George A. Mason
Royal Lane Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas
25 June 2023
4th Sunday after Pentecost
(George's sermon starts at 36:55.)
The opening stanza of William Butler Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming, begins this way:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats wrote that more than a hundred years ago, but it could just as well have been 100 minutes ago, right? That’s the way we think of our current situation. Whether the state of the world is actually terrible in this moment or that may depend upon what state in the world you are living in at the moment. (I’m looking at you Texas and Florida!) Still, it’s not hard to feel and fear today that the center may not hold, that antidemocratic forces are tearing things apart at the seams, that no one is looking out for the weak and vulnerable, that character no longer counts when power is on the line.
And this was certainly true in Judah at the end of the 7th Century BCE. A century earlier, the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians and were scattered about the empire, which is where the whole Lost Ten Tribes of Israel lore started. Judah was just a few miles down I-35 from there; I mean, not even as far as between two Buc-ee’s stops, don’t you know?! The Assyrians seemed poised to capture Jerusalem, too, and why they retreated is a mystery of history that the powers in the Southern Kingdom ascribed to … wait for it … Judah exceptionalism. Sound familiar? God specially favored the state of Judah and so protected them and not their northern tribesman.
Here's a handy-dandy rule of thumb: any time national hubris rises, justice declines. When you think you are living under a divine blanket of approval, you easily lose your moral bearings.
And that’s where prophets like Jeremiah come in. He sees that Judah is in more trouble than they know. He sees how the people are drawn to pagan gods that promise personal prosperity and political protection but have no power to deliver either one.
Get your worship wrong and your ethics follow. When religion is rooted in getting God to do things for you instead of getting you to do things for God, look out—you’re in the danger zone. You will ignore the cries of the poor, fail to care for the stranger in your midst, and try to tell a false narrative of history to justify your self-interest. Again, sound familiar?
All this was true when Jeremiah felt called by God to prophesy about the impending doom coming upon the people because they had turned away from the ways of the law God had laid out for them. His preaching was not well received.
We pick up the story with a poem of complaint we now call a jeremiad, named for the prophet. Jeremiah had been doing his part, speaking up as he should, and the chief official in the house of the Lord—let’s just call him the chair of deacons for fun, shall we?—had him put him in stocks at the Benjamin Gate, where he became a laughingstock.
Jeremiah tells God off. Accuses God of enticing him or seducing him into the ministry only to abandon him when things got tough.
Most preachers with even an ounce of prophetic courage know that feeling. Sometimes we talk about God’s call with language that sounds like we are being mugged. You know, we have to “surrender to the ministry”; as if God’s got a knife to our back if we don’t give up and give in. Most of us, though, are drawn into this calling more by seduction than assault. We heard the guitar and smelled the campfire and thought it was the Holy Ghost in the smoke. (Pass it on.) We felt helpless to do anything but commit, the way you feel when you fall in love and can’t help yourself. You just know there’s a connection deep within you that makes it futile to fight.
And yet, like Jeremiah, we sometimes wish we could. We feel compelled to cry, Violence and destruction! We see women’s rights to health care being taken away, forcing them to bear unwanted pregnancies that too often begin with violence and would lead to emotional and economic destruction. We cry out for justice. We see friends of color or gay or transgender siblings finally finding their voices to tell their stories, to set the record straight about their history, and they are met with silencing sanctions from those who are afraid of being woke to the truth. We cry out for justice. We see desperate human beings who look just like us but who lost the geographic lottery of where they were born and when they try to migrate to feed their families and find safety from those who would kill them or their children if they stayed in their home countries, we treat them as criminal invaders. We cry out for justice.
And every time we cry out prophetically for justice, those who profit by keeping things the way they are feel betrayed by us, try to discredit us, and sometimes mock us for doing so. They prefer that we lack all conviction that differs from theirs.
And honestly, that is tempting for preachers who serve stately churches like ours that appear to be crowning achievements of culture. I know this strikes close to home for both our churches—Royal Lane and Wilshire, but I’m afraid our architecture looks suspiciously like a nod to the plantations of old. The temptation for preachers is to play to the powers, not to challenge them. And after all, we like to be liked, too. Who doesn’t?
