[Sermon preached on 4 March 2018, 3rd Sunday in Lent / 3rd year, ELCF Lectionary]
It is so endearing at times to see little children in a big supermarket or shopping mall. They come in with mom or dad, but as soon as they see something interesting—toys, candies, pets, or anything else that moves—they go their own way and forget everything else around them.
And then at some point, suddenly, they look up and realize that mom or dad is not there anymore. They look around, first carefully walking, then running and checking out places. and then when they cannot find their parents, they start shouting, “Mommy!!! Daddy!!!” And when even that doesn’t help, you see their faces change from hope to fear and then to a sense of rejection. They think that they will never see mommy or daddy again. The result is a heart-rending crying that won’t stop until their parents have found them. Of course, we know that they wouldn’t ever reject their child just like that!
But what we don’t see in the supermarkets and shopping malls are the elderly parents that have been rejected by their grown-up children. They wait in vain, day after day, for their children to visit them or to give them a phone call and ask, “How are you? Would you like me to come over? Is there anything I can do for you?”
These parents have given the best years of their lives to their children. They have given what they could, sacrificed their time, their strength, their resources—everything—in order to give their children the best possible in life.
But then, when they in turn start being in need of their children, they find no gratitude, no commitment. They are just expected to understand that the children have a life of their own. They need their privacy. They need time and energy to develop their careers. They now have children of their own that take up so many of their resources.
And the parents try to understand, I am sure. They explain to others with an air of pride how their kids are so busy, because they have such a responsible job and are taking so good care of their own kids. But deep down inside, there is the searing pain of rejection, too great and too deep to describe, and too shameful to share with others.
God is like a rejected parent. The reading from Jeremiah 7 shows us a God who has been rejected by his people—a Father in heaven whose children have let him down and turned their backs on him. And the Gospel reading from John 8 give us a sad picture of how his children rejected even his greatest gift of love—his only begotten Son Jesus.
These are dramatic words in Jeremiah 7—even shocking—when God speaks to Jeremiah:
“Don’t pray for this people! Don’t offer any plea or petition for them! Don’t plead with me, for I will not listen!”
Wow! That’s tough language, isn’t it? Jeremiah is told that he is no longer allowed to pray for the people of God. And if he does, God will simply put his fingers in his ears, so to say, and make sure he doesn’t hear a word.
Have you ever seen parents doing that to their children? I have. Again, we need not go further than the supermarket to see it happening all the time. Kids find their way to the candy department and start begging for candies. Mom and dad answer with a firm “no”. Today is not candy day. Some other time. But kids are not good at taking “no” for an answer. So they keep on asking, they insist, they become stubborn and impossible to handle.
And that is where many parents lose their patience. It doesn’t mean that they stop loving their kids. It doesn’t mean that they stop caring for them. It doesn’t mean that they don’t want to give their very best to their children. It only means that at that point they come to the conclusion that their kids now need a firm teaching on the need to respect their parents. They need to understand that “no” means “no”. They need to obey their parents and accept their authority.
Jeremiah lived in a time when the people of Israel had turned away from God. They did not think of him any longer as “the” God of Israel. At best, he was “a” god—one among a lot of colleagues and competitors. For Israel, God’s law and authority had become negotiable. People felt they were no longer dependent on him. After all, they could always turn to other gods who were more apt to adjust to their needs and demands. Look, for example, at how Jeremiah 7 describes life in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem:
The children gather wood, the fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough and make cakes to offer to the Queen of Heaven. They pour out drink offerings to other gods to arouse my anger.
What we see here is this: The people of Judah had broken faith with God. They had committed spiritual adultery with other gods, which they had adopted from the cultures around them. They still went to the temple to bring petty sacrifices. They had a little time set apart for God. But it was not quality time. Their offerings did not come from the heart. They were just a routine ritual. They thought that, by going through the ritual, they could make God happy; They could make God believe they still loved and respected him.
But when the duties in the temple were done with, the families gathered together for quality time—a sort of barbeque party, you could say. The kids went to pick twigs and branches for the fire. Dad lit the fire—after all, that was the man’s job. And mom was in the kitchen baking delicacies. The cakes she made had the form of a woman. It was the goddess Asherah, the “Queen of Heaven”.
You may have read that after the reign of king Solomon, the Jewish nation had been divided into a northern kingdom, Israel, and a southern kingdom, Judah. By the time that God called Jeremiah, the northern kingdom of Israel had already ceased to exist. Almost a century earlier, the Assyrian army had come and conquered the nation. Many of the people had been killed or taken into exile, and groups of Assyrians came and settled in Samaria.
That should have been a clear warning sign for Judah in the south. But everything shows, that Judah had not learned its lesson. How come? Why was it so hard for the Jews to stay faithful to the God who—as they firmly believed—had led them out of slavery in Egypt and given them the Promised Land? Why did they so eagerly embrace other gods—the Queen of Heaven, the Assyrian goddess of the family; or Mammon, the Aramaic god of wealth and trade; or Baal, the Canaanite god of agriculture? Why did they reject their own God Yahweh, the Creator of heaven and earth?
When I look at the life of Israel, from the moment they left Egypt to the time of Jeremiah and even beyond, I can come up with two answers. First, their God was too limited. And second, he was too demanding. Let me spell that out for you.
