Trinity 8
Jer
23:16-29
7/26/15
During the last two weeks or so I
have started to use Twitter. Twitter,
for those of you who do not do much online, is a very popular social media
platform. It is in some ways similar to Facebook, but since you are limited to
140 characters per post – or “tweet” as they are called – they are far shorter
and concise.
Now I have had a Twitter account for
some time and if you look you will see that I have made 4600 “tweets.” But in fact almost none of those occurred on
Twitter itself. In order to get my blog
out in the cyber world a Lutheran pastor had shown me how to set it up so that
certain kinds of items posted on Facebook also get posted automatically on
Twitter – and vice versa.
I have started using Twitter more
because I have found that it is a great way to get current news and commentary
from interesting people. It works on the
basis of “following” and “followers.” You set it up so that “follow” someone,
and thus all their tweets appear in your feed.
The number of people who have done this is the number of “followers” you
have. So I have 222 followers. President
Harrison has 1300 followers. Taylor
Swift as 61 million followers.
I have been interested to learn,
however, that not everyone on Twitter is real.
In fact it is estimated that at least one in ten Twitter accounts is
fake. There is a whole industry that
produces, sells and runs automated Twitter accounts called “robots” or
“bots.” People purchase the service of
these robot accounts – tens and hundreds of thousands of them. They do this so
that their “followers” base looks bigger. This makes them they look more
popular and also influences the way their account gets promoted on
Twitter. So if I wanted to pass
President Harrison I could buy 1500 of these robot accounts.
But that’s not the only kind of fake
Twitter account. There are impersonator
accounts that parody real people. This
is legal, as long as the title has something in it to indicate it is not the
real one. And while I use the word
“parody,” much of what goes on is not funny.
In fact Tony LaRusse tried to sue Twitter over a vulgar account like
this.
And then there are occasions when
someone sets up an account and pretends to be someone else. This happened to a
writer named JoBeth McDaniel. She
realized one day that there was someone using an account that had her name and
picture. The impostor was tweeting
rambling statements about eating pizza and smoking marijuana. And it turned out that the fake JoBeth had
garnered more followers than the real JoBeth!
The problem was that the real JoBeth was in the process of applying for
a big new job, and the last thing she wanted was for the prospective employer
to search the internet about her and find these tweets that she certainly did
not send.
In our Old Testament lesson today,
Yahweh uses the prophet Jeremiah to condemn prophets who were speaking in Judah
with messages that he had not sent. They
were speaking lies that were misleading the people into disaster. Instead of calling people to repentance they
were leading them further astray. The
prophet’s words remind us this morning that speaking God’s Word is no small
thing. We are called to listen to what God actually says, and to share this
truth with others.
The prophet Jeremiah wrote at the
beginning of the sixth century B.C. and lived in the southern kingdom of
Judah. Judah was all that was left of
God’s people. The northern kingdom of Israel had been conquered by the Assyrians
in 722 B.C. and the entire population had been taken away into exile. In their place, the Assyrians had brought in peoples
from other parts of their empire as part of the “population swapping” that they
used to control conquered peoples.
Now, Judah faced the threat of the
Babylonian Empire, the new superpower in the near eastern world who had taken
out the Assyrians. Yet if the external
situation was bad, the internal one was even worse. The people had been carried away in the worship
of false gods from the surrounding pagan peoples. In fact, the images of false gods had been brought
into the temple itself in Jerusalem.
The people who were supposed to teach
the nation about God’s will which had been revealed in the Torah, were not
doing it. Instead they themselves were
living in sinful ways. Just before our
text Jeremiah wrote, “Both prophet and priest are ungodly; even in my house I
have found their evil, declares the LORD.”
He went on refer to the past about Samaria, the now destroyed capital of
the northern kingdom and said, “In the prophets of Samaria I saw an unsavory
thing: they prophesied by Baal and led my people Israel astray. But in the
prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing: they commit adultery and
walk in lies; they strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one turns from
his evil; all of them have become like Sodom to me, and its inhabitants like
Gomorrah.”
