"Believing in Tomorrow" 
Proclaiming the Truth.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Barry Day
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Text: Jeremiah 2:1-13
The American novelist, Frederick Buechner, describes a scene that could well be a picture of us as we gather here today at TEMC. In fact, he describes this very moment as it occurs every Sunday morning. Here is how he puts it:
So the hymn before the sermon comes to a close with a somewhat unsteady ”˜Amen,' and the organist gestures the choir to sit down. Fresh from breakfast with his wife and family, and a last- minute look at the weekend papers, the preacher climbs the steps to the pulpit with his sermon in his hand. He hikes his black robe up at the knee so he will not trip over it on the way up the steps. His mouth is a little dry. He has cut himself shaving. He feels as if he has swallowed an anchor. If it weren't for the honour of the thing, he would just as soon be somewhere else.
In the pews some turn up their hearing aids, and a young mother slips her six-year-old a Magic Marker and a pad of paper. A college student home for vacation, who is there because he was dragged there, slumps forward with his chin in his hand. The man who is a senior executive of a large corporation, who twice that week had seriously contemplated suicide, places his hymn book in the rack. A pregnant girl feels the life stir inside her. A high-school math teacher, who for 20 years has managed to keep his homosexuality a secret for the most part even from himself, creases his order of service down the centre with his thumbnail and tucks it under his knee ....
The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his sermon note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts; but at this moment he has them in the palm of his hand.
The silence in the church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening... including even the preacher. Everybody here know the kind of things he has told them before, and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them?
Let him tell them the truth....!” ”˜LET HIM TELL THEM THE TRUTH!'
To “tell the truth” ... that's the task of the preacher. But it's not as easy as it sounds! For starters, there's no guarantee that preachers know any more about the truth than those who listen to them. Like everyone else, the preacher, too, must first listen for that Word of Truth that comes from God.
Sometimes it speaks through the Scriptures; sometimes it speaks through the events of everyday life; sometimes it speaks in the silences of life. But that's the first problem for the preacher, just as much as it is for anyone else: to try and get some sort of grasp on what is the truth.
The second challenge is how to proclaim it. When people ask - as all of us probably ask every time we come to church - “Is there any Word from the Lord? Is there any Word for me?” and the preacher answers: “Yes, there is,” that's when his real trouble begins, because he has to find a way to proclaim that “Word,” that “Truth” in such a way that it will be heard.
It's not easy to tell the truth! Just when people want to hear comforting things, pleasant things, nice things ... that's when the Word of Truth that cries out to be proclaimed could well be a word of harsh judgement - something like: “Thus says the Lord: ”˜I despise your evil ways... you who oppress the poor, who crush the needy.'”(Amos 4:1)
“My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and have dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jeremiah 213)
“Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger. Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you…” (Luke 6:25ff)
Like it or not, that's the word of truth that sometimes must be proclaimed; and it isn't always easy... and it isn't always welcomed!
On the other hand, sometimes the preacher has some incredibly Good News to tell his listeners: a word of love, of forgiveness, of hope. But there are always some people who just can't or won't hear it - even when it's the best news they ever heard. Perhaps it's because they have become so accustomed to receiving condemnation, criticism, rejection. They could relate to that! That's what they get all the time! But when you try to tell them Good News, they just can't handle it.
Our Old Testament reading this morning was from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. A lot of people think that the prophets of Israel were primarily predictors of the future sort of like religious fortune-tellers. But that doesn't do them justice at all. Jeremiah and most of the other great prophets were preachers who tried to tell the truth. They were individuals of great spiritual and social and political insight and they didn't mind telling a few hard-hitting truths, reminding rulers and the religious establishment and all the people of Israel that sooner or later they would face the consequences of their actions.
I've been thinking a lot lately about Jeremiah, partly because the turmoil of our times is not too different from the time in which Jeremiah lived and preached. And I guess I've also been thinking of him because I believe we all need to hear a word of hope, some reason to believe in tomorrow. It was a challenge that Jeremiah faced as well.
Jeremiah was a prophet in one of the most turbulent periods of biblical history - around the year 600 BC. There were wars, threats of invasion, political intrigue and instability. In Jeremiah's own lifetime he served under seven different kings - they came and went like the leaders of some of our Canadian political parties. But through it all Jeremiah believed himself to be called by God to be a prophet to his people, and he kept the faith and he proclaimed the truth as best he could, whether the people wanted to hear or not.
A lot of what Jeremiah had to say was doom-and-gloom sort of stuff. (Even today the Oxford English Dictionary uses the word “jeremiad” for someone who complains a lot.) As a result, Jeremiah was never very popular; but he was always colourful, and he had a real flair for the dramatic. For example, there was the time he appeared at one of the main gates of Jerusalem carrying a huge clay jar on his shoulders. (If he lived in Canada he might have shown up here at TEMC on a Sunday morning, or at rush hour at the Bloor-Yonge subway station, or in the gallery of the House of Commons in Ottawa.) When he was sure that he had everyone's attention, Jeremiah smashed the clay jar to the ground, breaking it into a thousand pieces. Then he turned to the crowd and said THAT was how the Lord would deal with the nation if the people persisted in their immorality and disobedience: “Thus says the Lord of Hosts: So I will break the people of this city - as one who breaks a potter's vessel - so that it can never be mended.” (Ch.19) Harsh words... but words of truth and profound insight that needed to be heard by a people who had forgotten their spiritual roots and values and were chasing after every new false god that came along.
Another time, Jeremiah showed up on the streets of Jerusalem wearing a wooden yoke around his neck. He said it symbolized the yoke of slavery that the nation would be wearing unless they got their act together and started putting God first in their lives. Somebody snatched the yoke from him and broke it, they didn't like his little illustrated sermon. But the next day Jeremiah showed up wearing an iron yoke that could not be broken. And the people got his point.
