Honey from the Rock (Jeremiah 2:14-13; Proper 17C; September 1, 2013)

Honey from the Rock

Jeremiah 2:14-13
Proper 17C
September 1, 2013

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

We recognize that the Bible is more for us than an ordinary book, that its words are read among us with a certain authority and that, taken together, and in ways that while neither simple nor direct nor even literal, they are nonetheless God’s word and come to us as a gift.  So I say, “The word of God for the people of God” and ask you to reply, “Thanks be to God.” 

Sometimes it’s easy to be thankful for the gift of a word from God.  At other times it’s harder.  Sometimes I’m surprised you don’t respond, “Thanks, but no thanks.”  Today is one of those times and Jeremiah is one of those readings.  This is one of those readings that give the Old Testament its reputation for being judgmental and negative.  This is one of those texts that make some people say that the God of the Old Testament is a God of judgment while the God of the New Testament is a God of love. 

In my opinion those who say that don’t know either the Old Testament or the New Testament well enough.  There is plenty of judgment in the New Testament and plenty of love in the Old, but I’ll concede that this text has plenty of wrath and not a whole of good news.  I promise to bring us to get us there, but first let’s listen to Jeremiah and try to understand where he’s coming from.

I confess that I like Jeremiah.  Without a doubt he’s my favorite prophet.  Some prophets—like II Isaiah—get to share a lot of good news.  They are prophets of comfort and encouragement.  Other prophets are stuck with announcing bad news.  Think, for example, of John the Baptist speaking to the religious authorities who had come to the Jordan to see what the fuss was about.  John had no time for them.  “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” he cried.  He seems to enjoy his message a lot, maybe too much.

But Jeremiah is stuck between his love for his people and God’s deep disappointment with them.  He delivers the message, but not without his struggles.  We overhear his candid exchanges with God.  We look over his shoulder as his pen pours out his anguish.  God’s demand for justice and Jeremiah’s people’s consistent refusal to act with justice are on a collision course.  Jeremiah can see the crash coming.  He does everything that he can think of to get Judah’s attention, to get it to put on the brakes, but Judah does not respond.  Judah has plugged up its ears.  Judah’s theology has rendered it deaf to Jeremiah’s pleading. 

Judah has come to believe its own press releases.  Judah presents itself as the great exception among all nations.  It is a chosen people and a privileged land.  Yahweh, the true God, has made a covenant with Judah that will last forever.  The people of Judah have inherited the land of Judah and it will be theirs forever.  The king of Judah has been enthroned on Mount Zion and his throne will last forever.  Yahweh has chosen the Temple as a dwelling place and will defend it against every threat for all time.

For Yahweh to fail to guarantee these things was unthinkable.  For Yahweh to abandon Judah, even temporarily, was impossible.  Yahweh was their God.  They were God’s people.  Call it Judean exceptionalism.

The king had a central place in this theology.  He was a descendant of David—yes, that David, the one with the slingshot.  God had promised never to let David’s dynasty fail.  David’s heir could hardly lose.  This made him bold.  God was not called the Yahweh of the Heaven Forces for nothing. 

The king also had two direct lines to God.  One was through the temple. The king provided the temple and its staff with everything they needed.  In their turn the priests made offerings and prayed on the king’s behalf.  The other line to God was the company of royal prophets.  The king would consult them about policy decisions.  They would consult God and then tell the king, “Yes, Yahweh is with you in all that you propose to do.”

In theory these lines were supposed to keep the king’s actions in line with Yahweh’s will, but in practice the king did what seemed good to him and the people around him all agreed.  In theory Judah should have done what was right and just.  In practice Judah did whatever was good for Judah and called it right and just.  Well, that’s not quite right.  In reality what Judah did was mostly good for Judah’s wealthy and powerful.  And then, after the decisions had been made, Judah’s relationship with Yahweh was used as window dressing, as cover.  Yahweh always figured prominently in the king’s press releases.  Every royal speech ended with “God bless you and God bless the kingdom of Judah.” 

I think the leaders actually believed their own press.  I don’t think it was a cynical attempt to manipulate public opinion.  I think they were sincere in their belief that God would take care of Judah, its temple, its king and, of course, its elite.  They were sincere.  They really believed that God would protect them.  Otherwise, we have to imagine that they were so stupid as to believe that they could thumb their noses at the Babylonians and get away with it.  They had fallen victim to their own spin doctors.  They were happy in their false confidence.

