“Fire in My Bones”

Jeremiah 20:7-13

A sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

August 15, 2004

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            Jeremiah is the most human of the prophets.  You know why?  It’s because he was willing to admit that he didn’t like following God.  In today’s scripture, he tries to get away with cursing God.  We have been tempted to do that from time to time.

            Why did you make disease?

            Why did you make my loved one have disease?

            Why does evil prosper and good get punished?

            Why can’t I find the right job?

            Why can’t the people I love, love me back?

            Why can’t life be easier?

            Why is faith so much dang work?

            How can we have faith when people of faith do things that are down right evil?

            When we have these questions, we are tempted to curse God and read the Sunday paper over brunch instead of going to church. 

            We’re tempted to read a better or at least clearer book than the Bible.

            We’re tempted to look for and often find healing and health in things secular.

            Jeremiah did all of this but then there was something pulling him back to telling the truth that made him such a laughingstock.  Jeremiah called it a fire in his bones and that he was weary from holding it in.  That fire is called God.

            Jeremiah lived in the years prior to and after the 587 BCE fall of Jerusalem.  Jeremiah prophesied, like Amos and Micah before him that Judah was on a collision course with itself.  If they did not repent of their idolatry and injustice, they would see the destruction of the Temple and the loss of the Holy Land.  Jeremiah spoke God’s words and told the people that they had better shape up or they would be shipped out.  But the people didn’t listen to him.  They were riding the crest of the waves of the reforms instituted by the great king Josiah.  King Josiah called for a return to the laws of the Torah with all of its restrictions, patriarchy, xenophobia and blessed structure. The people of Judah were so proud of themselves and proud of the new regime that had taken over their country.         They got lazy and self-righteous.  They swaggered and said that no one had righteousness like Judah.  The last thing they wanted to hear was a country bumpkin from Anathoth say that the reforms had not gone far enough,  But that’s what Jeremiah said.  Jeremiah knew the difference between people who said all the right words and people who actually lived God’s plan.  Jeremiah knew that it was not enough to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk, too.    There was idolatry in the land and the weightier aspects of the law were being ignored.

            People don’t like to hear the truth.  We like our self-deception, thank you very much.  We don’t call it that.  We call it the no-spin zone.  We call it Fox News, We call it talk radio.  We call it the “free press” even though it blatantly ignores major portions of the stories.

            The people didn’t like Jeremiah.  They laughed at him.  They spat at him.  They put him in the stockades and he hated it and he hated God for his miserable situation.  He was tempted to just give in and give up.  But there was this fire in his bones and he was weary until it got out. 

            When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Christian theologian saw what Hitler and the Nazis were doing to the Jews of Europe in the name of Christianity, he stood up and spoke words against it.  He called the religion of the Third Reich a falsehood.  He demanded that they not continue this abomination.  For this he, like Jeremiah, was thrown in prison.  He was laughed at and ridiculed and eventually he was executed along with millions of Jews, gypsies, prostitutes, labor organizers, homosexuals and intellectuals.  But his message could not be silenced.

            When Martin Luther King stood up and said that church people must lead the struggle for civil rights, he was ostracized by many religious leaders for the sin of mixing religion and politics.  How easy it is to forget the words of Jeremiah that God knows our hearts as well as our words.  If we have the trappings of religion—the form of religion—You know, the church building, the worship services, the making of nice-nice with each other on Sundays, but not the function of religion: the action of compassion and justice and mercy and love, then our religion is hollow and shallow at best and false at worst.  Martin Luther King challenged the status quo, supposedly ordained by God and it was more than people could handle and he, too was cut down.  But the message lived on because it is God’s message. 

            Every generation or so, there is a prophet who stands in the temple, like Jeremiah, and says that our ways are blasphemous.  Organized religion, in the name of God tries to silence him or her.  And, usually too late, we realize that the prophet was right.

Jeremiah is a survivor, a witness.  Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Holocaust said this about Jeremiah:  “Of all the prophets, he alone predicted the catastrophe, experienced it, and lived to tell the tale.  He alone sounded the alarm before the fire, and after being singed by its flames went on to retell it to anyone who would listen.  Whenever we are struck by misfortune, we turn to him and follow in his footsteps; we use his words to describe our struggles.” (from Five Biblical Portraits, 1981:101)  We have a glimpse of Jeremiah’s heart.  We have chapter after chapter of his suffering.  We have a whole book, the book of Lamentations, all focused on Jeremiah’s suffering and his lament over his task and his people.   

            Jeremiah railed against God and against his beloved people, but his words seemed to fall upon deaf ears which made him even more angry.  It is one thing to be disagreed with and another thing to be completely ignored.  Once, from prison, Jeremiah wrote down all of his words and gave them to king Jehoiakim.  So filled with contempt was the King toward Jeremiah, that whenever three or four columns of the scroll were read to him, he took his penknife and tore the scroll and burned it column by column (ch. 36).  That’s how little attention people paid to Jeremiah.  That is how little attention people paid to God.  Oh, they used God’s name a whole lot, but they ignored God’s ways.  How often today do we hear people say things in God’s name that defy the inclusiveness and challenge of Jesus?

