This one went a little weird on me, but I hope I pulled it home eventually.
Luke 12:49-56; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Psalm 82; Jeremiah 23:23-29
At first listen, these readings make no sense together. Jeremiah warns us about false prophets and tells us to listen to God’s voice. The Psalm is a condemnation of those who oppress the poor and oppressed from their positions of authority. The reading from Hebrews tells us about all kinds of people who had faith, and the gospel of Luke – well, Jesus says some pretty strange things in there.
It feels a bit disjointed, and at first I wondered what in the world the people who made the lectionary were thinking. But the more I thought about it, I realized that part of why everything feels so awkward is that the order is weird.
It’s like the movie Memento. Have any of you ever seen it? It uses a technique called “non-linear storytelling”, where the movie’s plot is, in effect, backwards. There are two overlapping plots, one told forward and one told backwards. You basically spend the whole movie confused until the very end, when the two sequences meet. These readings kind of felt like this.
So let’s start with the Psalm. We’re presented with the image of God in a courtroom, passing judgment on the “gods”. It’s not very clear who the “gods” are, but my guess is that they are earthly rulers – kings and the like – who haven’t been doing their jobs very well. God accuses them of defending the unjust and favoring the wicked, and commands them to instead look after the weak, the orphans, the poor, the oppressed, and the needy and protect them from the wicked and the unjust. Even though they call themselves “gods”, they’re just ignorant humans, destined for death like everyone else.
The people God is judging here have claimed for themselves the wrong message. This is where Jeremiah’s reading fits in; instead of listening to God, they listened to everything else. They heard the lies of the world around them and forgot about God and His commands.
Of course the insidious part is if they’re anything like the people Jesus is referring to in the gospel, they actually think they’re being smart. He basically says they’re being too smart for their own good. They know how to predict the weather based on what they see, but they can’t see how things really are. Instead of treating God like someone close to them, God has become someone far away. God was a concept, not a person.
As an aside, this is something that was quite popular in the 17th an 18th Century. It’s a philosophy called “Deism”. It goes like this: God created everything and instilled in humans the ability to reason. However, God is only revealed through creation, and not through books, not even the Bible; theology; or miracles.
Deism came to be immensely popular, and was followed by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. Jefferson went so far as to edit the Bible to fit better with Deism, which he published under the title The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. The whole idea was that God created the universe and left it to run, leaving a few instructions behind to keep it on the right track.
It’s almost as if when God, through Jeremiah, asks, “Am I only a God nearby, and not a God far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him? Do I not fill heaven and earth?” he is speaking to these Deists. They focused on the far away God, and not the nearby God. In a lot of ways, this philosophy has continued in this country – Americans tend to believe in God, but I don’t think that the God Americans believe in is always the God who created the universe yet still loves every single human enough to die to give us life. The God people seem to believe in is a vague concept of a supreme being who rarely, if ever, interacts with individuals.
This is in direct contrast to the picture of God we get in the letter to the Hebrews. God is not just someone floating in the sky with a big fluffy beard, He interacts with humans on a regular basis. The writer of Hebrews gives us quite the list of names of people who God interacted with, leaving of many, but it’s still pretty good considering its brevity: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses’ parents, Moses, the people of Israel at the Red Sea and Jericho, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, the prophets, and all the other people that didn’t get mentioned.
With the example of all these people, it’s only fitting that the writer of Hebrews then gives us this simple command: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
We have the example around us of so many people who have spent their lives with God – not just following a far away God, but a God who is their friend and comforter. Our faith is not just a belief that there is a God out there somewhere, but that there is a loving God right beside us who hears our prayers, frees us from sin, guides us, strengthens us, and, most of all, calls us his own.