I have a new book coming hot off the presses this Tuesday. A book of my sermons from my Wilshire years. Not that you would want to buy it, of course, but it is available at Amazon and wherever else you order your books. (See what I did there?) Well, the commentary editor at the Dallas Morning News sent me some questions this week for an upcoming piece about the book and the practice of preaching. One question he put to me was this: When you're preparing a sermon, what are you aiming for? Poetry? Education? A poke in the ribs? Well, check, check, check. Already in this sermon, you’ve had some of all three. But the truth is, that last one is hardest—the poke in the ribs. Preachers know what it costs us every time we do it. And frankly, because it hurts us as much as you to do it, we would rather hold our tongues. (I sound like my father here just before administering a good spanking.)
But with Jeremiah, we know the feeling of having a burning fire shut up in our bones. We can’t not speak.
You are blessed to have a pastor who can’t not speak the truth. You have called a woman with a burning fire shut up in her bones. Victoria knows what it’s like to feel diminished and discredited. She knows how hard it is to speak troubling words. My God, she ought to get a break after all it took for her to get here. She should be able to enjoy the blessing of just being called pastor without having to climb behind this sacred desk and call out violence and destruction when she sees it. But you are blessed to have such a prophet among you. We are all blessed.
And yet, why should it just fall to the paid Christians to do this work? Doesn’t our tradition claim the priesthood of all believers? And doesn’t that priesthood include prophethood, too? Did not Moses tell Joshua, Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put [the] spirit on them? And did Joel not prophesy, and Peter not declare at Pentecost, that God would pour out God’s Spirit upon all flesh, and that your sons AND DAUGHTERS (Southern Baptists!) shall prophesy? And that the same would be said of enslaved persons—both men and women, as well as young and old. In other words, everybody and every body.
Which brings me to this question for you today in this beloved community of loosely, likeminded liberals: Do you not feel some burning fire shut in your bones that makes you want to cry out? Why is it that the worst are full of passionate intensity and the best lack all conviction? When did we get that idea that being nice in the face of violence and destruction is the godly path to change?
Adam Sorkin’s version of To Kill a Mockingbird conceals this critique of mild-mannered, well-meaners who always look for the good in people who do evil and make excuses for them. Atticus Finch is the kindly lawyer who can’t seem to get riled up at his racist neighbors because he thinks it's better to excuse them than accuse them. Sorkin’s rendition of the play essentially asks the question: “Is tolerating intolerance a virtue?” In a powerful scene, Atticus defends his non-confrontational approach by saying: I believe in being respectful. To which his Black housekeeper and friend, Calpurnia, retorts, No matter who you’re disrespectin’ by doing it.
Jeremiah understood in his bones that he had to stand with and speak for those who were being hurt, and that always means against those who are hurting them. It doesn’t mean dehumanizing them in the process; it does, however, mean calling them to repent and make amends, which is the only way they themselves can regain their humanity.
So, we’re all on board now, right? We’re all going to run right out and speak for right. Here’s the warning for all you would-be prophets that I hope to have now worked into a lather for justice: they’ll say, some of them, that you are serving Beelzebul, that you are an agent of Satan. (Literally been told that myself in my own church office by a dear, nasty sister in Christ. Go figure.) What’s more, you may find yourself at odds with family members, too. The people who love you most will come against you—out of love, of course. And all because they want peace and quiet more than peace and justice.
But here are two beautiful things you learn when you refuse to keep the burning fire shut up in your bones: one, God has not abandoned you after all; and two, there are new friends waiting for you on the other side.
The Lord is with me like a terrifying warrior, Jeremiah says after complaining that God didn’t prevent his suffering. He learned what we can only learn about God’s faithfulness by going through the pain, not by avoiding it.
And then, a new community awaits you of those who will honor your faithfulness rather than criticize it. As the psalmist said, Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning. And among those joys that come the morning after, are people—people like, well, look around, people like you who make it all worthwhile.
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