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The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
January 31, 2010

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Jeremiah 1:4-10

Jeremiah was a young man,
somewhere around 20 when God came calling.
Like most 20-somethings he probably had plans for his life,
plans for work, for marriage,
for a family.
Is it any wonder that he balked when God came calling?

Jeremiah tried to turn God down in a nice way –
did you hear it?
“I am only a boy, God.
I wouldn’t know what to say.”
But Jeremiah should have known better.
Had he paid attention in Sabbath School
he would have learned from Moses’ experience
that trying to debate his way out of serving God
would not work.
God’s response to Jeremiah’s hesitancy was simple:
“Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’,
for you shall go to all whom I send you,
and you shall speak whatever I command you.”

God was not interested in arguing with Jeremiah;
he had work for him to do,
important work,
work that God wanted done immediately.

Since the death of King Solomon three hundred years before,
God had watched with dismay as his beloved children
strayed farther and farther away from him.
Almost every king who followed Solomon
seemed to have as his goal
how bad, how corrupt he could be.
The kings in the northern lands of Israel,
and those who ruled the southern kingdom of Judah
were a rogues’ gallery of faithlessness,
corruption, selfishness, and ignorance.

Only a few would have been able to take the vow
our own elders and deacons took two weeks ago,
to lead their people with energy, intelligence,
imagination and love.
They were more interested in leading with power,
military might,
cunning,
bribery, duplicity:
whatever it took.
Morals and ethics?
Responsibility to their people?
All those things would only get in the way.

The kings created a culture that prized wealth,
prized materialism,
prized pleasure,
a culture that was indifferent to the Lord God,
ignored the teachings found in scripture,
and was oblivious to the words
God had spoken through the prophets.
And the people loved it.

One hundred years before Jeremiah’s encounter with God,
God had sent prophets to warn the children of Israel
that they were in trouble,
and that they’d better turn from the path they were on,
turn back to the Lord God.

God spoke through the prophets in strong words,
so there’d be no misunderstanding:
“You have plowed wickedness,
you have reaped injustice,
you have eaten the fruit of lies.”
(Hosea 10:13)
“Your princes are rebels,
and companions of thieves,
Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts.
They do not defend the orphan
and the widow’s cause does not come before them.”
(Isaiah 1:23)
“I hate, I despise your festivals;
I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Take away from me the noise of your songs.”
(Amos 5:21ff)

But no one listened to the prophets.
There was business to be done,
wealth to be accumulated,
Who cared about the sick?
Who cared about the poor?
Who cared about the unemployed
the outcast, the foreigner?
Looking after them took time,
took money,
time and money that could be spent on personal needs.

So God looked for a new voice,
a new prophet to carry his message,
this time a young person.
A young person who would speak to the older generation
and say, “you’ve gone the wrong way.”

And Jeremiah reluctantly did what God asked of him,
and spoke the words that God commanded him to speak.
Like the prophets before him,
Jeremiah spoke bluntly:
“Hear this, O foolish and senseless people
who have eyes, but do not see,
who have ears but do not hear…
there are no limits to your deeds of wickedness:
you do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan,
or defend the rights of the needy….
Run to and from through the streets of Jerusalem
…see if you can find one person who acts justly…”

How do you think people reacted to Jeremiah’s words?
Do you suppose they heard him?
Heard his call to repentance?
Realized that they had indeed strayed far from God,
were weak in faith?

No, they were outraged that the young man
would dare say such things to them!
Their reaction to the message Jeremiah had for them
was to threaten to kill the messenger,
not ignore him,
but in fact kill him.
Jeremiah quckly found himself
cut off from his friends, even his family
because of the words God spoke through him.

Even today we struggle with Jeremiah and his prophecies.
We call a prophecy of doom and destruction a “jeremiad,”
as though everything Jeremiah said was so much
gloom and bleakness.
“Come on, Jeremiah”, we might say today,
“lighten up!”
“We don’t want to listen to a guy like you.
We only want to listen to someone
who tells us what we want to hear,
someone we like,
someone we’d want to have a beer with.”

Jeremiah prophesied bad times ahead for the children of God -
the Babylonian invasion and exile from their lands.
But he also made clear that the children of God
had a choice,
that they did not need to go down that path.
All they had to do was listen and repent,
acknowledge the error of their ways,
and turn back to the Lord God.
It was that simple.
Jeremiah’s words were a call to action
a call to a new life.

