Speaker: Pastor Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Scripture: Jeremiah 1:1-8
Summary: We are living in changing and difficult times; we can look towards prophets like Jeremiah, who also lived through political and religious upheaval, as we seek to live faithfully. By keeping our vision on hope, community, and reconciliation, we can be agents of God’s grace even in a hard world. While doing so, we grow our practice sabbath, our local action, and our devotional lives so that we are maintained through difficult work.
Good morning everyone, good to be with you today after a few weeks away; thanks to many of you for coming out to the fundraiser last night, and particularly to Steve and Cindy for hosting! A real pleasure for us to meet the rest of the Sprunger family; we’re so honored to carry some of that legacy of connecting to Taiwan.
On that front, it’s hard to believe this is my second to last sermon here at Daniels Run; we’ll definitely be back again to visit before we actually depart in May, but just want to thank you all again for being such a great church for us over the past year and a half!
This week, I want to continue in a similar vein to pastor Tig’s sermon last week, thinking about the prophetic vision and spirit that Jesus so often tapped into. But to get there, we’re going to zag a bit, mostly focusing on Jeremiah; but on my mind, as you’ll hear, is the new administration and the Anabaptism at 500 celebrations that are ongoing this winter.
As we continue to live in a time of uncertainty, change, and sorrow, we need to, like Jeremiah, continue weeping for the brokenness of the world — but while we weep, we also need to remember the ultimate message of hope our faith provides. Ultimately, I think we need to stay centered on hope, community and reconciliation as we listen for God’s call.
Let’s start with Jeremiah.
As I was preparing for this week I was drawn to Jeremiah — which is not something I can typically say. Like most Mennonites, I love to preach most regularly on Jesus — I would say that nine out of ten of my sermons are on a gospel passage, rather than an Old Testament or Epistle. But we have a big bible for a reason; there are times when, to understand Jesus — and our world — we need the wisdom of the Old Testament and apostles, not just the stories from Jesus’ life. Jeremiah’s experiences of political and faith crisis hold much wisdom for our own day.
As I mentioned in children’s time, as I was preparing for this sermon I (re)discovered that Jeremiah is actually the longest book in the bible; if you add in Lamentations, the other book he wrote, we find out that this one prophet wrote about 6% of the whole bible.
Initially, this might not make much sense — why would Jeremiah share more than Psalms, or Genesis, or any other book? Jeremiah was a prophet at probably the third most pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish faith, with the first being the call of Abraham which was the Genesis of the people of God, and the second being the Exodus from Egypt — note that both these events are clearly positive. Jeremiah, however, lived and prophesied and wrote through the loss of the kingdom of Judah — the book opens with the huge ‘spoiler alert’ that all these kings are going to be deposed and the people exiled. Jeremiah lived through the exile to Babylon and the destruction of the temple — these events threatened to completely destroy God’s people. These were both political and faith crises on a scale the Hebrew people had never witnessed up til that point, which is why Jeremiah and Isaiah — they wrestle with the hardest events in the history of Judaism up until this time.
Right now, we may feel a little bit like Jeremiah — facing existential questions about our lives as our religious and national communities are divided, and changing, and pressured by politics. We might be tempted to run from these disagreements, losses, and changes — but like Jeremiah and the prophets, we should move towards these broken places, not away from them.
What enabled Jeremiah to stand up for what was right at such a hard time? Part of it, I think, is his background. Interestingly, only two of the Old Testament prophets record where they were born: Amos, and Jeremiah. In both cases, they emphasize that they are not from Jerusalem, the typical heart of religious and political power. In Jeremiah’s case, we hear he’s from Anathoth — a nowhere town in the hill country of Benjamin. Tradition links him to a line of priests exiled to Anathoth in 1 Kings for refusing to support Soloman’s ascension to the throne after David’s death.
