For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 4 – Jeremiah 28:5-9 (Related)

Last week we saw Jeremiah facing a personal dilemma; this week he is causing one. Once again, we need a larger context in order to understand this text, so let’s go back to v.1.

The prophet Hananiah stands up and delivers a prophetic oracle. The timing here is important: we know that this happened in 594 BC, which is significant because it lies midway between the first deportation of exiles to Babylon in 597 and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 587. The placing is important too: it’s in the Temple, in the presence of all the worshippers and priests. The message is simple: within two years all this mess will be over. The people and the sacred articles from the Temple nicked by Nebuchadnezzar will be returned. The Monarchy will be restored in Judah, and this exile of some of the people will have been only a blip, not a total catastrophe. In other words – and here’s the subtext – all that doom and gloom that Jeremiah has been spouting is complete rubbish. So how does a prophet respond to that kind of a message?

So how does Jeremiah cope, and what can this incident teach us about the nature of prophecy in general? Well, first of all he responds kindly. He hopes very much that what Hananiah has spoken about will indeed not come true. A mature prophet is not vindictive (although immature ones often are!), and he wants to avoid the complete destruction of Judah as much as the next man. But he believes the opposite of what Hananiah has predicted, and he can’t just let this go, especially with all the great and good of Jerusalem looking on. That would be to neglect his God-given calling. But rather than telling Hananiah that he is completely off the wall, he says that we’ll just have to wait and see. In fact he does then go on to embark on a battle of prophetic symbolism involving an ox’s yoke, but that isn’t where he starts.

An interesting question is about just why Hananiah believed what he was saying. The most likely explanation is wishful thinking. Of course we all want things to be nice and OK, so it’s a short step from wanting that to hearing God telling you that that is what he’s going to do. A couple of weeks ago we thought about childlessness. I can’t recall how many ‘prophecies’ I’ve heard for childless couples that within such-and-such a time they’ll get pregnant. Like Jeremiah I very much hope they were accurate, but I suspect that at least some of them led to even greater disappointment and suffering. Everything within us longs for a happy outcome when we’re praying for people, but we all know that happy outcomes are not guaranteed.

Or maybe it was about personal popularity. Hananiah could see that Jeremiah’s words had not made him the nation’s favourite, so perhaps he thought that he’d come out looking better as a prophet if he gave the people what they wanted, a message saying that everything would be fine. Who wouldn’t want to hear that? Or maybe he just got it wrong, and misheard God. We’ve all done that too. But whatever the reason for his prophecy, our hero Jeremiah had to correct it, and the ongoing prophetic battle in v.10-17 shows that he was not healthily open to correction. In fact Jeremiah was powerfully vindicated by predicting his death, which happened two months later. So much for Hananiah.

Two key points emerge from this sorry tale. The first is that prophecy is highly contextual. Later on Deutero-Isaiah told the people that God was comforting them, that the exile was over and their sin had been paid for. They were going home! In that context the message was exactly right, and proved to be accurate. But when Hananiah said the same thing, it was false prophecy. It all depends, and that’s why we need fresh revelation from God, and can’t just live on yesterday’s promises. But the second, as Jeremiah points out, is that prophecy has a much stronger track record at confronting than it does at comforting.  This seems to be the exact opposite of much charismatic prophecy, where encouragement and blessing seem to be the order of the day. It ought to give cause for concern if sin is never confronted and repentance never called for, lest we be guilty of crying ‘“Peace, peace” when there is no peace.’

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 3 – Jeremiah 20:7-13 (Related)

Every now and then, on a bad day, I find myself in a dilemma. In retirement I’m still involved in teaching theological students, training clergy and Readers for ministry. I love my work (that’s why I’m still doing it even after I’m supposed to have retired), but there are days when I feel like a complete hypocrite, because actually I wouldn’t wish ministry in the C of E on my worst enemies. Nobody had told me, as a bright-eyed bushy-tailed ordinand in the 70s just how heart breaking it was going to be (or maybe they did tell me but I just didn’t hear it). I feel that I know, in small measure, how Jeremiah was feeling.

This text is the final of six personal laments in his book, and it is by far the strongest in its language. Jeremiah knows what it is to have a hard message to deliver, and to be mocked for it. He knows the awful feeling of believing that God is going to act in judgement, but then to see him doing nothing while evil continues to prevail. He knows personal attack from those who don’t want their comfortable worlds rocked with bad news, and who don’t want to be called to account for their wrongdoing. But above all he feels deceived by God. You called me to this ministry, and I just can’t withstand that call, yet all it brings me is misery. I try to avoid my calling and to disobey you, but something within me just won’t let me do that. The word ‘deceived’ is that used often in the Bible for sexual seduction: the difference here is that God has seduced him into obedience, not sin. And it hurts.

