The Centre Cannot Hold
Pentecost 7
Jeremiah 7:1-7, 22-23
July 3, 2016
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
For many of the congregations of the Iowa Annual Conference and for many of my pastor colleagues, today is an important event: it's the first Sunday of a new pastoral appointment, the first time that the whole congregation will be present to check out the new preacher, the first time the new preacher will get a feel for what their new congregation is like, emotionally. This is a fraught event. The first sermon is an occasion.
Walter Brueggemann says that the sermon is a triangulated event. The most important relationship is between the congregation and the Scriptures. In a sermon the congregation and the Scriptures come face to face. The first question the preacher must ask, says Brueggemann, is On which side of the confrontation will she stand? Will she stand with the congregation as it hears the words from a strange text and struggles to respond? Or will she stand with the Scriptural text as it struggles to make itself understood?
My advice to preachers in new appointments? Stand with the congregation. The Bible is strange, even the parts that we have managed to tame and domesticate. The Bible makes outlandish demands that push us to the limit and beyond. The congregation has not been studying the text all week. The congregation has been trying to get through life and some of the folks on a preacher's first Sunday haven't been in church for weeks, months, or even years. They were hurt somehow. It wasn't necessarily anyone's fault; no did it on purpose. But they went away wounded and now they want to know if there is a possibility of healing for them. So, stand with the congregation. That doesn't mean you have to take sides, that you have to embrace everything the congregation thinks and reject what the Scriptures say. It just means that the congregation shouldn't feel ganged up on by both you and the Bible.
I say this for two reasons. First, I pay too little attention to my own advice. I know how it goes. I study a text during the week. When it comes to writing the sermon, I've come pretty far from the experience of first confronting it. If it angered or made me uncomfortable, I've had time to make up with the text and recover my composure. I come to see things from the text's point of view and so I easily step into the pulpit as the text's spokesperson, "Thus says the text," I begin in good prophetic form. And make clear whose side I'm on. I should take my own advice more seriously.
The second reason is that Jeremiah is a preacher preaching his first sermon and clearly ignoring my advice. The results are predictable.
Of course it's not the same thing as the dozens of duly-appointed, first-Sunday United Methodist preachers stepping into the pulpit this morning across Iowa and many other conferences in the United States. For one thing, Jeremiah isn't duly-appointed, at least not by the bishop. He is the great-great-great, etc. grandson of the priest Abiathar whom Solomon sent packing back home to Anathoth many centuries before for having backed a rival. Jeremiah has come back to Jerusalem from Anathoth at God's appointment. (The most dangerous people are always the ones who claim to have been sent by God.)
I don't even know whether the Temple had a pulpit, but Jeremiah doesn't preach from it. Jeremiah doesn't even preach in the Temple. He preaches outside the Temple near its gate, to the people going in and out.
This doesn't appear to have been a special day of any kind, not a festival, not even a Sabbath day. It was an ordinary day when people we going into the Temple to pray or to have a sacrifice made. A man who had been sick was giving thanks for his recovery. A woman who had just had her first-born son was bringing him for circumcision. You get the picture. They were ordinary people who got the strength they needed to face the things that life threw at them from the God of Judah. They found it helpful to come to the place that people called Yahweh's House. They were poor people mostly, because most people were poor. There were a few pilgrims, but mostly they were the city poor rather than country poor. The people in the countryside had their own ritual habits that gave them comfort and, besides, traveling to Jerusalem was a hardship when it meant leaving trade and field work behind.
No one had told them that it was Jeremiah's first sermon. They had thought it was an ordinary day. And what should they encounter but the lunatic Jeremiah holding forth at the gate. It would be as if I, on my first day here, had chosen to preach on the sidewalk to people out walking their dog, or to Pam Ransom on her way into the office to see to some UMW business with Rhonda. "Who in the world is that?" "Our new pastor."“Oh!”
Whatever brought them to the Temple, my guess is that they went home from their visit and talked about the lunatic preacher at the Temple gate and the awful things he said to them:
"Improve your conduct and your actions, and I will dwell with you in this place. Don’t trust in lies: “This is the Lord’s temple! The Lord’s temple! The Lord’s temple!” No, if you truly reform your ways and your actions; if you treat each other justly; if you stop taking advantage of the immigrant, orphan, or widow; if you don’t shed the blood of the innocent in this place, or go after other gods to your own ruin, only then will I dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave long ago to your ancestors for all time.
"And yet you trust in lies that will only hurt you. Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, sacrifice to Baal and go after other gods that you don’t know, and then come and stand before me in this temple that bears my name, and say, “We are safe,” only to keep on doing all these detestable things?"
Awful things! And they wanted to do was to pray for Uncle Fred!
Clearly, in this encounter between the Word of God and the People of God, Jeremiah stood with the Word of God against the People of God. I understand this. Jeremiah had been living with the Word of God for a long time and it was not fun for him.
The Word that came to him--you remember--was about digging up and pulling down, about destroying and demolishing, and only then about building and planting. I'm sure he had his own reactions to all this. Jeremiah was human, after all. But he had time to get used to the message.
Jeremiah had this terrible news to deliver to people who had never heard it and had never had time to get used to it and wrap their minds around it. Jeremiah delivered the news, but I'm not sure anyone heard it.
That doesn't make Jeremiah wrong about what is coming. There was another prophet, Hananiah, who was active during Jeremiah's life, who claimed that God would continue to protect Judah and Jerusalem for the sake of the Temple that was there. But the people of Judah forgot Hananiah and remembered Jeremiah, because events proved Jeremiah right.Jeremiah knew, as W.B. Yeats wrote just after WWI:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Jeremiah understood what was happening; his audience hadn't given it a thought. Jeremiah and the people were so far apart that, at this point at least, the people simply could not hear what Jeremiah had to say.We're not strangers to this. I was visiting Jim, a parishioner, in University Hospital in Iowa City who was receiving his third round of treatments for prostate cancer. He knew that treatments would be futile. He could sense it in his body somehow. He knew that at most the chemotherapy would give him a few more weeks and he also knew that those weeks would mostly be spent recovering from the chemo. He was ready to let nature take its course. He was ready to die. Why are you getting the treatments, then? Sandy [is wife] isn't ready to let go. I'm giving her some more time. You must love her very much to give this gift. His eyes welled with tears and he nodded.
At some point in the journey toward death, for many people a time comes when things fall apart, a time when the center cannot and does not hold. Before then we may live in a mental universe in which people who pray hard enough for health are restored, a universe in which people who live right, who see their doctor regularly, and who are diagnosed early don't die of cancer. But after that, after the prayers and the third round of chemo, and they can feel in their bones that the fight to stay alive is lost, the prayers and the treatments no longer hold the same meaning. While God is still there and the nurses and doctors, too, there is no longer the same expectation.
Jim knew where he stood and was ready to let go of life, but for Sandy the center still held. She still hoped that the third round would be the charm that magically restored their lives. The two of them were in far different places--this happens a lot--and communication across the distance was very difficult. At least he didn't shout it at her by the front gate. Instead, he gave her gift of time, time for her to catch up with him, time for them to share the last steps of his journey.
Soon enough Sandy would find herself an alien in her own life, exiled by loss into the twilight of grief. The gift that Jim gave her could not prevent that. But it did give her a little light to make her way through the valley of the shadow of death to the life on its far side.
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