Jeremiah’s frequent arguments and battles with priests and prophets of Jerusalem, who claim God will never destroy the temple or the throne of David — remind us today that these things we often think can never change — like nations, empires, and institutions — are indeed fleeting. When we look for God and God’s voice, it’s the outsider’s critique that tends to carry God’s word, rather than the insider with the best education, pedigree and connections.
So, knowing all this, let’s turn to what I find the most interesting part of the scripture we heard this morning: Jeremiah’s call. Hear verses five and six again:
Before I created you in the womb I knew you;
before you were born I set you apart;
I made you a prophet to the nations.”
6 “Ah, Lord God,” I said, “I don’t know how to speak
because I’m only a child.”
Jeremiah hears God’s word, his call to be a prophet, that God created him for this purpose — and Jeremiah has the audacity to say “uh, no thanks”! “I don’t know how to speak because I’m only a child” is sorta up there with “a dog ate my homework” as a stock excuse for why he can’t do what God wants. And Jeremiah isn’t the only major prophet who doubts even the most obvious and direct call from God — Moses famously tries five times, while speaking to God in the burning bush, to get God to send someone else to free his people from slavery.
This matters today — we tend to over-valorize people from history, and simplify their lives, ignoring the hard choices and what they risked to follow God’s call. This week, I was thinking of this in relation to the early Anabaptists. We can forget that some of the earliest Anabaptists, like Conrad Grebel, had much to lose by following their call to reform the church and preach in their local language, rather than Latin. Grebel was the son of an influential, wealthy family, he initially squandered his education in Paris before embracing the call to help reform the church. How many times did Grebel and the other Anabaptists shrink from God’s call in their lives before eventually taking up their cross — to witness to the importance of the separation of the church and the state, freedom of conscience, believers’ baptism, and the rejection of the sword?
We, too, face a choice when we see the truth of some situation that God wants to speak into today. We can do what Jeremiah initially did — come up with fairly-valid reasons, like we’re too young, or too old, or too poor, or too tired, to speak on God’s behalf. Or, we can do what Jeremiah and the Anabaptist leaders did later on: accept God’s mission for our lives, and step out in courageous faith; and we should do so accepting that there is risk involved.
I wish all Christians agreed on this, but some people come to Christianity not for a challenge, but for a salve — and when I think about where a prophetic voice is needed today, I think as much if not more about other Christians than I do about non-Christians. One of my favorite stories on this front comes from a modern Christian prophet, Shane Claiborne; in his home community in rural Kentucky, people often would say to him “I found Jesus, and he straightened me out.” But Shane likes to say — “I found Jesus, and he messed me up.” Accepting God’s rule in our lives will call us away from wealth and security and success and palatability and toward the broken places in the world where God’s grace and mercy are needed most; this can and should turn our lives upside down, as it did for Jeremiah and the early Anabaptists.
We face a similar choice — are we willing to accept God’s call in our lives and stand with the marginalized, even if that means we lose some of our comfort and security? As Anabaptists, we believe everyone has the opportunity to witness to God’s love and justice in some way — we all have a part to play in speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable.
But this doesn’t mean that when we accept God’s call we have it all figured out. So many mistakes have been made by people, many who call themselves prophets, who start to hold their theology with a closed fist, rather than an open hand. Jeremiah is never shy about his doubts, his fears, and his sadness; likewise, we must remain compassionate and invitational and in touch with our sorrow and doubt as we witness, prioritizing engaging with the people we disagree with with open hands; wrestling with God, with justice, and with what God wants from us.
This fits with a more Jewish conception of who and what prophets are; in Jewish tradition, prophets are not just messengers from God, but those who negotiate with God on the behalf of the people. Literal wrestling with God is the origin of the name Israel, and I think this is something we Christians need to reclaim. Sometimes the point is exactly wrestling with God’s decisions, weeping over the brokenness of the world and asking why, and praying for mercy, for a new path to be laid in front of us.
