Sunday, September 30, 2007

18th Sunday After Pentecost

Year C

Jeremiah 32
Jeremiah Buys a Field
¹ This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD in the tenth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. ² The army of the king of Babylon was then besieging Jerusalem, and Jeremiah the prophet was confined in the courtyard of the guard in the royal palace of Judah.
³ Now Zedekiah king of Judah had imprisoned him there, saying, “Why do you prophesy as you do? You say, ‘This is what the LORD says: I am about to hand this city over to the king of Babylon, and he will capture it. ⁴ Zedekiah king of Judah will not escape out of the hands of the Babylonians but will certainly be handed over to the king of Babylon, and will speak with him face to face and see him with his own eyes. ⁵ He will take Zedekiah to Babylon, where he will remain until I deal with him, declares the LORD . If you fight against the Babylonians, you will not succeed.’ “
⁶ Jeremiah said, “The word of the LORD came to me: ⁷ Hanamel son of Shallum your uncle is going to come to you and say, ‘Buy my field at Anathoth, because as nearest relative it is your right and duty to buy it.’
⁸ “Then, just as the LORD had said, my cousin Hanamel came to me in the courtyard of the guard and said, ‘Buy my field at Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin. Since it is your right to redeem it and possess it, buy it for yourself.’
“I knew that this was the word of the LORD ; ⁹ so I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel and weighed out for him seventeen shekels of silver. ¹⁰ I signed and sealed the deed, had it witnessed, and weighed out the silver on the scales. ¹¹ I took the deed of purchase-the sealed copy containing the terms and conditions, as well as the unsealed copy- ¹² and I gave this deed to Baruch son of Neriah, the son of Mahseiah, in the presence of my cousin Hanamel and of the witnesses who had signed the deed and of all the Jews sitting in the courtyard of the guard.
¹³ “In their presence I gave Baruch these instructions: ¹⁴ ‘This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Take these documents, both the sealed and unsealed copies of the deed of purchase, and put them in a clay jar so they will last a long time. ¹⁵ For this is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Houses, fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land.’

It is passages like this that cause so many of the youth I was friends with in High School and College to take a pass on the Bible. Too many names, with a bunch of rhetoric, and weights and measures that mean nothing to today’s world. And yet, with a closer look at this story it is like so many other stories I have seen lately.

Imagine if you will, that you are a person in South Florida, during hurricane season. When the first storm of the season hits a 4 on the scale, with near certainty that that same hurricane will come plowing through your part of the state. Then, at that moment you run out and buy three houses in your neighborhood, including buying one from a neighbor who had no intent on selling their home. Folks would of course find you to be a sincere mental patient. However, this is exactly what Jeremiah does in this passage. He goes out and buys up land, just as the invaders are outside the door and descending on Israel. What Jeremiah does is stake a claim for the future, taking himself out of the present fear and moving a people forward.

I think of several friends in seminary and others since, who have done similar kinds of things. The people who decided to move into the worst neighborhood they could find , rehabbing the house they bought, showing love to their neighbors, growing gardens in open spaces on their property and showing others how to do the same. Some even went so far as to do some guerrilla gardening - planting gardens in any open lot in the area. These friends knew the same truth that Jeremiah does, that renewal comes from hope. Something better is yet to come.

What hope is yet to come in your time of despair?
-When your bank account is down to nothing
-When your marriage is falling apart
-When your friends and family are dying off all around you
-When promises made are left empty and betrayed
-When your friends turn enemy
-When the shape of your faith is dented by some devastating moment
-When your house is burned down
-When your job is ended and no jobs are in sight

As Christians we have a claim for hope, in this world, even before we begin to claim the hope that comes in Life Eternal. Do not think that waiting for the future of life eternal is the only hope to be had. Jesus came that we might have life and have it abundantly, today, tomorrow and forever. The challenge comes in the call to Christian action. To reach out and give someone else hope when there is nothing to be found in your own heart. This is Jeremiah, Jesus, and so many of the Apostles…giving hope to others, when they have none themselves. In doing so, they are able to find greater hope than they could have imagined for themselves. This is the mystery of Christian service, that giving is the greatest way to receive, as long as the gift is freely and cheerfully given.

