Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
February 16, 2025

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Senior Associate Pastor

Psalm 1
Jeremiah 17:5–10

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It’s not possible to pin down when, precisely, in the chronology of the Babylonian exile the “Thus says the Lord” we just heard was first uttered.

The prophet Jeremiah addressed Judah — that is, the southern half of the ancient kingdom of Israel — for about four decades, covering the looming threat of exile as well as its enactment and aftermath.

Our passage for today, however, gives us few clues as to which part of that ordeal is actually being addressed. So it’s most useful to regard the experience as a whole.

In sum, an entire generation of Israelites lived under the threat of invasion and defeat at the hands of the mighty Babylonians and their king, Nebuchadnezzar, for decades. Successive administrations of Judah’s kings alternatively bent the knee and rebelled.

It all culminated in 597 BCE with the forced deportation to Babylon of a huge portion of Judah’s population.

That feels pretty salient to me, because we have been hearing for the past three weeks now of the realization of a long-threatened mass campaign of forced deportations.

I read a story in Reuters on Friday about an email sent to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement staff demanding 1200 arrests per day toward this end. Some of those sought in those arrests entered the country illegally. Others have criminal records.

But certainly not all of them; the Reuters story told of one man from Cameroon here with legal Temporary Protected Status and no criminal charges who was arrested and detained for ten days with no explanation.

It is important for us to note in this context that the so-called “sensitive locations” policy of ICE, which forbids arrests in churches and other houses of worship, was rescinded last month.

This past week the denomination to which this church belongs, the Presbyterian Church (USA), joined twenty-six other religious groups in suing the administration over that policy.

A biblical prophet speaks a word from God to a particular situation. Or, rather, a biblical prophet speaks words from God; the expression “Thus says the Lord” appears about 150 times in the book of the prophet Jeremiah alone.

Jeremiah isn’t the first prophet in the Bible to declare “Thus says the Lord,” though. The first is Moses, standing toe-to-toe with Pharaoh and declaring “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: let my people go.”

Prophetic men and women address God’s word to the powerful and powerless alike in whatever circumstance finds them, be it war or peace, feast or drought, in righteousness and wickedness, despair and hope.

Over and over again in the scriptures prophets are called for through whom God speaks to the real, lived, experience of God’s people — to offer guidance and warning and encouragement.

Sometimes they borrow words from the peoples’ earlier experience; the words of Jeremiah we hear today are probably not original to him, according to most biblical scholars.

Still, it is a word from God to the peoples’ situation.

God speaks to our situation.

Let me say that again: God speaks to our situation.

Every Lord’s Day when the scriptures are read and we say, “The Word of God for the people of God; thanks be to God,” we are doing more than enacting a ritual.

We are professing our conviction that these are God’s words for us today as much as they were for the women and men who first heard them. Amen?

We believe that God speaks. And so we listen. Individually and collectively we attend to these words to discern what God would say to us today in the specificity of our circumstances — as individuals, as a church, as a nation, as humanity.

And here is something critical: there is no domain that is off limits for the word of God. There is no bracketing off that which feels “political” from that which we deem “spiritual”; God speaks to address every person, every system, every power, every experience.

Still, it’s a little jarring to me that the first of the words that the Lord thus says here is a curse; personally, I don’t very much like the idea of God issuing curses, especially not in a fraught moment that feels like it needs, I don’t know, inspiration or encouragement?

When you listen to many curses in the Bible, what you hear is a warning that something we might do — or something we might refuse to do — might separate us from God’s desire and intent for us, for our relationship with God, our relationships with one another and with our neighbors, particularly those in need.

Curses warn us about compromising our God-given purpose.

So after being delivered from bondage to Pharaoh and wandering in the wilderness for forty years, in the twenty-seventh chapter of Deuteronomy Moses instructs the priests to declare twelve curses to the people and to say after each one, “All the people shall say ‘Amen!’”

So let’s try that. I’ll say the curse and we’ll all reply “Amen!”

Cursed be anyone who makes an idol or casts an image.

Cursed be anyone who dishonors father or mother.

Cursed be anyone who misleads a blind person on the road.

Cursed be anyone who deprives the refugee, the orphan, and the widow of justice.

That’s just a few of them (they’re not all safe for church). Some things are cursed because they distance us from what God wants for us and, through us, for the vulnerable and those in need.

And so cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.

We shouldn’t trust people, is that it? Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see?

The Gospel of John says that Jesus would not entrust himself to the people who saw the signs he was performing and believed in him, because he knew — he knew all people?

So God wants us to have permanent trust issues, at least when it come to people — is that it?

