God’s B-Team: Ebed-melech Part 8 of a Series Jeremiah 38:1-15 From the Government and Here to Help July 21, 2013 Acts 11:1-18 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham Ordinary 16 J. Shannon Webster

The short version of this story from Jeremiah 38 goes like this: The prophet Jeremiah was publicly and vocally critical of the monarchy’s foreign policy, long before there was such a thing as free speech. He was thrown into an empty, muddy well and left to die. He was rescued – if not at the last moment, not a moment too soon – by the intervention of a minor public official. Of course, there is always more story beneath the bare-bones data. There are three major characters in this text – Zedekiah the King, Jeremiah the prophet, and an African civil-servant named Ebed-melech.

These events took place at the end of the Chosen People’s experiment with royalty and empire, at the very end of the Davidic line. King Zedekiah was nothing like King David. He was not a man of action, a passionate poet, a dynamic leader with vision; he had none of those qualities. He was weak, vacillating and indecisive. Judah was a weak kingdom, militarily, in a region of aggressive, competing empires. The Babylonian Empire was expanding and threatening. Zedekiah himself had been installed as a vassal king some ten years earlier, and Babylon expected him to obey. The Babylonians had already taken captive some of the best and brightest of Judah’s professional class. Which is to say Zedekiah’s advisors didn’t exactly graduate from Georgetown.

Zedekiah sought advice, and the bloc of royal officials in his court assured him the Babylon was not a threat, and that Egypt would come to the aid of Judah. There were no prophets in the pay of the court who would say Babylon was a problem. When Babylon’s army set siege to Jerusalem, Zedekiah secretly approached the independent Jeremiah, who he already had in jail for more than a year, to see “if there is any word from the Lord.” He was desperate. No one liked Jeremiah’s answer, which was that it was the will of God that Judah be overthrown and Zedekiah deposed. Zedekiah wavered between the counsel of Jeremiah and that of his advisors, claiming he was powerless. His indecision made it worse. In the end, Jerusalem fell, as we know, and much of the populace was carried into captivity.

Walter Brueggemann writes, “The prophet says what must be said. Zedekiah, like all kings, does not know how to respond. He doesn’t like the truth, but he does not doubt it either… Like Pilate, Zedekiah surrenders to the old truth at any cost.”1 The king’s job is to preserve the status quo, to preside over consensus. The prophet proposed a new truth that was too hard – “The old way is over,” said Jeremiah. God does not think and work like humans do.

Jeremiah was taken from jail and thrown into the cistern, the muddy well, but a bloc of royal court officials we might call the “Egypt Party.” He evidently had some popular influence, because they saw him as a threat to national security and a traitor who deserved death. Jeremiah was not a traitor, and not a coward, but a realist. He must have been concerned for his own safety, but would not compromise his admittedly subversive political message. For him, surrender to Babylon was surrender to God’s will. Judah had become corrupt and useless, and something new had to take its place. History later proved him right. It was in Babylon that faith flourished, most of the scripture was finally written down, and Israel renewed. Brueggemann wrote, “It is as though life comes through death, well-being comes through submission, security through enormous risk.”2 1

So we know something of King Zedekiah’s motivations, and we know Jeremiah’s motivations, but what about the third character, Ebed-melech, who appears almost out of nowhere and into the narrative? The name “Ebed-melech” means “Servant of the King” in Hebrew, and may be either a literary device or simply what they called him. He may have been a eunuch, although the same word is used in describing s minor court official. He was an Ethiopian, an outsider to the covenant community, and was the one who raised moral concern and rescued Jeremiah from death. He is like the Good Samaritan, in Jesus’ parable, the outsider you would not expect to be the hero and the only one who did the right thing.

Ebed-melech was courageous when he confronted King Zedekiah, using strong language for the cabal that threw Jeremiah in the cistern: “they acted wickedly.” Ebed-melech risked his own life in doing so; he could easily have been labeled a “traitor.” We know how easily that happens. In the McCarthy era, in our own country in the 1950’s, thousands of Americans were accused of being communists, Soviets agents and traitors on the wildest of speculations. Careers and lives were destroyed. All it took to be labeled a communist and a traitor was to ask, “Why are you calling everybody a communist?” You can imagine Ebed-melech was way out on a limb, risking his life to keep God’s prophet safe. Is he a sort of Christ-figure in this tale? If so, Jeremiah may be one as well. What happened to Ebed-melech? A chapter later (39:8-15), when it began to come apart as Jeremiah predicted, God commanded Jeremiah to find Ebed-melech the Ethiopian and convey this message: “On the day I fulfill my word and hand this city over, I will save you, for you trusted me.”

We make a joke about the man who says, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” but in this case it was certainly true. Ebed-melech was no high-ranking official so far as we know, no giant historical figure. Just a regular civil servant doing his job. Or more. Ebed-melech could have stayed out of it, and maybe most of us would have. He went beyond the boundaries, beyond the minimum job description, to do what was right. We really know nothing about his internal motivations, from the text. We do know something about him from his actions.

