October 13, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Jeremiah’s Temple Sermon

The Second in the "Texts for Life" Series

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 15
Jeremiah 7:1–15
Mark 11:15–19

“Do not trust in these deceptive words.”
Jeremiah 7:4 (NRSV)

Because we did not make ourselves;
Because we do not keep ourselves;
Because we cannot forgive ourselves;
Our hearts reach out to you, O God.

Ernest T. Campbell

A general was doing a tour of the country whose armies he was responsible for and found himself passing through a small town where he saw indications of amazing marksmanship everywhere. Trees and barns and fences had circles painted on them with a bullet hole in the exact center. The general asked to see this unusual marksman. It turned out to be a ten-year-old boy. “This is incredible!” said the general in wonder. “How in the world do you do it?” “Easy,” replied the boy. “I shoot first and draw the circles later.” The master who tells this story has this commentary: “You get your conclusions first and build your premises around them later. Isn’t that the way you maintain, you manage to hold onto your religion and your ideology?”

That well describes the approach to religion of the Jerusalemites to whom Jeremiah is preaching in this story, which we know as the Temple Sermon. This is the second in a four-part series that I am undertaking in the next couple of months in which I am exploring texts in scripture that have sustained me on my journey of faith and which, I believe, speak truth to the life of our church, this congregation.

I’m sure this is true for all of you: along the way of life there have been people who have been important for you, mentors. One of those for me is the man who was my Old Testament professor at Glasgow University, Robert Carroll. The late Robert Carroll was an Irishman from Dublin, and being an Irishman he wasn’t afraid to have a Guinness or three or four. He was a somewhat controversial man in the academy among Old Testament scholars: he was not a professing Christian, had some suspicion of organized religion, but he was a brilliant, brilliant scholar. A polymath, you might say. He was steeped in the study of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, especially the prophets, and especially Jeremiah. He wrote one of the major commentaries in the 1980s on the book of Jeremiah. But he was also well-versed in disciplines of ancient languages, of anthropology, philosophy, literature. It was he who told me that I had to read Ulysses by James Joyce. Robert Carroll interestingly became something of a friend to me; he took a great interest in my ministry and the work I was doing in ministry. He once came here to Chicago some years ago. He was at a conference in South Bend, and he came and spent the weekend with me. It was early March. His thank-you letter that he sent to me when he returned to Glasgow began, “Boy, it was cold in Chicago.”

Robert Carroll taught me about the prophets in the Old Testament. And he taught me how the prophets in the Old Testament are not to be seen in some simplistic way as speakers about the future. The prophets in the Old Testament are not crystal-ball gazers whose words are only about some distant future. The prophets do sometimes speak about the future, and their message is still relevant for us, but the prophets are poets who are speakers of truth, speakers of God’s truth to the powers of their day. The prophets are calling the children of Israel to fulfill a covenant, the relationship they have with the God who has chosen them, by fulfilling their side of that relationship by right living, which we are told is found in the care of the least in the community.

The prophet Jeremiah was something of an outsider. We’re told in the text that he came from a rural village in the northern part in Israel, and so by coming to Judah, to the southern kingdom, and coming to Jerusalem he is an outsider coming to the place that is the center of the economic, political, and religious life of that nation. When he comes to the temple following God’s direction Jeremiah delivers what we know today as the Temple Sermon, that first part of Jeremiah 7. It is something of an exemplar of the prophetic witness in the Old Testament. It’s such an important story, the Temple Sermon, that it’s actually told twice in the book of Jeremiah. (It’s told again in the twenty-sixth chapter.) And there the response to the sermon that Jeremiah delivers is that the crowds want to kill him—not unlike the response to Jesus after his “temple sermon” of cleansing the temple as he arrived in Jerusalem. When teaching this passage, Robert Carroll said to us that those who were going to be preachers in the class should just remember that the sign of a good, effective, strong sermon is not when people line up to shake you warmly by the hand. It’s when they’re building a gallows because they want to kill you.

“Do not trust in these deceptive words,” says Jeremiah. What are these deceptive words? They are this: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” Why are they deceptive? They reflect the belief, the orthodox, religious belief of the day that the people in Jerusalem had: that the very presence of the temple ensured God’s presence with the people, ensured that God was dwelling in the temple. See, the people here are shooting bullets and then circling them and saying they’re all right. This is that kind of marksmanship in a religious sense—that simply because a temple is there, God will dwell with us. That’s bad religion, and Jeremiah’s sermon is an indictment of bad religion, of deceptive words that make us feel good and safe in a religious sense. Jeremiah is preaching to us that God hates bad religion, and in telling us that, Jeremiah is hearkening back to the law in Deuteronomy. He encapsulates it in this way: “If you amend your ways and your doings, if you act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, the window, or shed innocent blood . . .” Those are the terms of the covenant, of the relationship with God, and the people are not living into it. The great Old Testament professor and friend of this congregation Walter Brueggemann says that this is a “remarkable but quite representative” sermon in the prophetic witness.

It looks back to the covenant and the law in Deuteronomy, to that safety net that is in there so that the least and the poorest and the hopeless in the community will not be lost but will have a chance; to the law that after seven years, indentured servants are to be freed, to be given a chance to live their life. So it’s looking back, but in a sense it is also looking forward. Jesus looks back when he is in the temple, when he is challenging the monopolistic economic situation in the changing of money for temple taxes and the selling of animals for sacrifices. Jesus reaches back into the tradition and quotes two prophets, Isaiah first: “My house shall be a house of prayer for all nations.” Then he appends Jeremiah’s words from chapter 7, “but you have made it a den of robbers.”

I do have to say that one of the ways in which I feel somewhat comfortable in reflecting on this sermon here at Fourth Church is that in my experience of this church we have strived hard not to be a church that lives out formulaic concepts or words, but rather we have sought to be a church that has tried as we can to live into the great parable of Matthew 25, when those who are welcomed by the King are the ones who have clothed the naked and fed the hungry and visited the prisoner.

I was walking through the Commons in the Gratz Center on Friday afternoon and stopped to talk with one of our members who had recently gone through his closets and was bringing three huge bags of clothes for our Social Service Center, and I thought that really is literally living into Matthew 25. And I know many of you do that, because I believe that this is a community that seeks to care for the least and the last.

There’s a quote I love from the German theologian Paul Tillich from early in his career when he was a pastor. He wrote this: “The spirit of Christian love accuses a social order which consciously and in principle is built upon economic and political egoism.” Isn’t that an interesting word for us today as we are dealing with Congress’s inability to put away ego and keep the government shut down.

A prayer I love from Zimbabwe says,

Open my eyes that they may see the deepest needs of people,
move my hands that they may feed the hungry,
touch my heart that it may bring warmth to the despairing,
teach me the generosity that welcomes stranger.

The Temple Sermon in Jeremiah is one strand of a biblical theology that focuses not on purity and holiness but on care of the community. It’s how we care for the neighbor, the least of our sisters and brothers, that matters here in our relationship with God and Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. It’s not what we say or what religious formulas we use.

As Jeremiah preached, “Do not trust in deceptive words.” Amen.