ST
MARY MAGDALENE
June
18, 2006: 6.00pm
Jeremiah
7:1-16
What do we make
of the last verse of that reading from the prophecy of Jeremiah we
heard this evening?
As for you, do not pray for this
people, or lift up cry or prayer for them, and do not intercede with
me, for I do not hear you. ( 7:16 )
God doesn't
always do the things we expect God to do. We would hardly have expected
God to tell Jeremiah to pray for the people. But no! he was not to ask
God for their deliverance any longer, nor to cry out to God for them,
to fast, pray, nor in any way to intercede on behalf of these people.
God says, "Don't pray." Most of us think of prayer as something to do
hen everything else fails. And surely the last thing God would ever
command is that we stop praying!
I'm going to
come back to that, but first of all a note of caution for us to heed.
We know that God is a God who honours his promise; that when all else
fails he can be tursted. So, what's the catch? I think it is this:
We all like to
put God in a box, to programme him. We do it quite honestly. We
believe we know the Scriptures, what God has revealed of himself. We
have picked out certain promises he has given. We say that he is bound
to act by these, and so we expected him to act on those terms. But to
our utter dismay and toour annoyance even, he ignores this and acts
entirely differently.The problem is that we have picked just a part of
what he has to say. None of us is big enough to see God in balance. And
this was Jeremiah was having a problem in this message for just the
same reason.
To understand
what this is all about, we need look at the historical setting. So
let's go back the beginning of chapter 7:
The
word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: "Stand in the gate of the
Lord's house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of
the Lord, all you men of Judah who enter these gates to worship the
Lord.' Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, 'Amend your ways
and your doings, and I will let you dwell in this place. Do not trust
in these deceptive words: "This is the temple of the Lord, the temple
of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.'
"For if you truly amend your ways and
your doings, if you truly execute justice one with another, if you do
not oppress the alien [the stranger], the fatherless or the widow, or
shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other
gods to your own hurt, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the
land that I gave of old to your fathers for ever." ( 7:1-7 )
We need to
turn to 2 Chronicles, to chapters 34 and 35, which gives us the
historical background of this moment in Judah. Young king Josiah was
conducting an attempt to turn this nation back to God. At this precise
moment he had given orders to clean up the temple.
The great day
arrived. The sacrifices were to be offered in the temple. The companies
of singers and chanters were prepared, and the great procession, headed
by the king himself, was on its way to the temple to worship there and
to obey the command of God to perform the Passover supper. The priests
were swinging their incense pots, chanting as they went, and the choir
was singing a hymn which included these words: "The temple of the Lord,
the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord." People were heaving a
sigh of relief and thinking, "Now God is satisfied. Now he will save
us. Now the nations around will not attack us, because at last we are
settling our religious accounts with God." And on the way, as they were
chanting this chorus, suddenly to everyone's astonishment a young man
climbed up to a prominent place on the steps of the temple and yelled
out, "HOLD IT!" And everybody stopped. He began to speak. His message
was that they had to amend their ways. It was no use carrying on with a
life of injustice, a life of oppression of the foreigner, the
fatherless, the widow. It would certainly not do to murder, commit
adultery, commit perjury, to burn incense to false gods. They couldn't
do that and then say God will deliver us because we have the temple,
beacuse we are carring out the ritual sacrifices there. In other
words:"Who do you think you're fooling? Do you really think God is like
this, that all he is interested in is religious games, rituals that you
go through? Do you really think that if you merely get all this
religion going, God will be fooled and will spare this land? Don't you
know that God knows what is going on?" Here is a people who were
trusting in performance, in outward ritual, and they did not realize
that God knows the heart, and that he knew what was going on. Therefore
the only thing left to this people was that they be judged. When people
get so blind that they cannot see what they are doing, and they really
think that God is like them, that he cannot see any further than the
outward appearance of a life, then the only thing left which will open
their eyes is judgment. So, God tells them through Jeremiah, "Go to
Shiloh" Shiloh was, if you like the 'Jerusalem' of the Northern Kingdom
and because they had ignored God's propehts it had been laid waste.
This was God's
word of warning to a people who were turning their back on him. It is
God's way of discipline of an errant people, and it's his way with a
wayward Christian too, who may rely on outward show. In order to get
all this together, we ought to look back in Chapter 7 and see the list
of actions God says he takes when a nation or an individual begins to
turn away from him.The first thing God does when you begin to drift is
to warn you what the consequences are going to be. He is faithful to
tell you that if you "sow to the flesh you will of the flesh reap
corruption". There is no way to escape it. Even forgiveness for it does
not remove that. If you sow to the flesh, you will of the flesh reap
corruption. Sin will leave its scars even though the wound is healed.
God warns that there is going to be hurt in your life, hurt in your
heart, hurt for the loved ones around you. There is no way to escape
it. But then he says,
"...and when I called you, you did not
answer," ( 7:13b )
The call of God
is a picture of love, a love which is always seeking a response,
reminding us of who he is, and how much he loves us, trying in various
ways to awaken a response of love and gratitude, to call us back. He is
like the father in the story of the prodigal son, watching the horizon
for that son to return, longing for him to come back. This is the
picture of God, looking after men and women, boys and girls, being
faithful to them, longing to have them back, calling them again and
again. This is a picture of the patience of God. This may go on for
years in the case of an individual. And all this time he asks us to
pray for those like this, to hold them up, to reach out to them by the
power of prayer.
Let us learn the
lesson of Jeremiah 7. God is not impressed by religion that does not
touch the heart, that as we read in James chapter 1, true religion
keeps itself uspotted by the world. God looks for integrity, justice
and righteousness of life. He will, if necessary, like any good father,
discipline us