Right and Wrong Moments To Speak

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Right And Wrong Moments To Speak

Jeremiah 28:5-11
June 26, 2011

Then the prophet Jeremiah spoke to the prophet Hananiah in the presence
of the priests and all the people who were standing in the house of the Lord;
and the prophet Jeremiah said, ‘Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord
fulfil the words that you have prophesied, and bring back to this place from
Babylon the vessels of the house of the Lord, and all the exiles. But listen
now to this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the
people. The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times
prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great
kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that
prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the
prophet.’

Then the prophet Hananiah took the yoke from the neck of the prophet
Jeremiah, and broke it. And Hananiah spoke in the presence of all the
people, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord: This is how I will break the yoke of King
Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon from the neck of all the nations within two
years.’ At this, the prophet Jeremiah went his way. Some time after the
prophet Hananiah had broken the yoke from the neck of the prophet
Jeremiah, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: Go, tell Hananiah, Thus
says the Lord: You have broken wooden bars only to forge iron bars in place
of them

Over the years, I think I’ve shared with you from this pulpit many of the
mistakes I have made in my ministry, and sometimes even mistakes I have
made beyond my role as a minister, mistakes I have made as a spouse, a
friend, a human being, and, mistakes, I have made in my larger walk as a
disciple of this One from the city of Nazareth. And almost always those
mistakes had to do with words, the misuse of words on my part, the
bumbling of my words in this or that moment, or even the mishearing of
those words on the part of those who heard them, at least a mishearing
from my point of view. Still, overwhelming, so many of my mistakes in life
and ministry have been because I bumbled my words, didn’t explain myself
clearly, didn’t lay the ground work properly with words—think of the way I
handled or mishandled my explanation of the Sabbath Year a few years ago,
and the subsequent confusion and concern it brought on because I did not
present and explain it to you properly and clearly. Still, I have to say that, so
far, I have not made too many cringe worthy mistakes, such as one
exemplified in a funny story about a man who received a bouquet of flowers
upon the opening of a new store.   The card attached to the flowers
expressed deep sympathy for the occasion, which dismayed the owner of the
store. While puzzling over the message, his telephone rang. It was the
florist, apologizing for having sent the wrong card. "Oh, it's all right," said
the storekeeper. "I'm a businessman and I understand how these things can
happen." "Unfortunately," added the florist, "I sent your card to a funeral
party." "Well, what did it say?" asked the storekeeper. "Congratulations on
your new location," was the reply.

So, you see, words have power, and they can convey so much, and for the
prophetic class, the people called by God to tell us the truth about the
consequences of our actions, it is so important to get the words just right,
to make sure that what they say will accurately reflect what God is saying to
a particular people in a particular moment. Gerhard von Rad, one of the
great Old Testament scholar of the last one hundred years, has said that a
Old Testament prophet is one that “participates in the emotions of God.” If
so, it is so important for a prophet to have good emotional intelligence, to be
able to read the divine like a person with those gifts can read other people,
to know when to speak and when to be silent, when to do and when to cease
all doing. In the story we have before us today, we have two prophets, to
forth tellers, not fortune tellers, who are arguing that they have read the
emotions of God correctly, but the problem, of course, is that they are
reading the Divine in two profoundly different ways.

Some background will help us get a sense of what just happened in the story
we just heard: we know of Jeremiah, of course, the great prophet whose
ministry was primarily between the years of 626 and 587, during which he
railed against the people of Israel for their willingness to go after false idols,
and to care little for the poor, the outcasts, the supposed nobodies of this
world. In the particular text here, we have Jeremiah making the unpopular
case that the people of Israel will pay for these two sins, this wandering away
from the worship of God, and the desertion of the poor and needy in their
midst (22:1-9, 37:16-21, 38:14-28), he tells them that consequence of
these sins is that God will have them submit to the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar,
the Babylonian King on their doorstep. To resist would be futile, to use a line
from the a recent Star Trek series, because this Borg, this Empire will swallow
Israel up, and to resist Nebuchadnezzar will only bring destruction and pain.
To embody this truth, Jeremiah has fashioned a human yoke for himself, a
yoke being “a wooden beam, normally used between a pair of oxen or other
animals to enable them to pull together on a load when working in pairs, as
oxen usually do” (Wikipedia). And this living lesson was meant to embody
Yahweh plea to the people of Israel not to resist the Babylonians, because to
do so will only bring pain and destruction and ruin to Jerusalem.

