September 1, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

Masters and Slaves

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Jeremiah 2:4–14

I want to talk to you today about God’s freedoms and being free from the master-slave model. To get to that, some context:

If you’re anything like me, when you read the Bible maybe you find yourself wondering why God seems so angry in what is called the Old Testament—the Hebrew portion of the Bible that we share with our Jewish brothers and sisters. We wonder if God could simply be a better communicator, use a little more positive reinforcement, and there are a ton of ethical issues that lead us to question why God isn’t addressing them or is perhaps seemingly condoning them.

And just as you wonder all that, you get to the book of Jeremiah. Have you ever read this stuff? It’s one of the toughest scriptures in the Bible. It’s harsh. God is angry. The prophet Jeremiah is strange, not someone I really want to be friends with or hear.

And today’s scripture is no different. God is tough on the audience. God asks some probing questions—if you read the rest of it, it’s hard not to feel uncomfortable in your chair. But that’s just the thing. Jeremiah wants you to be uncomfortable, as he believes God is calling him to expose the injustice of a society that has lost its way.

We’ve talked about its harshness; now think of its power. In the African American church tradition, Jeremiah is a truth-teller. He’s telling a society that its status quo is oppressive and hateful to God. In fact, the term “Jeremiad,” which is a discourse leveled against an oppressive society, finds its origin here. In the days of slavery here on U.S. soil and in the days of Jim Crow, privileged white society was blatantly oppressing nonwhites (and some see this oppression continuing in different ways).

That’s the context, so we turn now to the text. Here’s where you get some tools for future use when you’re reading. Again, if you’re anything like me and sat through Sunday school, did you ever wonder why God seemed so angry over idol worship, worshiping stone and wood and other gods? It just seems like jealousy, almost unhealthy. Like, relax, God, we’re just friends . . .

Historically the church hasn’t always done a good job of conveying this point in the West—idol worship isn’t simply about worshiping some god named this or that, made of wood and stone, but it’s what it represented. It meant that God’s people were breaking covenant with God and handing over their futures, their energy, resources, time, potential, their worries, their service over to “gods.” It meant that they were leaving the ways of YAHWEH, whose name was revealed to Moses as the BEING ONE, the I AM. Leaving God’s ways had serious social consequences: It led to their oppression of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger. It led to deceit among them and coveting one another’s things. You see, whenever you see idol worship mentioned in the Bible, it has to do with lifestyle that has social consequences.

Listen to what it says in this part of Jeremiah 5:

Among my people are the wicked
who lie in wait like men who snare birds
and like those who set traps to catch people.
Like cages full of birds,
their houses are full of deceit;
they have become rich and powerful
and have grown fat and sleek.
Their evil deeds have no limit;
they do not seek justice.
They do not promote the case of the parentless [orphans];
they do not defend the just cause of the poor.

This is what it means to abandon the ways of YAHWEH, the Being One, God.

Now here’s another tool: in this evening’s scripture, we read, “The prophets prophesied by Baal, following worthless idols.” Interestingly, the name Ba’al has as its meaning “master-owner; overlord.”

The relationship here is that of a slave to its master. In the Bible, this isn’t simply a name for one god, but often references to many gods—things into which people put their time, energy, resources, and service. God has an issue with following other “gods,” because it represents a change of life in which we oppress, we lie, we indulge only in ourselves and not in the world around us and do not engage our neighbor or the stranger and we ignore the poor. God has an issue with our following other “gods,” because God objects to our objectification, in which we become objects to be ruled over in a hateful master-and-slave model. God takes issue when we reject our freedom and surrender as slaves.

We often live in this relationship, as masters and slaves. Historically we know this as we have seen slavery throughout the world, throughout history, including the United States. What other relationships are there? We enslave ourselves to money, to power, and to war. We are finicky creatures: when we’re resting, we think we should be working; when we’re working, we think of resting. We neither rest well nor work well, but daily struggle in this inner conflict.

We are slaves to war. In the midst of the drumbeat to all sorts of conflicts in the world, and especially now as we debate Syria, war seems the inevitable option at times, or the one we’ve become so accustomed to, so addicted to even. Yet, it leads to our destruction. In the film The War, starring Kevin Costner and Elijah Wood, which is about a Vietnam veteran trying to set a good example for his family, it is the veteran’s daughter who explains to her class: “War is like a big machine that no one really knows how to run and when it gets out of control it ends up destroying the things you thought you were fighting for, and a lot of other things you kinda forgot you had.”