The answer to the problem of evil in the world, to loss and war and racism and environmental destruction, to tragedies like the plane crash of this week, to christian nationalism and inept government, is not to ignore these problems, or act like we know exactly why they are happening — but to engage with them, stand against them as we can, and to plead with God for his intervention against them, too. As we face wars in Ukraine and Sudan, tenuous ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, not-so-frozen conflicts in Korea and Taiwan, political turmoil and tragedy in our own country and community, we can take up this mantle of prophet — praying and pleading with God to make a new path, to hear our cries, to help us understand the tragedies unfolding around us.
And, when we pray these prayers, we often hear the answer that Gandhi gave to these questions — be the change you wish to see in the world. One function of communal prayer is for us to hear the needs of our brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors — and when we hear, we must respond, with God’s help, because it is in living out our faiths where we really live God’s way; because faith without works is dead.
Jeremiah made this argument long before James did. Hear this passage, paraphrased from Jeremiah chapter 7:3-7: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Improve your conduct and your actions, and I will dwell with you. Don’t trust in lies, saying: “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” The temple will not save you — no, only 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, or go after other gods, only then will I dwell with you.”
This is a message for us today — just because we go to church, just because we were baptised, just because we believe God to be with us — if we don’t live out the good works of the kingdom, God will not dwell with us. God is where charity and love and justice are found, not where his name is plastered on the wall or the sign out front.
So — we need to accept the prophetic calls in our life as Jeremiah did, listening for the places of pain and brokenness where we can contribute to the answer, not by stopping ourselves from weeping, but by beginning there; because God may call us to the broken places, but he doesn’t leave us with despair — he leaves us with hope. We are not a crucifixion people — we are a resurrection people.
For Jeremiah, another piece of his radical vision was that even as he prophesied the destruction of the temple and the ending of the line of kings of Judah, he also foretold restoration, and acted on it. At God’s command, with a besieging army outside the city, he did the exact opposite of what a good financial planner would have told him to do in that situation: he took his cash on hand, which he could run away with any time, and started buying property that was about to lose all its value. Though it may feel like our problems are existential and will never pass, we need to remember that God’s plan continues to unfold — and that exiles end, tribulations pass, and God is still sovereign.
As we continue into a difficult season, here in the United States and around the world, I want to suggest three principles that can help ground us in the coming years: we need to keep our vision on hope, on community, and on reconciliation.
First, hope: Paul frequently talks about hope; that we have hope as the anchor of our soul, and that faith, hope, and love are the greatest virtues. Faith and love are answers of how we live — but we have faith and love because of our hope. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a spiritual leader who worked for the end of apartheid in South Africa, also reminds us that hope and optimism are not the same — hope, he said, is not a feeling or a mood like optimism; rather, hope is a choice, a decision, that we make to believe that what we do matters. When we imagine, and work for, and have hope in our ability to impact the world for the better, in big ways and small — that is hope; and the hope of God’s goodness and the resurrection will sustain us through even the worst of times.
This brings us to the second vision we need to maintain — community. In times of stress it’s easy to retreat inward — to have individuals and families and small groups begin fending for themselves, to allow fear to divide us from one another. But God calls us to do the opposite — to move closer together in the face of hardship and catastrophe. We need communities to provide us hope, to bear each other’s burdens, to sustain us against challenges. We need one another — for both support and accountability, for sticking to Jesus’s way. We as a church do good work in being neighbors to our Afghan and Ukrainian neighbors — they, and our Hispanic neighbors, will need us as neighbors more than ever now. We need to work to be in community with them even when that may be inconvenient or hard.
And third, we need to maintain our vision of reconciliation — because reconciliation is what it’s all about. Ultimately, God wants to reconcile all things, to bring all things into community — not destroying, but restoring harmony to humanity and creation. It is our calling, too, to love our enemies; in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, we seek the conversion of the enemy, not their destruction. We are called to be ambassadors for Christ, to work for the reconciling of the enemy, to work for the world where the wolf lies down with the lamb. And we can’t get to reconciliation if we never talk with those we disagree with — like Jeremiah, we need to engage with all types of people: those putting their heads in the sand, those making idols out of the temple, and the enemy across the battle lines.
