“In the Potter’s Hands...”

A sermon based upon Jeremiah 18: 1-12 
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time,  July 8, 2018 

(6-12) Sermon Series: Jeremiah: Prophet to the Nations

When I was in High School, my favorite part of my day was art class.   My talent was pencil work, especially drawing portraits.  I also did quite a bit of painting with oils and acrylics, but my teacher, Mrs. Crawford, introduced us to many other methods and mediums. 

One day, when I entered the room, there was a potter’s wheel placed in the corner of the room, but no one was allowed to go near it.   Several months later an older student came to our class to give us a demonstration.  That was the first time I’d ever seen a potter at work on the wheel.  As I watched, and after we got to try it ourselves, I realized that making pottery wasn’t just an art form, it was a learned skill that took a lot practice to perfect.  I also learned that even a skilled potter is constantly challenged by the quality of the clay.  Even the most skilled potter will have to start over, when flaws are discovered in the clay.

In one of the vivid images in all Scripture, the prophet Jeremiah likens the molding and turning of clay pots to the molding and making of the people of God.  Just like the quality of the pot depends more on the quality of the clay than the skill of the potter, so the making of God’s people depends most on the willingness of a people to be shaped and molded by God’s will and purposes.   In other words, God’s people do not have to be perfect, but they do have to be willing to allow God to use them and to perfect them, as they learn his purposes and his will.

GO DOWN TO THE POTTER’S HOUSE (2)

So, what does it mean, when Jeremiah was instructed by the Lord to “go down to the potter’s house”?   What was God trying to teach the prophet?  

To help us begin to think about a couple of examples from common life:   “A young mechanic was doing his studies about engine repair. He was in the final stages and was discussing with his instructor what he felt was the most important thing he needed to learn to master the engine. He told his instructor that he had read all of the relevant material on the internal combustion engine, the rotary engine, and turbochargers. He stated that he knew that the engine has nine systems, just like the human body: the oil system, the cooling system, the fuel system, the exhaust system, the electrical system, the drive train system, the steering system, the suspension system, and the braking system. He told his instructor that, if needed, he could enumerate the laws of thermodynamics and thermal electric power. The instructor reached out his hand, and the young mechanic, thinking that he was about to be congratulated, quickly placed his hand in the instructor's hands. As the instructor grasped his hand, he felt the fingers to see if there were any calluses, and he felt the palms, and they were as soft as a baby's skin. The instructor grasped the young mechanic's hands, briskly pulled him close, and whispered in his ear. "If you really want to be a mechanic, let me give you a piece of advice. Go down to the auto shop and wrap your hands around an engine, and stick your fingers in some grease, and then you will know what it means to become a master mechanic."

A young college student wanted to know everything she needed to be a master in addressing

social problems. As she met with her advisor, she discussed her training in sociology and the

grades she had obtained in human psychology. She told him that she understood Freud's theory of personality, and that she could identify and describe Erik Erickson’s eight-stages of human growth and development: she knew about trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, initiative vs. guilt, industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. role confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generatively vs. stagnation, and integrity vs. despair. The advisor looked in the young woman's eyes and he saw the intensity of her dedication and the sincerity of her commitment. Then he took out his notepad and wrote down these words. "You have learned all the theory, and you have received all the training. The only thing that you need is to come in contact with human problems. Go down to the neighborhood center and touch the lives of boys and girls, men and women, and after you give them all that you have in you, then they will give you all that you need to address human problems” (Lord, Send The Wind by James McLemore)

In this text, God was preparing Jeremiah to receive his message, and the first thing God told him was you have to "go down...." In order to understand the message Jeremiah would have to "go down” ... go down from his high studies, go down from his priestly position, go down from his isolation, go down to see an example from everyday life.   Sometimes, as Christians too, when we are seeking to understand how to live the Christian life may try understand it by doing more than reading, talking, discussing, or studying about it.  What we really need to do is to go down ... go down talk to our neighbor, go down to a hospital, go down to a jail,  or out on the road.  Until we come ‘down’ to get up and close and personal to what is really happening right now, outside of our own world of ideas, we may not know what it means to know and do God’s will.

When Jeremiah was preparing to speak God’s message, the reason God chose the potter’s house was partly because you couldn't cook a meal unless you went down to the potter's house. You couldn't carry water from a well unless you went down to the potter's house. To beautify your house, to plant flowers in a vase, you had to go down to the potter's house. And God's message to Jeremiah was, If you want to understand who I am, Jeremiah, you have to “go down to the potter's house."

The potter's house was called the Bayith Ytsar, the house of molding or making, because the potter would take the clay and mold it and make it, and give form to that which had no form. When God made humans, the description given in Genesis 2:7 is that the Lord God formed the man.  This same word "form," in the Hebrew, ytzar, means that God took clay, like a potter, and molded the man into God's own image, just as the potter molds and makes the clay into pottery.  This is another reason, Jeremiah was to ‘go down to the potter’s house’.  Jeremiah was to remind the people not only that God gave them life, but that God had given form and purpose to their lives too.

THE VESSEL WAS SPOILED… (4)

When Jeremiah reached the potter's house, he saw the potter working at the wheel, but the pot that he was working on was marred, or ‘spoiled’, so the potter took the clay and reformed it into a new pot. God told Jeremiah, ‘My people are just like that clay. They are marred, spoiled and broken, but they refuse to be remade’ (v.10).  The skilled potter can take old clay and make something new out of it, but human clay, given a mind of its own, must be willing to submit to the will, way, and work of the potter.   God’s people must not only ‘go down to the potter’s house’, but like clay they must submit and yield to the renewing and reshaping work of the potter.

While it is normal, if not natural, for the clay to become marred or messed up from time to time, it only becomes a problem when the ‘clay’ becomes hardened, unbending and inflexible.  This is the problem Jeremiah sees with Judah and Jerusalem.  The ‘nation’ has become a people who ‘turn to evil and will not obey’ (v. 10).   The New Living Translation puts it rather directly, interpreting the people’s response to Jeremiah’s message: "Don't waste your breath. We will continue to live as we want to, stubbornly following our own evil desires." (Jer. 18:12 NLT).  It’s not that Judah is in the ‘mud’, but that they are stuck in the mud and want to continue being mud, without any desire to be reshaped or renewed by God’s will or purpose.

Can’t we become the say way?   I know that each of us are already fixed in our ways and fixed in our habits. I know that we are used to doing things the way that we do them and saying things the way that we want to say them. And I know that if we don't want to change, nobody is going to make us change very easily.  But still, knowing us like I do, I’ve still got this message for us, for you: "Go down to the potter's house ...” and take another look at how the potter works and reworks the clay over and over.   The potter does not magically wave his hand and a vessel is complete, but it is a process; a progression which includes trials, errors, failures, and restarts.  Now these flaws have nothing to do with the lack of skill with the potter, but the potter patiently guides the clay through ‘thick and thin’, through start and restart, until the vessel is perfected and made complete.   In the same way, Jeremiah tells God’s people, God is like a skilled potter, sitting at the wheel of life, ready to change and rearrange us, if we are willing to ‘go down to the potter’s house’.   

We all need to let God help us, because all of us, at times, have been broken by life, and marred by wrong choices, and damaged by situations, until our vessel can’t hold life within us anymore.  If this is you, I've got a message of hope: In your heart "Go down to the potter's house." The Lord is ‘down’ there, and he can take your brokenness and fix it, or your marred condition, and heal it.  It all starts when you are willing to "go down to the potter's house."

