Reception, compassionate welcome, hospitality — Jesus tells us to practice these things in the Gospel passage today; they’re hallmarks of Christian life and if I do say so myself, St. Augustine’s is awfully gifted at them. Our Community Meals, our eagerness to fill up meal-train slots, our great gifts in casserole-making and in big-dinner-cooking, our saying hello to newcomers and inviting people into our pews — this community is one who knows the importance of compassionate welcome, of reception, of hospitality. 

But now most of those typical ways of sharing this gift — of sharing this mandate, really — have been taken away in the time of Coronavirus. So are we to do with this urge, this habit of hospitality that we have? Where can we put that energy? How can we exercise that muscle? 

Well, there’s good news and bad news: the good news is, there’s still plenty of field to harvest when it comes to practicing hospitality. The bad news is, it’s perhaps more demanding, more sacrificial, even, than our more comfortable habits of hospitality with respect to food. 

Jeremiah gives us an idea of how we might engage hospitality outside of food or bodies: he’s is hanging out with the — false — prophet Hananiah, who has just given a very optimistic prophecy. The first verses of chapter 28 record that Hananiah has declared that God will bring his people out of exile in Babylon in just two years’ time. 

Hananiah says that their travail is as good as over, their suffering has practically ceased. The favor of the Lord returns! Huzzah!

Jeremiah’s response is generous, one might even call it compassionate welcome. He tells the truth with gentleness, saying, “Oh, may that be true! What a wonderful thing that would be! Yes, ‘may the Lord fulfill the words that you have prophesied’!” 

You see, he joins in the desire and hope that the people long for, he affirms Hananiah’s instinct to give the people something to hang on to. Jeremiah seeks to understand where Hananiah is coming from, seeks to slip into the shoes of the people of Israel who are suffering exile. He knows their heart longs for deliverance. He acknowledges and reflects back to them — showing he’s an active listener — their thirst for better days ahead.

But that’s not all he says. 

Jeremiah continues with a warning: prophets from of old have prophesied disaster, destruction, continued suffering for the people. And clearly, he need not remind his audience, all this has come to pass. Indeed, they’re right smack-dab in the middle of some of the terror and hardship that Jeremiah himself has prophesied. So, if Hananiah has a message of imminent deliverance for the people, what a wonder it would be to behold, but it would go against decades, and even centuries of prophetic tradition, it would go against all that God seemed to have been communicating for years, it would be a complete 180-degree change from the direction and message that God has been giving and that has been coming true. And Jeremiah himself stands in that tradition.

Jeremiah bore this affront with great humility, with a generosity of spirit toward Hananiah and the people of Israel that shows a compassionate heart and a willingness to be hospitable to even those who are maddening. He’d had a lot of practice bearing the worst stuff — delivering bad news for decades, and living in the middle of that bad news with the people. 

While Jeremiah knows the truth of God, the repentance required for deliverance, the years still ahead of difficulty and of exile and of oppression, Jeremiah sticks with the people he’s been called to serve through prophecy. He stays with the exiles, he commits to suffering with, listening with, and living with the people of God as they reckon with their sin, their disobedience and hardness of heart. 

And isn’t this the same thing that God in Jesus shows us by his own behavior? Though he is God, he does not consider his almighty power and ultimate authority as something to be grasped, to be taken advantage of, something to be flaunted and waved around over the heads of sad, fleshy humans. 

God, the creator, the source of all wisdom, continues to show a willingness to be a compassionate parent. God surely knows better than any of us what the future will hold and how we ought to meet it, but like Jeremiah, God approaches us with curiosity and with gentleness in his truth, rather than trying to violently bend humanity toward his will. 

When I’m faced with opposition, I tend to dig my heels in. I desire to ah, “violently bend” others to my will. And I don’t think I’m very unique among humans on this account. We have a very strong bias for ourselves, and a need to be understood, to get our way. To remain the same, be unchanged. 

Now, God is the only one who is truly unchanged, and is fully consistent, and the only being whose will it would be a very good idea to bend toward. But this is not how God approaches us. It is his right to do so, but it is not his method. Instead, God in Jesus Christ becomes human. Chooses to walk around in our skin, to suffer our trials, feel our pain, enjoy our happinesses. God chooses to enter into our experience, to walk around in our shoes, to feel our feelings and to show he understands. 

Jeremiah is able to, intellectually, prophetically, sidle himself up alongside Hananiah, to look together, next to, with, the people of Israel at the prophecy that’s been given, and the truth of the prophecies received already, and the witness of God’s hand and behavior. Jeremiah receives and welcomes Hananiah, listening well, being curious instead of shutting him down, looking deeply into what Hananiah and all of Israel longs for, and uses that truth to guide his response of compassionate truth. 

