Jeremiah 29:1,4-7; 2 Timothy 2:8-15
October 10, 2010
Chaos, defeat, exile, fear, anger – it was not a good time in the life of the Jewish people when Jeremiah lived. Babylon had destroyed their homeland, and many had been taken to live in the enemy’s country. It was a disaster on a scale most of us cannot imagine. And everyone was asking the same question: “What the heck do we do now?” And as you can imagine, as is always the case, there were some differing ideas about that. When times are tough, when what you know is under attack, there is generally no shortage of opinions about how you are supposed to respond.
In exile, the people turned to the prophets to tell them what God wanted them to do. Some prophets at the time, like a man named Hananiah, said God wanted the people to resist Babylon and hold tight because they would soon be returning to their homeland, and the leaders of Babylon would be brought to justice by Yahweh. We read of his prophesy in the chapter right before our passage in Jeremiah this morning. Yahweh, the argument goes, is the God of the Jews and so anyone who messes with the Jews will not get away with it for very long. God, like an overprotective father, will “take care of things,” and life will go back to normal – the chosen people will once again be an independent nation- in charge of their own lives and destiny.
Jeremiah, another prophet, disagreed with this. He believed God was saying that this was not a temporary exile, and God was not going to exact revenge on Babylon for the destruction brought on Judah. Instead, Jeremiah believed God was using Babylon to do God’s work. The rulers of Judah and Israel had strayed from the Mosaic law; they had failed the poor, orphans, and widows, they had allowed injustice to reign supreme, and God would not stand for that anymore. So, Jeremiah’s argument goes, God sent the king of Babylon to teach the Jews a lesson. Given this, the Jews were not to resist their exile; they were to settle in and make peace with it, make peace with their enemies, and learn again how to live as God’s people.
Two prophets, two opinions, two Gods? These are both respectable prophets. Both had been credible in the past. People believed both were legitimate prophets of Yahweh. Now they are both claiming to speak for God , yet saying the exact opposite of the other. If Jeremiah and Hananiah were living today, I can imagine one as a pundit on MSNBC and the other on Fox News. They are both passionate, both believe that they speak for Yahweh, both believe they know what is best for the Jewish people in exile.
I can also imagine two neighbors talking over strong coffee one morning in their new homeland, Babylon; one having heard Hananiah, the other Jeremiah. Each believed what they heard. After all, it came from a prophet of God! Prophets know what they are talking about. It’s one person’s opinion against another. And so, political division is born and people have to take sides. How in the world were the people supposed to know who to listen to? Who was right? Who really speaks for God?
The only proof Jeremiah offered was something like, “I’m the true prophet of God because God says I am.” Well, that’s enough for me. As long as you say that you speak for God, then I’m convinced. Jeremiah’s defense of his authority is a bit suspect, don’t you think? Surely that could not have been terribly convincing to the people living in Babylon either. Figuring out who was right must have been pretty tricky.
We have a similar situation in 2 Timothy. The letter was written by a follower of Paul and he is concerned Christians are turning to other leaders whose ideas differed from Paul’s. There are new teachers, Hymanaeus and Philetus. They are denying that there is a future resurrection. Probably their view was associated with an individualizing of hope. They saw the gospel as something which guaranteed an individual eternal life, including life after death. Paul had a much broader vision of hope: Rooted in gospel images of social justice, Paul envisioned all of society – all of humanity – transformed. Hymanaeus and Philetus were preaching a spirituality of just the soul, and the author of 2 Timothy saw this as a gross misunderstanding of the gospel. So he wrote a letter. And the people who heard it read had to make a choice: Who’s right? How do they decide?
For that matter, how do we know today who speaks for God? We get lots of advice about what the Christian thing to do is. We hear it on the radio, the TV, in church, from our neighbors, etc. Good, honest, earnest people disagree about what it means to be Christian, what it means to be faithful, what God really wants us to do. How do we know? How, you know in the world, do we know what God really wants for our lives? Who should we vote for? Who can be ordained? When should we use war and violence? How do we get eternal life? What is sin? If we’re honest with ourselves, even if we might have answers to these questions, we can never be 100% sure that we know we are doing God’s will.
Some settle this matter by choosing a god who does and says what they want. Or put another way, their god ends up being always on their side – blessing everything they do…and the proof that God is on their side is their success, their power, their wealth and prosperity. It reminds me of how Christianity became the dominate religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century. Back in the year 300 CE, Christianity was a pretty obscure, and at times derided, religion. The god of the Christians was not the god most chose. Then, one day, the emperor – Constantine – was facing a pretty tough battle. Odds were heavily against him. Before going into battle, Constantine invoked the aid of the god of the Christians. He put a Greek monogram of the first letters of the name of Christ on his standards – the sign he carried that led the soldiers into battle. He won, and those letters became a talisman for him. He declared Christianity an acceptable and good religion with an effective god. From then on, his commitment to Christianity seemed to be based largely on a belief that if he wasn’t a Christian, things would go poorly for the empire.
This seems to me to be a suspect way to decide if God is really God. If we use Constantinian logic, then if you pray to Jesus and the prayer is not answered, that means Jesus is not worthy of your faith. If you pray to the Hindu god Kali for health and prosperity and then win the lottery, that’s a sign that Kali is the goddess for you. If one prophet says something you like, and another something that would make your life difficult, the prophet of God the one that says what you like. Surely this cheapens God and reduces life to a divinely sanctioned, self-centered existence.
