Proper 19
Preaching
Preaching and Reading the Old Testament Lessons:
With an Eye to the New
"Now it is I who speak in judgment upon them" (v. 12). Ours is a society that does not accept that as the Word of God. Many people do not believe that God judges anyone. Rather, the Lord is a forgiving God, a kindly deity who overlooks all wrong. As in the Gospel lesson for the morning, the Lord searches for the one lost sheep and returns it gently to the fold, or he hunts for the one lost coin until he finds it. God accepts the lost as they are, we think, overlooking Jesus' teaching about repentance and transformation of life.
The reason we discard all notions of God's judgment, moreover, is because we have lost all sense of right and wrong. No one is held responsible for his or her acts anymore. If they do evil, it is just because they are victims of society's structures, or their parents didn't raise them right, or they were under the influence of drugs or other outside forces. Right and wrong have become relative terms, subject to individual circumstances. And responsibility to a sovereign Lord is no longer considered to be applicable. If there is no responsibility, there is no sin, however, and therefore there is no occasion for God's judgment.
The prophets of Israel and our Lord Jesus knew differently. All persons, they knew, were responsible to the God who had made them, and Israel in particular had entered into a covenant with the Lord in which she promised to trust and obey him, just as all Christians renew that covenant every time they sit at the Lord's table. When Israel or we fail in our covenant with God, therefore, we are responsible to him for our thoughts and actions, and when we do not repent and turn our lives around to walk in God's ways, he is justified in his judgment of us.
Our text comes from the early days of Jeremiah's ministry, before 609 B.C., when Judah refused to repent. Instead, she gave her allegiance to the pagan fertility gods of the Baal religion; she denied justice to the poor and oppressed; her prophets and priests were corrupt, seeking only wealth and approval for themselves; her covenant obligations were totally forgotten -- all failings that could be duplicated in our present society. Indeed, Jeremiah tells us in the following chapter 5 that he searched Jerusalem for one righteous person and found none, among either the poor or the rich. And in his famous temple sermon in chapter 7, the prophet proclaims that the people thought their worship in the temple of the Lord was simply a hiding place ("a den of robbers") from the consequences of their sin (Jeremiah 7:8-11).
Our passage therefore sets forth two scenarios of God's judgment upon his faithless people. First, God's punishment is likened to the hot desert sirocco that blew into Judah to wither and dry up everything before it. Secondly, however, Jeremiah envisions an absolute judgment in which God reverses his very act of creation of the world.
Verses 23-28 deliberately parallel Genesis 1 and 2. The prophet sees the universe returned to chaos and void, as it was before God's creation of it (Genesis 1:2). The light is taken away (Genesis 1:3), the mountains and hills quake in the chaotic waters (cf. Psalm 46:2-3) and fall, birds and beasts and human beings disappear, and there is nothing left but the bare desert that can support no life (Genesis 2:4-5). In short, God takes back his creation. He is "sorry that he made man on the earth" (Genesis 6:6). And so earth and humankind are destroyed in God's last apocalyptic judgment.
Our fear is that a nuclear attack will destroy the universe. Perhaps our proper fear is that God, in his judgment on us, will bring it to an end. God made the world in the beginning. He determines its destiny. And he is quite capable of doing away with that which he has made. As Karl Barth once wrote, "The miracle is not that there is a God. The miracle is that there is a world" -- that God decided to create us in the first place and that he has put up with us and our evil as long as he has.
The call for our repentance in the Gospel lesson, with its promise of God's mercy, is therefore our only hope of salvation.
Lutheran Option: Exodus 32:7-14
This text forms a vivid account of our sin. Israel is at Mount Sinai. She has entered into covenant with her God (Exodus 24:1-11), and she has twice vowed, "All that the Lord has spoken we will do" (Exodus 19:8; 24:3). In short, she has promised that her life will be ordered according to the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17), that she will have no other God besides the Lord. But at the very mount of covenant, almost immediately after she has pledged her heart and her life to her God, she falls into sin and makes for herself a golden calf to worship.
Is that not the way with us also? That we partake of the Lord's Supper, in which we vow our sole trust and obedience to our Lord Jesus, and then before we even get out of the church, we violate his commandments -- gossiping about a neighbor, looking down on some poor soul, seeking our own status, turning our hearts and thoughts to the day's occupations with no thought of our God. Indeed, we leave the church, and it becomes business as usual, the daily preoccupation of seeking our own security and importance. And so we think to save our lives and, in Jesus' words, we will lose them instead.
The Israelites in our text have some remnant of piety. They know that it is the Lord who redeemed them from slavery. They know that forever after, the one true God is to be identified by that act. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20:1), just as we know that it is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who redeemed us from our bondage to sin and death. And so the Israelites have to claim that the idol they have made is the one who redeemed them (v. 8). And so often we attribute to Christianity some idol we have constructed for ourselves.
But there is one God alone who redeemed Israel and us from our slavery. And when we attribute that act to other gods, we violate our covenant with the Lord. God therefore is about to destroy Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai, just as he may destroy us.
Moses therefore fulfills the prophetic function of interceding for his sinful people, reminding God of his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses is the intercessor who turns aside God's judgment on his sinful people.