HE REWORKED IT …. (4)

When Jeremiah sees the potter at work with the spoiled, marred clay, he especially notices how he ‘reworked’ it into something new.   This is the hopeful word Jeremiah wanted to bring but Judah was not ready or willing to hear.  What Jeremiah saw was that when God is the ‘potter’ and you are his ‘clay’, there is always hope.   No matter how dark or desperate life has become, it is never too late to begin again.  You can always start over with God as long as you are willing to for God to start over with you.  You may be thinking, "I've really messed up my life", but it doesn't have to stay messed up.   You may be thinking, "I've married the wrong person." God can make that person the right person by making you the right person. You may be saying, "I've gone too far." No matter how far you have gone, God can bring you back.

Thomas Edison was a great inventor, but when he was 67 years of age, he had a horrendous fire that burned up everything he owned in New Jersey. Every asset he had which at that time in 1914 was worth about $2 million dollars was totally uninsured. All of his experiments, all of his records, all of his equipment, all of his work, and all of his labor had gone up in smoke.

Edison had a 24-year-old son that came out to where the fire was roaring and burning up his entire life's work. The two of them tried to stop the fire, but they couldn't do it. The son said, "I hated even looking at my dad. I just knew he would say that his life and his work were going up in flames." He said, "My dad was out there. The wind was blowing in his hair. His face was all red from the flames. He was pouring sweat and I didn't know what he was going to say to me."  I couldn't believe what I heard. He said, "Son, go get your mother quick. She has never seen anything like this!" He went to get his mother just so she could see the fire. Later on this son said, "My dad was out there the next morning kicking through the embers and he said to me, 'Son, there is something wonderful about a fire like this.'" The son looked at him in amazement and said, "Dad, what in the world could be so wonderful about a fire like this?" He said, "Son, it just kind of seems to burn up all of your mistakes and failures and give you a brand new fresh start."

Three months later that company presented to the world the first phonograph, because here was a man who didn't see his problems or his failures as the end, but simply an opportunity to start new and fresh with new beginning (As told by James Merritt, in a sermon, New Hope, at esermons.com). 

LIKE CLAY… YOU ARE IN MY HANDS (6)

I don’t want to over-glamorize or universalize the emotional strength of Thomas Edison.   It is beyond doubt that Edison was an extraordinary, talented, and unusual person, but what we need to also understand from Jeremiah is that Israel’s God is no ordinary God; who is no ordinary reservoir of truth, hope, and promise either.   The God who told Jeremiah to ‘go down to the potter’s house’ is the kind of God who declared to his people, “Can I not do with you, o house of Israel, just as this potter has done?” (v.6).  When Jeremiah was sent to the potter’s house, it was still not too late, for even though the clay was spoiled and marred, she was not beyond repairing and reshaping.  “I will change my mind about the disaster I intended to bring…” (v. 8b), God said.   “If that nation turns from it’s evil…” (v. 8a), everything can be reworked.  With you in my will and in my hands, this great coming catastrophe could be avoided, is the message Jeremiah wanted to bring: “Just like the clay in the potter’s hands, so you are in my hand, O house of Israel” (v. 6).   Will you allow me to remold, reshape, and rework you, my people, God said?  

This was how Jeremiah put God’s question to Israel, but it is still God’s question to us too: Will we allow God our potter, and are we willing to be his clay?  Will we, as the song says, be ‘yielded and still’ allowing God to ‘have his own way’ in us, in you?   It’s in the last line of that old hymn, that determines of what happens next.  It’s where the writer says to the LORD of his heart: “Have Thy Own Way Lord, Have Thy Own Way. Hold over my being absolute sway, Filled with Thy spirit till all can see Christ only always living in me.”  We can’t be reworked or reshaped until God has ‘absolute sway’ in our lives so that Christ is ‘ONLY always living in me’

There's a great story that illustrates how we trust our lives into the potter’s hands, that was once told about noted thinker and inventor Albert Einstein. Einstein was on a train leaving Princeton Junction in New Jersey, heading north.  When the conductor came to his seat, Einstein was unable to find his ticket. He searched through all his pockets and looked in his briefcase, becoming extremely disturbed. The conductor tried to comfort him, saying, "Dr. Einstein, don't worry about the ticket. I know who you are and you don't have to present your ticket to me. I trust that you purchased a ticket."

About twenty minutes later, the conductor came down the aisle of the train once again and saw Einstein, still searching widely for the misplaced ticket. The conductor again said to him, "Dr. Einstein, please don't worry about the ticket. I know who you are!"

At that, Einstein stood and said in a gruff voice, "Young man, I know who I am, but I am trying to find my ticket because I want to know where I am going!"

I love that story because to one degree or another, we all want to know where we're going. We want to know what's next. We want to know that everything is going to be okay. In order to reach such semblance of certitude, we often decide that we need to rely on our own ingenuity. We decide that the only one we can trust to create our future oneself.  

But what we need to understand is that God’s redeeming power is only released into our lives, when we fully yield and trust ourselves as clay in God’s hands and allow Christ to live in us.  Through, Jesus, God is like a potter working from the inside, reshaping our hearts by his reenergizing grace that will remake and reform us.  But for this to happen, we must humbly yield ourselves to God as pliable and bendable clay.   We must ‘trust’ that God knows who we are and where we are going.

There is an apt analogy of how Christ lives in us, to reshape and remake us, which is a story that originally came out of South Africa, entitled "The Parable of the Pencil"   The inventor of the pencil addressed his finished product as follows: "I want you to remember four things: First, your goodness or true worth is within you. Second, you'll need to be sharpened as you go through life. Third, you'll be in someone else's hand, otherwise you'll make an awful mess. Fourth, you'll be expected to leave a mark." (told by James A. Feehan). 

That’s not a bad way to get the point, and the main point Jeremiah saw was that God is the Potter, we are the clay. We spend so much of our lives – time, money, angst, energy - trying to shape our own lives.... But God knows who we really are, what’s inside of us, what we were created to be... and only God can shape us and challenge us and to lead us to live our best life.

 So, let me close with a statement Will Willimon once gave to his highly educated congregation: “Forgive me, and forgive the church, for sometimes implying that Jesus will make life easier for you, that Jesus will fix everything that’s wrong with you, that Jesus will put a little lilt in your voice and a little sunshine in your life. Chances are, he won’t. He can do even better than that: Jesus can make you a disciple””( William Willimon, Pulpit Resource, vol. 32, no. 3, edited by fte)

When Jeremiah says “he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.” (Jer. 18:4 NRS) since God is pure love, what is ‘good’ for him, is also ‘good for us’.  Will you allow God to have his way with you, so you can have your best life through him?  Amen.

“Those Who Trust In the LORD.”

A sermon based upon Jeremiah 17: 5-10

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time,  July 1st, 2018 

(5-12) Sermon Series: Jeremiah: Prophet to the Nations

Robert Fulghum tells about meeting a young American traveler in the airport in Hong Kong. She was tensely occupying a chair next to his. Her backpack bore the scars and dirt of some hard traveling. It bulged with mysterious souvenirs of seeing the world.

When the tears began to drip from her chin, he imagined some lost love or the sorrow of giving up adventure for college classes. But then she began to sob ” a veritable flood of tears.

She was not quite ready to go home, she said. She had run out of money. She had spent two days waiting in the airport standby with little to eat and too much pride to beg. Her plane was about to go and she had lost her ticket. "She had been sitting in this one spot for three hours, sinking into the cold sea of despair like some torpedoed freighter."

Fulghum and a nice older couple from Chicago, dried her tears. They offered to take her to lunch and to talk to the powers that be at the airlines about some remedy. She stood up to go with them, turned around to pick up her belongings. And SCREAMED. They thought something terrible had happened to her but no...it was her ticket. She found her ticket. She had been sitting on it for three hours.