We are slaves to war.

We are slaves to building up our cities and our empires on the backs of the poor, in disregard for the environment and future generations. When I studied in Guatemala, I met some anthropologists and archaeologists; one archaeologist, when asked why he liked to study the ruins of the Mayan empire, replied,

I like to be here in the midst of the Mayan ruins . . . major builders . . . but it all came crashing down. I think it’s a mixture of all the theories. . . . They destroyed the environment, the acid rain killed some crops, there was less rain, less water, more drought, and this killed their crops. Less food, more people, tribal fighting, warring. . . . The system collapsed. Trust in the government and in the priestly class waned. The lower classes were needed for war, and rationing for the rich began. It’s a warning to our own cities, when we do not care for one another and care only for building up.

We are slaves to our building.

We are slaves to our money.

In the film Glen Garry Glen Ross, with an all-star cast of Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, and Ed Harris, among others, we see what is called a modern-day Death of a Salesman, a play by Arthur Miller. Here we see men whose identity is caught up in how much they sell, what financial prizes they win; the theme of identity, of manhood and moneymaking, is found throughout the film, as are moral dilemmas. But interestingly, the moral dilemmas aren’t seen as troubling: everyone seems capable of corruption, as they seal sleazy deals and take on fabricated roles. In fact, when one character commits a crime, his underlying motive is his dying daughter, whom no one seems to care about.

As we celebrate Labor Day, we look to its history. Following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike, the United States Congress unanimously voted to make Labor Day a national holiday, and President Grover Cleveland signed it into law just six days after the strike’s end. We remember the countless who picketed and prayed and who protested and organized marches and found creative ways to fight for better conditions and benefits for workers and the building of a more equitable society. And it was done in the face of what was often some serious greed: those who were slaves to their own greed and made slaves of the working poor.

We are slaves to our money.

We are also slaves to our own lies.

We get caught in the world we make up, pretending to be something we’re not, to gain friends, to be liked, to be famous rather than just being ourselves.

In our scripture for today, God asks us if we are slaves, and it’s something we need to each ask ourselves. Are we slaves to our way of life? Do we live to work? Do we hoard with no end in sight? Are we guided by fear? Sometimes we feel overwhelmed by life and hardly feel like we can even choose to not be slaves. God asks us this probing question but also offers us something.

In contrast to the overlord/master Ba’al, God, YAHWEH, the Being One, the I AM, who opposes this oppressive and exploitative relationship of master and slave, this God invites us into relationship, to know and be known. In fact, in chapter three, it reads, “Return, O faithless children, says the Lord, for I am your husband. I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding. Later God says: And I thought you would call me, My Father, and would not turn from following me. Return, O faithless children, I will heal your faithlessness.”

Husband. Father. These are relational terms; they denote familiarity and intimacy. Let me be clear: this isn’t about God being a man; God is not a white man with a beard in the sky. God is beyond the God we can even imagine, and yet the God who comes to us in bewildering humility and comforting intimacy—this God invites us into relationship, into adventure fraught with risk, the risk of love; God doesn’t promise to be our rabbit’s foot, our deity we need to please in order to get money and fame, but this God is the one whose grace we’ve been given, whose love we’ve received and don’t earn. The good life God offers us isn’t one defined simply by material goods, but how we live—how we treat our neighbors, the poor, ourselves. In this love, God offers freedom. A freedom from our own lies, a freedom from war as the only option, a freedom from building so big it weighs down on the poor and we forget about our neighbor. God offers a freedom from the master-slave model.

We are faced with challenges in our city, in our world, with political dialogue about how we pay for services for those who need food, water, and shelter. We are faced with challenges to how we educate our children and address the violence on our streets. God’s offer is that we live into God’s freedom, even if it seems impossible now.

The freedom is the freedom of God’s love. It is there where we can be ourselves. It is there we can be just as we were created to be. The freedom is doing the best we can with what we can, to be kind to as many people as we can, to share our resources, and to be free from the lies we have come to believe about ourselves, about one another, and about our world. We are called away from the other “gods,” who enslave us—our greed, our building, our power and money—and all things that claim us as slaves.

As we rest, or try to, on Labor Day and remember the movement that brought us that day of rest, let us remember the One who called us into rest, on the seventh day, that we might always have a sabbath in God; that our restless souls might find true rest at last. Then, with the echoing voice of a thunderous Martin Luther King Jr., whose speech we recently remembered, we can say with him and all of God’s people: Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last!