Throughout the history of Israel, God appears as a very patriarchal God. He was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the God of Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel. He was the God of Moses and Aaron, not the God of Miriam. The creation story depicts God as inherently both male and female. But in the history and tradition of his people, he seemed to communicate primarily from man to man, and take sides with the men. He assigned all worship duties to male Levites and priests. God seemed to endorse a strongly patriarchal society, where women were owned by their father or husband. In the law he gave to Moses, women were given lesser rights than the men, even though, we must admit, in Israel women were treated with far, far more respect and equality than anywhere else in the Middle East. But of course, they did not know that.
At times, God threatened to abandon his people in the desert. At other times he threatened to wipe them from the face of the earth altogether. He was distant. They couldn’t see him, and he would not allow to have pictures or statues made of him. They couldn’t hear him, because he would only speak through his prophets.
To make things worse, he put a lot of demands on the people. I don’t mean the ritual worship and sacrifices. I mean the demands for moral integrity, for love and respect for one another and even for the foreigners living among them or traveling through their land. God demanded that they take care of the needy, especially the widows and orphans, since there were no institutional social services. God demanded that at regular intervals debts were cancelled and slaves set free. In short: God demanded the highest form of personal integrity and social justice. But for those in power—the kings and tribal chiefs, the landowners and those who had made a fortune in trade—these demands were appalling. The idea that one day out of seven they were not allowed to do business or make their slaves and hired hands work on the land felt like a terrible waste of time and resources.
No wonder, then, that the people grew tired of God. No wonder, then, that they looked for alternatives. There was an obvious demand for a woman god—a goddess—who was more empathetic, easier to approach, and closer to the life of the family—a goddess with whom particularly the women could identify. There was an obvious demand for a god who blessed business and trade and allowed a great measure of moral freedom, as long as you made money.
I believe that in that respect our time is not so different from the time of Jeremiah. The Christian Church is not so far removed from the Jewish nation in Jeremiah’s time. Of course, there are easy and obvious parallels to draw.
Traditional churches from before the Reformation actually have a Queen of Heaven. It is Mary, the mother of Jesus. They call her the Mother of God. When you look at how she is adored and prayed to, it is difficult, if not impossible, to tell it apart from divine worship. The same is true for the saints, whom many believers turn to in their prayers instead of to God.
In Japan, many Christians will visit Shinto and Buddhist temples for certain religious ceremonies, because they feel that the God of the Bible is not particularly good in that area.
In Africa, Asia and Latin America, the worship of spirits and forefathers has found its way into many churches. The official teaching of the churches may be sound, but the practice of their members is quite another story.
And here in the west, New Age spirituality has mixed with the faith of many Christians. People go shopping, as it were, to fill their religious shopping cart with a nice religious mix that they feel good about. These are the obvious forms of idolatry—the obvious ways in which God is being rejected as the one and only God.
But there are also less obvious parallels between Jeremiah’s time and ours. Every Christian knows the Great Commandment:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.”
But how many of us are really serious about this? Oh, I know, it is so easy to come to worship and sing or pray: “Oh, Lord God! How I love you! Oh Lord Jesus! How I adore you!” But when it comes to the choices and decisions we make, to the way we deal with our family and friends, with the people at school or at work, in the bus or the metro; with the beggars in the streets or the customers on the phone… can everybody see that our lives are driven by commitment to the Great Commandment?
Look at the way you spend your time and your money. Look at the friends you choose and the friendships you neglect. Look at your priorities. Listen to your words when you are angry or excited. What do these tell you and others about your love for God and for your neighbor? That is a question we should all ask ourselves—every day!
I see yet another parallel in the way we respect or disrespect the authority of God in our lives. The simple truth is that God’s will doesn’t necessarily always coincide with ours. More often than not there seems to be a conflict of interests between God and us. Just like the little kid in the supermarket, who is determined that she must have an ice cream right now. To her great disappointment, she may find that her parents have a very different view on the matter.
God speaks with authority through the Bible, which we often call the Word of God. Luther called the Bible the supreme authority in matters of faith and living. That does not mean that everything we read in the Bible is normative. Not everything that is normative is unambiguous and self-explanatory. Not everything that is unambiguous and self-explanatory is independent of time, place or culture. But it doesn’t really matter. The question is: when we recognize God speaking to us through the Bible, do we respect his authority? Is it our heart’s desire and our will’s determination to seek to obey him? Or are we selective in applying only what we are comfortable with and what we feel good about?
Think of the events in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3. Adam and Eve heard God loud and clear: “Don’t eat from that tree.” But they chose to ignore him and disobey what they knew was God’s command. First, there was doubt creeping in: “Did God really say that?” Then, there was distortion of God’s command: “He said we cannot touch the tree.” It all stems from an image of God as a stern and bossy and unreasonable God who wants to make our lives miserable by denying us the good side of life, and who demands the impossible from us day and night.
As individual believers, and as the church of Christ—and, if possible, as a society built on the foundation of the Christian faith and tradition—we should take God’s authority seriously. We should pay heed to his voice crying out in a broken world against social injustice, various forms of abuse and exploitation, discrimination and racism. And it is not enough that we just refrain from going along with them. As Christians, we should echo that voice and obey it. We should encourage one another to live our lives the way God meant our lives to be. And perhaps, the best way to do so is to be imitators of Christ: to love like he loved, to care like he cared, to heal like he healed, and to sacrifice ourselves for others the way he sacrificed his life for us.
Lent is a special season of reflection and self-examination. Maybe this week we should especially ask ourselves in all honesty: Do we allow God to be God in every aspect of our lives? Have we truly surrendered our homes, our families, our calendars, and our bank accounts to him? Have we submitted our professional, financial, and ethical decisions to what we understand to be God’s will? Is his law written on our hearts? Is he the desire of our hearts?
Amen.