No doubt we’ve all heard sermons about how it’s OK to get angry with God, and to express our true feelings rather than pretending everything is nice, and this passage certainly validates that. But the liturgist in me wants to read this text from a different point of view. It is a great example of a liturgical form called ‘Lament’, and as such it is intended to contain and express those negative feelings we so often have, but also to move us on to a more positive place. Lamenting is not the same as whingeing.

So what is really interesting about this passage is the way in which Jeremiah’s relationship with God changes through it. In v.7 God is without doubt the enemy, the deceiver who has tricked Jeremiah into working for him in such a painful job. But by the time we get to v.11 things have changed, and God has become an ally against his attackers. And by the end of our text (v.13) a song of praise to God springs to his lips. As in any good liturgy there is a journey here, a progression from where we are now to a different place, and Lament form follows this well-trodden path, allowing us to express with raw emotion what it is we’re upset about, but not leaving us there. You can see this journey in many of the Psalms: Ps 13 is a good example, but there are several others. Note too that part of the Lament process is often imprecation, calling down curses on the heads of those who have hurt us. I know we’re supposed to forgive people this side of the cross, but so much ‘forgiveness’ is cheap and shallow because it doesn’t take seriously what we would actually like to do to our enemies. My favourite definition of forgiveness is ‘choosing to leave it up to God to punish my enemies, rather than trying to do it myself’, and this certainly doesn’t mean that things are going to be nice from now on. I may forgive someone, but it might be impossible ever to trust them again, and often the most sensible course is simply to keep away from them.

There are two more important things to say about Lament. The first is that if you’re feeling that this is all a bit quick and neat, that you can deal with your feelings in around six verses, you’re right. That’s what liturgy does: it expresses concisely a journey which may take us years to travel. When we say the Creed in church it takes a few minutes, but for us to have come to the point where we can say ‘I believe …’ may have taken considerably longer. Indeed we may still be on that journey, working through our doubts and uncertainties. In the same way a liturgical text expresses what ought to be going on, what we hope will be going on, even if we’re not entirely there yet. The level of pain Jeremiah is feeling cannot be dealt with lightly, but Lament is a good start, a roadmap for the journey if you like.

The second point lies beyond our passage, but note that after the song of praise in v.13 he is straight back to moaning again. The benefits of using Lament seriously are not instant and permanent, not least if people are still hurting us. It is a resource to be used over and over as needed, but every time we do so we remember to make that shift from God being our enemy to our saviour.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 2  – Genesis 18:1-15 (Related)

The Epistle for today, from Romans 5, contains the well-known line about suffering bringing hope, which does not disappoint us, or put us to shame. But what when it does? Abraham had been told 25 years earlier, in Genesis 12:7, that the land would be given to his offspring, and that he would be the father of many nations (Gen 15). But Sarah his wife remained stubbornly childless. Abraham, faced with this hope which certainly had disappointed him because they had been unable to have children, tries in two different ways to help God out. First he decides that what God really meant was that Eliezer of Damascus, his chief servant, who was no doubt like a son to him, should be his heir, and then he follows the custom of having a child with Hagar, Sarah’s servant. Neither of these approaches really work out, though, and indeed the Arab-Israeli conflict of today could be traced back to the animosity between Isaac and Ishmael. But what must it have been like for Abraham and Sarah living through those years, with monthly reminders that God had not acted, and with the sense that the biological clocks were ticking and time was fast running out?

Our passage begins with the unexpected arrival of ‘three men’ (18:2) who eventually become ‘The Lord’ in v.13 (v. 10 simply uses the pronoun – ‘Then he said …’) Like a good Middle Eastern host Abraham makes them welcome, but he must have been suspicious when in v.9 they appear to know his wife’s name, and when they cut right to the chase with the reiterated promise from 15:4. These are not merely men, and they are soon recognised for who they are, whether angels, or the Trinity incarnate. 25 years on, God still means what he said, and the fact that the couple are approaching their century makes no difference.

