Narcotic Religion (6th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 5:1-5, 10-13, 30-31; June 26, 2016)

Narcotic Religion

6th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 5:1-5, 10-13, 30-31
June 26, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Compared to the New Testament, the Old Testament has a bad reputation. The Old Testament is assumed to be filled with violence, judgment, and condemnation, but the New Testament with love, mercy, and grace. This has even led some to say that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New are of entirely different character, even that they are different gods. The truth, though, as anyone who has actually read the whole Bible carefully knows, is that both Testaments have their full share of violence and love, judgment and mercy, and condemnation and grace.

We don't like the harsh themes wherever they are found and we try as best we can to read around them. Especially we are not fond of judgment and condemnation. When television preachers claim that the Orlando massacre happened as God's judgment because same-sex marriage is legal or that abortion is such an heinous sin that our toleration of it will cause God to bring the downfall of the United States, we find their claims reprehensible.

We are sure that God doesn't work like that, although we're not quite sure why we're sure. We sense that these so-called prophets are a little too gleeful about the destruction they announce. We sense that they are not so much speaking God's heart as they are pretending that God is speaking theirs. When they cry doom we sense we are getting a glimpse into the abyss of their hearts where the resentment they have nursed toward the world has festered and become a deadly poison.Judgment has a bad name among mainline Christians.

So offensive do we find the notion that God would stand in judgment of us and of what we do that we imagine instead a God who indulges every moral failure. We suppose that this sort of God is more loving than a God who judges us. But a God who overlooks every injustice, who refuses to choose between oppressor and oppressed, who indulges every whim of the powerful is a God who is not so much loving as indifferent.

There is a tension between God's love and God's judgment, but it isn't so hard to understand, at least in general. Any parent who has waited for a child out past their curfew and not answering their cellphone knows this tension all too well. Love and anger are perfectly compatible when a teen does dangerous stuff. But every honest parent also knows that the anger is also just a little bit about the ego of the parent whose rules have been broken.

In Jeremiah, God is very much a loving, angry parent who has been pushed to edge of sanity by the dangerous way that Judah and especially its capital city Jerusalem have been behaving. God is a parent who has run out of ideas for turning a delinquent child around.

Our reading does not spell out clearly just what Jerusalem has done that is so offensive. They have broken the covenant with God, that much is clear--"They...have broken their yoke and shattered the chains"--but that isn't much to go on. In the surrounding verses we find two things: First, they call on other gods besides Yahweh the God of Israel. "They do not say in their hearts, 'Let us fear the Lord our God, who gives the rain in its season...'" [5:24a] They worship fertility gods who claim to be able to give abundant harvests and to make the herds of sheep and cattle increase. These are the Ba'als, gods of production and profit who promise prosperity and ease.

We know that the God of Judah is prone to jealousy. Perhaps this has to do with God's ego, the ego of the offended parent whose rules have been broken. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has written that the Israel's testimony about its God is that God can be characterized by two things. The first is a passionate commitment to justice. The second is a massive self-regard. God's famous jealousy would be an example.

But this isn't simply a matter of God's demand for exclusive worship. Maybe people imagined that they ought to worship someone, though it didn't matter too much just who they worshiped. But God sees it differently. The worship of a god is not simply a matter of a few ceremonies and a couple of festivals. We become like what we worship. The Ba'als are interested in production and profit and if we worship them we will be interested in production and profit. Yahweh, on the other hand, is committed to justice, and those who worship Yahweh make justice their commitment, too. Which brings us to the second of God's concerns with Jerusalem's behavior.

Jerusalem has given itself to a love of profit and production and to the easy life that these make possible. Easy for them at least, not so easy for those who must produce the profits. "Scoundrels are found among my people; they take over the goods of others. Like fowlers they set a trap; they catch human beings...They know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy."

These are the reasons for God's anger and disappointment. They raise the specter of God's judgment.We are right to reject the televangelists' notion of judgment. They see some catastrophe or misfortune and assume that there must be some wrong-doing close at hand for which these things must be punishment. But the world clearly doesn't work that way. There is no easy, one-to-one relationship between wrong-doing and disaster, either for individuals or for nations. When something awful happens to us, we might ask, What have I done to deserve this? And the answer, more often that not, is that we haven't done anything at all. Otherwise, only the wicked would suffer cancer, only those who deserved it would be poor. We know better than to believe that. The psalmist says, "I have never seen the children of the righteous begging bread." To which I say, "You must not get out much, because I have seen the children of the righteous going hungry."

But having rejected this mechanical notion of judgment and even more an idea that God sits up in heaven looking to zap anyone who gets out of line, there is still another notion of judgment that is at work in the world. Martin Luther King, Jr., was fond of saying that "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." There is a deep structure to the world that we live in that embodies God's dream for us. If we live against that arc, against that dream, against that wisdom, we diminish our chance for lives that are fully human. Founding a city on injustice and exploitation is not a sustainable policy. Sooner or later it will collapse. No zapping necessary.

I think that deep down, the people of Jerusalem understood this. And they tried to ease their own guilty consciences. We humans are pretty good at this. We have all sorts of ways. The way that Jerusalemites salved their own guilt was to build a religion around Jerusalem exceptionalism. Jerusalem is Yahweh's city. Yahweh's Temple is there. They exploited the orphan, the widow, and the needy. And then they said to each other, "God will do nothing! Disaster won't come upon us; we won't see war or famine." They have a "get out of jail free" card. Their religion tells them they can go on living against God's justice and have nothing to fear from God. It has come to this in the city where God's name supposedly dwells: "An awful, a terrible thing has happened in the land: The prophets prophesy falsely, the priests rule at their sides, and my people love it this way!"

The world situation for the world of ancient Jerusalem--and for our world as well--is this: A disaster is coming. They and we might imagine that God will spare us. But God's love, as deep as it is, cannot save our world from the consequences of a prosperity built on injustice. That is Jeremiah's message.

Jeremiah does not leave us much hope, but that is not quite the same as no hope at all. Jerusalem had sought prosperity by appealing to the Ba'als, when Yahweh would have given them all that they needed. So the grapes that grew in its vineyards had not come from Yahweh, but from the Ba'als. Therefore, says God, "climb through her vineyards and ravage them, although not completely." Did you catch the little bit of hope there? The disaster is coming. The vineyards will be ravaged. But not completely. Not completely. Something will remain. Something will survive the disaster.

That doesn't sound like much good news now, but there will come a time for Jerusalem when that will be very good news indeed.

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