August 22, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Yesterday, Today, and Forever

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 71:1–6
Jeremiah 1:4–10

We know that the old, old story—
in our telling—becomes
a new, dangerous,
transforming song.
And so we sing!

Walter Brueggemann

My friend’s father, who was in the Navy in World War II, used to tell the story about a sailor on telegraph duty who was assigned to a new vessel and sent out in Morse code to the guy he was replacing, “How is the food on this ship?” He got the cryptic response “Hebrews 13:8.” Well, he had enough religious education from his boyhood to get a Bible and look up the passage, where he found the dispiriting text, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and forever” (see William Placher, Speeches and Sermons, 2 September 2007).

My intention this morning is to come back around to why that text, Hebrews 13:8, is a challenging, but not dispiriting way to understand God’s word to us in the Bible. First, though, do allow me to back up. I want to begin by making the case that to call anything the same yesterday, today, and forever is an idea that has the potential to be quite frightening. An example:

Not too long ago, a National Geographic article on terrorism began with this opening paragraph:

As the new century began, an epidemic of terrorism spread panic around the globe. In world capitals, leaders fortified their security and curtailed public appearances. Ordinary citizens felt unsafe walking the streets of major cities, while the terrorists themselves were like phantoms—everywhere and nowhere at the same time, seemingly able to strike at will. Terrorism became the preoccupation of police and politicians, bankers and business leaders. Headlines screamed out news of the latest outrage: “WASHINGTON STUNNED BY THE TRAGEDY” in one paper; “IN GREAT PERIL” in another. One horrific September terrorist attack, in the United States, sent the stock market reeling and sparked anti-immigrant sentiment. Another attack, in Madrid, plunged Spanish politics into turmoil over issues of war and peace. Politicians in the U.S. took to describing the war on terror as a struggle of good versus evil, while some religious leaders, quoting scripture, proclaimed the end of the world was at hand.

The year was 1901.

(National Geographic, November 2004, p.76)

The article goes on to recount the political assassinations of Czar Alexander II and President William McKinley, the attempt on the life of French president Sadi Carnot, and the eventual terrorist assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the spark that ignited World War I. Terrorism—and the bitter fear it generates—the author argued, is nothing new.

I was taken by this introduction, and particularly its statements about the rhetoric of politicians and preachers, because I am struck by the number of politicians and preachers who motivate people by implying either that things are getting better or things are getting worse.

Examples of motivational attempts arguing for human progress or regress are too many to count. Today is the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina—please do remember the people of the Gulf Coast in your prayers. Following Katrina, theories abounded as to where the disaster came from and how it was a sign of The End. And it’s not just the biblical literalists talking. Stephen O’Leary, a professor at the University of Southern California, notes that “both sides are eager to see America punished for her sins; [it’s just that] on one side it’s sexual immorality and porn and Hollywood, and on the other side its conspicuous consumption and Hummers” (beliefnet.com).

The doomsday predictors are only one side of the story. There are many folks out there who would like for you to believe that everything is getting better; they appear on the right and the left as well. Authors from the Cato Institute have written that when compared to those in the past, “our species is better off in just about every measurable material way. And there is stronger reason than ever to believe that progressive trends will continue indefinitely” (cato.org, 11 November 1996). Liberal theologians and preachers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took a similar approach. The core testimony of mainline churches in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and it has continued to today—suggests that people of the church are responsible for ushering the reign of God into the world. Things are getting better. You, Christians, can play a part in the upward march of humankind.

This is an appealing notion. And it is probably both biblically inaccurate and, so far, factually wrong. Renowned preacher Tom Long has noted that such a way of preaching the gospel is “a marriage of biblical interpretation and social theory that was doomed from the beginning” (Tom Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope, p. 114). Lo and behold, in the two centuries since preachers began making that argument, it has been undercut by the terrorist trends that began this sermon, two world wars, the Holocaust, genocide in Africa and Bosnia, the war on terror, and some of the most major environmental catastrophes in the history of the world, just to name a few of our recent challenges.

I cannot blame preachers and politicians for trying to motivate us with the testimony that the world is getting better or that it is getting worse, because I must admit, having chosen to take the middle road on that old argument today, I am somewhat surprised that more of you have not left already.