This is a New Testament theme as well. In the early church, at first, it was a question whether the followers of the Way of Jesus would be a Jewish sect alone, or whether this was a movement bigger than that. Cornelius was prompted by God to send for the apostle Peter. Cornelius was not only a Gentile, but an officer in the Roman army, a centurion. He was not only an outsider, at best on the fringe of the community, he was the enemy. Peter might not have gone had God not shown him a vision, a large sheet let down with all kinds of animals, some of them prohibited by Jewish dietary code. A voice from heaven said, “Up, Peter. Kill and eat.” Peter protested he had never eaten anything “unclean”, never broken the dietary laws. God asked, “Who are you to call unclean what I have call clean?” Peter was not stupid; he got it. There are no unclean people. He rose and went to Cornelius. Was Cornelius the Gentile converted, or Peter the Jew? Yes. And that had to happen in both of them for the church to move ahead.

We take it for granted that new members are a good thing, but that was not so with the Jerusalem congregation at that time. Peter had to defend himself for his relationship with Cornelius. The Jerusalem church wasn’t concerned that he had baptized Gentiles, but they were very disturbed that he had eaten with them. Dietary laws. Purity codes. And indeed

2 the community may still be defined by who is welcome at our table.

In 1963 our then-pastor Ed Ramage added a line to the liturgy, at the invitation to the table for communion – “We welcome those who God welcomes.” I learned that from your stories, and use it every time. The faithful here had to work hard, in 1963, to get beyond the boundaries our culture had put between races. It is a Biblical and faithful act to do so. Our scriptures today have people like Peter and Ebed-melech moving beyond boundaries. Luke’s work, both the Gospel and the book of Acts, show a church moving into the world and drawing a wider and wider circle, one that included more and increasingly different sorts of people into the circle of grace, into the table fellowship of Christ’s church. When Luke recounted, in Acts 8:26-40, the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch, was he recalling Ebed-melech?

The conflict between Jeremiah and Zedekiah’s court was not political so much as it was theological. Who is God, and what is God likely to do? For the church, that is still true. When we differ over issues, the core of our difference may be how we understand God. Perhaps it is as simple as whether we see the church as the pure and righteous, or as a community of redeemed and grateful sinners. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes: "The absolute religious genius of Jesus is that he utterly refuses all debt codes, purity codes, religious quarantines and the searching for sinners. He refuses the very starting point of historic religion. He refuses to divide the world into the pure and the impure, much to the chagrin of almost everybody — then and now.”3 Did his status as an outsider enable Ebed- melech to rescue the prophet Jeremiah? It probably was a factor.

God continues to challenge the church to be faithful, and in recent years that has meant the inclusion of gay and lesbian believers in the life of the church. In this, the American church may be ahead of most of the rest of the world. Our question may be where next, in our world do we need to draw wide the circle of grace. From these texts we might ask it both ways: to whom do we need to reach out, that we did not expect, in order to be faithful? Or, perhaps even harder for us, when do we need to accept help from one we did not expect?

At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Israel, there is a monument to the Righteous Gentiles, those non-Jews who helped and rescued Jewish people in World War II. Elie Wiesel said, “And so we must know these good people who recued Jewish people during the holocaust. We must learn from them, and in gratitude and hope remember them.”4 The French village of Le Chambon was famous for such rescuing. Madame Eyraud said simply, “Look. Look. Who else would have taken care of them if we didn’t? They needed our help and they needed it then.”5 My friend Doug Huneke did his doctoral these on those rescuers, hoping to learn if there were transferable practices or lessons on which we could build a more just and loving world. He said, “My purpose is to my colleagues, clergy and laity…with a way or appropriating essential elements of the history of the Shoah (holocaust) in order to respond to both the evils and the grace that came from it.”6 His question was, about the behavior of the rescuers, “Can we teach this?” His conclusion was that we could, and he even developed a curriculum for the Marin County, CA elementary schools. He identified a number of characteristics that the rescuers of the Jews had in common. One was not that they were religious, perhaps oddly enough, but an important one was that they were raised in families that cultivated their imaginations. So that when the time came, they could imagine what it was to be the other. Huneke calls it “empathic imagination: saying “their prior sensitivity to suffering contributed to their wartime 3 planning and decisions to become rescuers.”7

In fact, we can say that is what all these Bible stories are about. They are our story, and this is why we must read, and own and tell them. They teach us what to do when the time comes. They allow us to do moral previewing, so we will have practiced what to do not if, but when, we have to make a moral decision, take an ethical action for the sake of love.

Does it make sense to say that even God became human in Jesus Christ, one of us and one like us, our rescuer, to imagine and experience what it is to be us, even to the point of death and beyond? We tell these stories over and over again, in a rhythmic pattern through the Christian liturgical year, so that we might teach to ourselves and our young ones how to be like Jesus when the time comes.

Thanks be to God.

1 Brueggemann, Walter. The Creative Word, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1982, p.66. 2 Brueggemann, Walter. Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming, Eerdman’s Press, Grand Rapids, 1998, p. 361. 3 Rohr, Richard. Hope Against Darkness, St. Anthony Messenger Press, Cincinnati, 2001, p. 151. 4 Wiesel, Elie – in Carol Ritter, Sandra Meyers. Courage to Care, NYU Press, 1986, p. 2. 5 Hallie, Philip. Lest Innocent Blood be Shed, Harper and Row, NY, 1979, p. 127. 6 Huneke, Douglas. The Stones will Cry Out, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1995, p. 15. 7 Huneke, Douglas. The Moses of Rovno, Compassion House, Tiburon, CA, 1985, p. 183. 4