But there is another forth teller, another prophet there in Jerusalem, one
who also claims to be able to read God’s will, God’s emotions, and that is
Hananiah, this one that says the opposite, that God will send the heavenly
armies to defeat the Babylonian armies of Nebuchadnezzar, and will bring
home all those Israelis held captive in Babylon, these vessels of the nation.
So, Hananiah argues, resistance to Nebuchadnezzar is not futile at all, but
fully in line with what God is going to be doing through this divine angelic
army (Jeremiah 28:1-4). In the scene here, Jeremiah speaks to his prophetic
competitor, pointing out the history of those who proclaimed the
consequence for Israel of abandoning God, and abandoning the poor, would
be destruction, and that those who say the opposite, the prophets of peace,
those who say that God will rescue them from that destruction, will tested by
history, by what happens after the words of prophecy are spoken. The
future will ultimately prove you wrong or right, Jeremiah says, but, of course,
he believes Hananiah has read God’s emotions all wrong, at least in that
moment. In response to being called out, Hananiah takes hold of the
wooden yoke Jeremiah is wearing to make his dramatic point, and does his
own bit of drama by breaking it, and saying that God will break the yoke of
Nebuchadnezzar rather than that yoke being imposed on the people of
Israel. Later, God will have Jeremiah forge a steel yoke to wear around his
neck, making it impossible for Hananiah to conduct his drama a second time,
and further make God’s point that Jeremiah is right and Hananiah is
wrong.

James Limburgh, a Lutheran scholar, writes this, when he was doing research
on this Scripture: My work on this text was interrupted by a telephone call
from a Jewish friend. When I told him I was dealing with the encounter
between Jeremiah and Hananiah, he immediately launched into a narrative
telling of his role in a play produced at a summer Hebrew camp. He had
taken the part of the false prophet Hananiah and reported with glee how
these high school students had constructed a breakaway yoke for Jeremiah's
neck and how he, at center stage, had taken the yoke from Jeremiah's neck
and smashed it over his knee. The play climaxed with the burning of a
model of Jerusalem on the beach of a Wisconsin lake.

But the problem, in many ways, is that actually, both messages, the one
given by Jeremiah about the consequences of walking away from God by
walking away from worship and walking away from the poor, and the other
message, the one by Hananiah, where God’s faithfulness to the people of
Israel, God’s willingness to fight for them and beside them, is told, are both
true messages: they have both been important messages found in the
prophetic works of the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Tanak. What often
happens in our readings of texts like this is that we automatically put people
like Hananiah into the “false prophet” camp and thus we forget that these
prophets who have either honestly misread God, or even sometimes
purposefully misread God, they often share a true word, though—and this is
important—that word is often uttered in the wrong moment. God has been
faithful to Israel, and, actually, will indeed bring the vessels of Israel, the
people of Israel back home some day, but that is not God’s message for that
moment, that particular moment in time and history in our story.

In a book I read recently, the late Texan political commenter Molly Ivins
recounts a funny story that Lyndon Baines Johnson used to tell about a
young unemployed science school teacher who was desperately looking for
work during the great depression. He found himself being interviewed by a
Texas school board in the midst of debate about whether students should be
taught that the earth was round or flat. In school board’s interview of this
young teacher, they asked him what he would teach about this
“controversy,” and he replied, “Well, sir, I can teach either way, whatever way
you want me to teach it!” Well, the reality is that in our situation Hananiah is
telling the truth, but he’s telling the truth at the wrong time, in the wrong
moment. Most false prophets will tell you what you want to hear, like the
teacher in our story here, and no doubt the people of Jerusalem wanted to
hear Hananiah true words of God’s faithfulness to them, a faithfulness that
they hope will somehow manifest itself in a miracle victory over the despot
King Nebuchadnezzar. And yet, this true word of divine faithfulness is not
just a false word but a true word spoken in a false moment, and the
consequences for Jerusalem in wanting to hear the right thing at the wrong
time will be the destruction of the city itself.

