Between an Insistent God and a Resistant People[1]
October 18, 2020
Jeremiah 20:7-18
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached is available here: https://youtu.be/cwbLLM3MQB8
While we were on vacation, Jim and I came across John Brown’s farm in North Elba, New York. You will remember John Brown the abolitionist who led the raid on the armory at Harpers’ Ferry just before the Civil War. Until we saw the signs for his farm and burial site, I did not know he had a New York connection. In fact, he only lived a few years on that farm before his activism took him elsewhere.
I mentioned our visit to his farm to some friends who told me about a book based on his life called Good Lord Bird. It has just been released as a TV series. I wanted to show you a clip from it, but everything I could find was too violent for our context. So I just have this screen shot. Until two weeks ago, what I knew about John Brown was what I learned in middle school social studies, that he was an abolitionist who was executed for insurrection at Harper’s Ferry. It turns out that his story is much more complicated than that. But based on that memory from school, I guess I pictured him fairly mild-mannered, maybe like I imagined the scholarly Henry David Thoreau who went to jail for refusing to pay his taxes. If you had asked, I might have described John Brown like that, but just a bit tougher. Then I watched the first episode of Good Lord Bird where Brown is portrayed as wild and slightly mad.
And because Jeremiah lives in my brain right now, I began to wonder what John Brown and Jeremiah might have in common. John Brown’s biographers described him as both “extraordinary” and “a victim of mental delusions.” Some called him a terrorist, but others said that his struggle against slavery was very personal and religious. Biographer Stephen Oates said that he was “maligned as a demented dreamer, but that he was in fact one of the most perceptive human beings of his generation.” [2]
This is not a sermon about John Brown, but my brief encounter with him helped me realize that I was probably domesticating Jeremiah, toning down some of his outrageous rhetoric, making him gentler and kinder than he probably was. Jeremiah’s contemporaries probably thought he was delusional, but the Biblical witness is that he perceived what others did not and he was faithful to God no matter what.
In chapter 19, at God’s command, Jeremiah prophesied against Judah, describing the coming destruction in graphic and horrifying terms. This kind of speech is costly. Jeremiah is immediately punished, put into stocks near the gate of the temple where he suffers public humiliation and derision. It is costly in a less visible way as well. We remember that Jeremiah is from a priestly family. His proclamation is against his spiritual home, challenging the religious authorities whom he believes are leading the people astray. That takes a personal toll. [3]
Then we hear the complaint that Jim read for us. In these verses, Jeremiah reveals his internal turmoil. He says that he is a laughingstock. From chapter 16, we know that God forbid him to marry and also forbid him to attend other people’s weddings or funerals. He was socially isolated. [4] Everyone seemed to hate him. The people of his home village plotted against him. The priests and prophets called for his death. He ministered for 40 years and in all that time, he never saw a sign of repentance or anyone believing him.
He never wanted to be a prophet in the first place and now he doesn’t flinch from reminding God of that. The verbs in verse 7 are very strong. Jeremiah says “you have enticed me and I was enticed. You have overpowered me and you have prevailed.” What the NRSV translates as enticed can also mean seduce or deceive or make a fool of. The second verb can mean overpower in a military or physical sense, but it could also mean to outwit.[5] Jeremiah has been duped into being a prophet, and he is ticked off about it.
But as much as he hates it, he can’t abandon his vocation as a prophet. God’s word is within him. When he tries to keep silent, it burns inside until he can’t stand it and has to speak it. But when he speaks, it is at great personal cost. “He suffers if he speaks the word of God and he suffers if he doesn’t, and the God who called him from the womb is ultimately responsible for both realities.” [6]
In the first section of this complaint, he wants some reward for his obedience, some vindication. He asks God to take the appropriate vengeance. Stuck between an insistent God and a resistant people, he sees that he is helpless. He cannot prevail, but God will prevail, so Jeremiah’s only hope is that God will be his ally.[7] This section ends with verse 13 which confidently asserts that God has already delivered the needy from the hands of evildoers.
What follows in verses 14-18 is even more disturbing. Here, Jeremiah is even more candid about his despair. He wishes that he had never been born. “He imagines the day of his birth. His father waited while the midwives worked. Then the news. Then rejoicing. But the waiting, the news, the rejoicing are all rejected. If only the news [of his birth] had not been brought, . . . then Jeremiah might have been unnoticed, unvalued, uncalled [to prophesy]”[8]
I notice a couple of things here. First, I notice the honesty of scripture. Walter Brueggemann says, “It does not deny or deceive about how costly the truth of God’s word is. Such deep faith as Jeremiah’s does not lead neatly to well-being, but to recurring crisis. The Bible knows about troubled, bitter faith that is left unresolved.”[9]
Second, I notice a tension between Jeremiah’s public ministry and his private struggles. Publicly, he was God’s unwavering mouthpiece. Internally he was in turmoil. I point that out because often we only see the public witness of others. Because we are not privy to their private struggles, we may think that faith comes easy to them. Because we are too aware of our own private struggles, we may think that we are less faithful or less gifted or less obligated by God’s call.
Verses 7-12 are a complaint to God. Verses 14-18 are an existential cry of despair. In the middle is verse 13, which praises God in confidence of deliverance as if it has already happened. It demonstrates the tension in a faith-filled life which cycles between lament and praise and despair in no particular order.
Here is the good news buried in all of that – if we have seasons of complaint and doubt and anger, if we have times when all we can do is sing the song that says we will understand it better by and by, if we have moments when we question the meaning of our existence, we are in good company. So did the prophets. So did generations of faithful ones before us. Being faithful does not mean never asking questions, never being troubled. Most often it seems to mean asking all the questions and getting few answers and continuing to trust anyway. Sometimes, some us get a glimpse of God along the way, and that makes praise possible.
I’m remembering another reluctant prophet. Dr King was a new local church pastor in Montgomery who thought that he might someday become a professor. He had no desire to become a national civil rights leader. When Rosa Parks was arrested, King had to be talked into the bus boycott. Once he accepted that responsibility, that calling, the death threats began. About midnight one night, he was pacing the floor unable to sleep when the phone rang. A sneering voice on the other end threatened to kill him and to blow up his house unless he left town immediately. Listen to his own words about what happened next:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCdmxGjUuyA
We only know the story of the kitchen table prayer because eleven years later, Dr. King shared it in a speech. It reminds me of the way that Jeremiah was God’s mouthpiece in public and suffered inner turmoil in private. Again, the good news is that if we wrestle with doubts, fears, complaints against God, we find ourselves among the psalmists and prophets who have wrestled before us.
Let me close with some good words from Frederick Buechner. He wrote, “If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say . . . you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: “Can I believe it all again today?” No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible.
Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer’s always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and...great laughter. [10]
May it be so for you and for me. Amen.
[1] This phrase originated with Terence Fretheim in Jeremiah, (Macon, Georgia: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2002), p. 300.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)
[3] Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1998), p.181.
[4] Kathleen M. O’Connor Jeremiah: Pain and Promise, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), p. 75
[5] Terence Fretheim, “Caught in the Middle: Jeremiah’s Vocational Crisis” Word and World, Volume 22, Number 4, Fall 2002, Luther Seminary, Saint Paul Minnesota, p. 352-53
[6] Terence Fretheim, “Caught in the Middle: Jeremiah’s Vocational Crisis” p. 355
[7] Brueggemann, p.183.
[8]Brueggemann, p. 185-86.
[9] Brueggemann, p. 186
[10] Frederick Buechner, The Return of Ansel Gibbs (New York: Knopf, 1958).