14th Sunday after Pentecost

Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

All our Bible readings this morning are powerful, but the passage that immediately grabbed me was Jeremiah’s conversation with God. More specifically, what spoke to me and kept calling me back to it was the very first line: “O Lord, you know.”

There are several ways in which we can read these words.

O Lord, you know – you know what’s going on in my life. You know how rough it has been. You know about my health concerns, my job stress, my worry about grades, my anxieties, the strain in my marriage, my loneliness. You know, God, what is keeping me up at night.

O Lord, you know – I have no idea what the future will hold. No idea what the next chapter in my life will be like. No idea what the news will tell me tonight about the latest war or disaster or government action or court decision. I am apprehensive, but you, Lord, you know.

O Lord, you know - I have something to tell you. I am not happy with what is going on. I had thought my life would be different, my nation would be different, this world would be different. As a person of faith, I expected a smoother, easier, more comfortable life. You know, God, I just needed to get that off my chest.

Can you relate, perhaps?

All three of these sentiments are part of Jeremiah’s conversation with God.

God, you know what’s going on in my life. Jeremiah shares how he has suffered loneliness and felt distant from merrymakers and those rejoicing. He suffers pain and has wounds that won’t heal.

And indeed, Jeremiah did have a rough life. He was a prophet during the tumultuous final years of the kingdom of Judah. Here is just some of what took place while Jeremiah was serving as God’s prophet: King Josiah put through a major religious reform; Egypt occupied Judah and made it a vassal state; Babylon defeated Egypt and Judah became its vassal; Judah staged a revolt and was conquered again by Babylon; Judah staged another revolt and Babylon retaliated by eliminating the nation, deporting thousands of people into exile in Babylon.

Throughout all this turmoil, Jeremiah preached about the need to return to God, both as individuals and as a nation. Jeremiah highlighted God’s call to focus not on empire and weapons, but on caring for the weak and marginalized. He reminded his listeners that hope and joy are not found in wealth and power but in communion with God and neighbor.

Nobody wanted to hear this message. Nobody wanted to change their ways, to return to God, to give up their status or riches for the sake of a blessed community. Some got so angry at Jeremiah that they taunted him, locked him in the stock, and even threw him into a cistern to die.

O Lord, you know, Jeremiah says. You know how rough it’s been, how this nation and its leaders have lost their moral compass, how the people have lost their faith, and how mean they have been to me. I am exhausted.

O Lord, you know – you know what will happen next. “Remember me and visit me,” Jeremiah says. He trusts that God will be in his future. God will remember him and come to him and help him deal with the next challenge and set-back and disaster.

O Lord, you know, I have to tell you that I am not happy. This call had started great. Jeremiah found God’s words and internalized them, and that was a joyful experience and delighted his heart. But then the call became so very challenging. It made him persona non grata among his people. Nobody wanted to hear what he had to say about God. Nobody listened to his warnings that their lives and the nation as a whole were going down the wrong path, a path that would lead to harm and destruction. And so, in our text, he accuses God of being deceitful. This is not what he expected the life of God’s servant to be like!

I love how brutally honest Jeremiah is about his feelings. It’s good to know that we are allowed to talk to God like that. We can tell God exactly how we are feeling, no holds barred. So refreshing!

God answers Jeremiah. However, as I am sure we all have experienced a time or two, God’s answer to prayer is not always the response we want to hear. Professor Walter Brueggemann reminds us, “The hazard of such honest prayer […] is that God can be equally honest and therefore abrasive in response to prayer.”

First, God calls Jeremiah to repentance. Repentance?! Why repentance?! I think because in his frustration and exhaustion, Jeremiah was calling for vengeance on those who made his life so difficult. Calm down, God says. I am glad you got that vengeance talk out of your system, because suppressing such feelings isn’t healthy, but now that you expressed your deep desires, come back to God, back to what would actually be healing to you and everyone else.

Second, God almost verbatim repeats the words with which he had called Jeremiah to serve as prophet in chapter 1. Right then and there, God told him that he was going to fortify Jeremiah because this calling was going to be really tough. There was no false advertising.

And third, God promises to be with Jeremiah in the midst of his challenging call in this challenging time. There will be people who will listen; they will come to him and seek hope and guidance. The word of God will continue to nurture him and give him delight. And God will continue this intimate relationship with Jeremiah, a relationships that is deep and strong enough to allow Jeremiah to pour out all his exhaustion, all his frustration, all his anger at God and the world, and still be known and loved by God, still be part of God’s plan for the world, still be able to share God’s love with the world.

I gain a lot of comfort and assurance from this scripture today. What I hear is that it’s okay to feel frustrated and overwhelmed at times, okay to despair when watching the news, okay to be angry at God when life is hard and wounds don’t heal and it’s hard to keep the faith. We can feel all that and still continue our relationship with God, still feel beloved and known, still find joy and delight in God’s word and God’s world.

That amazing relationship we have with God begins when we are baptized. Today, we are baptizing Matilda and Alex. What a blessed day it is.

As we celebrate the baptism liturgy, listen to what God is and is not promising.

God is not promising that all believers will have an easy life, that God will prevent all hardships, that from today on it will be “happily ever after.” Like Jesus announces in the gospel and Jeremiah experiences, there is a cross involved.

But God is promising love and guidance, accompaniment and support, joy and community, life and eternal life.

My prayer is that Matilda and Alex and all baptized people of God will rest in these promises and will grow in their baptismal covenant with God, so they can continue to faithfully share God’s word with a world so desperately in need of it.

Originally, I ended my sermon here. But then I read the closing chapter of the book “Separation of Church and Hate”, and it was like a dope slap: Where is the “Why”? Why do we need a solid, honest relationship with God? Why do we need to eat and read and internalize God’s word? Why do we need to pick up our cross and struggle in our call as disciples?

That last chapter gave me the “Why”: Because that’s how God raises up the people who make this world a more godly place for everyone, ourselves included. That’s how it has always been, and that’s how it is still today.

When Columbus and his people colonized and slaughtered the natives in the Americas, Christ followers like Bartolome de Las Casas shamed them with God’s word in the Bible. When the crusaders inflicted unspeakable violence, Christ followers like St. Francis used nonviolence and scripture to demand peace. When southern states justified slavery, Christ followers like Fredrick Douglas and Harriet Tubman and the Quakers called it out as a moral abomination and resisted it. When Jim Crow Laws forced segregation, Christ followers like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer preached nonviolent resistance based on scripture and brought down the racist system. When people pushed anti-LGBTQ legislation and bigotry, Christ followers like Bishop Gene Robinson and many other clergy took God’s command to love all neighbors to heart and embraced LGTBQ individuals as beloved children of God.

Christ followers who listened to God’s call and were willing to endure the struggles that came along with it, who internalized God’s word and worked on a deep, honest relationship with God that guided and encouraged, sustained and empowered them – they were and are the prophets who bless the world with a glimpse God’s vison for humanity. They live what we pray each day: “Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”

May Alex, Matilda, and all of us baptized people of God pick up our cross and follow on this path towards blessing. Amen.