Sarah can’t believe it – why would she? – and responds with incredulous laughter. It has been suggested that this is a joyful laugh as, brimming with faith, she celebrates what God is about to do, but the text doesn’t read like that: it’s much more like ‘You’re having a laugh, O Lord!’ She is soon penitent, and tries to lie her way out of the embarrassment, but she has been caught out. She didn’t really believe God would fulfil his promise. The passage leaves her, and us, with the question ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’

In my experience, though, this isn’t always the question we are really asking, and that’s why we so often need to protect ourselves from the pain of hope which does in fact disappoint us. I don’t disbelief God’s power to act and to answer my prayers, but I’m never terribly sure about his will. I’m with the guy with leprosy from Mt 8: ‘If you are willing, you can …’ But like Abraham and Sarah I’ve lived with dashed hopes for so long that I need to protect myself from further hope, which will only add to the pain.

We ought to be so powerfully full of faith that even 25 years of waiting does nothing to dent our belief in God’s plans to act. But most of the time we’re not, and we need that self-protection. So I don’t want to be too hard on Sarah. It’s not like me to be pastoral, but I’ve been aware over the years of couples desperate to have children, who have spent thousands on IVF-type treatments but who have still remained childless. For them this isn’t just a story: it’s their life, and the more well-meaning people have given them ‘words from the Lord’ and hopeful promises, the more their disappointment has grown. It’s worth remembering three things from this passage. First of all, God will do what he wants to do, and for many people that means that hope is disappointed – big time. Secondly, the fact that Abraham and Sarah’s story has a happy ending does not invalidate the stories of countless others during the years of Israel’s history who had no such outcome. They may not get the headlines, but they were there, and are every bit as much a part of the biblical experience of God’s people. But thirdly, the one hope which will not disappoint us is that of the place where crying, mourning, pain and death will be no more. Sometimes, sadly, pie in the sky when we die is the only sure and certain hope we have. How we live faithfully until then, disappointments and all, is what we’re all trying to work out.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 1 – Hosea 5:15 – 6:6 (Related)

What would you rather have: a God who was angry with you, or a God who was dead and powerless? That is the question posed by this very difficult passage from Hosea. We need a bit of background to understand both the question and how we might answer it. Hosea was a contemporary of another OT prophet, Amos. Both of them were based in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and both wrote around 740 BC, not long before Assyria captured the kingdom and virtually wiped it from the pages of history. But although writing in very similar circumstances, their messages were quite different. Amos focussed on social injustice: the rich were cruel and oppressive towards the poor, justice could be bought with bribes, and the people were thoroughly corrupt in their dealings with one another. Amos’ most famous call was for ‘justice [to] roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.’ (5:24). But Hosea saw things differently. The root problem was not the people’s lack of love for one another, but their lack of love for God. He lived out his message by obediently marrying a prostitute, whom he knew would be unfaithful to him, and by yearning for and welcoming her return.

One clear message to emerge from the book was that it was the same God who punished the nation and healed them. In the verses just before our passage there are three powerful pictures of God’s action on the adulterous people: he would flood them with his anger, he would eat away at them like moths or rot, and he would tear them apart like a lion. This seems problematic to us: we are used to someone else harming us but God restoring us. The idea that the God who has torn us to pieces is the only one who can bind up our wounds (6:1) seems difficult to say the least! So how can we understand this in context, and make sense of it for ourselves?

Hosea appeared to know that before too long the growing and greedy Assyrian empire would destroy Israel. Because of Israel’s fierce monotheism, they simply could not believe in another power at work alongside God’s will, or an equal and opposite ‘devil’ figure. Whatever happened, good or evil, could only possibly come from God. That, by the way, is the explanation for the difficult idea found in 1 Samuel that ‘an evil spirit from the Lord’ attacked King Saul. There was simply nowhere else from which an evil spirit might come: it had to be God. So if you were beaten in battle, there could only be two possible explanations. Either your god was cross with you and was teaching you a lesson, or he was weaker that your enemy’s god and had been defeated. Of the two options in OT thought, clearly the first was less serious than the second. If your god was dead, there was no hope, but if he was annoyed with you, there was still the possibility that he might forgive you.

So having torn the nation apart, God retreated in 15:15 to his lair to wait and see what the people would do next. In 16:1 we have a change of voice, and the people do indeed come back to God, confident (perhaps over-confident) that he will turn and restore them, and that he will do so quickly. But it isn’t as simple as that, and in 16:4 God again speaks, lamenting the short-lived fickleness of his people, and longing for their so-called repentance to manifest itself in love for him and therefore mercy in the land. Cheap repentance, and shallow worship, would not cut it, so he had had to cut them.