"Like a sinner saved from the very jaws of hell," writes Fulghum, "she laughed and cried and hugged us all and was suddenly gone. Off to catch a plane for home and what next. Leaving most of the passenger lounge deliriously limp from being part of her drama."  She had been sitting on her ticket the whole time.

THOSE WHO TRUST….  (5)

In our text today, Jeremiah reminds the people of God that their ‘ticket’ to the promises and possibilities of God is ‘trust’.   “Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him” (17:7).    Here, Jeremiah understands that nothing is more foundational to the human person than trust.   We first learn to trust the world around us because our parents love and care for us when we were dependent children.  If children are not cared for properly, trust is difficult for them for the rest of their lives.  Trust is at the core of what it means to believe, and to believe and have faith is at the core of what it means to trust.

When Jeremiah speaks of trust, we need to understand that trust is not only a religious concept.  Trust is a religious concept because trust is the very stuff of life and hope.  This week we are commemorating America’s 242^nd Birthday as a nation.  We are a nation that was born out of the shared ‘trust’ and belief that freedom was a better way of being a people than what was known before.  Recently, I came to appreciate the struggle for liberty even more as I was introduced to Alexander Rose’s novel about the American Revolution and the American revolutionary spy ring commonly known as “Washington’s Spies”.  The AMC TV network made a movie on that book, focusing on the life of one of those patriot spies, Abe Woodhull who lived on Long Island.   It was Abe Woodhull and that spy ring who kept the continental army led by General George Washington informed of British movements near New York.  Washington relied on a cabbage farmer to give him some of the most important intelligence gained during the Revolution.

Rose’s account is an incredible retelling of how our American forbearers wagered their own lives and livelihood in the faith and trust that liberty was worth the risk.  They did not know how England would respond to their opposition.  They also did not know who would win the war.  They did not know whether they would live or die in that struggle for liberty.  Remember Patrick Henry’s words, “Give me liberty, or give me death.”  Most specifically, those ‘spies’ who served George Washington and the American Colonies, risked everything they had because they believed that freedom was worth more than anything else in life.  Independence, liberty and freedom was their greatest ‘trust’.

Jeremiah reminds God’s people, that while trust is foundational to human life and prosperity, they need to take care about who and what they put trust in.   He told them that the LORD would bring a ‘curse’ upon “those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the LORD” (Jer. 17:5 NRS).  Those are very strong words, which could make the LORD look like an evil tyrant as bad as the king of England must have looked to the American colonist. 

But Jeremiah does not mean that God is against anyone.  If “God is love” as the New Testament attests, how could this be?   What we need to understand is that when Jeremiah used the idea of being cursed by God, he did so within the ancient Jewish perceptions that God, the LORD, was responsible for both the good and bad of life.  You can especially see this in the story of how God allows Satan to ‘test’ Job with heartbreak and heartache.   In that world, where there were not yet enough resources to understand how there could be any randomness, chance, or unpredictability in the world or universe, people reasoned that since all things were ‘created’ by the LORD, all things had to be ‘caused’ by the LORD too.  Today, we would understand much differently, that while the LORD has created the potential and possibility of life, God has also given us, and has given life and nature its own freedom, own ‘mind’, choices, and creative powers.  In other words, our God is not the kind of God who keeps all the powers of life only for himself, but he makes humans ‘co-creators’ and responsible care-takers, who work with God to become ‘masters of our own fate and captains of our own souls.’   

My point in explaining all this is to help us understand better what Jeremiah means when he speaks of people being ‘cursed’ when they lose trust in God.  Jeremiah means that when people only ‘trust in mere mortals and make their flesh their strength’ and leave God out of the equation of their lives, when we put our trust in lesser things, life turns against us, rather than works for us. It was not an accident, that the United States government voted to put the phrase “In God We Trust” on the American dollar.   This statement first appeared on American currency during the civil war, but was not made the official American motto until 1957.  It became a reminder to a growing, prosperous and affluent nation that if we are not careful, our greatest trust and our greatest need to trust in God,  can be displaced by lesser things.

This is exactly what happened to the people of God in Jeremiah’s day.  They had exchanged their trust in the LORD for trusting in themselves and what they believed they could accomplish on their own without God’s help.   But instead of increasing in prosperity and success, Jeremiah points to how they had become a people hopelessly struggling like a unfortunate ‘shrub’ planted in a parched wilderness (v. 6).   People who misplace their ‘trust’ are a people who end up starving for the bare essentials for life, faith, and hope.

Frank Campbell, who was once pastor of First Baptist Church in Statesville, gave a powerful illustration of misplaced trust way back in the 1980s, when he quoted American financial expert David Harrop who once lamented how many people wrongly measure their own worth based on how much money they have.   As a pastor of a well-to-do church, Dr. Campbell also noted how many people had sat across from him in counseling sessions who had more money than they ever needed, but they were miserable and struggling in their emotional and spiritual lives (From ‘God’s Message In Troubled Times’ Broadman Press, 1981, p. 66)

 When we put our ‘trust’ in lesser things, we will find it hard to get through troubled times, and no matter how well we have it, hard times will come.   This is exactly what Dr. Campbell observed when a very successful young couple started having serious martial problems.  He had been counseling with them, but one evening he received a phone call from the wife who informed him that she taking the young children and was leaving town and leaving her husband.   It wasn’t long after that, that a very irate husband called, demanding to know where his wife had gone.  Campbell observed, here was a couple who had everything one could possibly want; they were wealthy, well-educated, and very successful in their careers.  They carried real clout in the church and community too and where shakers and movers in various civic organizations.  They had everything you could imagine, he noted, except that they had lost trust in each other and they had also lost their trust in God.  When that trust was lost, their lives became a barren, parched wilderness having little to sustain them as a couple or as a family (Campbell, p. 69).

I THE LORD TEST THE MIND…SEARCH THE HEART (10)

If we lose ‘trust’ in each other, or we lose our trust in the LORD, what do we really have?   There are many things people go after in life, but what do we have really have left when we lose trust?  We’ve all seen it happen.  Some of you have tragically lived through the loss of trust in others.  Most of us have been hurt by someone you once trusted.  There is no pain greater and no hurt any worse than the loss of trust.  Humans can survive most anything, if we know people really care for us and about us.   The apostle Paul suffered much too, but he also said: “If God is for us, who can be against us.”  When we have ultimate trust from those we love and the God who loves us, we have what we need to get through life, but what do we have if we lose that trust, especially our trust in the LORD?

Isn’t this what Jeremiah means when he asserts that when people ‘turn away from the LORD’ life will become like a desert, that is barren and cursed.   When we lose trust, we may try to cover up that barrenness, or we may pretend that everything is going fine, or like that young wife in Frank Campbell’s account, we might get away, take the children, and try to start over.   But it is not until we come to address to the core of the hurt, the emptiness, and the barrenness in our lives, that we will can find renewal of hope and faith.

“I the LORD test the mind and heart”, Jeremiah reminds the people (v 10).  What Jeremiah means is that God knows the heart, so that we get out of our lives what we put into it.  If life becomes empty and barren, there is a good chance we have misplaced or displaced our trust.   What we need to do is to come clean with ourselves and examine exactly what we are putting our trust in.   We need to take the barrenness as a ‘test’ revealing that we have put our ‘trust’ in the wrong things.   As one pastor rightly named it, life is, just like faith is, finally “A Token of Trust.”  The ‘test’ of life is that everything boils down to who do we, should we, and must we trust.  