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.

Thoughts on Jeremiah 18 - Pentecost 15C

-revcamp

BoW 513

Almighty God, you created us in your own image.

Grant us grace fearlessly to contend against evil,

and to make no peace with oppression.

And, that we may reverently use our freedom,

help us to employ it in the maintenance of justice

  to the glory of your holy name;

through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.

(THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, U.S.A., 20TH CENT., ALT.)

Jeremiah: I did try pottery one year. I went to the wheel I had formed my clay. This big lump they told me would need to be wetted down before I could form it or shape it. Trying to find the right mix of water and clay was a chore in itself, too little and it wouldn’t shape easily, too much and all you had was mush, and the outer layers of clay would just run away, and so it would take even more time and effort to get it reshaped and restarted.

The truth of clay though is that if you get the clay just right, the shaping you can do with it is amazing, though it will not hold for ling without some firing in the kiln. Add some glaze to make it even harder. The real kicker is that if you just let it set up and dry and it begins to have failures in the structure, you can wet it, and push the clay back into shape, add some clay, or break it down altogether, such that you have a simple blob of clay again.

God has tried to get the moisture mix right for Israel, and after many years of shaping and forming God has set Israel out to dry again, to harder and begin to be stronger in the ways of the Lord. This time though as the cracks form, God calls Israel out and tells them they need to keep it together, or God is going to have to take the whole shape back to a formless lump of clay to reform, be tried by the shaping and the drying.

Jeremiah 18

At the Potter’s House

 1 This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD : 2 “Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.” 3 So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. 4 But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.

 5 Then the word of the LORD came to me: 6 “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?” declares the LORD. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. 7 If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, 8 and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. 9 And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, 10 and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.

11 “Now therefore say to the people of Judah and those living in Jerusalem, ‘This is what the LORD says: Look! I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.’

Jeremiah 1

The Call of Jeremiah
⁴ The word of the LORD came to me, saying,

⁵ “Before I formed you in the womb I knew ^[1] you,
before you were born I set you apart;
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

⁶ “Ah, Sovereign LORD ,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am only a child.”
⁷ But the LORD said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a child.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. ⁸ Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the LORD .
⁹ Then the LORD reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “Now, I have put my words in your mouth. ¹⁰ See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”

Footnotes

1.       1:5 Or chose

The Call

Why is it that whenever someone comes across youth and young adults in college that one of the first questions that comes out of their mouth is “What are you going to do with your life?” As I have gotten older and found myself asking the same question of people I think it has to do with people who are looking for ideas, either for themselves or for others.

Jeremiah is told from an early age what it is he is going to do with his life. Like so many before him Jeremiah also has a response as to why he can’t or won’t be able to perform the call that God has made on his life. “I am just a boy and I cannot speak”

God responds, “Don’t worry I will give you words”.

God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called.

-Moses

-Isaiah

-Peter

-Each of us

We are all gifted for ministry of some form.

            -We have specialized stengths

            -It is the same spirit present with us, and it is through the Spirit that we have our gifts, we all have some part of all the gifts. (18, 26, 37 or so gifts depending on the inventory you use).

            -All Christians have all of the gifts in some part.

            -How to find our ministry. Find your strength and grow.

How often I have struggled with the question that I have posed to God, “What do you want me to do?” In talking through my struggles with call over the years and in reading a book this month “The Gifted Pastor”, a dear friend shared the words of Micah with me. ‘Do Justice, Love Mercy and Walk Humbly with Your God.’ This is what is required of each of us.  It is just this simple. Jesus shows it one more time clearly in the temple dealing with the woman hunched over for years. The law forbids this in some ways.

Jeremiah faces in his call the call to destruction. Jesus shows us an example of how destruction can come in some form. We may be called to destroy Idols, like Gideon, ideas, like Jesus, Unrighteousness, like the prophets, and hypocrisy, also like Jesus.

But it comes with the call to plant and build as well. What do we want to build and plant?

The use of all of the gifts is to God’s glory. There are gifts that people have that look like spiritual gifts, but are not because they do not glorify God.