This wasn’t the logic used by the Israelites living in exile. They chose Jeremiah as the true prophet, but Jeremiah was saying God was not on their side at the moment. God was not protecting their country, their self interests. Yet somehow they believed Jeremiah spoke for their God. “Seek the welfare, shalom, peace of the city where you now live,” Jeremiah tells the people. That could not possibly have been what they wanted to hear. “Fight, resist, you’re going to be coming home and Babylon will get their comeuppance!” That’s what people would have wanted to hear after everything they had been through. So why didn’t they choose Hananiah as their prophet? Why does the Hebrew bible have a book called Jeremiah and not one called Hananiah?
In the same chapter that Hananiah gives his thoughts on what God is saying to the people, we see that at first Jeremiah listened to Hananiah. I suspect he too really wanted to believe Hanahiah. He wanted, as much as anyone else, for this all to be a terrible dream, for Babylon to be punished for what they did. But something in him told him that wasn’t how his God worked – that wasn’t the way of Yahweh.
In a very telling piece of scripture, Jeremiah says to Hananiah, “The prophets who came before you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. 9But the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that Yahweh has truly sent the prophet.” (Jer. 28: 8-9). When we hear about peace, and when we bring about peace, that’s when we know we are hearing and listening to God’s voice. It’s easy to preach a God that is always on your side, that always wants the defeat of your enemy, that always champions your causes. Jeremiah could have preached about God’s hatred of the enemy. Instead, he preached peace with them. Shalom. It wasn’t easy to hear, but it must have resonated with the people as being like the God they had known in their scriptures, in the stories of their ancestors.
Listening for God is tricky business. There will always be competing voices – sometimes competing voices from our own scriptures, sometimes competing voices of people we trust and respect, sometimes competing voices in our own heads. In the end, I think the best we can do is look at the overarching themes of the bible, of our faith tradition, and of the life of Jesus, and use them as our guideposts: Shalom, peace, healing, justice, care for the poor and weak.
Elizabeth Schuessler Fiorenza is a feminist biblical scholar. I remember reading her books as a student at the University of Iowa. In one book, she made the point that a single, biblical text can be interpreted many different, legitimate ways. It wasn’t just that a text can say whatever you want it to say. She pointed out that rigorous, intelligent, genuinely faithful interpretations of one text can yield different, sometimes conflicting, results. That’s because we can’t ultimately know what was in the minds and hearts of the authors; we don’t have Jesus sitting here to settle disputes. On top of that, each of us inevitably brings our own biases and experiences to the bible when we read it and try to make sense of it. That’s not bad, it just is what is.
Without having the actual Jesus or Paul, or Matthew, Mark, Luke and John right in front of us today, we simply can’t know what they would say to us now about our issues and our world. We can only ever guess. And there are many, many good, sound guesses out there – and they don’t all agree with each other.
Fiorenza did not try to resolve this. She did not try to say, “if you apply the best possible scholarship to the texts, you will be able to figure out what Paul really meant, and further what his words mean for us today.” She did not deny the need for good scholarship. Some interpretations are not tenable. They have no basis at all in the text or the historical analysis. But, she said, there will always be multiple ways to hear the text, multiple possible interpretations that are equally justifiable. The answer is not to figure out the right one among them – as if that exists. The answer, she said much to my shock at the time, is to simply choose the most liberating one among them. I was scandalized by this. It seemed so self-serving. Just choose the one you like best?
But over the years I have come to understand the wisdom in what she said. She wasn’t arguing that we just choose the one we like best. In fact, it is at times almost exactly the opposite. She was arguing that the overall message of the bible – the overall truth about God as revealed in scripture and in Christ - is one of liberation for the oppressed, peace for the beaten, wholeness for the broken. And many times, we are not the oppressed one, or the beaten one or the broken one, and so we are not choosing the interpretation that benefits us. In fact we are often forced to choose the interpretation that costs us if we apply this standard.
I still find her advice scandalous at times. I still struggle with whether it’s just another version of choose the God that best suits you. And maybe that’s a good thing – it keeps me humble in the whole task of listening for God’s word today. I suspect as soon as it feels easy, straightforward and comfortable, I will have lost my way. But one marker I use is that choosing the most liberating interpretation means we are not choosing the God that best suits us – we’re looking to the welfare of others – the shalom of the city, as Jeremiah says.
How do we sort through all the voices out there? How do we know when we are being faithful? How do we know a true prophet from a false one, a true teaching from one that will lead us astray? It’s tricky business. Jeremiah says we will know a true prophet when peace is the bottom line. Timothy says simply, “remember Jesus Christ.” Remember what his life was like, remember that it led to his death, remember that death does not have the final say, remember that he cared for sick and poor, outcast and sinner, the least and the last. If we think we are hearing God, yet all we hear is what we want to hear, our ears might be tuned to the wrong station. If we hear God calling us to be with those Jesus lived his life serving, we might be on to something. If we hear God calling us to make peace with our enemies, even though that seems impossible, we might be on to something. If we hear God calling us to seek the liberation of the oppressed, the poor and the weak, we might be on to something.
May our ears be open to the true prophets of our day; may we be open to hearing God’s word; and may our lives be a reflection of the God we know in Jesus Christ. Amen.