In our text this morning, Yahweh’s
instruction is very clear. Jeremiah
writes: “Thus says the LORD of hosts: ‘Do not listen to the words of the prophets
who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their
own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD. They say continually to those who
despise the word of the LORD, ‘It shall be well with you’; and to everyone who
stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No disaster shall come upon you.’”
The prophets were speaking their own
word, not Yahweh’s. They were telling
people who despised God’s Word and followed their own sinful heart: “No
problem. It’s all good.” God says the problem with these fake prophets
is that they have not stood in the council of the Lord to hear the real word of
God. If they had then things would be
very different. He says in our text: “I
did not send the prophets, yet they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they
prophesied. But if they had stood in my council, then they would have
proclaimed my words to my people,
and they would have turned
them from their evil way, and from the evil of their deeds.”
As we listen to our text, it is hard
not to think about the world in which we live today. The problem was that the false prophets were
not speaking the word of the Lord to the people. They were not saying the hard
things. They were not saying that Yahweh
is the true God and that every other one is a false god – is a nothing. They were not confronting sin and calling
people to repentance.
If you have been paying attention at
all, you will notice that what I just said describes a big chunk of
Christianity in America. It describes a
big chunk of those in the United States who identify themselves as
“Lutheran.” There is a refusal to say
that Jesus Christ alone is the only way God has revealed by which sins are
forgiven and a person can have eternal life with God. There is a refusal to
call sin a sin – especially if it has anything to do with sexual activity.
The root cause of this is a matter
of how people view God’s Word – the Scriptures. Is it the authoritative Word from God that determines how life is to
be? Or is it a word from man about God
which we can sift and sort for the parts we keep based on our desires and
wishes? You know what Jeremiah’s answer to that question was.
Yet the truth of the matter is that
you can’t get away from the question that easily. For you see it is one thing to say it is the
authoritative word from God that determines how life is to be. It is another thing to acknowledge that it
determines how your life is to
be. In our text Yahweh says, “Is not my
word like fire, declares the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in
pieces?”
You don’t want to face the hammer of
the law. God’s word confronts you with
the things you put before God – the things you show that you value more because
you give them more of your time, attention and money. It confronts you with the ways you love
yourself more than your spouse, your sibling, your family members. It confronts you with the ways that you nurse
anger and hate in your heart, and then look for opportunities to act upon it.
God’s Word is a hammer that breaks
rocks into pieces. It shatters the way you want to do things and calls it what
it is: sin. But it is a word that God
means for your good. It is a word that
calls you to repentance. It is a words
that forces you to confess your sin and all of the ways that you have no righteousness.
Martin Luther called this work of
the law God’s “alien work.” By this he
meant that God does not desire to judge.
He does not desire to condemn. Instead, over and over in the Old
Testament we hear the words that the Lord is “gracious and merciful, slower to
anger and abounding in steadfast love.”
Being gracious and loving is what Luther called God “proper work.” It’s
what he really wants to do.
And the evidence of this is our
Savior Jesus Christ, who in fact appears in the same chapter of Jeremiah as our
text. For earlier in chapter 23 we read:
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up for David
a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall
execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved,
and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be
called: ‘The LORD is our righteousness.”
Those who have been in Bible class
will immediately recognize that this is a promise about the Messiah descended
from King David. God sent his Son into
the world as the incarnate One, Jesus the Messiah. He came to offer himself on the cross as the
sacrifice for your sin and then to rise from dead. He is your righteousness because he has taken
away all your sins. Baptized into his
saving death you have been clothed with Christ and so now he gives his
righteousness to you. He gives you the
ability to stand before God – not on the basis of what you have done but
because of what he did for you.
The message about God’s love in
Jesus Chris is Gospel – it is good news.
And who doesn’t want to focus on good news? Who doesn’t want to speak
about love? It is easy to speak about
God’s love. But God’s love comes in the shape of a cross. And where there is the cross there you have
sin in the picture. This means that as
Christians we can never stop speaking the hard things; the things people don’t
want to hear – because they are true things. They are true because they come
from God. We can never stop speaking them to one another because it is in
repentance and faith that we stand forgiven.
And we can never stop speaking them to others because it is only in the
recognition of sin that we can understand the depths of God’s love for us in Jesus
Christ.
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