How do we remain focused, and sustained, as we pursue these three goals, when the news seems so overwhelming and hope seems so difficult? I have three suggestions of practices that have helped me:
First, sabbath. Now, this may seems like a very strange place to start — but now more than ever as we engage with heartbreaking deportations and massive upheavals in our professional and personal lives, finding times to mute the news, remember God’s goodness, and spend quality time with ourselves, the people we care about, and with God, is more important than ever. We are running a marathon, not a sprint — we will run out of hope and energy if we swing at every pitch, if we don’t care for ourselves and our own needs. Since the election, I’ve taken two days a week off from reading the news each week, which has been great for my mental health; but it also drives me away from just consuming the news, and towards thinking about what I can actually do to help those in need.
This leads to my second suggestion: engage locally. While it’s important we know what is going on at the national level and how that impacts us, we have immeasurably more power working in local ways than we do nationally. A story here: as an undergrad at EMU, a Harrisonburg city employee came and shared with our class about a new initiative of the city: giving out free bikes and helmets to recent immigrant families that couldn’t afford them. He asked us — how many emails in support of this initiative do you think we got before we took the initiative to the city council for approval? I guessed 100 — a classmate guessed 200. The correct answer was five. Here in Fairfax, or elsewhere around here, yes, it is more populated and will take more than five emails to sway public officials — but still, organized citizens talking to county and city and even state officials — who are often far more pragmatic and less polarized than national leaders — can do a lot of good, particularly when the federal government is alienating local governments left and right. We as a church work with a number of great local organizations, like the Lamb Center and others; I’d encourage you to get involved directly with local organizations like this where one or two people, doing just a few volunteer hours a week, can make a massive difference.
Third suggestion — draw closer to God and God’s story. I know I’ve shared here before, that when I began working for Virginia Conference, and we were facing existential questions about the future of our fellowship and denomination, how many of our churches would leave conference, and whatnot, I began, for the first time in my life, to really practice daily devotions. Starting my day with scripture and prayer has enabled me to better engage the brokenness of the world, and given me a much deeper appreciation of the power of God and the spirit; readings like Jeremiah, who lived through political upheavals worse than our own, provides perspective and hope that keeps me going and able to engage. I encourage you all to consider doing the same — scripture and the faith community can bear us up — we should not be shy about the power of God and faith community in our lives. The church we’re a part of — to call back to an earlier sermon here, a church of exile, rather than empire — will play a key part in sustaining us and standing up to the idolatry of the so-called Christian empire. This is a time to invite people in to God’s story — to the way of Jesus, of compassion, of peacebuilding, of generosity, of standing with the marginalized, through thick and thin.
To wrap up, I want to return one last time to Jeremiah. Jeremiah had a choice: to move toward the pain and disappointment and brokenness of the world, or to move away from it: we now face this choice. Do we run towards the sounds of chaos in our world, not with the guns and bombs of an earthly army, but with hands of compassion, with peace to spread, with understanding and patience and hope, willing to risk all for the greater good? Do our communities move towards the brokenness of the world, preaching peace to those who are far and peace to those who are near, or do we content ourselves with running away from places of need? Will we move toward conflict and pain in the next four years, and for the rest of our lives, or will we run away from them? I know which way Jesus would have us move.
Friends — we are entering a hard era. But we, as Anabaptists, and Christians, as followers of Yahweh, were born from hard eras and for hard eras; may we be inspired by Jeremiah, who spoke out for truth as his country collapsed; may we be like the early Anabaptists, calling the church back to faithfulness at any cost; and may we be like Jesus, following the way of peace even to the cross.
Amen.
