SERMON: Pentecost 5 Year A  - 19 June 2005

Readings:   Jeremiah 20: 7-13        Psalm 86        Romans 6: 1-11        Matthew 10: 24-39

May our hearts and minds be open to your truth, O God. Amen. 

A challenging set of readings! A quick read through hardly acts as a shining advertisement for the faith! The first and the last readings talk clearly about the difficulty of being faithful to God and the risk of finding yourselves in direct opposition to those around you.  The middle one is one of the apostle Paul’s complex and tortuous passages about who Jesus is. It is intended to reassure and encourage us but, being designed for a first century audience, not a twenty first century one, it uses forms of logic we are not familiar with and makes all sorts of allusions to Jewish theology and teaching that we simply don’t get until they are explained to us. 

Today I’d like to leave Paul to the side and focus on the Old Testament reading – the one from Jeremiah – and the Gospel reading from Matthew: the two readings which highlight some potentially painful consequences of following God’s call. 

Jeremiah has gone down in history as a prophet of doom. As well he might. When you read the Book of Jeremiah, there are times when Jeremiah seems to be a close cousin of Marvin the paranoid android from Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. This morning’s reading is no exception! In this lament, Jeremiah complains to God that he (Jeremiah) is a laughing stock because he is doing what God has told him to do – he is being a prophet. 

The prophet’s role is never an easy one and rarely a popular one.  The role of the Old Testament prophet was not to foresee the future, as we tend to think, but to critique the society of the day and to point out how it was deviating from God’s wishes. Jeremiah and the other Old Testament prophets challenged people about their behaviour. Part of this critique was often to point out the inevitable consequences of living in ungodly ways but the basic prophetic function was critique – not prediction.  

Prophets were not simply an ancient phenomenon. Prophets continue to try to knock us out of self-satisfaction and call us to reflect on who we are and what we do. Wherever human societies form, there are those who critique the dominant paradigms – sometimes with great accuracy, sometimes not. There are many modern examples. People such as David Suzuki, or example, warn us about the unsustainability of our Western patterns of consumption and of the consequences for us and for the environment if we continue to live as we do. Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Steve Biko acted prophetically against the rule of apartheid in South Africa.  

Jesus was also a prophet and experienced distrust, suspicion, and the enmity of institutional powerbrokers as he called people to a true understanding of the nature of God and the meaning of God’s teachings. His critique was particularly aimed at the religious rulers who had, wittingly and unwittingly, distorted the religious and political life of the Jewish people.  

Christians, of course, believe that Jesus was much more than this – that he was a unique revelation of God, that he was no less than God in human flesh. But even people who are not Christians, who are members of other religions such as Islam and Judaism, recognise in Jesus a great prophet. In today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel, he warns his followers that they too will find themselves at odds with their society, indeed even with their own families.  

This message was particularly valuable for the community which produced the Gospel according to St Matthew. Indeed, that may well be why it was remembered and recorded within that community. As far as scholars can tell, the author of the Gospel according to St Matthew was a Jewish Christian of the second generation writing around 70 CE in or near Antioch in Syria. The Jewish Christians had been kicked out of the synagogues, rejected as heretics and forced to form their own religious communities. Although they had seen themselves as Jews, the Jewish authorities did not agree. They were familiar with rejection and with alienation. This text, calling them to hold fast to their convictions, spoke to their experience and was deeply reassuring. 

Not all of us are called by God to be prophets. And for that I think we may be truly grateful. But it is certainly true that at times our beliefs and our desire to live a godly life will mean that we find ourselves standing against the norms of society, against the way that people expect us to act. It may be a small thing, like being honest if we are given too much change in a shop, or refusing to speak badly of someone that everyone else is getting stuck into. Or it may be a much larger issue such as challenging systemic corruption, or injustice.  

Whatever the issue, our sense of being connected to a bigger story – the story of the relationship between God and humanity – will mean that we operate from a set of values and beliefs that flow from that bigger story, rather than from the culture in which we happen to be. Our true home is in our relationship with God and with the community of faith. 

And that can be a very uncomfortable place to be. We human beings are social animals – we like to feel we belong and have a place within our grouping. Standing at the edge can be a risky and painful place to be – just ask Jeremiah, just ask Jesus. At such times it is important to be clear about why we are taking the stand we are taking and about the values and beliefs that are important to us. These texts tell us that it is OK to be standing in this place, indeed, it is probably inevitable from time to time.  

There is, of course, a downside to this reassurance. These texts, and others like them in the scriptures, have been used to justify a ghetto mentality, an us/them approach. They have been used to shore up walls of self-righteousness. You can hear people say, ‘We must be right – our view is being opposed and Jesus said we would be persecuted.’ But that does not follow: opposition does not mean that you are necessarily right. There are occasions when we get it wrong, there are times when the community of faith is slower to understand the gospel imperative than the secular world. Blinded by the weight of tradition, distorted by human sinfulness, the church can obscure truth, as well as understand and proclaim it. The scriptures were used to defend apartheid – they were also used to oppose it. The scriptures were used to defend slavery – they were also used to oppose it.

There are no easy answers. But when we find ourselves, either as individuals or as churches, standing on the outer edges hurling prophetic missiles at our society (or indeed, at our churches) we need to do two things. 

Firstly, we need to ask ourselves if what we are saying and doing is truly godly – have we been blinded by self-interest? By naivety? By someone else’s charisma? And secondly, we need to remember that we might be utterly convinced that others are wrong, but they are nonetheless deeply loved by God and not to be despised. And here I take issue with Jeremiah. His vindictive response to his persecutors, while completely understandable, is a long way from Jesus’ cry on the cross, ‘Father, forgive them foe they know not what they do’ .It may be our task to critique our society, it may be our task to say things that others will find uncomfortable. It is also our task to love our neighbours as ourselves and to love even our enemies.  

May God be with us in all that we do and say. Amen.