And yet, again, to be fair to Hananiah, I get the temptation to speak words
that the people will want to hear rather than the words that the people need
to hear. I mean, we all do, don’t we? Who hasn’t said something to another
person because we knew that it was what they wanted to hear. Most of the
time there are no real consequences to that choice: telling someone that
outfit looks great on them when it actually looks disastrous is not going to
really be earth shattering or life changing. But sometimes there are real
consequences to being less than honest with people—when we don’t tell
them we think they are making mistake after mistake, that choosing of “x”
will likely lead to horrendous consequence of “z.” And people resent it, of
course, and I resent it, when sometimes tells me that what I am doing is
wrong, or that no good is likely to come from my choice to do this rather
than that. I get that, but sometimes we do need to tell the truth to each
other, even when it is not a popular truth, even when the people of
Jerusalem, so to speak, would rather hear that everything is going to turn
out OK, even as the very walls of the city are being besieged by the armies of
Babylon. Sometimes we have to tell the truth to someone, to love them with
the truth, as we understand it, of course, with full humility that we might,
just might not be a Jeremiah, and we could be reading God and the universe
wrong, and that we hope, actually hope that we are wrong—I think Jeremiah
hoped that Hananiah was right, but deep in his bones, he knew that he had
read the emotions of God correctly, much to his dismay.

So, let me share with you something I just need to say today, my own
prophetic moment, something I say with humility, and that is that we are
more like Israel in Jeremiah’s time than we would like to believe. Remember:
Jeremiah has two major charges against Israel, the first being that they have
abandoned their God as a nation, and secondly, they have abandoned the
poor.   Now, I have no desire for a theocracy, no desire to set up a religious
country—that idea has been a disaster from the beginning, from Israel’s
time, to the Puritan’s efforts to do the same, all of these attempts to have
God as our head of state have been disasters. It didn’t work for Israel, and
it certainly work for anyone else. But the second theme of Jeremiah’s
ministry is one that we still need to attend to, the one in which he takes
Israel to task for abandoning the poor, sweeping them under rug, as if God
would not notice such a thing. Right now in our country we are on a path
like the one Israel was on, thinking we can walk away from those who cannot
walk, who don’t know how to walk, who don’t have the intellectual and
emotional skills to walk in this world. This past week Douglas spent tons and
tons of time trying to help someone in our community who doesn’t really
have the skills to navigate the world at this point in their life, and maybe
never quite will, and both of us were stunned at how little help there is out
there for people like them. Until you have to go out there and find that help,
you just don’t realize how little help there is out for the really poor. I know, I
know, certain parties in this country have been stirring a reverse class war,
where the rich and the middle class, wage war on the poor, saying that they
are the reasons this country has gone to pot, is suffering so. And so
government social programs are cut, and the salaries of the people who
teach our children are questioned, while wars and defense manufacturers
have a field day, and oil companies get tax breaks during a time of record
profits. And no one dares say the obvious, which is that we need to raise
revenue taxes on those who have benefited the most in the last 15-20
years, the very richest among us, so that we can help the ones that have
suffered the most in the last 15-20 years. NO, say some, the government
shouldn’t get involved in this—let the poor get help from the churches, as if
we the church could ever be able to replicate what the government can do.
And frankly, the care of the least of these in our culture is not just the
church’s job—it is our job as a country, and not just the job of the
Christians or the Muslims, or the Jews, or any other religious group in our
country. Like Jeremiah, I tell you this: we cannot walk away from our duty to
all of God’s children, not without invoking the wrath of the same God whom
Jeremiah heard in those days of old.

How is that for prophetic truth telling? Some of you may agree with what I
just said, and some do not, I am sure, but it’s all about the timing, and for
me, the timing is now, especially after experiencing this week of trying to get
help for someone and realizing that there is no real help out there, and what
little help that is out there is overwhelmed by people like me calling to see if
we can get any sort of help from them. Now, the truth telling moment may
be different for you, the prophetic moment may be a whole different situation
for you—maybe you need to be a Jeremiah to someone you love, or someone
you struggle to love, and you have in your hands two truths: God’s
faithfulness, in one hand, and God’s judgment, in the other hand. Both are
true, and sometimes they are true at the same moment, but often they are
not, and so one truth must uttered to those who may not want to hear it.
Sometimes the truth is a bitter pill to swallow, and we’ve all had to swallow it
as some point in our lives, even if we resisted it at first. But sometimes you
have to take your medicine, and sometimes you have to dispense the
medicine to another. Sometime the medicine is good news—yes, God is with
you, God is beside you, and sometimes it’s bad news: you can’t escape the
consequences of your actions, and your actions are likely to cause you and
others great harm. Either way, in our truth telling, some humility needs to
be involved, knowing that we are no Jeremiah, and we too, at times, have
misread the emotions of God. But sometimes we have to pick up the pieces
of the wooden yoke that someone has wrenched from our necks, someone
who has denied the truth of the situation, and we have to forge a yoke of
iron, knowing that some truths must be told in this world, and we, we are
the ones tasked with doing that truth telling at that very moment. Amen.