Interestingly, this is where Pastor Campbell’s story finally lands.  He says that after the husband realized that the wife left town with the children, the pastor agreed to meet with him in the pastor’s study.  After discussing some of the things that had gone wrong in his life,  pastor Campbell told him that until he got his relationship with Jesus right, there wasn’t much of a chance that anything else would go right either.   Before the session was over, the man and pastor Campbell got down on their knees and the man asked Jesus to be Savior and Lord of his life.  The husband was a changed man and got back together with his wife, and they both made Jesus the lord of their lives together.   They were a changed couple because they when they got their most basic ‘trust’ in God right, they were able to rebuild trust in their marriage and in their lives.

THOSE WHO TRUST IN THE LORD (7)

So now, as we come again to the core question of today’s text, let me ask you how do you ‘trust’ in the LORD?  Is it the kind of whole hearted trust that makes a whole life worth of difference?   Jeremiah says that ‘those who trust in the LORD… shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit (Jer. 17:8 NRS).  The image Jeremiah uses is not that of just any tree.  This is a tree that thrives, even in a barren, dry, thirsty desert because the tree is planted near constant and consistent flow of the water of life.   When your trust is sure, it is secure that you will have promise of life, no matter the conditions around you.

Several years ago, there was an article in the Greensboro News And Record by assistant district attorney Susan Bray.  She wrote about recently meeting her ‘role model’.   This role model was not a movie actress, sports star, or wealthy rock star.  She was an 5’ 3’’ 86 year old lady who then lived in east Greensboro.  She was a very independent woman who had worked and lived in New York City for many years, working as a hair-stylist and makeup artist, even working for some notable people like Lucille Ball, and others on Broadway.  

When the honorable Mrs. Bray got to know this Sunday School teacher, she unfortunately had to handled her sexual abuse case.   Late one evening, after watching “Murder She Wrote”, she noticed that her lights went out.  When she got up to check the circuit breaker, the 86 year old was hit on the head with a coffee mug by a young man who had broken into her.  When she came to her senses, she heard him ordering her to disrobe and to move down the hall toward her bedroom.  She continued to resist him, rolling back and forth on the bed, even moving her bloody head side to side on the pillow to make sure to leave evidence. 

Finally, the fellow gave up his assault plans, and demanded she give him her money.   She gave him the 3 dollars she had in an envelop on the dresser, but he wanted more.  She said he would have to wait until the bank opened.  He insisted on more, so she gave him some cash she had saved for charities in her cabinet.  He hit her with the telephone, and demanded her car keys.  He said he’d bring the car back the next day.  She gave him the keys, then watched the direction he drove when he left.   She called the police and they caught the man within 6 minutes from her home.   He was arrested and was put away in prison serving a 20-year prison sentence.

They 86 year old lady took stiches in her forehead, and she lost some of her hearing, but when lawyer Bray met her, she was back to life as normal, walking 45 minutes every morning,  cleaning her house and yard, and ‘driving the older ladies in her Sunday School class to their doctor’s appointments.   She still goes to church on Sunday’s and Wednesdays, which I could attest to, because I was her pastor.   Mrs Marie Latta was one of the most remarkable, faithful, trust filled people I’ve ever known.  She was that way even when she was 95 years of age, when she broke her hip, pneumonia sit in, but she was still able to recover.   No one thought she would.  When we had to move from Greensboro, she kept up with us, and even set us a note saying that she’d seen our picture with our daughter in the Baptist Children’s Home newspaper, “Charity and Children”.  Marie was just that kind of person, always caring, always faithful, always trusting, even trusting the Lord through the best of times and the worst of times.  She was like a ‘tree planted by the rivers of water’ who ‘leaves stayed green’ even when the heat was on.

When your trust is in God, you will be able to plant deep roots that will yield a garden in the most extreme circumstances.  You will be able to stand the test and find a trust that will never let you down.   Unfortunately, God’s people had lost their trust in the LORD in Jeremiah’s day.  They had known the LORD, but somehow they had put their trust in other things that were nothing but junk and now they had lost their trust in what mattered most.  At one time the LORD was first on their heart when they got up in the morning, but now they did not know how to think about him anytime of day.   All trust had been lost and now, their lives were as barren as the desert where they lived.   Do you think anything like this could happen to us?

Some years ago a radio station invited people to call in and tell them the first thing they had said that morning when they awoke. The third caller would win a cash prize. It was funny.  One guy said, “Do I smell coffee burning?” Another one said, “Oh no, I’m late for work.” A woman confessed that her first words were, “Honey, did I remember to put the dog out last night?” and you could hear a muffled curse in the background and a man growling, “No, you didn’t.”  One morning, the station phone rang and the perky DJ said, “Good morning, this is FM 106. You’re on the air. What was the first thing you said when you rolled out of bed this morning?”  A voice with a Bronx accent replied, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The caller was reciting the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4), so prized by our Jewish friends. 

The radio host did not know how to handle it. He was looking for junk and instead encountered a jewel. There was a moment of embarrassed silence, then the announcer said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and cut to a commercial. 

How do you start your day?  Is God the first and last thought of your day?   Listen, most all of us have to deal with junk both around us and some even on the inside of us too. But ‘junk’ of life doesn’t have the power to give us what matters most in life.   We need to ask God to remove that junk from us.  We must put our trust in the only one who can give us our life back, even when we mess it up and lose our way.   He is the only one who give us a life that never ‘ceases to bear fruit’.   Amen.

“…And We Are Not Saved.”

A sermon based on Jeremiah 8: 18-9:1

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 24th, 2018 

(4-12) Sermon Series: Jeremiah: Prophet to the Nations

At the end of last year, a Thai soccer player attempted to win a tie-game with a final kick.   The ball struck the top of the goal post and went straight up into the air.  The goalie on the opposing team began to celebrate by running out onto the field.  His celebration was premature, however.  While he left the goal unattended, the ball came down bouncing with a back spin until it bounced right in to the goal.  This meant the opposing team broke the tie and won the game.  The moral of the story: It’s not over, until it’s over.

In a similar situation at McGill University in Canada, the engineering and medical faculties had an intramural basketball game.  The score was 33 to 34.  With about a minute left, the engineers stole the ball, and then froze it with excellent passing and ball handling until the clock ran out.   It was kind of like a 4 corners strategy invented by the late Dean Smith.  Unfortunately this did not work, because when the final whistle blew, they then realized that they were the ones behind.  They were so wrapped up in freezing the ball, and keeping things like they were, they had lost track of the score.

I’m afraid that we in the church can do the same thing.  We can go into a 4 corners kind of strategy, trying to keep our buildings, our budgets, our programs, and even our baptisms like they are or were.  But by freezing the ‘ball’, when we ought to be in a full court press, life goes on, but leaves us behind.    We mistakenly think we can keep things like they were, but we can’t.   As Jeremiah told his people in today’s text, “The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved?”   The spiritual point here is that you can’t freeze the way things are:  Times change.  Season’s change.  The world continues to be on the move.  As the Insurance commercial says,  “Life keeps coming at you, and fast.”    

IS THE LORD NOT IN ZION?  (19)

Jeremiah’s sobering point to his people is that you can’t take the salvation you have established in the past and make it your salvation for the future.   Faith doesn’t work that way.  It’s much like it is with food, or anything else in life.  If you eat a good meal today, you can live on it a little while, but it will not keep you alive for long, unless you keep eating.   It’s the same for exercise, and for most everything else we do to keep ourselves alive.  We can’t do something one day, and keep it.  We either ‘use it’ or we ‘loose it’.  

