Preached at Christ Church Brunswick
Jeremiah 38.1–13
Stuck in the mud. Up to his neck in it. If ever a man needed rescuing, then it was Jeremiah.
Thrown in on the orders of the king.
How had he got to be in this sticky mess? What had he done exactly?
You’ve heard a lot about Jeremiah over the past weeks. Different stories about his curious exploits.
But the one common theme running through everything is that Jeremiah made people lives uncomfortable.
Why? Because he told the truth. And that hurt.
Jeremiah sat in the mud.
He’d managed to find a solid bit of stone and now, as he sat shivering, his mind ran over the events of the past months.
‘I told God not to ask me to do this. What was it I’d said right at the start:
‘Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”
But the LORD had said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I shall send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you, Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD.”
I tried so hard to decline politely. Didn’t God know about my family?’
The first thing we need to understand about Jeremiah is that he comes from the outside, from a ‘nowhere sort of place’,
a place that was famous for nothing except for being where king Solomon had banished Jeremiah’s ancestors generations before when they had caused trouble then.
Trouble-making seemed to run in Jeremiah’s whole family
So it was to Jeremiah the dangerous outsider that the word of God came for those at the centre of the political and religious life of the nation
Jeremiah’s mission impossible was to speak the truth to the leaders of the established religion,
bursting the bubble of their complacency and so compelling them to recognise how God’s future for them is not at all what they might have imagined it to be.
Do you begin to see how Jeremiah’s circumstances might link with our day? Keep listening….
In Jeremiah’s day it was King Josiah who reigned in Judah and
He had tried his best to be faithful to the covenant God had made with his ancestor David.
He strove to do away with the worship of foreign gods and he repaired the temple.
And it was during these repairs that they discovered the original copy of the Law scroll….
When it was read out Josiah realised everything else that still had to be done
and he led the people in a great act of national repentance.
But shortly afterwards, Josiah was killed in battle against the Egyptians and was succeeded by each of his sons in turn.
The first two sons were as bad as each other. The third son Zedekiah was worst of all! Just imagine that.
Jeremiah tried to stand up a bit to ease his back pain, but missed his footing and fell headfirst into the stinking mud. Just imagine that!
Just imagine. The year was 597, the start of ten years of utter chaos and madness as king Zedekiah ruined the country undoing all the achievements of his father.
Despite the political chaos that was happening around them: the enemy occupation,
the capture of the city, the destruction of the temple and the deportation of many of the leading inhabitants to Babylon,
Zedekiah and Hananiah, his chief prophet and priest were convinced that Jerusalem was the safest place to be because it was the location of the temple and because they thought it was secure, protected by God.
But they failed to read the signs of the times.
They held on to the belief that sticking to the old ways would solve all their security fears and problems;
They believed that the occupation they were experiencing was just a ‘temporary upset’
and that everything would be OK if they trusted in a new allegiance with their former enemy Egypt.
‘Politics, politics, politics,’ thought Jeremiah as he climbed back onto his stone & tried to wipe off the worst of the mud from his face.
Jeremiah’s task had been to go to the king and tell him that this belief was utterly wrong.
But there was Hananiah the king’s right hand man barring his way.
Now Hananiah was no doubt a good man and some might even say a patriot since he clearly believed God was calling him to work to ensure his country’s stability in difficult times.
But he couldn’t see what God was trying to say through Jeremiah. In fact Jeremiah really annoyed him.
Eventually one day Hananiah finds Jeremiah prophesying in the temple before all the leaders of the priesthood and the nation continuing to upset people with his warnings that things would only get worse.
So it was show-down time between Hananiah the spin doctor and Jeremiah the descendant of trouble-makers
Hananiah announces to Jeremiah that he has been told by God that normality will soon be restored:
“Thus says the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon.
Within two years I will bring back to this place everything our enemies stole from us.’ Just you see.
Hananiah is confident that, through the ‘on-going negotiations’ with the Egyptians,
God will have things back to normal ‘within two years at the most’.
Jeremiah replies: “Amen! May the LORD do so; may the LORD fulfil the words that you have prophesied”,
who could not wish that to happen?
But then he adds words that cause Hananiah to wince,
Now you listen to the word of God that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people.
The prophets of old never warned of good things. That’s not what prophecy is about.
‘Good luck to you if you want to start a new tradition,’ Jeremiah seems to suggest.
‘But will it be of God? Will it be God who speaks then?’
Hananiah responds to this outage by walking over to Jeremiah
and breaking the wooden ox’s yoke that he wore on his shoulders to symbolise the oppression of the people.
Sitting in the sludge at the bottom of the well, Jeremiah smiled to himself as he remembered what happened next day.
He went back wearing a heavy iron yoke. He stood up before Hananiah and the crowd and spoke:
‘The only thing that was true about your prophecy – has announced – was that within two years you will be dead.’
You have made this people trust in a lie… you have spoken rebellion against the LORD. God will punish you.’
Well – you could have knocked Hananiah over with a feather….
The show-down here is between the truth-telling of the outsider Jeremiah
and the spin-doctoring of the spokesman of a corrupt and compromised regime that only remains in power
because it’s cahoots with an alien dictator.
The show-down is between two versions of who God is:
the God who fits conveniently into political wrangling and wheeler-dealing – at the disposal of the spin doctor,
or the God who is utterly different, utterly untameable,
utterly beyond any misguided attempts to make God become subject to human direction.
What’s at stake here are two different truth claims; two contrasting readings of reality;
two conflicting notions of the way the world is.
Hananiah has lied. He has lied about the truth of their plight and its causes;
he has lied about God.
He has lied in order to keep himself in power
and because he could not bring himself to speak a message that would upset the comfortable familiarity of his life.
Jeremiah, on the other hand, is able to speak the truth.
His calling is to be the truthful bearer a radical alternative view of the world.
And while his message is chiefly one of God’s unravelling of the familiar securities of life, it’s also one of profound hope: because the God who unravels and bring to nothing – is also the God who is able to create out of that nothing.
Jeremiah proclaims a vision in which disorientation, anxiety and loss of meaning become the very occasion and opportunity for God to cause new life to spring forth from death and decay.
Jeremiah sat quietly in the mud remembering. Then, in the silence, he heard voices. People coming close, shouting.
‘Hold on to the rope. Put the rags under your arms’ Pull him up.
Then he leant against a wall as they threw buckets of water over him to swill off the sticky mud.
Where’s that Hananiah gone? He shouted……….
Who are the prophets in today’s church? How do we listen to their voices?
How important is social justice to your religious practice or understanding of your faith?
What role is there for the church to usher in radical newness for today’s world?
If Jeremiah the prophet were to write a letter to those of us who feel we live in exile in today’s disoriented and fragmented world, what exactly would he say to us?
And would we be open and brave enough to hear and act and change?
The message of Jeremiah is quite clear: God longs to give us newness beyond our imagining.
And yet it seems that the overwhelming number of churches and congregations still have trouble hearing God speak.
Cue Advent.
A time for listening to what God is saying.
Starts next Sunday. Here.