Words of the Lord

A sermon for Sunday, August 25, 2019

Would you pray with me?
God who sets us all free, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

We’ve talked for the past two weeks about how we need to investigate passages from scripture that seem to conflict but, in the end, are actually telling two sides of the same story. But sometimes, the lectionary passages for a Sunday have a through-line, some common theme that runs through them, and I think that’s our situation for this morning. There’s a little bit of a two-sides vibe with the passage from Jeremiah from Hebrews, but they come together in the gospel. To see this, we’ll start with Jeremiah this morning, jump to Hebrews, and land in the passage from Luke, which is where I think we find the grounding for how we apply these passages. You see, I believe that whatever the word from the Lord is, no matter who is called by God to proclaim it, we will always find that a word that truly comes from God is liberating, rather than binding.

So. Jeremiah. We’ve been reading from Isaiah the past two weeks, but this week the lectionary jumps to a different prophet. Our readings will stay with Jeremiah, so it’s worth it to get reacquainted with him.

Jeremiah is sometimes called “the Weeping Prophet.” The book of Lamentations is traditionally attributed to him. Why the weeping and lamenting? Well, Jeremiah is active at the time of the Babylonian Exile, which we talked about two weeks ago, the deeply traumatic event in the history of Israel and Judah where the Babylonian Empire comes, lays siege to Jerusalem, conquers the city, and after a long conflict, destroys much of Jerusalem and takes its leaders into captivity in Babylon. Jeremiah watches all of this happen. He’s taken off into exile too, despite his protests. After all that the Babylonians did to Judah, Jeremiah would rather stay with his land than go into exile in a foreign place. Jeremiah warns against the destruction, calling for the leaders to change their ways, and mourns when the worst happens.

We’ve dealt with some mourning this past week, haven’t we.

And as you expect from someone in mourning, the book of Jeremiah is disjointed. It’s difficult to make rhyme or reason of the book as a whole. At times it’s a compilation of various prophetic oracles that Jeremiah spoke over the course of his life, sometimes there’s explanatory prose, some of it sounds like sermons. The book of Jeremiah is doing what it can to make sense of the grief that comes upon the prophet and his land, but because the grief is so fresh and immediate, it’s hard to make heads or tails of it.

But Jeremiah speaks powerful words, words that have been handed down through the centuries, and that is why we have the passage that we read this morning. It’s Jeremiah’s call story. Jeremiah has heard a word from the Lord and it is a both a word of comfort and word of challenge for him. God had a plan specifically for Jeremiah before he was born, before he was formed in his mother’s womb. God had provided for Jeremiah.

And God’s providence can be a great comfort to us, can’t it? One of the many profound moments for me at Doug’s service on Thursday was when Pastor David closed out his remembrance of Doug by saying that Doug believed in and relied on the providence of God. It is powerful when someone witnesses to their trust of God with their life, and it is powerful when you see that God does, indeed, provide. I struggle with God’s providence. I struggle with verses like these from Jeremiah. And yet, what a profound thing to believe that God has provided enough for all of us, and to trust in that, and rest secure in it.

Whatever comfort Jeremiah gets from God’s providence, however, is short-lived, because God challenges him right away. God tells Jeremiah that God is appointing him to be a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah, like most prophets, doesn’t like the sound of this. He doesn’t want to be the person telling the powerful people that they need to change. He starts his ministry by trying to excuse himself from it. “I’m only a boy,” Jeremiah says. “No one will listen to me. I won’t know what to say. I can’t do this. I’m not prepared for this.”

“Do not say I am only a boy,” God immediately replies. “I have put MY words in your mouth and I have appointed you this day to pluck up and pull down nations, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.

God takes Jeremiah, this young man that God has already planned for, and God provides again for him. He gives him world-changing work and assures him that he won’t have to come up with words to make God’s case. God has put God’s words in Jeremiah’s mouth.

Now, I am not one to believe that you need anything special from God in order to preach. I think God gives gifts, sure, and scripture attests to that, but God speaks a word to each of us. While I often want us to resist the temptation of putting ourselves in the shoes of the prophets, I do think that something of Jeremiah’s experience is mirrored in our own. God has given each of us a word to speak with our lives. God has put God’s words into each of our mouths. It’s just whether we choose to speak it or not.