God in Jesus Christ makes the ultimate example of love in coming alongside humanity as a man, living with poverty, ministering with the sick, teaching with the uneducated. Listening in love, loving in truth. 

To whom are we called to listen in love? To whom are we called to love in truth? Who in your life, which individual, or what group, tempts you to pull on that rope, to trip them, rather than to understand? To silence and squash them, rather than to welcome, and receive them, and then, in curiosity, to redirect? 

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union. Grant that we may not so much seek to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

I love the Epistle lesson for today. It’s one of my favorite passages and speaks so deeply to me of my constant desire to do and be good, and my constant inner battle to accomplish that good that I desire. “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… what a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?!” Usually, of course, the thing I’m not-doing is avoiding dessert, or getting out of bed to go for a run, or spending my precious-little unfettered time helping someone rather than binging netflix. 

Oh, but if I leave the passage there, in the place where it’s talking about my little bad habits or guilty pleasures, then it’s castrated. The message Paul seeks to deliver is totally turned lukewarm and inert. And all too often, isn’t this exactly what happens? We interpret Scripture, perhaps as best we can, but in getting it just a little off-kilter, it becomes about eating too many cookies, or giving our time to the poor, rather than the deeper, sinister, actually life-and-death Word that Paul is moved to write and warn his fellow Christians about. 

If sin is just resisting the thing we already hate, then if we just try hard enough, we’ll be fine. If reconciliation is just doing the right thing, we can strong-arm our way into it, and sleep in on Sunday mornings. 

I suspect that each of y’all know that sin is much deeper, much worse, much more insidious, than that. 

So if we turn back to just before this passage starts, a few verses earlier in Romans, we read (in verse 13), “Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions…”

Even when we follow the letter of the law, the law, which is good, Paul says; we don’t know the outcomes of the actions we’re taking, and the straightforward results of following the good rules in this sinful and broken world often lead to more sinfulness, more brokenness, because we ourselves, humans, are a broken mess of sin. Like Paul says, “I am of the flesh, sold under sin.” 

He’s a great example of what I’m talking about, actually: in his great faithful zeal, he persecuted the church. He is infamous for his great power and work in destroying God’s own bride, the fledging group of Christians who followed Jesus in the first century. His Road to Damascus moment — whence came the phrase we now use — revealed to him the way that sin had taken the good desire in his heart to keep the people of God pure and to help others seek holiness, and made it into something used for evil, almost without him even knowing it. He did not understand the implications of his own actions. He did not know what it was that he was really doing to God himself. It’s why Jesus, when he appeared to Paul on that road said, “Paul” (or really, “saul” as his name was at that time), “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” WHat Paul was really doing was tearing down the very kingdom he desired to build. 

This is what sin does. It takes wise, knowledgeable, faithful people and it twists their good work into absolute repugnance. This is what we must admit to, and against which we must pray, and toward which we must show no mercy. The heinous power of sin is to twist and deform the good desires and good intentions and true actions of people into darkness and evil and sickness. And because we’ve tried to be good, to follow the law, to do the right things, when evil and sin take hold and they twist our good, we get defensive, we double down, we refuse the truth of the sin before our eyes. 

That’s what I do when I make this passage to be about eating too many cookies or watching too much tv. This passage is about the power of God over sin and death and darkness and evil. It is not about my willpower. 

Paul shows us that even in our hard trying — even in our willpower, we are programmed in our bodies — as Paul says here, I am of the flesh — to twist it into evil. That — that is sin. Sin is when order turns into oppression. Sin is when beauty turns into a contest. Sin is when diversity becomes a tool for division. When skin color is a way to define “normal,” and when my celebration is more important than your safety. 

This is why, on our own, as humanity, we are hopeless. It is the way of humanity to twist the good, to infect the true, to deform the beautiful. I believe this is why the Gospel passage is so startling, and why I’ve heard it explained as a new way to train your body and soul, but I think that misses the point entirely, again. 

“Come to me, all you that area weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” 

The burdens of Jesus may seem heavy to us — can you imagine anything more onerous than being like Jesus in this sinful and broken world? But the yoke of God is only heavy if we are also still holding on to the sin that causes oppression for some, but supremacy for me, or the understanding of “normal” that puts me in the center and others on the outside, or the definition of beauty that sets me ahead when I’m shopping for a car or walking down the street or saying something in a crowded room. 

The yoke of Jesus is only heavy if we keep hold, too, to the sin that warps it and makes that burden, that yoke, into something that is inside our own system of the world already. 

The burdens and yoke of Jesus is the way that God has *made* the world to function, the grace under which we are *created* to live, the “burden” that our bodies and souls are formed to carry. The yoke of Jesus is the freedom of worshipping him, the burden of God is living in his kingdom, the new Eden (city?). 

