Sermon July 19, 2009

Proper 11 in the Season after Pentecost

Jeremiah 2: 11-22, Psalm 23, Ephesians 2:11-22, Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

I want to begin with a couple of quotes this morning. I'd like to see if you can tell me where the first one comes from - it's the opening line of a service in the Prayer Book - I'll give you a hint, some of you heard it 9 days ago: "I am the resurrection and the life says the Lord". It's the opening line from the Burial of the Dead. It's how a funeral service begins.

The second quote is a little different. "Cross her palm with silver and Madame Velda will tell you your fortune"! That's from a sign outside a tent at a carnival I remember attending as a college student in Wales. A group of us went in and the women inside gazed into a crystal ball, examined our hands, and told us, essentially, that we'd all live long and happy lives.

Now I'm guessing that your are wondering, right about now, what on earth I' talking about! Can anyone see a connection? I'd be surprised if you could! But there is one, and guess what? I'm going to tell you! I can sum it up on one word: Prophesy.

In reverse: We often think of prophesy in the same category as Madam Velda, that it's about magically revealing some mysterious and unknown future. The prophets of the Hebrew scriptures did not do that. Hebrew prophesy was about reading the signs of the times and then speaking about those signs. Usually it's about pointing out to specific groups within a society the inevitable consequences of their actions for themselves and their nation.

One of the most common prophetic literary devices was what is called a "woe oracle" - it begins "Woe to......" and then names the group to whom the oracle is addressed. It's pretty easy to see that the prophet is angry, but it's also really, really important to understand that the language of a woe oracle is anything but bland. Its polemic; it's full of barbs, swearing, sexually explicit and derogatory comparisons - it's purple speech.

For an example lets go back to the first question I had for you: "I am the resurrection and the life, says the Lord". From which service? The burial office. Now, guess what the word "Woe" is the first word of? A Jewish funeral service. Why, do you suppose, the prophets would do that? Because they want to begin by driving home the absolute seriousness of the situation. A paraphrase of "woe" would go like this: "According to God you guys are as good as dead."

Which raises another question: who are "you guys?". Jeremiah tells us: "the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of [God's] pasture!" That would be the leaders of the nation, who because of their greed, sought to manipulate what the peasants grew on their small land holdings. As part of that process they accumulated vast tracts of land from the peasants, turning them from modest landowners to day laborers working the land that once belonged to them, and turning family members into indentured slaves.

As the rich got richer, the poor got poorer.

As my mother used to say to my brother and I when we were playing just a little too energetically, "if you don't stop this someone's gonna get hurt." Or, to put it another way, "goodbye celebration, hello, deportation!" Exile. Jeremiah writes in the context of that exile, explaining to the elites what had happened, in the hope that they would see the places where they had failed in their covenant obligations, repent, and return to the Lord.

Lest you think this is all very interesting, but also only relevant in 7th century B.C.E. Israel, here is the opening three verses of a modern woe oracle (and remember what I said "woe" was the equivalent of? The opening of a funeral service): "I am resurrection and life, says the Lord", but you do not want to know that resurrection let alone live in it, you who devised credit default swaps at parties, you who conspired over sub-prime mortgage loans. For you lined your pockets while the people's houses were foreclosed upon, you laughed while their retirement funds became "201K"s. You spent your time feasting at expensive restaurants and being driven around in chauffeured limousines while the people were forced to go to food banks and walk to the unemployment offices.

I'll bet a few of us here today are saying "right on!" "Yeah!" Seeing Jeremiah's words in a contemporary context certainly shows their real force. It's easy to see how ticked-off those exploiters would be with him - and that also helps explain why most prophets' lives do not end quietly in their beds!

For us I want to offer a caution and an observation. The caution is this: scape-goating is an age-old practice that is designed to focus on the splinter in the other's eye while preventing us from seeing the 2 X 4 in our own eye. Some examination of our own participation in a system that led to the current financial crisis is appropriate. If consumerism is one of the causes it might cause us to rethink how we interface with our self-focused culture.

The observation is about how we can dismiss prophetic words. For instance, it would be easy to see all the prophets as finger-pointers so that we could then simply dismiss them as busy- bodies.

I would instead invite you to see the redemptive, restorative side of all the prophets: Jeremiah says that there will be a restoration - remember? - of "Justice and righteousness". The elites in Israel manipulated the courts and found the peasants guilty of various trumped up charges so they could steal their land. But, the prophets said, the peasant's cases were appealed by them to a higher court - Yahweh's court - where the peasants had the judgment reversed they received true justice - they were found to be in the right - that's what the word "righteousness" means - God has found us in the right, God has vindicated us.

And that vindication, that redemption, Jeremiah (and all the prophets) say comes at the very least from the dissolution of classism and sexism - it's a new paradigm for the way that human beings should act toward one another, brought about by God's redeeming action.

That leaves us with an invitation from this reading - to be a part of that new paradigm, to enter into the process of restoration, the vision of justice, the judgement of righteousness, the overcoming of classism and sexism, that all the prophets speak of - all the prophets, the most famous of whom is, of course, Jesus. Amen.