A sermon on Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; & Luke 16:1-9 by Geoff Leslie

There is a new frightening type of person in the world today: the culture warrior. Please try not to become one of these, we need culture healers not culture warriors.  Social media is creating an increasingly polarised world. People are forming into tribes and especially there is the so-called Woke tribe on the left, and there are the Right Wing people who range from conspiracy theorists to Christian nationalists to what some call Right Wing Nut Jobs.  From the point of view of those on the right, the Woke are destroying our culture and eroding our morals.  From the point of view of those on the left, the Right-wingers are destroying the planet and continuing the oppression and rejection of women, ethnic groups, and first nations people.

Truth is, it’s killing us. The divide is so vicious, people are truly hating their opponents and the community is losing trust and supportiveness. The people who pursue one or other of these ideologies we call ‘culture warriors’.  It gets so that the issues come in a package.  If I know you support equality of women, then I can assume you support gay marriage and electric cars. You’re woke. If I know you voted ‘No’ in the Voice, then I can assume you will hate wind turbines and are worried about migrants. 

Not only that, when we identify with the extreme left or right, we inherit a list of people we are to hate. We project all the badness in the world onto these enemies and then we feel like we are the righteous ones. We are good, even though we are abusive and rude, because those others are just so bad. The Left hate authoritarians, wealthy elites, climate wreckers, for example, and the Right hate the ABC, trans people, unionists, minorities for example.  When you put it like that you can see how it is an unhelpful way to be in this world. But our social media tries to recruit us to one or other of these positions.

Today is the Equinox. In Winter, the darkness is longer and stronger than the light; in Summer the opposite – days are long, nights are short, temperatures are high.  At the Equinox, there is a balance. The sun rises and sets at 6, approximately.

In a democracy, all voices get a say. In a loving, safe community, different voices are listened to and we allow other points of view to affect us. We don’t shoot them. We don’t hunt them down and defund them. We seek to be loving communities of healing and embrace.  It’s getting harder and rarerto be that kind of community and if the churches become garrisons of culture warriors, they have fallen short of God’s call on their lives. It may seem a long bow but in a troubled world full of catastrophe, I think today’s readings give us 3 alternative ways we can resist the dividing forces and find ways to reach balance and equality like the equinox.

1. Tears Jeremiah 8:18-9:1

Jeremiah is one of the most powerful prophets who spoke at a time just before the destruction of Jerusalem, and he kept on telling the people that destruction by the Babylonians was inevitable and any time soon. But unlike most prophets, in this book we get occasional glimpses of how it affects him to be the bearer of such bad news. There is a series of poems where he cries out to God about how he feels, about how distressing he is finding his role. They’re called the Confessions of Jeremiah. (I wrote an essay on them once.) And this passage in chapter 8 is the first. Up till now his words have been full of anger, terror, threats and condemnation about how terrible the people are and how much they deserve what is coming to them. Suddenly he stops and tells us a different perspective.

I drown in grief. I’m heartsick.
Oh, listen! Please listen! It’s the cry of my dear people reverberating through the country.
Is God no longer in Zion?  Has the King gone away?
The crops are in, the summer is over, but for us nothing’s changed.
We’re still waiting to be rescued.
For my dear broken people, I’m heartbroken.    
I weep, seized by grief.
Are there no healing ointments in Gilead?  Isn’t there a doctor in the house?
So why can’t something be done to heal and save my dear, dear people?
I wish my head were a well of water and my eyes fountains of tears
So I could weep day and night for casualties among my dear, dear people.

Jeremiah has stopped the judgment, the criticism and the threats and has burst into tears.  Richard Rohr has a new book out which is on the NYT bestseller list called The Tears of Everything. It is about the prophets and he reckons they go through stages of growing up.  They start with anger but he says behind all anger is grief and sorrow.  They are angry at injustice, oppression and stupidity (but anger can pass on the hurt in ever new directions and injure our own souls – it is killing our postmodern world). Anger turns to tears turns to compassion turns to a vision for how to find a new and better way.

Weeping acknowledges the tragic reality; it sees that beneath the surface there is imperfection, incompleteness, woundedness. 

So he sees the people that he’s been castigating are actually broken and wounded. He doesn’t hate them.  He hurts for them. They had such hopes and they are so disappointed. They wear the name of God and that should mean their lives are a brilliant testimony to the blessings that flow from following God’s law – instead their world is a wreckage and people are saying, ‘Where is your God? I thought God was supposed to give his people a better life? Has he gone away?’

Jeremiah started with anger and judgment. But here we begin to see a change. The anger of the opening chapters turns to weeping. This new mood will swing in and out as he continues to preach about the imminent destruction, but it shows he is finding how God feels.  God weeps for broken people also. And Jeremiah comes to realise that beyond the destruction, there will be reconstruction, restoration, a ‘nevertheless’, a point beyond the doom to a grasp of God’s everlasting love and our possibility of praise and hope in a future with God. Eg 31:3 “The Lord appeared to me and said, I love you with an everlasting love. I will continue to show you my faithful kindness. I will build you up and you will be rebuilt, O Israel.”

