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Jeremiah 1: Now the word of the LORD came to me saying,
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations."
Then I said, "Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for
I am only a boy."
But the LORD said to me,
"Do not say, 'I am only a boy';
for you shall go to all to whom I send you,
and you shall speak whatever I command you.
Do not be afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you,
says the LORD."
Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said
to me,
"Now I have put my words in your mouth.
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant."
Luke 13: Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath.
And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her
for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up
straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, "Woman,
you are set free from your ailment." When he laid his hands on her,
immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader
of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept
saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be
done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day."
But the Lord answered him and said, "You hypocrites! Does not each
of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and
lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of
Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this
bondage on the sabbath day?" When he said this, all his opponents
were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful
things that he was doing.
Jeremiah's call is a profoundly disturbing call.
To accept it, Jeremiah accepts a life of great uncomfortableness. The
nation of Israel was diminishing. The only way it could be saved was for
God to pluck up what was and plant something new.
As in our time, there were people who wanted things to go on as they were,
even though the manifest direction was towards extinction, no t extinction
of God's people, but of the way things were. And people were desperately
holding onto what had been, even if it meant compromising their integrity
to God, making alliances where alliances should never be made. There was
a profound self absorption in Israel at the time of Jeremiah - that wanted
to preserve what was, what supported the power and prestige of the powerful
and prestigious, even if in doing it they were doing what was manifestly
against the very essence the nation of Israel was set up to be.
It is easy for a system, once it is running, to become its own raison
d'être, and to forget the purpose for which it is created. The modus
operandi becomes more important than its purpose, in fact the maintenance
of the way things are done becomes an end in itself.
Christian faith asks of us a deep commitment to Christ, that extends beyond
the borders of any system, any convenience, any other loyalty. That is
a very difficult thing to achieve. It is difficult because it is not a
simple matter to extract oneself from habit and acquired culture, and
honestly look at what you are doing. It is difficult because we don't
have a blueprint as to how we should be faithful and loyal to God. We
can't say the Bible is a blueprint because the Bible was written in a
totally different world with totally different challenges, and as you
read through the Bible it is pretty clear that in every different era
and place, people responded to the call of God in different ways, with
different answers, different responses to different challenges and different
times.
And the more disturbing awareness is that the numerous wildernesses that
Israel went through: the Wilderness of slavery after Joseph, the wilderness
of Sinai with Moses, the wilderness of political chaos after the collapse
of the Judges, the wilderness of deportation after the collapse of the
monarchy, each of these wildernesses brought about a reassessment of Israel's
existence and its way of being. And with each reassessment, there was
a time of deep striving after purity, followed by a gradual decline of
morality, of strength, of spirituality, of integrity and security.
When Jesus came, the reassessment that had occurred after the division
of the country, after the destruction of Israel and the deportation of
Judah to Babylon, a reassessment that created the formation of the Synagogue
and the formation of the dispersed people of God into the new Israel,
all of this had calcified over a period of several hundred years into
a rather slavish adherence to rules and laws which masqueraded as Godliness,
as faith.
If I truly love, I don't need a law to tell me how to do it. I do need
some benchmarks to alert me if I'm slipping away from my ideals of love,
but rules cannot manufacture the Spirit of God or the spirit of love.
In the Israel of Jesus, time and time again, he encountered rules that
faked Godliness. And every time he encountered this, he challenged people
with the reality of the motivation that lay behind the façade,
and the reality that people had accepted the façade but not the
reality.
What is the Sabbath about? It's about space to listen to the Spirit of
God, not a rule to beat people over the head with. It's about space to
listen to the compassionate God, to become more like that God, more in
tune with that God. This is what lies behind the story we read from Luke's
gospel this morning. But this is only one example of the same collision
at work in the life of Jesus, again and again and again. In Jesus, we
see a fresh recalling of people to the heart of what their faith is about
rather than a comfortable acceptance of the veneer which clads it. It
is so easy to get the two confused.
But to take on that agenda, to really try and pare back the veneers to
expose the heart of faith is a frightening, unsettling and costly business.
Jeremiah found it so. Jesus found it so.
And so will we if we have the faith to do it, and yet that is at the heart
of the Eucharist, at the heart of our confessional prayer.
"Create in me a clean heart O God, and renew a right spirit within
me". Until the day that I can achieve perfect unity with Christ,
my life is daily under radical review if I am true to those words, a radical
review in the blinding light of the presence of Christ which, if we have
the faith, exposes us in our imperfection, but also exposes us to Grace,
and love. The purpose of this brutally honest review is to redefine us
in the image of Christ.
So it is for us. So it is for the church.
So it might be for our country, if we have the faith, and the courage,
to walk the road of Jeremiah and of Christ.
But in that road is also salvation, oneness for all time with the God
who gives us breath, oneness with Christ who died for us, forgiveness
and peace, for us, for all of God's earth.
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