Even when we try, we do the thing we hate. We do it wrong. Humanity can’t get it right outside of God’s own hand and work in the world. So we gather, we kneel, we ask God again (and again and again) to make us as members of his own body, as pieces of his own kingdom, bricks in his own house of justice, and truth, and beauty. Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. 

What is this book? What is Scripture? What’s its use to us, what’s its place in our faith and in our life? 

Is it a set of origin myths? Not to be taken as real, but as beautiful stories and analogies to truth. They’re just telling us the history of humanity in the form of story; story is, of course, one of the most powerful tools of communication throughout time. 

Or maybe the point of Scripture is to name and detail the heroes of faith. Like the stories of Roman and Greek and Norse gods, their exploits, their accomplishments, their foibles, and how, through their leadership and formation, the world came to be as it is. 

Is Scripture, perhaps, a moral code, a compass for humanity, gathered up over thousands of years, comprising the “best practices” the greatest wisdom that humanity has been able to come up with over ages?

I do not believe that the Bible is any of these things, or, that it is limited to being any of these things. Scripture is full of misfits; there is not one hero among them. Nobody was born in the right lineage, no one was full of courage, not one was wise with wealth or power of prestige. None of the patriarchs or the characters we know had any kind of squeaky-clean character. Not one. Fight me. 

But that’s exactly the point. Scripture is not about human superheroes. The Bible is not a moral code to keep us hemmed in. The point of Scripture, from the first verse, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” to the last, “the grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.” This book is about Yahweh. About the Almighty God. About the power of the universe, and his revelation of himself, and his love for and relationship with humanity. 

So it is in this context, this spirit, that these Words come to us today. Drops of manna, of nourishing bread, from the mouth of the Lord God, creator, redeemer, sustainer himself. 

Brothers and sisters it is hot, so the message this morning is short and it is simple.

 I don’t know of one person on the face of the earth whose plans for 2020 have not taken a detour. things are not shaping up the way that we thought, and that’s a lesson not only this year but one that we have surely experienced throughout our lives and will do so again. No one plans on divorce. No one expects cancer. No one is prepared to lose their income or their home or their family network. In ways big and in ways small, we face jarring disappointments, frustrating deviations, and dizzying changes every single day. We see through the parable of the sower, at least, that this is nothing new, and perhaps less comfortingly, that change and variability is a constant in earthly life. 

Paired with this parable which promises upset and unpredictability, the lesson from the prophet Isaiah, declares one thing in which humanity and history and all creation can trust: that God’s will cannot be thwarted. Giving voice to God, Isaiah says definitively that God’s purposes, God’s plan, God’s words, will absolutely be accomplished. There is nothing that will come in his way, nothing that can divert him, nothing that might squash him, no way to stymie the Lord of Hosts. 

We see this message threaded through the Gospel passage, too. Despite the sower who casts willy-nilly, and the seeds which land in places unfit for growth, the harvest of God goes forward, and it is miraculously abundant. God gives the growth. It may not be the way we imagined, and it may look different than we thought God’s will would, but we have assurance throughout all of Scripture, and indeed, I would wager, testimonies of assurance sprinkled throughout your own lives. 

There’re a lot of things — most things, I suspect we’ve found — that’re out of our control. There’s very little that we can do to shift the course of history, and only a bit more we can do to shift the course of our own lives. 

Brothers and Sisters, this is a comfort. This truth is a freedom — we haven’t got much of any power anyway, so we might as well do what we can and leave the rest alone. 

One of my favorite psalms says, “I do not concern myself with things too great for me.” It is one I pray often, because it is something that I have a hard time following. 

I have seen over and over in the last months, and continue to have presented to me on a silver platter of uncertainty each day, that we do not know what the future will bring. 

The virus is moving more rampantly across our state, and soon it will be time for school to start again — but what will that look like? We have both students and teachers in our midst, we have working parents and we have those who live alone, who are desperate for contact, for companionship. We are, all of us, stretched to our limits. 

And while I have seen the response of some of my friends, saying, “How can you believe in a God who would let something like this happen?” I have seen all the more in my own life my need and desire for the companionship and the security of the unflumoxable God, the Almighty God, creator of all, revealed in Scripture, made man in Jesus Christ, indwelling in the Holy Spirit. 

As we’ve been reading Jeremiah this month, the hard truths keep landing — the consequences of sin and disobedience weigh heavy, with little relief. But again and again we see in Jeremiah the same thing that we see prophesied in Isaiah, and that is revealed in the parable of the sower: This God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, this God revealed in Jesus Christ, this God who is the bridegroom of the church, whose image is stamped on each human life, whose love alone conquers death, whose kingdom will prevail, is unstoppable. He will accomplish that which he has set out to do, and he will bring all nations to himself, and he will be with you and me, and every living thing till the end of the age. 

Amen.