It really is laughable to take the middle road on much of anything if your goal is to be inspiring. The late George Carlin, in a marvelous standup routine, once talked about daily opinion polls on cable news, where people phone in and cast their vote on a debatable question. “Did you ever notice,” Carlin said, “there’s always, like, 18 percent who vote, ‘I don’t know’? It costs a dollar to make those calls,” Carlin said, “and they’re voting ‘I don’t know.’” Carlin imagines a man at home watching TV with his wife and saying, “‘Honey, give me the phone!’ He shouts, ‘I don’t know!’ into the phone and then says proudly to his wife, ‘Sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe you’re not sure about’” (Carlin, as quote in Preaching from Memory to Hope, p. 111).

This morning I want to argue that if you want to understand God’s call to Jeremiah and if you want to better discern God’s call on your own life, at some point you must first grapple with the seemingly uninspiring idea that things are not getting better or worse; in many cases, things are staying the same.

The book of Jeremiah requires a little background. The story begins near the end of the glory days of Jerusalem. Over the course of Jeremiah’s life, the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem, and eventually the city fell, the temple was destroyed, and the people of Israel were taken into exile. At the beginning of the story, though, on the surface, many things seemed to be OK. Prosperous members of the community made money, brought in their crops, and celebrated with big parties, slaying the fatted calf. Respectable folks did their religious duty, giving to the temple, bringing sacrifices, obeying commandments that dictated the way they should dress and pray and plant their crops. But underneath this pleasant exterior, things were not as they should be. The numbers of the poor and the jobless was on the rise; you could see them, begging for alms near the temple. On the outskirts of the city, widows and orphans and day laborers had fallen on hard times. Wages were low, food was scarce, and the social safety net the temple was supposed to provide had largely been forgotten.

There are echoes of this in our own city. Yes, we are in the midst of a recession, but our commercial culture continues to weave its magic up and down Michigan Avenue, glimmering buildings, high fashion, and fusion cuisine providing a thick curtain to shield us from the rest of the city, where the jobless and powerless struggle to provide a home and find a meal, where gangs and guns rule the streets, and where we send children to overcrowded and underfunded schools and wonder why they don’t learn. From where many of us sit, though, it is easy to forget.

This is our world, and it bears similarity to the one in which Jeremiah lived. And so we can perhaps assume that Jeremiah’s world, like ours, had much of the same motivational rhetoric as ours.

By the second chapter of Jeremiah, we hear the beginning of the message that Jeremiah is supposed to pass on to the people of Israel.

Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel. Thus says the Lord:

What wrong did your ancestors find in me
that they went far from me,
and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?
They did not say, “Where is the Lord
who brought us up from the land of Egypt,
who led us in the wilderness,
in a land of deserts and pits,
in a land of drought and deep darkness,
in a land that no one passes through,
where no one lives?”
I brought you into a plentiful land
to eat its fruits and its good things.
But when you entered you defiled my land,
and made my heritage an abomination.
The priests did not say, “Where is the Lord?”
Those who handle the law did not know me;
the rulers transgressed against me;
the prophets prophesied by Baal,
and went after things that do not profit.
(Jeremiah 2:4–8)

It sounds as if things are getting worse, the world is going to hell, and God is going to get you. We don’t like passages like this very much. They aren’t very affirming or hopeful, are they? Jeremiah sounds like just another fearmonger. No wonder the biblical literalists of 2010 quote Jeremiah. But maybe there’s another way to hear the story.

In preparation for this sermon, I studied this passage, as I often do, with one of our Bible study groups here at the church, and when we read these verses from chapter 2, one of our participants made the astute observation that these verses sound familiar; they sound a lot like passages from the book of Exodus.

That’s right. One good example shows up in Exodus 32, following the famous story of the Israelites making a golden calf. God says to Moses,

The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.” (Exodus 32:7–10a)

This kind of language comes up often in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, Judges and Kings, Isaiah and Ezekiel. It forms the basis of the Old Testament, and it forms the basis of the story of Jesus Christ as well. Jesus Christ came to show us how to love one another, but then we hung him on a cross because we were not ready to love. It’s the same story, again and again; Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today and forever.

I want to suggest to you this morning that Jeremiah’s words may sound scary, they may seem to suggest that the end is at hand, but one of the clearest signs that the Bible is a relevant book, that the Bible really does make sense, is the fact that in much of the Bible, signs that the world is actually getting better or worse are conspicuously absent. That’s right: in the Bible, signs that the world is actually in the process of getting better or worse are conspicuously absent. That’s why the call comes again and again, encouraging us in the midst of what can often be a very frustrating life.

If that is the case, what are we to do with God’s call to Jeremiah, and what are we to think of God’s call on our lives?