But the people who heard Jeremiah
dismissed him,
dismissed his words,
cursing him in the process,
and their course was set.

Jeremiah is speaking to us even now,
2600 years after he walked the streets of Jerusalem.
Jeremiah’s words are powerful, timeless.
We cannot turn from the messenger,
for the messenger’s message
are God’s own words to you and to me.

Were Jeremiah to walk the streets of our cities now
speaking God’s words he might begin his teaching
by reminding us of the words of one of his predecessors,
words from the prophet Micah:
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?”
(Micah 6:8)

Do justice, and love kindness.
Such simple words from the Lord God spoken to us
time and time again through the prophets.
And yet, do we do justice?
How can we say yes,
when there are more than 40 million men, women
and children in this country who live in poverty?
During the decade just ended,
we successfully turned a blind eye
and a deaf ear to the fact that each year
another one million people fell into poverty:
one million more in 2002,
one million more in 2003, 2004, 2005…
and that was before the economic downturn.
Millions upon millions fell into poverty
while most of us were focused on home equity
and the latest electronic games.

The Great Recession over the past 18 months
has only made matters worse.
Fully one in five people in this country
are struggling simply to put food on the table.
One in five: that’s more than 70 million people
just in this country!
Would we consider it just
to allow 80 men, women and children
of this congregation to struggle to feed themselves?
Would we dismiss them as victims of their own laziness,
their own irresponsibility,
pleading that we were doing all we could do?

You have heard me say repeatedly that access to health care
isn’t a political issue,
it is a moral issue,
a justice issue.
Those who have politicized the debate
and in the process demonized it
with their lies of death panels
and 18-month waits for surgery
are not doing justice, not living justice,
and neither are we if we aren’t in the vanguard
to work to assure that the sick are healed
without regard to employment,
finances,
or the whims of a claims clerk
at an insurance company
who has been trained to define any illness
as pre-existing.

Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine
has argued that the question we should be asking
is not, “when will the economic crisis end?”,
but “Will we do things differently
as a result of the economic crisis?”
Will we create a new economic standard,
one that is still based on capitalism and free-enterprise,
but one that is also based on justice and equity
rather than greed and
what’s in it for the individual.

Corporate executives argue that the purpose of a business
is to make a profit.
That’s true…
if your business is loan-sharking, or drug dealing,
where your only goal is to make money
and you don’t care about the impact
of what it is you are doing.
But Peter Drucker, the great management writer,
very wisely and very faithfully reminded us
the corporations are social entities,
part of society’s compact to do justice,
to act justly.
The company that acts justly,
that blends its business with responsibility,
that seeks justice even as it goes about its business,
will still make a profit,
but profit will be a result of its work,
not the goal.

In our sound-bite, polarized world,
such talk is dismissed as quickly as Jeremiah’s prophecies,
suspiciously socialist,
menacingly Marxist,
but studies have shown that companies that do best
in the long run are precisely those companies
that operate ethically,
morally,
justly.
(see e.g., Drucker, Handy, Collins,)

Jeremiah is timeless,
walking our streets here and now
talking to me,
tallking to you.
We – you and I - can turn away from him,
not listen to him,
but we do so at our peril
because he, like the prophets before and after him,
spoke the words God commanded him to speak.

In turning from the prophets --
Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah --
turning from their difficult words,
their words that seem to make us so uncomfortable,
we – you and I - turn from God’s words,
God’s words spoken precisely to shake you, shake me
turn you, turn me.

Eugene Peterson has taken the passage from Micah
and worded it in a way that speaks so powerfully:
"But he’s already made it plain how to live,
what to do,
what God is looking for in men and women.
It’s quite simple:
Do what is fair and just to your neighbor,
be compassionate and loyal in your love.
And don’t take yourself too seriously –
take God seriously."
(from “The Message”)

Do what is fair and just to your neighbor,
Be compassionate.
And take God seriously:
that’s the message God was calling Jeremiah to share;
the same message our Lord Jesus Christ
shares throughout the pages of the gospels.
A message for me to hear, to respond to;
a message for you to hear, to resond to,
For God’s sake;
For Christ’s sake.
For your sake.
AMEN