            Why wouldn’t Jeremiah have hated to do what he did.  Hear what he says in today’s scripture.  He accuses God in the following way: “You have seduced me and I was seduced.  You have raped me and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me.  Whenever I see people, I have to cry out “Violence and destruction.” Your words have become for me a reproach and derision all day long.”

            When the lies come swift and furious, it’s a lonely job to be the only one telling the truth.

            And yet, that is where we find God.

            And try as we might to hide, God will find us there, too.  But what if the God we find is not a God we like or can stomach.  What if the God we find appears like a rapist, to use Jeremiah’s words?  What do we do about this God?

            Yes there is a fire in our bones with this God.  I am not sure Jeremiah is happy with his lot, nor would ever be happy or comforted with God.  His was a lonely, troubled existence.  What if God is like this?

            I don’t think God is like that.  But maybe I, too have been seduced by the easy life.  Maybe I have been seduced by the temptations to do things that will make people like me.  Maybe I will be seduced by wanting the right car, or the right job or the right friends or the right sense of self-worth.  Maybe I’ll be seduced by the temptation to do the easy-answer form of religion.  The book of Revelation says that the beast of this world seduces us and that we most of us are drunk by the wine of the whore of Babylon.  All except for the remnant church that Revelation calls the faithful witnesses.  These are people that amidst all of this seduction of this world, God has seduced right back with another vision.

What if God is out there saying things like, “You know this religion of prosperity theology is a sham.  You know that it’s going to take a lot of hard work to bring people into peaceable coexistence.  You know it’s going to mean destruction of some things you hold dear.  You know it might cost you your comfort, your easy answers, your acceptability, your friends, your family, your political affiliation, your pet project.  But it is also incredibly good news.  And it is what you need to do,” says God.

When God is like that, then we have to decide whether or not to accept God or to argue with or rail at God.  I tell you what, I prefer to listen to the rail-at-God prophets any day.  I think they are more honest.  I may not agree with them, but they cannot be ignored because they hold a kernel of truth that blows on the embers of something deep in our own bowels.  They make life more colorful.  They ask the right questions.  They are the artists.  Like Jeremiah, they are consumed with a passion that acts like a fire within their bones and it longs to come out.

How about it?  Do you have a fire in your bones?  Is there something you have been dying to yell at God? 

If you are like Jeremiah, the fire will not remain there, eating away at you.  It demands to come out somehow.  And when it does, sometimes it sends people into exile and sometimes it sets people free.

In two weeks time, Jean Lubke and I will go to the Regional Policy Board meeting.  We will bring an appeal to the Board of their decision to deny ordination recognition to Ross Aalgaard and Lynn Welton.  Pray for us.  In the midst of this struggle, I have been tempted to yell and scream at people.  There is a fire in my bones that begs for the truth to be known and the truth to be heard.  And yet, I am no Jeremiah.  I want to transform my adversaries into my friends.  I want there to be a new kind of relationship with them.  I don’t want to burn the bridges.  I want to be a bridge builder.

But there is a fire in my bones sometimes that just wishes to get out.  It is a seething rage at how my fiends have been mistreated in the name of God.  I want to yell blasphemy.  And maybe I should.  But I don’t want to be a prophet.  I don’t want to speak the word that will make people dislike me, as if I could control that.  And yet, I know that if I don’t say it right now, there will come a time when I will say it, hopefully with a cooler head, because there is a fire in my bones.  It is the fire of God leading me by night and day. 

I’ve seen this fire in you, too.  May you kindle a flame of love, mercy and kindness and at the same time never forsake the power of the Gospel message of justice laced with compassion, love and mercy.  For such is the will of God to be burned in all of our bones until such a time when the world is reconciled to itself and all see the glory , wonder, challenge and blessings that are the gifts of God for the people of God.

            Jeremiah tried to live in denial. But when he did, then God came in to break his denial, seducing him once again.  Jeremiah wrote in his diary, besotted with his tears, “If I say, “I will not speak God’s name,” then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

            What burns inside of your bones?  Usually something burns when we have been trying to hold it in for too long.  The only way to be healthy is to let it out, but even that is too scary, sometimes.  But sometimes we need to let out the fire, so it can bring its healing powers.

            There’s an old hymn that us Sacred Harp singers wail every Tuesday night that  reminds me of Jeremiah and of my own calling:  “Come Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove with all Thy quickening powers.  Kindle a flame of sacred love in these cold hearts of ours.”

            May we pay attention to what might be burning within our bones.  Chances are, it is crying to come out.  And only when it does, can it help set you and our world free.