Of course not. Even Jesus trusted the people he spent his days and night with, or else he would never have closed his eyes for fear that one of his disciples might murder him in his sleep. He would never have broken bread or shared a cup with anyone out of suspicion that it might have been poisoned (bear in mind his habit of dining with criminals).

No, perhaps the curse of trusting mere humans and making mere flesh our strength is rather a question of from where we draw strength and where we invest the allegiance of our hearts.

Jeremiah prophesied to a people for whom the questions of allegiance and strength were matters of immediate life and death. Who would save them from the Babylonians at the gates? Would it be a new and stronger king, a more faithful one? Could they entrust themselves to the king of a neighboring nation, say, Egypt, with whom a military alliance might offer resistance?

Would their strength come from their priests, or even from the prophet himself? Yet the word of God that the prophet has for the people at this moment is that to trust in any of these mere mortals, to seek strength in any of the systems or powers of mere flesh, would be a curse to the people.

In turning their hearts toward a king, they would be turning their hearts away from God.

What a temptation we face: to entrust ourselves, to literally turn our hearts toward a leader — a military or religious or political or cultural figure, a person of power and influence — who promises to protect us from all that confounds us, from the things that threaten the people and the values we care about.

Some days I am ready to hand my broken heart over to such a figure. The warning of Jeremiah is that doing so might calm my fear and anxiety for the moment, but then when relief comes, my heart will already be spoken for and I will miss it.

Should we support women and men who are resisting lies and cruelty emanating from people in power? Should we join them in their resistance by standing up and speaking out for what’s right?

Please, yes. But we do so with one eye on our hearts, guarding them against the temptation to entrust our identity and our purpose to any mere human strength.

Are you with me?

The call of our faith is to place our trust not in people and powers that we can see, but in God, whom we cannot see.

This is the blessing on the other side of the curse, the action or the decision that aligns our lives with God’s purpose and desire for us and for the world through us.

“Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.”

Though “Trust in the Lord” sounds somehow abstract — especially when the circumstances feel severe and when the stakes, for ourselves as well as for the vulnerable and the marginalized, feel really high, dire even.

The Reverend Dr. King — who knew stakes as high as any — preached that “the church has often been content to mouth pious irrelevances and sanctimonious trivialities.”

Yet trust in God in the face of the threat of evil was not a pious irrelevance to Dr. King.

In a sermon titled “Our God Is Able,” he shared his personal experience of receiving threatening phone calls and letters as a result of his involvement with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, an experience with which he knew many in his congregation were also personally familiar.

After one such call in the middle of the night, he reached what he called “the saturation point.”

He got up and made himself a pot of coffee and buried his head in his hands in out-loud prayer at his kitchen table. He told God, “I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

And then he says in the sermon,

“At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never before experienced him. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice, saying, ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to pass from me. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything. The outer situation remained the same, but God had given me inner calm.”

Three nights later, his home was bombed, yet he said that his experience with God in the middle of the night had given him a “new strength and trust.”

Entrusting our lives and the life of the world to God is the persistent calling of our faith. It’s not a strategy for victory, or even survival; it wasn’t for Dr. King. Rather, it is our calling, to be worked out with fear and trembling in the midst of whatever circumstance finds us.

“They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit” (Jeremiah 17:8).

To entrust ourselves — to entrust those we care about and fear for — to God is not to be passive or weak in the face of threat.

Rather, trusting in the Lord, whom we do not see, is the only thing that will enable us to bear fruit we can see, fruit everyone can see and take for nourishment in hard times — the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

This moment needs people of faith to bear such fruit. And the nourishment for that fruit comes from a deep place, down beneath the ground, where no one can see it.

The “sending out” of the tree’s roots in the prophet’s powerful image — that verb carries a meaning of real effort and strain. That tree is doing real, strenuous work to put down roots that will enable it to bear fruit. It is not like the seed in one of Jesus’ parables that springs up quickly, but quickly withers for lack of a depth of soil and no roots. It is going deep, underground, to serve its purpose.

Let me briefly suggest an example from some of our country’s exemplary Christians, in honor of Black History Month

(By the way, I hope you will take note all month of the signs celebrating Black History Month along Michigan Avenue and on the digital marquees in the Narthex and near the Delaware and Chestnut doors.)

Harriet Tubman and her network of abolitionists on the Underground Railroad helped dozens of people escaping slavery reach freedom.

In open defiance of the law and at great personal risk to themselves and their families, they dug deep for courage and faith that had to operate out of view; that it was underground, like the roots of a fruit-bearing tree, is what made it work and what provided its spiritual strength.

May we, too, trust in God to guide us through these days, so that we, too, may bear fruit for all who need it.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church