Worthless Things
Vicar Erik C. Nelson
Texts: Jeremiah 2:4-13; John 8:46-51
Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Last week I encouraged this congregation to refuse to harden your hearts. I talked about the importance of living with a soft heart and open hands. I talked about all the forces in the world that conspire to harden our hearts, cutting us off from the love God pours out upon us and from being able to share that love with others.
I talked about how having a soft heart makes you vulnerable. Cynicism and apathy can be a powerful armor, and if you want to stay safe, maybe that’s the way to go. But refusing to harden your heart means that in spite of the risk of loss and pain, your earnestness matters.
An essential part of having a full life with a soft heart is a commitment to honesty and integrity.
So I have to be honest with you today, in this pulpit, about how I’ve wrestled with today’s readings. In our gospel reading, Jesus has one of his most intense clashes with the Pharisees, which ends with them picking up rocks to stone him. In our first reading, we have Jeremiah speaking for God, calling the nation to repentance in a truly brutal way. I can’t stop thinking about the line that says that the nation “went after worthless things and became worthless themselves.”
I can’t shake this line, as it shakes the foundations of my vision of God. I know God to be merciful and compassionate, looking at us with total delight, seeing us as having infinite value, such great worth that God himself took on human flesh and lived among us.
So I hear this, and the prophetic hyperbole stops me in my tracks. These incisive words from Jeremiah are meant to catch us off guard, to get us thinking about our own lives. What are we doing with our lives? What worthless things are we pursuing? What are we putting before God in our life?
How are we undermining our own worth in that pursuit?
I can’t stop thinking about the fact that for the last eleven days, our own country has been pulled into yet another illegal war for oil. This war shows us again, the gods of this nation. The idols that we lift up that threaten our relationships with God and with one another.
These idols are money and oil and weapons. And these idols are different from the idols Jeremiah is speaking against. But what our idols have in common is that they all demand blood. Especially the blood of children.
A challenge to our soft hearts is the fact that in the opening volley of this war, 175 students and staff at a girls’ school were killed by American weapons. Since then, seven American soldiers have been killed, leaving families without their mom, their brother, their dad, their uncle. 1200 Iranians so far have been killed.
And in the continued attacks, the destruction of refineries has resulted in hellish conditions in the cities of Iran, with the gutters full of burning fuel and the air full of smoke and ash. Children’s lungs are full of these toxic fumes and they will have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.
What’s happening there is catastrophic now and will be for decades. So when I hear today’s scripture lesson, these extreme words from God’s prophet, it strikes at my heart.
It hits me where I’m most burdened. Our country is pursuing worthless things. I hope we’re not becoming worthless in the process.
It would be easy to preach a lighter sermon, one that only briefly touches on these things, but these are heavy texts, and they call for a serious wrestling.
And we live in the context of our faith being contorted to justify this war.
From the beginning of the war, religious liberty watchdogs have received hundreds of reports from our soldiers of commanders and leaders telling them that this is a holy war. Leaders of our military and defense structure have been using their interpretation of scripture to say that by bombing a girls’ school, they are bringing about the return of Jesus.
But the Bible is very clear about idolatry. The Bible consistently rails against any attempt or effort to put something else in God’s place in our lives.
And this condemnation of idolatry comes up in our gospel reading today. This dispute between Jesus and the Jewish leaders ends with Jesus making a claim to be God, and so the leaders pick up rocks to stone him.
Even if these leaders were wrong, not recognizing Jesus as the Son of God, their intentions were right, resisting what they saw as idolatry and the wrongful use of God’s name.
Violence was the wrong response to that, but we must respond in some way. We don’t have the right to remain silent when we see or hear our scriptures and beliefs being twisted to justify violence and Christian nationalism. We must resist it.
These holy days, when Lent and Ramadan coincide, we have an opportunity to slow down and see our neighbors as truly our siblings. We have an opportunity to live in solidarity.
We saw in our city’s resistance to federal occupation that when God’s people come together to resist tyranny, even the darkest of days can be overcome.
In the gospel reading today, Jesus promises that whoever keeps his word will never see death. Whoever listens to him will see eternal life.
We have an opportunity to listen to him when he says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
“If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
When we live with soft hearts and open hands, these things that Jesus says, they start to make sense. The violence and idolatry of the world is laid bare. We see the emptiness of the messages we receive that make us see one another as enemies to be conquered or a means to an end.
When we live with soft hearts and open hands, we become conduits for God’s love, the living water that Jesus pours out for us.
This living water that Jesus gives us is not a tame, quiet puddle. But it is active and rushing and moves us into action, for the sake of the world.
In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