Of course, we don’t like to talk about our ‘salvation’ this way, but in the New Testament Jesus does.  When Jesus was warning his disciples about the ‘things to come’, he warned that only those who ‘endure to the end will be saved’ (Matt 10:22, 24:13, Mark 13:13).  These kinds of texts are enough to shake us out of our spiritual comfort zones, aren’t they?   Even the Apostle Paul echoed that salvation is not ‘worked out’ in a moment or instant, but salvation most continue to be ‘worked out’ in our lives with ‘fear and trembling’ (Phil. 2:12).   What Jeremiah, Jesus, and Paul are all saying is that we can’t simply carry the relationship we had with God in the past into the future, without living it out day by day.

This is exactly what did not happen in Jerusalem, in Jeremiah’s day.  This is why our text today begins with questions, rather than answers:  “Is the LORD not in Zion?  Is her King not in her?”  The point Jeremiah was making is that things have change?  The LORD is not with at Zion with his people, because God’s people are not with God.  Things have changed.  It isn’t God that changed, but the people have.  They had exchanged the truth of God for all other kinds of ‘images’ and ‘idols’ (19b).   The spiritual situation in Jerusalem was much like the relationship between a wife and husband driving down the road in their old ‘bench seat’ car.  The woman used slide over and sit close to him while he put his arm around her.   The wife complained: “You don’t put your arm around me like you used to.“ The man, who was driving, looked at his wife who was now sitting next to the window.  He answered.  “Yes, honey you’re right. Who moved?”   This is exactly how the spiritual situation was in Jerusalem.  It wasn’t that God had taken his salvation away from them, but that God’s people had moved away from their God and their salvation.

If you want to think about how much our society has moved in its values and ways of thinking, let me ask you a question to think about.  The answer might astound you.   This question is: Who is the best known person in the world today?  If you said some preacher like Billy Graham, you would be wrong.  If you said a great politician, or even a sports figure, you would be wrong. If you said the Pope, you would also be wrong.  Even if you said some celebrity or entertainer, like Lady GaGa, you would be wrong.  And if you said Jesus of Nazareth, you would be wrong too.  The answer to who is the best known person in the world is Mickey Mouse!  Think about it.  Here is a cartoon figure of a person who does not, and has never really existed, but he is better known that the Christ who died for the sins of this world.  That’s the kind of world we live in.

Now we can understand that the world might know more about Mickey Mouse better than the true Son of God, or more about Disney World, that it does about the Church,  but what how much does the church know these days?   We can say that the church still knows who Jesus was, but how much do we know about who Jesus still is?   In other words, how much do we know about how to ‘be’ and ‘become’ a disciple living for Jesus in today’s world?   Can’t we, like Jerusalem did in Jeremiah’s day, also get lost in our ‘images’ and ‘idols’ too?  Can’t we come to church questioning whether or not ‘the LORD is in Zion’ or at work in us?   And if God is ‘at work’ in us,  how do we know, what does it mean, what should it mean, that is not just another ‘idol’ or self-prescribed ‘image’ of the kind of ‘faith we want, instead of the kind of ‘faith’ that we really need?   What does it mean for us to say that the “LORD “ is “IN ZION?”

THE HARVEST IS PAST (20)

Someone has said that they have no fear whether or not the church will succeed, but that it will succeed in those things that do not matter.  No matter how many barns are built, how much cattle is bought, how much seed is sown, or how much land is cultivated, the farmer is a still a failure if he does not bring in the harvest.    

The failure of the ‘harvest’ is the tragic event that Jeremiah alludes to in this text.  Here we have one of the most haunting statements in the Bible.   Jeremiah explained to his people that in this moment there is nothing more they can do.  It’s too late for them.  The season for harvest has come and gone: "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved" (Jere. 8:20).   This is so negative.  It’s so depressing.  How could a preacher or a prophet say something like this?   The answer is that he wouldn’t, unless it was true. 

This was the political and religious situation of God’s people in Judah and Jerusalem at the beginning of the 6^th century, right before their nation was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BCE.    Jeremiah had been warning of doom and disaster because of their rebellion against God.  In this very chapter God declared that their ‘fields would be given to conquerors’ (v.10), and that the people would ‘perish’ even in their ‘fortified cities’ (v14) and that they would ‘look for peace’ but ‘find no good’ and ‘terror’ instead (v.15).  The sounds of war horses were already being heard in the north, and soon they would ‘devour’both the ‘land’, the ‘cities’ and the people who ‘live in’ them (v.16).  It was not a pretty picture.  The political situation was already at the point of no return.  The people were still saying, ‘peace, peace,’ when there was in reality, ‘no peace’ at all (v11).

Jeremiah had preached that only God could deliver Judah them from the armies of Babylon that were marching toward the city (7:23). But they did not listen. Instead they formed an alliance with Egypt to fight the Babylonians (2:18, 42:14ff.). But Babylon defeated Egypt and then turned and marched on Jerusalem (46:25-26).  They surrounded the city and laid siege to the people.  Back in those days people lived within the walls of the city, and the crops were outside the walls. The Babylonian army simply waited for the people to run out of food.  All the people could do was watch the crops spoil, the harvest wither, the summer end, and then say, "We are not saved."  They learned the bitter lesson that there is no loss, like the loss of the harvest.  Eventually, because they left God, they ended up losing it all.

How does a tragic story like this speak to us, still today?  Of course, we don’t want it too.  None of us want to hear, look, think, or reflect upon what is happening right before our own eyes.  We want to ‘freeze’ our churches or try to make them ‘the way we were’ or even try to make them what we would like for them to be, even though it really does look as if the ‘harvest is past’.  This is not something we would ever want to believe.  This is something we would like to think we can still turn around.  Maybe we could just start a new program in the church.  We might try to build up our youth or children’s ministry.  Maybe we could try to go back to something we did in the ‘good ole’ days, thinking we might make church like it used to be?  If something like this doesn’t work, we can resort to blaming somebody. We could blame the teachers, the leaders, the deacons, the members, or maybe even the pastor.  It’s got to be somebody’s fault, doesn’t it?  Somebody has to be able to ‘fix’ this, or ‘make it happen’ like it used to happen, don’t they?  Who would dare say we’ve already reached the ‘point of no return’?  Who would dare preach a sermon like this?  Jeremiah did.  

If the truth be told, according to Jeremiah it was, for his people, too late: “The harvest (was) past, the summer (had) ended, and (they were) not saved” (v.20).   The plug had to be pulled.  The respirator had to be removed.  Israel was gone.  Judah was breathing her last breathe.  It was time to call the undertaker, make the funeral arrangements, and for the people who remained to pay their final respects.  As God told Jeremiah in 8:13, comparing Judah to a unproductive vine: “When I wanted to gather them, says the LORD, there are no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered, and what I gave them has passed away from them?”  Sad.  Tragic.  Makes you want to cry.  Jeremiah did.  Again, this is why we call him ‘the weeping prophet’.  As Jeremiah says in the very next verse: “For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me (21).”

FOR THE HURT OF MY PEOPLE I AM HURT (21)

In the church today, and in our world, most of us are feeling a some ‘hurt’ and a little ‘dismay’ too.  Church simply doesn’t ‘work’ like it used to.  Most everything I learned in Seminary to prepare me for ministry doesn’t fit today.  Most every way we built our churches back in the 1950’s, seems to work against what we need to be doing today.

In fact, those few churches that appear to be growing are nothing like what church ‘used to be’.  As one pastor of a large, growing church told me, “We have a lot more unchurched people attending than we have members, than we have disciples or than we have Christians.  And we see that as a good problem,” he said.   Perhaps it is a ‘good problem’, when you have a lot of people coming to church who change what church once looked like, if the people going there actually ‘grow’ and ‘go’ back into their communities and make a difference.  But I’m still not sure that ‘growing’ spiritually or ‘going’ back into their communities is really what these young, new, contemporary style churches have learned to be about.  I hope they will get there.  I’m pulling for them.  I’m certainly not against “God” working in ‘new’ ways, with new ‘ideas’, but I’m also not sure how good going to a church fits what “I” want, does for the good of the church and for the needs of the world.  That’s what still concerns me.

