

            which are nowhere to be seen in his world.

 

He articulates a hope that someone will come,

            who will embody justice and righteousness.

 

This is a mind-altering moment,

            and it sets the agenda for everything that follows.

 

What, he asks, would it mean

            for God’s justice and righteousness to be embodied and enacted?

What would it mean for someone to live out

            God’s eternal intent of setting things right?

What would it mean for the kingdom of Israel,

            to become the Kingdom of the Lord, who is righteousness and justice?

 

It is an astonishing articulation of hope,

            in the face of overwhelming despair.

 

In Jeremiah’s world, righteousness and justice are gone,

            and for him to assert that God is righteous, and that God is just,

            and that God has not yet finished with his people,

is a narrative of hope that has the capacity to change the world.

 

But here’s the thing,

            Jeremiah says all this, when the reality of it is nowhere to be seen.

 

And to leap forward now to the coming of Jesus,

            (we are, after all, now in Advent),

it is not immediately clear that God is putting things right by sending a child,

            who will be born in difficult circumstances and flee his home as a refugee;

it is not immediately clear that God is putting things right

            through the horror of a crucifixion and the rumour of a resurrection.

 

And yet, Jeremiah says that he is so certain of his hope,

            that Jerusalem itself will be renamed,

            and it shall be called ‘The Lord is our righteousness’.

 

The hope that Jeremiah proclaims is not dependent on any human activity,

            it is dependent on God’s action.

 

He is saying that it is always God

                        who gives new life in place of death,

            and that it is only God who brings new righteousness and justice

                        into the very heart of the place where despair is most deeply felt.

 

If Jerusalem, the city of death and destruction in Jeremiah’s time,

            can be the place where hope enters the world,

then hope can come to anywhere that despair is at its worst,

            whether that is lonely solitude of the human heart,

            the corporate victims of an act or terror,

            or the communal hell of a besieged city in Gaza.

 

And so, because it is Advent,

            we come at last to Jesus;

who asked his disciples, ‘But who do you say that I am?’

            and his friend Peter answered him, ‘You are the messiah’ (Mark 8.29)

 

Within the Christian story,

            the hope of Jeremiah and Isaiah is fulfilled in Jesus,

who embodies God’s righteousness and justice,

            bringing hope to all those whose lives are lost in despair.

 

And for those of us who find ourselves living in turbulent times,

            not knowing who to believe, or where to go for truth,

the living hope that is Jesus,

            made known to us by his Spirit,

and encountered in one another as we gather in his name,

            gives us a hope that will sustain us

 

And so we pray, again, the Advent prayer

            of longing for a world transformed.

 

“Come, Lord Jesus, Come.”

Rebuilding the House of God

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

26 November 2023

 

2 Kings 22.1-10, 14-20; 23.1-3
 
I have a question for us to consider this morning, and it’s this:
            ‘What God lives here?’
            ‘What God dwells in this place?’
 
Or, to put it another way:
            What is the nature of the God we worship in this place?
            What kind of God do we embody in our relationships with one another?
And how does this God call us to behave
            in our engagement with the wider world?
 
These are profound questions,
            as they take us right to the heart of what it means
            for us to be the people of God called to this place, at this time.
 
It’s been a tough few years, in many ways.
            The long term impacts of the pandemic are still with us,
                        and they affect everything from Sunday attendance
                        to the way we enact our mission in the world.
 
The answers to the question of who we should be
            as the community of God’s people,
answers that we knew well before the pandemic,
            are not the answers that serve us now.
 
We need new answers,
            we need a new vision of what it means
            for us to be the people of God in this place.
 
We need a fresh encounter with God’s word,
            as we hear God’s calling and purpose
            on our lives and for our community.
 
Well, so far, so revivalist sermon.
            You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again I’m sure.
 
And whilst it’s all true,
            we still need to work out what this actually means for us?
 
How does one have a fresh encounter with God’s word?
            How does one hear God’s calling and purpose
            on our lives and our community?
Where do we go for our new answers, for our fresh vision?
 
Well, the lesson of Josiah might suggest
            that we start with a building project,
a bit of sprucing up the house of the Lord,
            maybe a renewed basement,
                        with a sprung floor and some good air conditioning,
                        and a classy glass screen…
 
After all, that’s basically what Josiah was doing
            when Hilkiah discovered the book of the law.
 
Josiah had become king at the age of 8,
            and his coronation came on the heels of the long reign of king Manasseh.
 
The books of Kings love to characterise their rulers
            as either a ‘good king’ or a ‘bad king’
and Manasseh, in addition to being
            the longest reigning king of Judah, at 55 years,
            is also definitively a ‘bad king’.
 
We’re told that he persecuted the prophets,
            promoted the worship of other gods,
            and enacted violence with ease, on one occasion killing his own son.
 
Certainly by contrast to his predecessor Manasseh,
            Josiah is a ‘good king’, he’s pious, careful, and a fair ruler.
 
When he was in his mid-20s, he decided to embark on a project
            to restore and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem,
            which had fallen into disrepair.
 
No expense was to be spared,
            and Josiah commissioned the High Priest Hilkiah to carry out the work.
 