In fact, the destruction did take place, the great Babylonian empire destroyed the Temple in 587 BC and took many people away as exiles.  But Jeremiah’s accurate warnings, and his assurance that God would be with them in exile and would bring them back, helped Israel to enter a stunning transformation.  Without a king, without a land, without a Temple, they could be faithful followers, a worshipping community, a people of prayer and holiness. They could read Scripture together and sing the songs of Zion.  

I think this is relevant to us today. Culture warriors are at the immature stage of anger. The Right hate the Woke and the Left hate the climate-denialists. We can get so angry at the madness in the world, the injustice, the stupidity, the cruelty.  But in both cases that anger has to turn to tears, don’t get mad; learn to weep and listen for what God would have us do. Beyond the tears, we can look for the path to recovering community and hope as we trust in God and work together.

So the first strategy for being a community of hope and love not culture warriors. Is to turn our anger to tears.

2. Prayers and Compassion: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

In 1 Timothy we are told another strategy for the believers to cling to when times get rough.

“First of all, I encourage you to make petitions, prayers, intercessions and prayers of thanks for all people, for rulers and for everyone who has authority over us. Pray for these people so that we can have a quiet and peaceful life lived in a godly and reverent way….For God our Saviour wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

During Covid lockdown I carefully led prayers in church for Dan Andrews and Scott Morrison. I don’t care what side of politics they are on, our happiness and wellbeing depend on these people and the decisions they make. We need to pray for them, not hate them.

Those people you hate – God loves them and wants to save them. It’s going to take some work in this life and the next, but everyone is salvageable.  He goes on to say, There is one God and there is one mediator between God and humans – a human, Christ Jesus. He sacrificed himself for all people to free them from their sins.’  I’m not making this up. The text says God wants to save everyone.

So often we have an ‘us and them’ mentality. I boldly claim an ‘us and them’ mentality when I’m watching football. I want my side to whip the opposition. But God is not a one-sided barracker. And we need to develop that love and empathy for people we disagree with so we can act with humility and kindness and they can ‘come to a knowledge of the truth’ – this truth that God aches for them.

This is the second strategy for a healthier mindset in our communities;  turn your politics into prayers.  Remember God wants everyone at the table, who are we to think some are unworthy.

3. The shocking disruption of debt forgiveness: Luke 16:1-10

And finally a word about the Gospel story. This is a story of a steward who was the business manager of a rich man’s estate and he’s about to get the sack. He says (my favourite verse): I’m too old to dig and too proud to beg.  So he calls in his master’s debtors and offers them partial debt reduction, knowing that in a world of reciprocity, he will have friends when he gets laid off who will help him during his time of crisis.

It’s not easy to know how to take this story – the man is a crook. He’s playing loose with the boss’ business, costing the rich man some of his profits. But he himself is not profiting financially; he profits relationally with the debtors. And the rich man is probably mad at him, but he admires his shrewdness and Jesus commends him as well. He says it’s not the sort of thing good people do, it’s an act of calculated risk. He implies that maybe we ought to take that attitude.  

The world has all these rules about money and mostly they work to keep the rich rich and the poor poor.  But what if we started to think about money as a way to improve relationships.  In a world where every debt has to be paid and there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and many friends and families fall out over debts and loans, in such a world it is extremely powerful to forgive a debt. It is disruptive, unexpected, it breaks the power of Mammon (the name for the god of Money that Jesus coins in verse 13)

Jesus has other stories about debtors and forgiveness and he urges his followers to be debt forgivers. Cf Lord’s Prayer (in Luke): forgive us our sins as we forgive our debtors. Maybe you are the bank of Mum and Dad for someone and repayment is really hurting them. Consider what debt forgiveness will do to that relationship.  It’s your money, yes, but don’t let the rules of Mammon ruin your life. Think about eternal life and eternal friendships.

Replace ruthlessness with generosity. Use your money to bless. Practise some debt forgiveness

So let me bring all these things together. The world is in a time of crisis right now: climate crisis, polarisation of politics and military build-ups everywhere.  We make it worse when we jump on a Left of Right bandwagon. The church ought to be safe and interesting and brave and countercultural. What can we do?  

Turn hate and judgment into tears: acknowledging our own woundedness and that of those who are acting badly.
Turn resentment into prayers: praying for the world day and night till earth and heaven are reconciled.
Turn financial power into generosity: disrupting the god of Mammon by caring more about relationships than the rules of money.  

Together we can build communities of faithfulness, love, prayer and friendship that will abide when other things crumble.