Perhaps my greatest concern, however, is what happens when so many communities no longer have people to witnesses to the good news of Jesus right where they live.  As Jeremiah rightly saw it, the concern is not just that there no harvest this year, or that fall is coming, but that there is no more harvest, no more summer or growing season, that that there will be no more ‘salvation’ for anyone at all.   My concern is not what is changing, but what will be no more: no more witness, no more love, no more community, and no more place for children, elderly and lost souls to find their way home.  As Jeremiah says, ‘the harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are NOT SAVED”.  This is the kind of ‘impossible’, ‘never again’ situation that makes Jeremiah’s heart ‘hurt’.

The writer of Ecclesiastes once wrote: "Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come…, and the years draw near when you will say you have no more pleasure in them" (Eccl. 12:1).   Doesn’t a text like this make your heart ‘hurt’ for the increasing amount of young people who say that the church means nothing to them.  What will this mean for them, in the years to come?  How will they have faith?  Who will believe in anything, if you don’t find ‘hope’ when you are also young?

Several years ago a famous evangelist, unscientifically, but wisely concluded, after many years of surveying the crowds that came to his crusades, that if a person isn't saved by the time he is 21, the chances are 5,000 to 1 that he will ever be saved.  If he isn't saved by the time he is 30, the chances are 15,000 to 1 that he will ever be saved. If he isn't saved by the time he is 40, the chances are 30,000 to 1 he will ever be saved. If he isn't saved by the time he is 50, the chances are 150,000 to 1 that he will ever trust Christ as Lord and Savior.   When our youth leave this church, much of our harvest is passing, and we don't even realize it.   When people get older, their heart is hardening, and they don’t even realize it.  You think about it:  how many do we baptize over 60? How many over 70?  How many over 80?  It’s practically none.

Dwight L. Moody, the great evangelist, told a story of how one time he was preaching a crusade in a large city, and he was preaching on this text, Jeremiah 8:20. When he gave the invitation, the man's wife who was sitting next to him, who loved the Lord Jesus, begged him with tears to go forward and give his heart to Christ. But he adamantly refused to do it.

Many years later Moody was back in that same city preaching a crusade.  There was an older man who had contracted a terminal illness, and he asked to see the great evangelist. Well, Moody and his song leader, Ira Sankey, went to see this man whose hair was now gray, whose face was now wrinkled, whose body was now withered with age and disease. When Moody walked into his bedroom, his sweet godly wife was kneeling beside his bed pleading with her husband.   The man was mumbling something. Moody leaned down to hear what this man was mumbling. He was repeating over and over: "The harvest is past, summer is ended, and we are not saved."  

Moody asked this wife why he was repeating that verse. She said, "You preached on that text the last night of your crusade here many years ago. My husband heard that sermon and adamantly refused to be saved. That's why he is repeating it now." Rev Moody got on his knees and began to plead with that man to come to Christ. But the man just kept shaking his head and repeating over and over, "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." Dwight L. Moody said that man died about sundown with gritted teeth and clinched fist, saying, as he went out into eternity, with these last words, "The harvest is past."   Doesn’t that ‘hurt’ your heart to hear something like that?

IS THERE NO BALM IN GILEAD? (22)

Jeremiah’s heart does not stop hurting all the way to the end of today’s text.  The text ends with one of the most ‘memorable’ questions in all the Bible, “Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?  Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored (v.22).  The heartbreak Jeremiah feels goes right into the next chapter and the verse that gave Jeremiah his nickname, ‘the weeping prophet’, where he cries out:  “O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!”

Last year, right before Christmas, we had two funerals back to back, one for our beloved DeEtte Renegar, and the other for the feisty, energetic Lenette Murphy.  Then, on Christmas Day, I got the news that one of my colleagues in ministry, Ed Bettingfield, lost his wife in a house fire on Christmas Eve.  It was believed to be started by their Christmas Tree.  Teresa and I have had an artificial tree for 10 or so years, but this year, because the tree was worn out, we decided to get a real tree again.  After I heard about the fire, the day after Christmas, I was so shook up, I couldn’t burn the light again, even though the tree seemed to be in good shape.

What an event like this teaches us, is that are things in life that bring us to the point of no return, like an illness, an accident, a natural disaster, or a house fire.  Just like that, it can all be over, or we can lose someone precious to us.  Of course, we don’t want to think about it, but it can and it does happen.  There are still things that can hurt us that we can’t be healed from, can turn around, or can’t change, and must learn to face, to deal with and finally, to accept.  

Interestingly, what Jeremiah meant when he asked, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” is not one of these ‘unchangeable’ things.  God’s people did come to the ‘point of no return’, but it didn’t have to be that way.  They could have learned.  They could have changed.  They could have avoided the great disaster that came, but they would not face their rebellion and the reality before them and find the healing they needed.  The doctor was in in Gilead, right across the Jordan river, but no one wanted to go and fetch him.  The people’s health could have been ‘restored’, but Judah decided they knew more than the doctor.  They decided they could live by their own diagnosis, and make up their own concoctions.  That’s why the healing did not come—no because there was no doctor or healing ‘balm’, but because they wouldn’t admit they needed it.   Then, it was too late.

Several years ago, when we lived in Greensboro, Teresa and I were returning from a Halloween “Trunk of Treats” event at church.  There were still “Trick or Treaters” in our development at Forest Oaks, but there was a bit more commotion than normal.  Children and adults were wandering, looking around, calling out a child’s name.  When we stopped to asked what was happening, they said a Three year old child in our neighborhood had wandered away from home.  We decided to drive around a bit too.  The Firemen came.  The whole community, it seemed were going up and down the streets calling out his name.

When we arrived at the home, where they child was last seen, we discovered it was his grandparents house.   The child had come to visit, and was in a different, more unfamiliar place.  Right behind the grandparents home was a lake.  The grandparents didn’t think he would come down that far.  They had thought about putting up a fence.  They had thought about making a gate on the pier, but they never did.  If you guessed what happened, you’re right.  Later on that evening, after hours of searching, the underwater rescue found the child.  He was discovered only in 8 feet of water, only about 5 feet away from the pier.   One moment, the child was with their grandmother, but when she turned away just a moment, he was gone.  Can you imagine how heartbroken that grandmother must have been?  Can you imagine how many times those grandparents wished they had not built on that lake?  Can you imagine how many times they wondered why they didn’t put up a fence or a gate?

There is a poem that haunts, but it’s true:

When the choir has sung its last anthem, and the preacher has prayed his last prayer,

When the people have heard their last sermon, and the sound has died out in the air.

When the Bible lies closed on the altar, and the pews are all emptied of men,

And each one stands facing his record, and the great Book is open, what then?

When the actor has played his last drama, and the mimic has made his last fun,

When the film has flashed its last picture, and the billboard displayed its last run,

When the crowd seeking pleasure have vanished, and gone out in the darkness again,

And the trumpet of ages has sounded, and we stand before Him, what then?

When the bugle's call sinks into silence, and the long, marching columns stand still,

When the captain repeats his last orders, and they've captured the last fort and hill.

When the flag is hauled down from the masthead, and the wounded afield checked in,

And a world that rejected its Savior, is asked for a reason, what then?

"The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." The time between when the harvest is ripe, and when the harvest is rotten, is so very short. The harvest is great, the need is for laborers. Will you understand the help and the healing that is offered right now?  And if not now, then when?   If we wait too late to find the healing, what then? Amen.