We can thank a merciful God that we too have a mediator, who interceded for us on the cross. "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). By his pleading for us, and by his sinless death, Jesus Christ turned aside the judgment of God on us that we, like faithless Israel, so richly deserve. And indeed, writes Paul, the risen and ascended Christ continues to intercede on our behalf before the Father (Romans 8:34). But it is all for the sake of enabling us to repent and to return in trust and obedience to the one true God, so that we walk in newness of life and in the joy and peace and salvation with the Father that he so much desires for us.
The reason we discard all notions of God's judgment, moreover, is because we have lost all sense of right and wrong. No one is held responsible for his or her acts anymore. If they do evil, it is just because they are victims of society's structures, or their parents didn't raise them right, or they were under the influence of drugs or other outside forces. Right and wrong have become relative terms, subject to individual circumstances. And responsibility to a sovereign Lord is no longer considered to be applicable. If there is no responsibility, there is no sin, however, and therefore there is no occasion for God's judgment.
The prophets of Israel and our Lord Jesus knew differently. All persons, they knew, were responsible to the God who had made them, and Israel in particular had entered into a covenant with the Lord in which she promised to trust and obey him, just as all Christians renew that covenant every time they sit at the Lord's table. When Israel or we fail in our covenant with God, therefore, we are responsible to him for our thoughts and actions, and when we do not repent and turn our lives around to walk in God's ways, he is justified in his judgment of us.
Our text comes from the early days of Jeremiah's ministry, before 609 B.C., when Judah refused to repent. Instead, she gave her allegiance to the pagan fertility gods of the Baal religion; she denied justice to the poor and oppressed; her prophets and priests were corrupt, seeking only wealth and approval for themselves; her covenant obligations were totally forgotten -- all failings that could be duplicated in our present society. Indeed, Jeremiah tells us in the following chapter 5 that he searched Jerusalem for one righteous person and found none, among either the poor or the rich. And in his famous temple sermon in chapter 7, the prophet proclaims that the people thought their worship in the temple of the Lord was simply a hiding place ("a den of robbers") from the consequences of their sin (Jeremiah 7:8-11).
Our passage therefore sets forth two scenarios of God's judgment upon his faithless people. First, God's punishment is likened to the hot desert sirocco that blew into Judah to wither and dry up everything before it. Secondly, however, Jeremiah envisions an absolute judgment in which God reverses his very act of creation of the world.
Verses 23-28 deliberately parallel Genesis 1 and 2. The prophet sees the universe returned to chaos and void, as it was before God's creation of it (Genesis 1:2). The light is taken away (Genesis 1:3), the mountains and hills quake in the chaotic waters (cf. Psalm 46:2-3) and fall, birds and beasts and human beings disappear, and there is nothing left but the bare desert that can support no life (Genesis 2:4-5). In short, God takes back his creation. He is "sorry that he made man on the earth" (Genesis 6:6). And so earth and humankind are destroyed in God's last apocalyptic judgment.
Our fear is that a nuclear attack will destroy the universe. Perhaps our proper fear is that God, in his judgment on us, will bring it to an end. God made the world in the beginning. He determines its destiny. And he is quite capable of doing away with that which he has made. As Karl Barth once wrote, "The miracle is not that there is a God. The miracle is that there is a world" -- that God decided to create us in the first place and that he has put up with us and our evil as long as he has.
The call for our repentance in the Gospel lesson, with its promise of God's mercy, is therefore our only hope of salvation.
Lutheran Option: Exodus 32:7-14
This text forms a vivid account of our sin. Israel is at Mount Sinai. She has entered into covenant with her God (Exodus 24:1-11), and she has twice vowed, "All that the Lord has spoken we will do" (Exodus 19:8; 24:3). In short, she has promised that her life will be ordered according to the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17), that she will have no other God besides the Lord. But at the very mount of covenant, almost immediately after she has pledged her heart and her life to her God, she falls into sin and makes for herself a golden calf to worship.
Is that not the way with us also? That we partake of the Lord's Supper, in which we vow our sole trust and obedience to our Lord Jesus, and then before we even get out of the church, we violate his commandments -- gossiping about a neighbor, looking down on some poor soul, seeking our own status, turning our hearts and thoughts to the day's occupations with no thought of our God. Indeed, we leave the church, and it becomes business as usual, the daily preoccupation of seeking our own security and importance. And so we think to save our lives and, in Jesus' words, we will lose them instead.
The Israelites in our text have some remnant of piety. They know that it is the Lord who redeemed them from slavery. They know that forever after, the one true God is to be identified by that act. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20:1), just as we know that it is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who redeemed us from our bondage to sin and death. And so the Israelites have to claim that the idol they have made is the one who redeemed them (v. 8). And so often we attribute to Christianity some idol we have constructed for ourselves.
But there is one God alone who redeemed Israel and us from our slavery. And when we attribute that act to other gods, we violate our covenant with the Lord. God therefore is about to destroy Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai, just as he may destroy us.
Moses therefore fulfills the prophetic function of interceding for his sinful people, reminding God of his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses is the intercessor who turns aside God's judgment on his sinful people.
We can thank a merciful God that we too have a mediator, who interceded for us on the cross. "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). By his pleading for us, and by his sinless death, Jesus Christ turned aside the judgment of God on us that we, like faithless Israel, so richly deserve. And indeed, writes Paul, the risen and ascended Christ continues to intercede on our behalf before the Father (Romans 8:34). But it is all for the sake of enabling us to repent and to return in trust and obedience to the one true God, so that we walk in newness of life and in the joy and peace and salvation with the Father that he so much desires for us.
