July 2, 2023, Ripe Figs and Itching Ears, Jeremiah 28:5-9 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ July 2, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to this sermon, click the link above. Below is the outline of the sermon

Today’s reading from Jeremiah:

The prophet Jeremiah spoke to the prophet Hananiah in the presence of the priests and all the people who were standing in the house of the Lord; and the prophet Jeremiah said, “Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord fulfill the words that you have prophesied, and bring back to this place from Babylon the vessels of the house of the Lord, and all the exiles. But listen now to this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people. The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.”

One of the really good things about the way we do Mass is that we always read from the Bible. God’s word is always part of our worship. The danger, though, of reading the Bible in bite-size pieces is that we have to make sure we know the context, because if we don’t know the big picture we very often can’t understand the piece we are reading.

The big picture, summarized:

God is speaking a word of judgment to Judah, especially for the evil rulers and prophets who have failed to care for his people, and who have led his people astray. He warns the people through Jeremiah that he has determined to give Jerusalem into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Those who stay in the city, God tells them, will be destroyed, but those who surrender will live.

God gives Jeremiah a vision of good figs and bad figs. The good figs represent the people in exile, whom God will care for in their captivity. “I will plant them, and not uproot them I will give them a heart to know me, and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.” The bad figs represent King Zedekiah and all those who remained in the city. To them God says, “I will send sword, famine, and pestilence upon them, until they shall be utterly destroyed from the land that I gave to them.”

God tells Jeremiah, “This whole land is going to become a ruin and a waste, and Judah, and all the nations around, are going to be under the rule of the king of Babylon for seventy years. But then, after seventy years are completed, I will punish your oppressors for all that they have done, and I will restore Judah.”

When Jeremiah brings that word to the people, the priests and prophets threaten to kill him. But fortunately for Jeremiah, there are some wise elders who warn them not to be too hasty in assuming Jeremiah is not really speaking God’s word.

Next, God tells Jeremiah to make straps and yoke-bars, the kind of thing worn by a beast of burden. It’s a symbol, a sign to Judah and all the surrounding nations, that God is warning them to submit themselves to Babylon, telling them to bend their necks to Nebuchadnezzar’s yoke. If they do that, God tells them, they will live. Don’t listen to the false prophets, God says, who are saying that everything is going to be OK.

But there’s another prophet, named Hananiah, who also claims to have a word from the Lord. Things look bad right now, Hananiah says, but God has already broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two years, the king, and all the exiles, and all the vessels that were stolen from the Temple, they will all be returned, safely brought home. And as his sign he takes the yoke-bars off of Jeremiah’s neck, and he breaks them. “Thus says the Lord,” says Hananiah,”I am going to break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all the nations within two years.”

And that brings us to the reading for today. Jeremiah is standing before Hananiah, and he says, “Great. May the Lord do just what you say. May he bring home all the exiles, and may all the holy vessels be returned safely to the Temple. But listen to me. The prophets who came before us prophesied war and famine and pestilence. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, if his prophecy comes to pass, then we’ll know that he is really a prophet from God.”

It’s a face-off. In one corner, we have Jeremiah, who’s speaking a message nobody wants to hear. God is bringing judgment on his people. He’s giving them into the hand of the godless, merciless nation of Babylon. Only the people who surrender to the enemy will be saved. And they’ll be in captivity for seventy years before God rescues them. You understand what that means. No one, except maybe the tiniest baby, is going to live to see the end of this.

In the other corner, we have Hananiah and his cohort of much more cheerful prophets. Nebuchadnezzar has us in his grasp for now, yeah, but God is already on top of things. Nebuchadnezzar’s yoke is already broken. Two years from now all the exiles will be home again. Jeconiah the king will be back on his throne. The vessels of the Lord’s house will be back where they belong. Two years.

So who are we going to believe? Who do you want to listen to? Will you listen to the strange man wearing an animal’s harness, who always seems to have a message of doom and gloom, who says your only hope is to give in to the enemy, to watch him plunder your sacred places, to resign yourself to living in exile for the rest of your life? Or will you listen to the man who speaks confidently about God, who talks about God as if he’s really on top of things; the man who tells you things might look bad now, but just wait, not long now, and God will restore everything before your very eyes?

This story is history; it’s a story about events that happened to real people more than 2500 years ago. But it’s also a story about our universal human tendency to believe what we want to believe. Paul wrote about the same thing when he was advising Timothy on the importance of preaching the word of God faithfully. “The time is coming,” Paul wrote, “when people won’t stand for sound teaching, but having itching ears they will gather to themselves teachers that suit their own passions. They’ll turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”

We see it in our own time. In the last few years we’ve seen a proliferation of news sources – or sources that claim to be news – and most people, I think, get their version of reality from the source that suits them best. Sometimes it’s a matter of preferring a certain slant to the issues, or choosing from among a variety of facts. Other sources play to the preferences of their consumers and offer up fiction as reality.

Even in the church, there is a natural and very dangerous tendency for people to seek a version of God’s word that makes us comfortable or that doesn’t challenge our preconceived notions. We like a word from God that paints a rosy picture of life in the world – there’s always suffering in other places, of course, refugees and martyrs and the like – but for us, we like being told that life with God is a victorious life. We like being told that our success and our comfort are his blessings. Because we know that it is God’s will for us to flourish.

And we’re not wrong about that. God loves each and every one of us. He intends for us to flourish. He sent his only Son to us because his abiding desire for us is that we have life, and that we have it abundantly. What we don’t always like to understand is that flourishing isn’t about success. Abundant life isn’t always comfortable. And a holy life doesn’t always look like a victorious life, from a purely human perspective.

Flourishing is about living more and more fully into God’s will for us’ it’s about growing up – and very often that happens through suffering, or through struggle. It’s hard to see the benefits in the moment. Our spectacular personal failure doesn’t feel anything like flourishing, probably, any more than surrendering to the Babylonians felt like flourishing. And yet God was with them in their captivity.

All those who surrendered to the enemy; all those who chose to suffer the grief and sorrow of exile, they were the ones God likened to the good figs of Jeremiah’s vision. “I will set my eyes on them for good,” God said, “I will build them up, and not tear them down. I will plant them, and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people and I will be their God.” Any of us who have gone through the suffering of losing someone we love, or of a serious illness, or any other human tragedy – when we look back, then we can see the presence of God with us in that time, building us up, strengthening our roots, causing us to flourish right in the midst of our sorrow and pain.

The test of God’s word isn’t how pretty or happy or comfortable or well-articulated it is. God’s prophets have a reputation for being a little rough, in fact, and truth has a way of being pretty uncomfortable. The proof is that only God’s word prevails. Only God’s word bears good fruit, in our lives and in the world. Reading the passage today from Jeremiah, there’s nothing we would like better than for Hananiah to be right. We want to believe the prophet who prophesies peace. But two months after his showdown with Jeremiah, Hananiah died. Nebuchadnezzar kept hold of his empire for seventy years, just like God said he would. And then God brought the power of Babylon to an end, just as he had promised, and the exiles returned to rebuild Jerusalem.

We don’t get to choose the reality we like best; only God’s word is truth, even if we find it in unexpected places, even if it isn’t what we want to hear. Because only what is true is truly good. Ours is not a choice of alternate realities or parallel truths; it’s a choice of God’s word or empty lies. It’s a choice of life or death. +