“WAYS AND ….DOINGS”

A sermon based upon Jeremiah 4: 11-28

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

11th Sunday in Ordinary Time,  June 17th, 2018 

(3-12) Sermon Series: Jeremiah: Prophet to the Nations

How many of you remember the movie Duck and Cover? It really wasn't a movie but more of a "short" advertisement — just over nine minutes in length. But don't sell it short — it featured a great leading role, Bert the Turtle, and a very catchy theme song:

There was a turtle by the name of Bert and Bert the turtle was very alert;

when danger threatened him he never got hurt he knew just what to do ...

He ducked! And covered! Ducked! And covered!

He did what we all must learn to do.  You and you and you and you! Duck, and cover!

(Archer Productions, Inc., Duck and Cover (Distributed by the United States Federal Civil Defense Administration, 1951).

After what looks like a dramatized cartoon, Bert the Turtle follows the "duck and cover" rule when a monkey dangles a fire­cracker over his head and survives the blast.  But then the movie takes a more serious tone as live footage of a nuclear blast is run, and viewers are assured that the way to survive such a blast is to "duck and cover."  ‘Duck and Cover' was produced by the United States Civil Defense Administration in 1951, about two years after Russia detonated its first nuclear device.  As the Cold War between the United States and Russia grew, Civil Defense began designating fallout shelters and devising other means for protection from nuclear attack (From Sermons on the First Readings, by Chrysanne Timm, CSS Publishing Company, Inc). 

Other films addressed the threat of nuclear attack. ‘On the Beach' in 1959 and ‘The Day After' in 1984 imprinted terrifying images of the complete destruction and desolation that would occur after a nuclear holocaust.  Some of us who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s seriously questioned whether we would live to see forty years of age.  Many feared the total annihilation of the whole world, the undoing of God's good creation.  It wasn't until later in the 1980s that concentrated efforts toward peace between the United States and Russia eased the fears of nuclear destruction of our nations, and ultimately our planet.  But with the threat of Nuclear war with North Korea now on everyone’s radar today, fear of nuclear holocaust is on the rise again, but who realizes the threat, and who understands the warning? 

WOE TO US, FOR WE ARE RUINED! (13)

When we read this passage in Jeremiah, we cannot but help remember the terrifying images of films we’ve seen about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Japan is the only nation to have been attacked with nuclear bombs. As a result of that bombing, burning hot winds ignited fire upon anything that remained standing after the massive blast. Entire neighborhoods were laid waste, all structures destroyed. The cities lay in ruins and the fruitful foothills looked like a desert. 

Although Nuclear bombs were not dropped on Nazi Germany, fire bombs were.  In both Hamburg (1943), and Dresden (1945) fire bombings were carried out by both the Americans and the British Air forces.  The results were horrendous.  I’ve known people who experienced one of those bombings they spoke of fires being so hot, that even people underneath the ground were burned or suffocated in the bombing raids.  The question was ‘Why is this happening to us?’   The same kind of question was being asked after Americans watched the destruction in New York and the falling of the Twin Towers.  “What do those people have against us?”   Who will forget the horror of those who were trapped in those buildings, or those who rushed in to save them when the towers collapsed?   Still today, illnesses and sickness remain, as a result, of the dust of devastation and destruction.  

When you speak all the destructive forces in this world, some of which we’ve lived through, you can’t help but be moved by these images from Jeremiah 4.  They are some of the bleakest images in the Old Testament. This is certainly not the kind of text pastors want to preach. The nation of Israel had been duly warned that continual sin against God would bring judgment upon them. God pleaded with them to repent and return to him, but it was to no avail. 

Had I not watched the Twin Towers fall on live TV, I am not sure that I would reflect upon this text in the same way.  Most of us have never had great fears regarding safety and security for our households or our community.   Only recently, due to the rise of Terror and random copy-cat violence, are churches beginning to face and come to understand the threats to our world.   A local pastor said in a Security meeting I attended recently, that twenty years ago selling the need for having a security plan at church would have been next to impossible, but not today.   Today most everyone is waking up to the threats.   We are beginning to grasp the gravity of destruction and desolation that can happen in our own time and place.

FOR MY PEOPLE ARE FOOLISH…STUPID (22)

Jeremiah may have believed that even though Israel did not ‘get it’ and change her ways, that the southern kingdom where he lived in Judah, where Jerusalem was, and where all the smart people were supposed to be, would now understand the gravity of their situation and repent.  Surely after watching the ‘towers’ fall in the north, Judah’s choice would be clear and Judah would ‘get the message’ to choose God and choose life.  But Judah and Jerusalem did not choose God or the good, and in this text Jeremiah laments their ignorance: "For my people are foolish, they do not know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good" (Jer. 4:22 NRS).

"Stupid is as stupid does." So says the famous quote from the movie, Forrest Gump.   When we think of the stupidity of people in Jeremiah’s day, it can remind how nowadays, even in a time of high tech, people can be as ‘stupid’ as ever.  Just type the words "stupid people dot com" into your internet search engine and you find loads of websites where people share their tales of stupidity. One man wrote: "My ex-wife once called me at a bar and asked, 'Where are you?' Another story is told about a high school teacher who assigned her class a paper on World War Two. On the date it was due, one boy came in empty handed. "I went to every library I could find, but I found NOTHING on World War Two. I found a lot of books on World War 11, though."

The most laughable, and often the most tragic stories too, are about the criminally dumb. Nearly any law officer could write a book on these. The following one came through the grapevine from a patrolman in Ohio in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  He was assigned to security detail at a New Orleans Wal-Mart that had been looted.  Several days after the flooding ceased, a man brought a plasma television back to the store's customer service department. He'd "picked it up a few days earlier" (those were his words). But when he took it home and plugged it in the television didn't work, so he was bringing it back for replacement. It was obvious to all that the television had been stolen. The officer had a tough time keeping a straight face as the store rep explained that this problem was to be expected since that part of the city still had no electricity.  Wonder how much time that man did for a TV he stole but couldn’t get to work because there was no power?

An Ann Arbor newspaper crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan, at 5 a.m., flashed a gun, and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn't open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren't available for breakfast. The man became so frustrated he walked away.  Dumber still is the guy who walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter, and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount he got from the drawer? — $15.

Stupid behavior has its own competition these days. In recent years, the Annual Darwin Awards have honored "the least evolved among us." Sometimes the competition is deadly — as in the 2005 winner. "When his 38-caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California, a would-be robber did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked."
(These stories from:  CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Sermons for Sundays after Pentecost (Middle Third): The Hard Task of Truth-telling, by Lee Ann Dunlap).

You might laugh, but it also makes you want to cry.   Stupidity can hit close to home too.   While criminally stupid is one thing, the spiritually foolish can have equally devastating consequences.  Year after year, Jeremiah had watched and warned his nation about the consequences of their spiritual ignorance, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.  Jeremiah laments: "….They have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil,…and do not know how to do good" (Jeremiah 4:22).  Spiritual foolishness leads to moral stupidity which brings social tragedy, with both personal and national suffering. As Jeremiah looked toward his nation's future, he saw only death and destruction: the earth "waste and void," the heavens "had no light," the foundations of the earth shaken to the core.  The fruitful land lay deserted and the cities were in ruin. From the depths of his soul, Jeremiah knew these desolations were the fate of the spiritually stupid.  So Jeremiah wept, even as God wept.  This is why he is called the ‘weeping prophet’. Why was Jeremiah weeping?  His people were acting like “stupid children," but still they belonged to God.