So what does this say to those of us living in Christ on the other side of God’s son being torn on the cross? In one sense, nothing has changed. We would all, if we’re honest, acknowledge that we can be fickle and insincere, repeating liturgical words of penitence but then living in exactly the same ways as before. Indeed these very words form part of one Common Worship prayer of confession. We would all own up to loving God nowhere near as intensely as we should. But it remains true that the only one who can bring forgiveness is the same one who castigates us for that lack of love, and who, like Hosea himself, yearns for a restored relationship with those who go off after others. If God is upset with us, there is hope: because Jesus died but was raised we do not have a dead, powerless God, but rather one longing to forgive, heal and restore.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity Sunday – Isaiah 40:12-17, 27-31

This has got to be about the hardest Sunday of the year for which to write an OT Lectionary blog! If the Trinity is only alluded to in the NT, how on earth are we meant to find it in the Old? In fact it wasn’t until the 4^th century that the doctrine of the Trinity as we understand it was finalised, the end of a journey in which Christians had tried to express theologically what they knew and had experienced of God, and to outlaw false doctrine. So to expect to find a fully developed trinitarian theology in our Bibles is a vain hope. Yet there are hints, the very hints which caused early Christians to try to formulate the idea. Maybe there are some in today’s OT reading.

The passage comes from the second part of the book of Isaiah (Deutero-Isaiah) which dates from the end of the Babylonian exile, and announces to a weary and homesick nation that God is about to rescue them and build a highway to take them back to their homeland. There is the feel that people had almost given up on their God after decades away from home, with their Temple having been destroyed, and being surrounded by the gods of Babylon, where they now felt they were doomed live for ever. So to a people who had forgotten, the prophet poses a series of questions, with the refrain ‘Do you not know?’

‘Who has …?

v.12-17 pose a series of questions about God as creator, and the relative tininess of humans. The reference to God’s Spirit or spirit in v.13 is probably what inspired the lectionary compliers to choose this as a trinitarian passage, although most likely it simply means the ‘mind’ of God: who can grasp what God means to do, or tell him how to do it? But what we do have here is a dramatic picture of the majestic creator of all, before whom humans appear as nothing.

The filleted out verses, 18-26, similarly pose questions to the disillusioned Jews: With whom will you compare God? (v.18), Do you not know? (v.21) and again To whom will you compare God (v.25). If we are seeking to read these verses through the lens of a trinitarian theology, we have a description of God the Almighty king and Father, before whom we are left with no option other than humble and awe-filled worship.

But then the next question introduces a different note:

‘Why do you complain …?’

This leads into an assurance that God has in no way forgotten them, nor are they beyond his reach in Babylon, nor has he grown old and past it, needing to be replaced by a more up-to-date Babylonian deity. In fact he is among them even so far away from home: the very ends of the earth are his. If we want to, we can perhaps find a hint of the incarnation here. God, rather than leaving the exiles to get on with it, is still present in their world, with compassion and care. Jesus is God with us.

‘Do you not know …?’

This question, to which we shall return in a moment, ushers in the famous verses about renewed strength and eagle’s wings, which we might want to read as a reference not to the majesty of the creator, nor the closeness of the redeemer, but rather God’s Holy Spirit within us, renewing, empowering, comforting and equipping for the journey.

So at a stretch, and without believing that Deutero-Isaiah had a fully developed 4^th century doctrine of the Trinity, we might see some hints here about the nature of God as creator, redeemer and empowerer. But to return to that question which forms a refrain in between the others, what is significant is that the people ought to have known, and that in knowing would be their comfort and salvation. The Hebrew word yadha’ is a rich one, and is not just used about having information. Its primary meaning is to ‘ascertain by seeing’, and that right there is perhaps the most helpful thing we can say about the Trinity from this passage. Preachers have spent so long trying to get people to understand how God can be three and one at the same time, but that is to miss the point, not least because no-one can understand. But Isaiah’s question isn’t about what they comprehend; it’s about what they have experienced. ‘Have you not heard?’ in v.28 could mean ‘Have you not experienced?’ And there’s the point: how have we experienced the awesome majesty of God the Creator and sustainer of the whole universe, and how do we respond to him in worship? How do we know the closeness of Christ with us day by day, such that we love him and call out to him for help in all the circumstances of life? And how have we felt the empowering of the Spirit, bringing his gifts and growing his fruit in us, refreshing us, renewing us and causing us to flourish? This is a very different kind of knowing, and is of far more value then mere theological formulae.