Sunday, September 23, 2007
17th Sunday After Pentecost - Year C

-Revcamp

 

Call to Worship

L: The first thing, then, is that we should pray, and we should pray hard.
P: Pray for everyone we can imagine, but especially hard for our leaders that they may lead us in ways of peace, and toward God’s ways in the world.

L: This is the right thing to do as we stand before our God and savior.

P: It is the right thing to do as we stand before this God of ours who desires tha tall people should be saved, that all people should find God’s truth in the world.

L: These earnest prayers come because there is one God, and the way that we connect with this one God is through Jesus Christ.

P: It is this Christ who offered his life on behalf of all people. Praise be to God. (Preaching Word and Witness, Sept. 23, 2007)

 

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 (New International Version)

Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society

18 O my Comforter ^[a] in sorrow,
my heart is faint within me.

19 Listen to the cry of my people
from a land far away:
“Is the LORD not in Zion?
Is her King no longer there?”
“Why have they provoked me to anger with their images,
with their worthless foreign idols?”

20 “The harvest is past,
the summer has ended,
and we are not saved.”

21 Since my people are crushed, I am crushed;
I mourn, and horror grips me.

22 Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then is there no healing
for the wound of my people?

Jeremiah 9

1 Oh, that my head were a spring of water
and my eyes a fountain of tears!
I would weep day and night
for the slain of my people.

Footnotes:

1. Jeremiah 8:18 The meaning of the Hebrew for this word is uncertain.

 

Sermon title: “Being Common”

Live among men as if God beheld you; speak to God as if men were listening.

Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD), Epistles

To offer God to the people you must spend time with them; To spend time with the people you must spend time with God.
The steward of Luke and the prophet Jeremiah are aware of the people and their situation and recognize their own similar experience. The ministry of each goes with being with the people. We are also called to be with the people, in their pain, in their poverty and in their lives. Consider Simone Weil and the depths to which she took this particular kind of teaching.

 In reading a commentary on another prophet this week, I discovered a profitable thought. “Every generation considers their calamity to be the worst of any generation.” In this instance the prophet proclaimed the calamity to be judgment for the wrongs and sins of the people.

Moreover, I found it interesting that the study group I worked with fostered the thought that every generation seems to be called to repentance, in the midst of the calamity, and that this trend continues today. This is true. Tragedy strikes, and some proclaim the disasters as God’s judgment. It is also true that every generation needs to be called to repentance. We have all done wrong and need to seek after God first.

 Jeremiah calls out to the Comforter, as one in mourning. Consider the practices of mourning in ancient times, tearing the old clothes off, and putting on sackcloth, fasting, weeping, and covering onesself in ashes as unworthy, until repentance comes, and God pronounces relief.

A friend has suggested that the use of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s practice of taking the scriptures in one hand and the newspaper in the other is helpful to this form of mourning, and being with the people. The activity is to take pieces of the newspaper, every section-comics and classifieds, too, and to give everyone in the congregation these pieces and to raise up prayers for persons affected by the situations depicted in your section. Some imagination may be required, but in order to be with the people, and to cry out to God the connections must be made.

Once again - be with the people, for God’s sake and for the people’s sake, pray with God.