A sermon on Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 & Luke 15:1-10 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

Athol Gill, who was once my professor of New Testament studies, used to say that any gospel that cannot be meaningfully preached in the presence of a woman grieving over her dead child does not deserve to be called gospel. He didn’t just mean that what we preach should offer some sort of comfort, but that the comfort offered cannot be cheap comfort. Anything that is going to be truly gospel in the face of something so terrible must begin by facing up fully to the awfulness in all its horror.

I’m going to do something quite different in tonight’s sermon. I’m going to talk about my preaching, and about what is going on in my preaching lately. I’m not going to entirely ignore the scripture readings we have heard read, but they are not going to be my main focus in the way they usually are.

The reason I’ve decided to talk about my preaching is because several of you have asked me about it in the last couple of weeks. Some of you are now immediately thinking, “Ooh, is that me he’s talking about?” Yes, it probably is, but you’re in good company. It certainly wasn’t just you! And I wasn’t surprised.

The question has been put in a few different ways, but I think I can summarise them by saying that you’ve detected a change in tone in my preaching since I returned from overseas, and it seems a bit dark and doomsday-ish, maybe even a bit despairing. Your observation is not a surprise to me. I’m aware of it too. In fact, I wondered if I might hear from some of you after the first sermon I preached on my return, but it was not until the second and third.

On the other hand, some of you haven’t thought it was such a change. Acacia, for example, said that she remembers me preaching a far more depressing sermon last year. I looked back through the archives, and I think she’s right. I found a sermon in which I spoke about feeling depressed and in which I said “when everything is depressing, maybe depression is just good sense.”

Nevertheless, I think those of you who think there has been a change since I got back from my recent travels are right. It feels like a change to me. I think that what is new is that in all three of those recent sermons, I have said straight out that the world has almost certainly passed the tipping points on both climate catastrophe and political collapse. I’ve said that it is no longer a question of whether we are headed for disaster, but only of how bad it will be. That’s not easy to hear – for me either.

But before I unpack why I have begun saying that, let me point out something else. The blame for doom and gloom sermons recently has to be shared with the Bible itself. On the first Sunday I was back in the pulpit after my return, the Lectionary which sets our Sunday Bible readings began a nine week series on the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah is the longest book in the Bible, even before you add the book of Lamentations which he also wrote, and most of it is grappling with grief, despair and anger over the imminent and now unavoidable destruction of Jerusalem by the expansionist Babylonian empire and their brutal army. When it comes to preaching doom and gloom, my three recent sermons have got nothing on Jeremiah.

The extract we heard tonight would be a perfect set-up for another sermon on climate catastrophe, and I preached that sermon from it six years ago. Jeremiah says:

At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem: A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my poor people, not to winnow or cleanse— a wind too strong for that. …

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;
and to the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro.
I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins …
For thus says the Lord: The whole land shall be a desolation …
Because of this the earth shall mourn,
and the heavens above grow black

And we are observing a four week season of Creation, which invites us to turn our attention to the care of our planet and its ecosystems and to what faithfulness to God the Creator might look like in the midst of the dangers it faces.

Of course, I don’t have to focus my preaching on Jeremiah, and I haven’t. I preached on the gospel passage last week, but Jesus too is quite the apocalyptic prophet at times. The gospels contain large slabs of thoroughly apocalyptic teaching from Jesus, much of which, like Jeremiah, spoke of the imminent destruction of Jerusalem, this time by the Romans, in end-of-the-world terms.

And even apart from those sections, when taken seriously in its context, much of Jesus’s teaching is jarringly bad news before it is good news. Take tonight’s extract from Luke’s gospel for example. The stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin are usually heard by us as wonderfully good news – no matter how lost we are, God will come searching for us until we are found and saved from danger. But we hear it that way because we identify ourselves with the lost sheep in the story and not with the people to whom Jesus was telling the story in its stated context.

Put it back in its context, and the story is a lot harder to stomach. Jesus told this story to people who were feeling outraged over who Jesus was willing to reach out to. So while it is perfectly appropriate to sometimes imagine ourselves as the lost sheep and rejoice in how loved we are, what the story is also asking us to do is identify ourselves with the objectors, and ask which lost sheep would we not want to see Jesus go searching for. And to sharpen that question, Jesus depicts the shepherd as leaving 99 sheep alone in the wilderness while he goes searching for one lost one. He’s leaving us behind for someone else.

So who do we secretly hope will not be saved? Who do we think is so far beyond the pale that the good shepherd should not be leaving us unprotected to go off in search of? Benjamin Netanyahu? Maybe you’re better than me, but I don’t feel okay about Jesus going on a reckless search to try to save him while leaving us alone in the wilderness to take care of ourselves? Vladimir Putin? Donald Trump? What about the local neo-nazis who attacked Camp Sovereignty a couple of weeks ago? This parable is telling me that Jesus is just as eager to seek out and save them as he is to save me. Who wants to hear that? It’s not news that immediately inspires me to rejoice with the angels.

But for all that, I can’t pretend that the shift you’ve noticed in my preaching is simply because of the Bible readings that are coming up at the moment. I’ve been preaching from these Bible readings for 35 years, and I know there has been a shift in recent weeks. So what’s going on?

I could try to answer that question by talking about some of the things I saw and experienced while I was a way, especially in Uzbekistan and Georgia, but the Host Group has asked me to show my photos and tell my stories of Georgia at the conclusion of next Sunday’s AGM, so I don’t want to steal my own thunder. Most of that experience was wonderful and joyous anyway, as you will see, so although there are some connections, it wouldn’t really get to the crux of the change.