This is when things get interesting, of course,
            because Hilkiah discovers the scroll of the Law.
 
Now I’m afraid that our recent renovation work at Bloomsbury
            hasn’t unearthed anything nearly as exciting;
although we did find some newspapers and cigarette packets from the 1970s…
 
But Hilkiah found what seems to be part of the book of Deuteronomy,
            a book we know as the fifth book of the Old Testament.
 
The book of Deuteronomy has a very specific understanding
            of how God works in relation to human beings.
 
In a nutshell, it describes a system of reward and punishment,
            where those who are ‘faithful’ to God are rewarded by God,
            and those who are ‘unfaithful’ to God are punished by God.
 
This perspective on divine blessing and cursing
            lies behind the books of Kings
            that we’ve been reading in recent weeks,
and it informs the assessment it offers
            of which kings are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’.
 
A good king is one who obeys the law of the Lord,
            and a bad king is one who is unfaithful.
 
And the proof of whether a king is good or bad
            is found in whether their reign is a success or a failure,
because, according to the theology of Deuteronomy,
            God rewards the faithful and punishes the faithless.
 
Well, this discovery of the law scroll clearly affected Josiah deeply,
            and he realised that the law of God
                        had been neglected in the land for generations,
            through all the long reign of Manasseh.
 
And as a bright young ruler with ambitions to rule long and well himself,
            Josiah embraces this theology,
            and institutes a widespread set of sweeping reforms.
 
And so Josiah is declared by the Jewish historian writing the books of the Kings
            to have been a Good King, a faithful and consequently successful ruler,
            who pleased God and was rewarded accordingly.
 
And I just want us to stop and think for a moment
            about whether we think God really works in this way?
 
Does God always reward faith and punish disobedience?
            Certainly many of us will have been brought up
            to believe that this is the case…
 
The theology of Deuteronomy is alive and well
            in the contemporary Christian church,
and it takes various shapes,
            from the more extreme gospels of wealth and prosperity
            to the moralising crusades of those who would demonise the LGBTQ community.
 
The temptation to equate success with God’s blessing is always before us,
            but when we stop for a moment and think about it
we know, don’t we, that sometimes good things happen to bad people,
            and that bad things happen to good people?
 
Read the book of Job if you’re in any doubt!
 
So what are we to make of this story from ancient Israel,
            of a Good King who reforms the religious life of his country
            in search of God’s blessings?
 
Well, I wonder, what are we hearing God say to us
            as we ‘fix up’ our own house of God?
What word of the Lord will guide us in the coming years?
            What wisdom will we uncover that will shape our community going forwards?
 
What we will not hear, I hope and pray,
            is a message of fear,
where God is poised to bring down divine judgment
            on those who get it wrong.
 
We need a word for our time,
            and our time is not Josiah’s time.
 
I do not believe that reform in our time
            will be a purging reform focussed on scapegoating the supposedly sinful.
 
But there’s an interesting cameo in Josiah’s story,
            which can I think point us in a helpful direction:
and that’s the visit Hilkiah the High Priest makes to the female Prophet Huldah.
 
We cannot underestimate how significant it is
            that the religious elite go to consult this holy woman.
 
In a male dominated culture,
            and in a biblical text where women are hardly even named,
            and when they are it is usually in the context
                        of them being property, wives, or mothers,
            we meet the Prophet Huldah who speaks for God
                        into the highest levels of society.
 
As we discern God’s call on our community,
            as we seek to hear God’s message for our time, and our building,
we need to listen to the marginalised, the excluded, and the oppressed,
            because it is likely that God’s voice will be heard through their voices.
 
As we learn to listen to the least, and to put God first,
            we may begin to discover a religious reform for our time,
where the competing loyalties of our age,
            the economic, social, and political forces that clamour for attention,
are relativized before the God who calls us to follow the counter-cultural path
            of radical love, radical inclusion, and radical justice.
 
The book of Deuteronomy contains the great command,
            that echoes down to us directly from Josiah’s temple,
            via the voice of Jesus himself:
 
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
            You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
            and with all your soul, and with all your might.” (Deut 6.4-5 // Lk 10.27 //s)
 
Putting God first never goes out of fashion,
            because it has never been fashionable to do so.
 
But if we want to hear the word of God for how we live our lives,
            how we spend our money and resources,
            and how we interact with one another,
then it is, in truth, the only place to start.
 
And so I do think we need to recover the word of God in our time,
            and I think we need to remember that when God speaks,
            what God speaks is a person.
 
As the opening of John’s gospel tells us,
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
            and the Word was God. 
² He was in the beginning with God. 
                ³ All things came into being through him,
                and without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being ⁴ in him was life,
            and the life was the light of all people. 
⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.
 
When God speaks salvation,
            God does not speak a text but a person,
the divine Word is the Word made flesh,
            and word of God we need to recover, to rediscover,
            is the God of love and justice revealed in the person of Christ Jesus.
 
So, to return to my question from the beginning,
            of ‘What God lives here’, of ‘What God dwells in this place’,
 
The answer, I hope we will discover together,
            is the God of love made known to us in Jesus,
            revealed to us as we are attentive to the least and the lost.
 
The question that Josiah may well ask us,
            is whether we are listening carefully enough?