One Good Prophet

Jeremiah 23:21-31 One Good Prophet One of the favorite stories of native Texans is the legend of the Ranger sent to quell a big disturbance in a small South Texas town. When he rides into town, the mayor looks him over, dismayed, and says, “Where are the others? Are you the only one they sent?” And the Ranger calmly replies, “Well, you’ve only got one riot.” I think we like to consider ourselves, as Texans, heirs to that same tough self-sufficiency. “One riot, one Ranger,” if true, is an amazing tale. But it’s more generally the case that one person is helpless against the many- or if not helpless, at least stands little chance of winning the fight. Perhaps the better example of one man against the mob, or against lawlessness or evil, is the movie “High Noon,” in which Marshal Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper, all alone must face Frank Miller and his gang. For several reasons the townspeople refuse to help, his deputy deserts him, his bride of only a couple of hours rides away: out of fear certainly, or religious vows of non-violence, or a sense of accommodation to the evil, or belief in the lie that if the Marshal will just go, and they remain quiet, everything will sort itself out. It’s said that the movie was a metaphor for the nation’s response to McCarthyism in the 1950s- or the lack of response- as so many people of the time were able to justify their own silence, their own inaction against the abuse of power by those political bullies. Cooper’s desperate house-to-house search for help in “High Noon” reminds me of Jeremiah’s futile search for one righteous man- just one in all of Jerusalem. In chapter 5, God commands him, “Run through the streets; search the marketplace to see if you can find one man who does justice and seeks truth.” But Jeremiah can find no one, and says, “These are only the poor, the uneducated. I’ll go to the great ones, who know God’s law, who know the ways of God.” But no, neither will they respond, they refuse to face the evil that is in them and that surrounds them; and so, they will be destroyed. In chapter 23, Jeremiah is still looking for that one righteous person, and cannot find him even among the clergy, not a single prophet who will speak God’s word of truth rather then proclaim convenient lies to the people. These false prophets speak with words that cause their hearers to feel good about themselves, even as they ignore the wrongness in their lives; they speak so that their hearers are not forced to face the lies they tell themselves that justify their greed, their unfairness toward the poor. It is great sin when the powerful create a system that benefits only themselves, when they withhold justice and just wages, when they remove opportunity and try to silence the voices that cry out. Here, it is only Jeremiah, the one good prophet, who speaks God’s word- the mighty word of the God who hears the cries of the poor, who stands always on the side of the hurting and the hungry. That is the word we read over and over in the Old Testament; and it is the message of Jesus in the gospels. Jeremiah is the one good prophet in Jerusalem, which may cause us to ask, “How many good prophets do we hear today”? We must recognize those God condemns in this passage: the prophets, the religious leaders; don’t think “oracle” or “fortune-teller,” but “preacher.” And here is every preacher in Jerusalem, save one, who will not listen for the word of God. They may want to sound holy, like God speaks through them, may actually believe they know and preach God’s word. But if they think thus, they are wrong, and they are judged; and if they speak only to satisfy or placate their hearers, they are judged. Whether they lie inadvertently or intentionally, the people are led astray, and it is a great sin. A TV show I watch sometimes has the main character trying to discover how her best friend died, and in one episode she comes to question an inmate in prison. As she drives up to the entrance, she says to herself, “They say the truth will set you free- well, here I am trying to find out the truth in a maximum security prison.” It seems absurd, doesn’t it? Yet, truth may be found even there, even in the dehumanizing cruelty of prison. Just ask Viktor Frankl or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, prisoners of the Nazis, or read the stories of Dostoyevsky’s Siberian incarceration in The House of the Dead; watch the final, beautiful moments of Preston Sturgess’ masterpiece, “Sullivan’s Travels,” or Stephen King’s “The Shawshank Redemption.” We can find truth even in the meanest or most unexpected places: in the friendships forged in coal mines and factories and migrant worker camps; truth in a community’s response to tragedy, as in Aurora this week; beautiful and timeless truths in Shakespeare and Mozart, truth learned watching and pondering the ocean roll to the shore, of course- but sometimes we can also discover truth about life- about our life, from a whiny song of lost love or a crummy TV show or from a flattened critter by the side of the road. But of all places, we may- or may not- find the truth in our churches- of all the places where the truth should be! Here is Jeremiah speaking God’s judgment upon those lying preachers in Jerusalem, who say, “All is well if you keep sending in those pledges”; God’s anger toward those religious leaders who say, “God has given me a vision,” even as they speak lies about God, who say, “It’s the fault of the homosexuals and the brown people who sneak across the river, or the other brown people who hate our freedom and want to kill us, or the lazy black people who take advantage of the system.” What about the fault in me? What about our tendency to justify our own sin and pride? Isn’t it a lie to blame everybody else, and absolve ourselves? It’s a religious question- and a political one, but we don’t have to agree politically to believe that God calls us to love and care for one another- that’s straight out of scripture. Jesus gave only two commandments: to love God, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Loving God involves trying to discern the truth about God, and not simply holding onto our same old comfortable concepts about God, “delusions” as Jeremiah might call them, as though God is utterly familiar, as though we know the whole truth about God. And loving our neighbor means loving even those outside our comfort zone, those outside the mainstream, loving gays and brown people and black people: different, but still like the rest of us, in that they know a bit of the truth we do not; and we learn some of that truth as we care for them. Let us come together at the Table and learn about our Lord, as he calls everyone to join in the feast. In verses 23-24, God asks, “Do you think I am merely the hometown god? Don’t you realize that I am everywhere? Don’t you know that I am the transcendent God?” If it is true that our God is the mighty and powerful and mysterious God, then we should assume that we do not have him figured out. And so we must be careful what we say and do that may diminish the truth about God or that might belittle and harm any of his creatures. We can spend many years in school, and we can contemplate and pray and see visions, and yet still not understand who God is; still not know God’s true word, still be held back from finding the truth that defines us. So, who stands in the pulpit and tells you the truth? I try to, but it takes all of us, blending our different experiences, different viewpoints, and different voices, hearing one another, learning from one another, and giving thanks to God for each other, and coming closer to the truth as we serve and love one another. If God is the God everywhere, and transcendent, then, to understand more clearly the truth about God, we must abide in the inclusive community of those who have beheld God in other places and known God in circumstances other than our own. The truth is never alone; it is found in loving our neighbor, and in our fellowship together, and discovering our connection to the things God has made. .

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