Sadly enough, foolishness and stupidity are with us yet.  Not long after Hiroshima and Nagasaki became "cities laid in ruins” of the our planet being plunged into darkness with no light from the heavens has shifted from poetic language to an all-too-real possibility.   In the days since then, humans have not only split the atom and drop the bomb, but we have spliced the genetic code and trod on other divine mysteries, as well. Designer babies may soon be an option for those who can pay. Gene-specific germ warfare (killer viruses which can target a specific ethnic or racial group) may well be added to future war arsenals. Jet travel in the modern age means a deadly virus can be passed around the globe in a matter of hour.

As Lee Dunlap has said, “ Miracles" have become the norm of human science, while God is increasingly pushed from the public arena.  Even though much good has been accomplished by the human pursuit of knowledge and control, we have, by our own stupidity, placed our own survival in jeopardy. Global warming, ozone depletion, worldwide pandemics, even the rise of terror, are very real consequences of spiritual foolishness. We have usurped God's authority while failing to attain God's wisdom and in so doing invited judgment upon ourselves.

Yet spiritual foolishness need not be on such a world-wide scale. Examples are evident even in churchyard.  Spiritual stupidity, like any other, happens when we don't stop to think about the long-term consequences of our actions, or when we refuse to listen to the warnings of others when the truth is right in front us.  We live in a time, as the Washington Post says, when the “truth has a difficult time” getting through.  And believe this: We religious or spiritual types can be as obstinate and dense as anyone.

Pause for a moment to consider what we might call "stupid church behaviors" and most of us could fill a page or even two. To give a few examples: How about Baptists using to fight religious battles with each other rather than finding it a resource to read and learn how to love, or what about so called Christians having "hissy-fits” in the pew over the color of the  carpet or the problem with the youth people then come and ask the pastor why the church has so few children. Duh!   Or what about those who oppose making the building more accessible to handicapped persons or more appropriate for strangers with the reasoning, "We don't have anybody like that who comes here." Of course not — they can't get in the building or not feel wanted or welcomed!  When one church council adopted a goal to bring in needy children and youth, a member complained, “Those kids don't belong to our church!”’Okay — that was sort of the point! Don’t we want kids who need the Lord as much as those who know the Lord?

Then there's the pastor who, like many others, scheduled mornings in the office and afternoons doing hospital calls and home visitation.  Part of the congregation complained they could never reach the pastor because he was always out and about while others said he spent too much time stuck in the office. RIGHT!  Everyone knows more than the pastor how to be a pastor!  Finally, consider the story of one church member who, while visiting friends, had been invited to attend a thriving mission church in Los Angeles. She returned to her own church in Ohio rather indignant because the church was packed on their arrival and they were seated in the very back while the local street people, prostitutes, and addicts were given room in the front. Some of "those people" even participated in the service. She handed her pastor a newspaper article on the congregation and its pastor, inquiring whether this church received any mission support. If so, she was solidly against it. She did not want her dollars going to support a church prostitutes have a front row seat.  Wonder where this church got such a notion? Could it be from someone who ate with tax-collectors and healed lepers?

 "My people are foolish," we could well hear God say about us today. "They have no understanding." How sad it is — the pain and the heartache caused by our own stubborn ‘ways…and doings.” Makes you wonder how the church has survived all these years. Yet, miraculously we are here.    The tragic story of what happened to Jerusalem, and even to ‘the temple of the Lord’ which was burned and destroyed along with the rest of the city, makes an important warning to us, in hopes of waking us up.   The point is that we all share in the responsibility of what happens and what doesn’t happen.  This is one of the most important messages contained in the book of Jeremiah.  What you do to others and what you don’t do for others, will come back to haunt when the world you thought was forever, falls apart, and there is no way back.

THE WHOLE LAND SHALL BE A DESOLATION, YET…. (27)

Stupid children we might be at time, but we belong to God. Suffer the consequences of our foolishness we shall, but God has a plan to save us, and all creation as well.  

And God does not relent, either in judgment or in salvation. "I have not relented, nor will I turn back" (Jeremiah 4:28). God utters a breath of mercy in the midst of the ruins of our human failures:  For thus says the Lord, "The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end” (Jeremiah 4:27).  Here, God breathes love and hope even in the midst of the harsh, hot heat of his anger and judgment. God pledges that humanity will not utterly be destroyed. For some, there is still time and space to turn around, to take our attention off only what we want and to join with Jesus in redeeming the broken, desolate places of our world. 

Here, the prophet reminds us of one thing above all else.  Even when life stands in ruins: Redemption is God's specialty. "For God so loved the world, he gave his only Son," the Bible says. When all the hatred and fear and corruption in the human arsenal had been inflicted upon the Son of God in a place called Calvary, he bore it upon himself and took it to the grave. Scripture tells us the mountains quaked and the heavens grew dim, and the community of disciples sank into despair, much like the experience of Jeremiah. Then God raised Jesus from the dead, and all that hatred and corruption came to nothing. As the Apostle Paul would later write, "God's foolishness is greater than human wisdom." In this we must have confidence.  Even when we are stupid in our behavior, God can still save.

As Rabbi Kushner once said: ‘God's not calling names; he's calling us to life! L'chaim! To life! Kushner writes: "The uniqueness of the human being is captured in the phrase that we are 'created in the image of God.' We have a moral dimension. We can be good or bad, where animals can only be obedient or messy. (He says) "When Charles Darwin shocked the conventions of the 19th century with his theory that human beings were related to animals and did not represent a special creation, someone asked Darwin, 'Is there anything unique about the human being?' Instead of talking about upright posture or brain cavity size, Darwin answered, 'Man is the only animal that blushes.' (Kushner goes on:) "To recognize that we have done wrong, to recognize that more might have been expected of us than we delivered, is part of the uniqueness of the human being. No other creature can do that. Animals (and little children) can realize that they are about to be punished for something they did, but only mature human beings can judge themselves." (Harold Kushner. To Life! (Little, Brown, Inc., 1993) pp. 184-5).

So, dear friends, when we fail or realize our wayward ‘ways and doings,’ we need not duck and cover from God as Adam and Eve did after their sin, or as Judah did when Jeremiah preached.  Let us return to God’s grace and mercy.   Let us trust God and dedicate ourselves to the care and redeeming love God has placed in our hearts, in the name of Jesus.  Are willing to admit or need and judge our wrongs in hope?

Dr. Tom Long of Princeton Theological Seminary quotes a character from a short story by Paul Devries: "There was a time when we were afraid of being caught doing something sinful in front of our ministers. Now we are afraid of being caught doing something immature in front of our therapists.". The essence of good therapy, by the way, is to help us learn to take responsibility for ourselves, and to not take inappropriate responsibility for the actions of others. Jeremiah thought there was a great deal to be responsible for in this world, and we're the only ones around to take responsibility.  Anything else is just plain stupid. Mohandas Gandhi said that these are the things that destroy life -- the stupid things: "politics without principle, pleasure without conscience, wealth without work, knowledge without character,

business without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice." (Source unknown). Gandhi put in modern language; God put it in eternal language. The ten commandments could just as well be known as the ten "don't be stupids.".

Will we be smart enough to understand what God meant?  It's said that a woman rushed up to the famous violinist Fritz Kreisler after a concert and cried, "I'd give my life to play as beautifully as you do." Kreisler replied, "I did.". Will we?  Will we give our life to what is right even in bad times?  We should, and Jeremiah tells us why.  Even when times are at their worst, when all we see in our church or community or in the mirror brings us to the brink of despair, we ought not lose hope in doing good because God did not lose hope for us, or for the world. Because Christ does not give up on us in our foolishness, neither shall we give up on ourselves or others. Releasing our folly and clinging to Jesus we find forgiveness and hope for new life, not for ourselves alone but for the entire world. Amen.