As you might well imagine, Jeremiah was soon seen as something of a threat - because he kept proclaiming all these nasty warnings about the grim things that were going to happen to the nation if the people continued to disobey the will of God. So the king at the time, Zedekiah by name, had him arrested and locked up as a threat to society. (For all I know, they may even have accused him of having weapons of mass destruction, or sent him to Guantanamo Bay!) Anyway, under the pretext of “national security,” the king had Jeremiah thrown into prison, so he could be silenced and stopped from proclaiming the truth as he saw it.
Now if the story of Jeremiah had ended there, it would be just another account of a burned-out, “pooped-out” prophet of God who had tried to tell the truth and then just disappeared from sight. But there was more to Jeremiah than that, because while he was in prison he gave what was perhaps the most profound and dramatic message of his whole career. Here is how it happened.
One night in his prison cell he had a dream, all the great prophets seemed to have a lot of dreams. (Maybe it was something they ate!) Maybe it wasn't a dream at all, but a sort of “premonition,” a flash of insight. But, then, maybe it really was the voice of God speaking in the silence of the night. (I remember the time I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that I was composing poetry in my sleep - lines that just seemed to come out of nowhere. So I got up and went to my desk and wrote my poem on a piece of paper. In that case I don't think it was the voice of God - it was just Barry, going from bed to verse! )
Anyway, in Jeremiah's dream the Lord God appeared to him and told him that Hanamel, his cousin, was coming to pay him a visit, and he was going to offer to sell Jeremiah the old family farm back in his home village. Like most dreams, it didn't seem to make much sense. Jeremiah was a rather poor sales prospect: He was locked up in prison, he wasn't a farmer, and he wasn't even married and didn't have a family for whom he had to provide the land. And besides, if things went the way Jeremiah had been predicting, enemy armies would soon invade and destroy their nation, and what would be the point of buying land?
Sure enough, a few days later Jeremiah had a visit in prison from his cousin, Hanamel, who said: “Jerry, baby! Have I got a deal for you! Tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you the first chance to buy the old family farm. For you, my friend, it will only cost 17 pieces of silver.”
Now obviously, Hanamel was simply trying to unload the property - to liquidate his assets and get out while the going was good. Even in today's sophisticated markets there are those who run to the precious metals - silver and gold - as soon as there is a cloud on the horizon. It wasn't very nice of him to try and take advantage of the poor preacher, but I guess it wasn't the first time, nor will it be the last, that someone tried to make a deal like that.
Anyway, Jeremiah didn't even haggle. He simply said, “Hanamel, you've got a deal!” And right then and there, in the courtyard of the prison, Jeremiah dug deep into his robe and pulled out his old purse from its hiding place, and he counted out 17 pieces of silver - he even had it weighed, just to be sure. The only condition Jeremiah put on the his purchase of the land was that he wanted the papers on this transaction to be signed and sealed in a public place, in front of all the people and properly witnessed, and he wanted the documents stored in a safe place.
You see, it was Jeremiah's way of proclaiming another kind of truth; no longer a word of doom and gloom, but now a word of hope - a promise that, by the grace of God, “Fields shall again be bought and sold in this land ... and in this place shall once again be heard the sounds of joy and gladness! This is the Word of the Lord.”
It was Jeremiah's way of saying that he believed in tomorrow - even though the city and the nation he loved so much were even then under siege. He believed in tomorrow in spite of the fact that at that very moment he was a prisoner. He believed in tomorrow even though he was by nature a man of dark moods and deep concerns. He believed in tomorrow because he still believed in God and in the power of God to save and redeem his people.
In that particular moment of history, this was the word of truth that needed to be shouted out. It was a message of hope - that it's still worth buying a piece of land; and that once again in this place the sounds of joy and gladness will be heard.
“This,” said Jeremiah, “is the word of the Lord!”
Like Jeremiah and the people of his generation, we, too, are passing through uncertain times. There is a dreadful amount of uncertainty and instability on the world scene; there is uncertainty in our nation; and many of us, in our own personal lives, are passing through times of tremendous turmoil and insecurity.
And if you, or anyone else, should ask this particular preacher: “Is there any Word from the Lord, any great truth that we should hear” I would crave the courage to speak like Jeremiah did and to remind us all that we need to hear first a word of warning and of judgement, and to remember the rock from which we were hewn and the roots from which we have sprung and the foundations of faith upon which our lives are supposed to be built. We all need to hear that Word!
But I would hope also that I could help you hear a word of hope and of promise, like Jeremiah gave to his people when he put his money on the line and bought that field and declared his faith in the future, based primarily on his faith in the power of God to save and redeem his people.
There is still Good News to be heard! In spite of the uncertainties of our times. Remember the words of the Gospel that were read for you this morning: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” (Jn 3:16,17) For those who have eyes to see and faith - even as little as a grain of mustard seed - God continues to demonstrate his presence and his power to save, to bring light out of darkness, hope out of despair, and life out of death.
Robert Browning wrote: “God's in his heaven: all's right with the world.” Now you know and I know that all is not right with the world ... far from it! But God is still present; and, even more, the Spirit of God is in our midst - calling us and helping us to change the kingdoms of this world into the Kingdom of our God and of his Christ. That's the Truth, the Word from the Lord, that I want you to hear today. So:
Believe in God!
Believe in yourself as a child of God!
And you can believe in tomorrow, whatever it might bring!
Because nothing - no circumstance of life or death; of things present or things to come - nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God as we have come to know it through Jesus Christ our Lord.
That's the Good News, the Truth, that I want you to hear today and carry with you into all of your tomorrows.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.