When God finds Jeremiah, Jeremiah may not know if the world is getting better or worse, but one thing is clear: things are not as they are supposed to be. In the midst of this, God says something wonderful to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” Jeremiah responds, “I am only a boy!” as if to suggest, “How will they listen to me? The problems of this world are too great; They have been going on forever. Who will listen to me?” And God says, “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.” God calls Jeremiah to service and says to him, “See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”

God knows that Jeremiah lives in a world where there is plucking up as well as planting, pulling down as well as building up, and it is in the midst of a world of both creation and destruction that God says, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. . . . Do not be afraid.” God can say this because God has an end in mind, something that, on his own, Jeremiah cannot yet see.

Jeremiah’s story of faith begins in the middle of a much larger story, the same story we are living out, and in that story, God’s work is not over yet. The great challenge of this life arises because we have to learn to keep living and loving and learning in the midst of a story that is not over, and we can only do that if we are sustained by the promise that God will see us through.

Perhaps the greatest illustration the Bible has to offer about the power of the unfinished story is the Gospel of Mark. You might remember that a significant difference between Mark and the other Gospels—Matthew, Luke, and John—is that in Mark, Jesus does not appear after the resurrection. In Mark there is no ascension into heaven, no walk with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, no meeting doubting Thomas in the upper room. According to the last lines in Mark, the women visit the tomb and find it empty, and the last verse of Mark’s Gospel reads, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8).

New Testament professor Don Juel tells the story of a student who became fascinated by the Gospel of Mark and memorized the entire book from beginning to end so that he could offer performances of it in front of an audience. The first time he performed it, something happened that the student had not expected. When he came to the end of the book and uttered that last line the room was filled with complete silence. Left with a story that seemed unfinished, everyone could feel the tension in the room, and the young man stood nervously in front of the crowd, shifting back and forth on his feet until finally he said “Amen,” whereupon, totally relieved, the audience burst into applause. “Thank God he had finished the story.” But the next time that student performed the Gospel of Mark, ready for how the ending would feel, the student said the last line, waited a few seconds in the stillness and silence, and then left. “There was no applause. Instead, “discomfort and uncertainty within the audience were obvious, and as people exited the sanctuary the buzz of conversation was dominated by the experience of nonending” (Don Juel, as quoted in Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope, p. 128).

Sometimes the most engaging part of the story of faith must be the fact that the story is still going on and we do not know how it will end. The most engaging part of our faith lies in the fact that, as Walt Whitman says, “the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse” (Walt Whitman, “O Me! O Life”).

Sometime after God first visited Jeremiah, Jeremiah must have figured something out about how to live faithfully in the midst of a story that has not yet come to an end. This next story takes place toward the end of Jeremiah’s life, long about the thirty-second chapter of the book. As I mentioned to you earlier, the book of Jeremiah tells the story of the fall of Jerusalem, and by chapter 32, things have gone from bad to worse. Jeremiah has landed in jail. The Babylonians have surrounded the city and laid waste the countryside; it would seem logical that it’s about time to close up shop and wait for the world to end. It looks as if things are getting worse.

It is just at this moment, in a surprising twist of the plot, that Jeremiah’s cousin visits him in prison and says, “Jeremiah, I have a field at Anathoth, and according to our laws you have the first right to buy it” (see Jeremiah 32:8). And there, stuck in a jail cell in the midst of a war with the city under siege, Jeremiah buys the field. And Jeremiah says to his cousin, so that everyone will know what he did, “Take these deeds . . . of purchase . . . and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” (Jeremiah 32:14–15).

Why on earth did Jeremiah buy that field? Perhaps because, over the course of a life of faith, a life lived in the midst of a story, Jeremiah learned that even in the midst of great trouble, there is beauty in this life we live, beauty that the story contains but words cannot express.

Some of you will remember the movie The Shawshank Redemption, a movie about life in prison, a movie full of some of the greatest darkness that is a part of the story of humanity. At one point in the story, the main character, Andy Dufrane, at the risk of great punishment, takes advantage of a rare opportunity. Finding himself alone in the room that houses the public address system, Andy locks the door, puts on a record of a duet in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and turns on the PA so that the whole prison yard can hear. The inmate who narrates the movie says,

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singin’ about. . . . I like to think they were singin’ about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away . . . and for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free. (The Shawshank Redemption)

We live in the midst of God’s story, and we live free. This is a world where there is plucking and pulling up and there is building and planting. In the middle of this great story, you, like Jeremiah, are called to be not afraid, to live in faith, to buy that field knowing that “houses and fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land.” At the tomb “the women went out and fled . . . for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” “The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse . . .”