Sermon for 4th Sunday after Pentecost – Jeremiah 28:5-9

These days, it seems like everything’s up for grabs. We’ve overwhelmed with explosive issues of justice and righteousness. Stories keep coming to light about police brutality. We argue whether the entire policing system is utterly broken, or whether we just have a few bad actors that need to be brought to justice, though a few folks insist there’s nothing wrong at all. Or there’s all these confederate monuments aound the country, whether we tear them down because of the oppression they perpetuate, or whether we preserve them as painful reminders of our legacy of injustice. Or there’s the folks demanding to remove product branding like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben as racist tropes, and those who resent everything familiar being taken away from them. Everything’s up for grabs. You and I have our dead-set convictions. But in theory we all want the same thing. We want peace. So, who’s right?

Now, our problems aren’t new. Just ask the prophet Jeremiah. Jerusalem’s a trainwreck. No one cares about God. Widespread corruption. Total abuse of authority. Foreign powers sticking their fingers in and pulling strings. Sound familiar? So God calls Jeremiah and gives him a word to preach. Call Judah to repent or suffer conequences. Do they listen? Nope. Instead, they persecute Jeremiah because it’s an inconvenient message for a bunch of sociopaths sitting on the throne. They surround themselves with all these advisors who they call “prophets” – meaning “yes men.”

So today we’re at the end of the line. Zedekiah, Judah’s last king before Babylon conquers and exiles them. They’ve laughed at Jeremiah for decades. So the Lord commands Jeremiah to take a wooden yoke upon his shoulders and preach this sermon – I have given Judah into the hand of Babylon. Put Nebuchadnezzar’s yoke upon your necks. And if you don’t, I will punish with sword, famine, and pestilence. Resistance is futile. The worst case scenario has arrived. Or has it? Here we have chapter 28 and a prophet Hananiah who prophesies FABULOUS news. He proclaims that in 2 years God will deliver the people of Judah from Babylonian exile, restore Jerusalem’s king, and break the yoke of the king of Babylon. Odd since the king is part of the problem, but whatever.

So Jeremiah asks the same question we ask. Who’s right? God told me doomsday but this Hananiah dude says 2 year after-school detention. Is Jerusalem forever shutdown or getting ready to re-open? Well, Jeremiah has always staked everything on a God who keeps promises. So he says “Amen! May the Lord fulfill the words that you have prophesied!” It’s sincere. Better 2 years of exile than whole decades. But Jeremiah also knows the difference between yes-men and prophets, so he warns – “But listen now to this word. The prophets who preceded you and me prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many 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.” In other words, time will tell. So no surprise, Hanaiah totally doubles-down. He walks up, rips the yoke off Jeremiah’s neck, snaps it in two, and preaches “Thus says the LORD: I’ll smash the Babylonians and bring all the exiles back within two years!” What does Jeremiah finally do? Walk away.

See, Jeremiah speaks to us, because we’re arrived at the same protest and righteous anger. Our instutitions and power structures are failing the least of us. On one side folks demanding a righteous upheaval of a seething injustice. On the other side yes-men promising a status quo that pretends peace but fails to deliver. Generations of racism and poverty continue to literally kill us yet we fail to comprehend it. So who’s right? We know the right answer is supposed to be God’s promise to deliver us, but Jesus died 2000 years ago and after all this time, do we honestly believe it anymore? Maybe we’re actually in exile right now – exile from God and exile from each other. Unrepentant and doubled down in our camps. It’s strange that our lectionary conveniently leaves out the end of the story. Jeremiah goes back to Hananiah with a final word. “The LORD has not sent you, and you made these people trust in a lie. Therefore the LORD says, within this year you will be dead, because you have spoken rebellion.” 7 months later, Hananiah dies.

So what do we do with this story? Well, hear the word of the prophet Jeremiah just before our reading. “They shall be carried to Babylon and stay there until the day when I give attention to them. Then I will bring them up and restore them.” The good news is that Jeremiah was right. God has given attention to us by his Son, Jesus. We may be in exile but we’ve never been alone. Jesus has been with us the whole time, by his dying and rising, so that we might know the kingdom of God come near. The true peace that passes all understanding and surpasses every difference or disagreement is our reality right now in Christ Jesus.

Here’s the thing. Jesus meets us in exile to show us why Hananiah was so wrong. Sure, God doesn’t love exile any more than we do. And God never abandons God’s people. But we get this horrible idea that peace is when we’re comfortable and we have the right answers and we make the right decisions. That’s the lie that Hananiah spoke. So Jesus forgives us unbidden in order to give us the true gift of repentance. It’s the same thing we heard Jesus talk about last week. He came not to bring peace, but a sword, because everywhere he goes he reveals what’s broken. That’s what repentance does, and you can’t un-see it. That’s the repentance that Jeremiah preached like a broken record, but Hananiah was never going to get on that bus. We don’t want to get on that bus either, because we misunderstand repentance as punishment, but it’s not. True repentance is the gift of knowing there’s another way – the surpassing kingdom of God. So maybe God has to literally shove us into exile so that we know once and for all that the last word hasn’t been spoken. Exile will come to it’s end. That’s peace.

But no one said peace was easy. Repentance hurts because the old creation dies. It’s not fun. But you know, given the choice of watching my step or wading in the crap, wouldn’t you really rather pick the crap every time? I would. What have we got to lose? Where else do we expect to meet our neighbors? Where it’s messy and we don’t know the right answers. But what we do know is the one who we welcome, Jesus, the one that opens our eyes to see each other, the one that opens our ears to listen to each other, and the one that makes us to know what’s right together.