Jeremiah, on the other hand, was not taken in.  Jeremiah saw past the names and the false assurances.  Jeremiah saw that, while the leaders of Judah talked about Yahweh a lot, the god they talked about had very little in common with who Yahweh actually was.  In reality, the god they were calling Yahweh was a figment of their own imaginations, the projection of their own ambitions.  In short their version of “Yahweh” was an idol.  Why anyone who had a real God would give that up for an imitation was something that Jeremiah could not understand: “Has a nation switched gods, though they aren’t really gods at all?  Yet my people have exchanged their glory for what has no value…They have forsaken me, the spring of living water.  And they have dug wells, broken wells that can’t hold water.”  But whether he could understand it or not, Judah had done it, and Jeremiah could see it. 

And it tore at his heart.  I appreciate that.  I get it.  Every parent who watches his grown child doing something foolish knows this exasperated love.  Every patriot who sees her country making bad policy choices knows this devoted sorrow.  Take Thomas Jefferson, for example, who wrote in the context of slavery, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever…”[1]

Of course it is one thing to notice the gap between our ideals and our practice and quite another to bring the two together.  I have had more failure than success at closing that gap myself.  Still, it is the role of a prophet to say what she sees, even if she herself is among those accused.

On Wednesday last week thousands gathered in our nation’s capital to remember the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” of 1963.  We remember it, of course, for the “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King, Jr.  We hear or read a few lines of that speech and we are moved.  But something funny happens inside our heads and the image we see is of people holding hands on a hilltop and singing a song which sounds more like an old Coca-cola jingle than the spiritual “Free at Last.”  The remembered version of King’s message has been sanitized; it has become safe.

And so maybe we don’t notice the yawning gaps.  But they are there.  For the President, for example, to interrupt his plans for attacking Syria to go to the Lincoln Memorial, say some stirring words of his own, and go back to the White House to continue his plans for war, betrays a failure to understand the core of King’s message that real peace can never come from cruise missiles.

Tomorrow we will celebrate Labor Day.  Some will spend the day in outdoor activities—and it does look like we’ll be blessed with another day of nearly perfect weather.  If retailers have their way, we’ll spend it scooping up bargains. 

But we observe Labor Day in a nation that increasingly despises laborers.  In 1963 they marched on Washington for jobs as well as freedom.  As King observed that day, the freedom to sit at a lunch counter doesn’t mean much if you can’t afford to buy a meal.  Under the heading of “jobs” they wanted “full employment,” job training programs that would impart real, marketable skills and an increase in the minimum wage from $1.25 an hour to $2.00.[2]  Important things came from the March, but the jobs demands were not met.  Since then the lot of minimum wage workers has declined.  $1.25 in 1963 would be worth $9.54 today.[3]  $2.00 would be worth $15.27.  Our current minimum wage is $7.25, three-quarters of what the minimum wage from a half century ago would be worth today.  We talk as if we honor labor, but we pay like we despise it.

It is the prophet’s unenviable task to shine a light into the dark places of our world, into the places where our practice contradicts our talk, the places where injustice is done for the sake of expedience or ease, the places where we have “forsaken springs of living water…[for] wells, broken wells that can’t hold water.”

Up to now it’s been bad news, the bad news that our shared life falls short of what God requires of—and hopes for—us.  I promised you I would get us to good news and I haven’t forgotten.  In the first place, bad news isn’t an entirely bad thing if it tells us the truth about ourselves.  I’ve never seen real change start in any other place than a painful truth reluctantly faced.

And that is the good news—we do not have to remain in this stuck place.  We can move, change, shift.  Our encounter with a disappointed God is not like a courtroom trial with a verdict followed by a sentence.  Our encounter with God is a story.  In this story God is not some sort of ideal, a principle of justice or some such.  In this story God is a complex character.  Yes, God is passionately committed to justice.  Yes, the present arrangement of things runs afoul of God’s passionate commitment.  But God is more than willing to forgive when we change our minds and change our ways.  God is looking for an excuse to speak more kindly.

I could show you the places in Jeremiah where God does precisely that, but Psalm 81 is already before us, so I’ll use it instead.  In Psalm 81, too, God has been disappointed in the covenant people.  They have turned away from the God who had delivered them from Egypt.  So God had turned away from them and let them “follow their own counsels,” do whatever they want.  But God’s hand is still stretched out to them, still offering them a way to renew the covenant, to begin again.  If they will take God’s hand, if they will change their minds and their ways, God will care for them.  They will eat the finest wheat, drenched with honey from the rock.  And they will be satisfied.  And so will we.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

---

[1] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 4 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1892-99), page 232.

[2] US Department of Labor, “History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938 – 2009,” http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm, accessed: August 30, 2013.

[3] Calculated using the calculator based on the Consumer Price Index found at: http://data.bls.gov/data/inflaction_calculator.htm.