So instead of trying to trace the steps and influences, let me try to identify the nature of the change in my own head, in my thinking, and in some decisions I’ve made around that.

The first thing is that I’ve noticed some patterns in the way I respond to much of the really bad news in the world, and I’ve realised that my patterns are quite common. My patterns include distracting myself, and avoiding acknowledging the severity.

I saw an article in the media last week about the phenomena of “comfort viewing” and it quoted a study done last year by a mental health service that found that three quarters of Australians aged 16 to 25 said they felt worried about the future, and that they consumed comforting media as a way to cope. The researcher said “there’s a lot of really negative things going on in the world at the moment and I can appreciate that sometimes you don’t want to hear any more about all that negativity” and rewatching comfortable familiar TV shows and movies “can give you a sense of a world where positive things happen and good things turn out for you.”

Most of the time, I don’t actually watch a lot of TV or movies, but I’ve noticed that I begin to if I slide into a period of depression. A year ago when I preached that sermon Acacia referred to, I was spending quite a bit of time curled upon the couch binge watching a somewhat mindless sit-com. But whether or not that sort of comfort viewing is your thing, the more general point is that many of us cope with our fears about the state of the world by distracting ourselves and not thinking about it too much. 

That, of course, doesn’t make the problems of the world go away. But I notice that I’ve been trying to cope by thinking that the problems are still way off in the future and imagining that someone will find a way to solve them before it’s too late. That’s despite all the evidence that our capacity for the necessary levels of widespread cooperation is falling apart

In another thing I saw in the news media this week, Dr Richard Harris, the famous cave-diving medico, spoke about a growing threat to the groundwater systems on South Australia’s Limestone Coast, and he said “When people start to get thirsty, I think that’s when they’ll really start to take notice that we’ve got a problem.”

I realised that that’s me he’s talking about, instinctively pushing away awareness of the problems until they impact me directly, until it’s me that’s thirsty, and perhaps I’d even still be minimising them then. I remember once when I was still in my teens thinking that we Australians would never tolerate anything that seriously threatened the health of the Great Barrier Reef. The Reef was too iconic and too much a part of who we are for us to ever stand by and watch it die. But here we are, feeling helpless and trying not to think about it.

Despite my best efforts not to think about it, I think I’ve known for some time that the climate crisis is extremely serious. We used to talk about trying to keep global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees, but I don’t know of any reputable climate scientist who still thinks that’s achievable. They pretty much all say we’ve passed the tipping point, and many of them sum it up in much more colourful language: “we’re fucked.” 

That’s not really news. The thing that has shifted for me recently is realising that the coping mechanisms I’ve been employing, and that many others have been employing too, are not actually helping us to cope at all. Denying, deflecting, distracting, and refusing to think about it are actually making us sick. Not only are our coping strategies allowing the problems continue to escalate, but we are seeing widespread rapidly escalating mental health problems. I’m not suggesting that all mental health issues have this one cause, but I’m pretty sure that the emotional effort of trying to suppress a growing sense of dread is a significant factor for many. We can’t find healthy ways of dealing with a dread about which we are still in denial. It festers inside and makes us sick.

That brings me back to that quote from Athol Gill about grieving mothers. If we are looking for good news, for a word of comfort, it had better not be cheap comfort. Cheap comfort is just another form of distraction or denial. We need a gospel that begins with taking seriously the horror of the apocalypse we are facing, the apocalypse that both Jeremiah and Jesus spoke of regularly. That doesn’t mean that we should binge on bad news; moderating our intake is probably an important part of healthy self-care. But we need a gospel that breaks through our denial and acknowledges the reality we are facing, because only then will we begin to be able to hear what the Spirit is calling us to do in response. 

I totally believe that there is seriously good news, that Jesus is calling us into the fullness of life. But I know I won’t recognise or understand that call as long as I’m curled up on the couch distracting myself with the cheap sit-com version of fullness of life. 

I have decided that in order to be healthy and hopeful, I need to quit denying and distracting and start being unflinchingly honest about the perilous state of the world I live in. Jesus comes to save us, but I won’t be able to recognise what that means as long as I am in denial about the horror that we need to be saved from. 

So initially, I’ve decided to do that for the sake of my own health and discipleship, but I’m a preacher too, and I don’t want my preaching to be doing what I’ve come to see is not healthy. I don’t want to be preaching cheap comfort. I want to preach good news that is worthy of the name because it speaks truth and hope into our world as it actually is.

From the conversations I’ve had with a few of you recently, I know that there are some of you who have seen past the “new gloom” in my preaching, and noticed that there is also a new hope and promise, a new positive vision of healthy discipleship and a shared life of beauty in the midst of a world in crisis. I hope that that will come through more and more clearly, because it is certainly a big part of the shift that I think is happening for me. 

But I know from my own experience that when I’m hearing truths that I don’t really want to hear, I find it hard to keep listening and hear where the message might go from there. If you can hang in there with me, I believe that the journey we can take together is a journey into the fullness of life and love that God has prepared for us. But I do understand that the shift in the way I am trying to preach that is jarring for many of us. For me too. 

God has not abandoned us. Both Jeremiah and Jesus were unflinchingly honest about the doom we had brought on ourselves, but both of them could also see beyond that to the new life that God was beckoning us into. I’m no Jeremiah or Jesus, but I will endeavour to do my best to similarly preach that vision of the life and beauty that springs up like a colourful wildflower through the cracks in the crumbling concrete. I hope and pray that we can live into that together.

For anyone wanting some more help to think through these issues, I recommend a recent book I have been finding super helpful, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, by Brian McLaren (Hodder & Stoughton 2025)