We can choose to speak it in our daily lives. We don’t have to be prophets or preachers to speak it. We don’t have to use words all the time either. When we are most fully ourselves, when we’re being the person that God created us with the potential to be, God’s word for our lives speaks whether we open our mouths or not. Maybe God shaped you to share a word of compassion. Maybe God shaped you to speak a word of challenge to those that need to be challenged. Maybe God shaped you to witness to God’s faithfulness, or beauty, or power, or mystery, or love. Jeremiah, as we find in this passage, was shaped to carry God’s specific message to a specific time and place, a message of both mourning and hope.

It’s also no wonder that Jeremiah was reluctant to receive a word from the Lord, given the description of God that we find in Hebrews. Remember, Hebrews was written to the church in Jerusalem during a time of persecution, a time when it was easier to fall away from the new Christian faith than to remain faithful to it. The church needed to hear that the God of power was on their side, because it didn’t seem like that to them at the time. They weren’t sure at all of the power of a God who was crucified and who had abandoned them to the same fate.

And so, the writer of Hebrews reminds them that God is a consuming fire. Those who come to encounter God encounter something that cannot be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice that makes those who hear it beg for it to stop speaking. God is a fearful mystery, more than we can endure or comprehend, much less flee from.

But those who come to God, Hebrews tells us, are not brought into a covenant of death, but a covenant of life. It is not violence that binds them, as Abel was bound by his brother Cain, but new life that frees them through Jesus. And just as Jeremiah knew that his words would challenge people and shake kingdoms, and so he feared his work, the writer of Hebrews acknowledges our fear at what could be. Kingdoms have been shaken before, we know, and they will be again, but kingdom of God, the reign of God that is to come, cannot be shaken.

We can rest in that providence. 

It’s telling that God choses people to speak for God, to convey God’s words about God’s reign to others. Hebrews makes it very clear that God has all the power she needs to do all that needs doing. And yet in both Hebrews and Jeremiah, God insists that we come along with God, that we bear the word of the Lord to those that need to hear it.

But we are not Jeremiah. God’s word was specific for him in his time. Nor are we the church in Jerusalem and the one writing to comfort and challenge it. We can learn from their situations but we’re not exactly in either of their stories. We learn from them that God has a word for us to speak and that God insists on us speaking. But how do we know what our word from the Lord is?

I think Jesus gives us the beginnings of an answer. We’ll know our word from the Lord because words from the Lord set people free.

This is a story you don’t find in any of the other gospels. Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath, when a woman comes in who has been bent over for eighteen years. For eighteen years, she couldn’t stand up straight. And in the middle of the service, Jesus sees her, stops what he’s doing and calls her over, and tells her that she is set free. She’s immediately cured.

Now the leader of the synagogue thinks that he has the true word from the Lord: to honor the sabbath and keep it holy. He tries to reprimand Jesus for what he’s done. But Jesus is having none of this. If in keeping a commandment you are keeping someone bound, then you’re not truly keeping the commandment. If a word from the lord is being used to bind someone, it’s not from the Lord.

Words of the Lord set people free.

Now, I want you to notice that Jesus sets free more people than just the woman. The crowd around him sees what happens and knows that if they are ever in need on the sabbath, they won’t have to suffer until the next day. If they are ever in this woman’s position, they won’t be bound as she was.

He also sets the synagogue leader free too. He too is no longer bound by this limiting interpretation of the law. But he doesn’t respond to his freedom in the same way as everyone else, because he benefited from the way things were.

Sometimes people won’t see the word from the Lord as freedom. Doesn’t mean that it isn’t.

So, friends, I speak to you again the words from Jeremiah: Go where God sends you and speak what God gives you to speak. And I give you the words from Hebrews: you have come to a God who is a blazing fire and darkness, the same God tells you not to refuse a word from the Lord, but to know that you are being given something unshakable. And I give you the words from Luke: You are set free from whatever binds you. Go into the world and spread word that free others, for these are surely words from the Lord. 

Amen.