Sermon: God's Chosen Vessel

 Jeremiah 31:31-34
God’s Chosen Vessel

James Sledge                                                                         Lent 5 – March 21, 2021

Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem

I don’t need to tell any of you what a long, difficult year it’s been. Some of us have been separated from family and friends for all that time. Schools have been closed leaving parents to oversee children’s virtual learning. Often, this responsibility has fallen more heavily on mothers, and a disproportionate number of women have had to put careers on hold during the pandemic.

Teachers have been stressed to the max. Figuring out virtual learning, then figuring out hybrid learning, all while worrying about students’ and their own safety.

For some people the loneliness of the pandemic has been overwhelming. Working from home, isolated from others, seeing people only via zoom; it’s all too much. For others, the constant togetherness of couples working at home, children always there, has put incredible stress on relationships.

Then came the murder of George Floyd and waves of protest around the country and the world. The need to reckon with the legacy of slavery, to address the white supremacist foundations of our nation and the white supremacy still woven into the structures of our society: our legal system, churches, educational system, neighborhoods, economy, and so on, pushed its way into our cultural consciousness.

Throw in a little partisan, political dysfunction, a presidential election filled with bizarre conspiracy theories, and an attempted insurrection, and it’s a wonder that our collective mental health isn’t worse than it is.

I’ve had the luxury of being able to go into the office for most of the pandemic, but the stresses of this last year have taken a toll on me, too. When I talk with colleagues, they speak of overwhelming tiredness that no amount of sleep can cure, and I’ve certainly experienced that. I often feel on the edge of burnout, and so I may not have been in the best frame of mind when I listened to the provocative keynote address by Lenny Duncan at the NEXT Church National Gathering, held virtually, of course.

The Rev. Duncan is a Black, Lutheran pastor and author of the book, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US. Duncan doesn’t fit the mold of what many of us think of as a pastor He has been homeless and incarcerated, and his speech is peppered with profanities. But what he had to say was hard to ignore.

Much of it was also hard to hear. He said that while God is always with the oppressed, the church as religious institution inevitably sides with the state against love or any love movement. He said we in the church are far too invested in institution, and that there is a worldwide spiritual awakening going on that the Church barely notices.

But what hit me the hardest was when he said this. “The church on earth is no longer God’s chosen vessel.” He added that this broke his heart, but that didn’t soften the blow much for me. No longer God’s chosen vessel? Could that be true?

I thought about what I’ve said frequently during this pandemic. “The church building is closed but the church is open.” I’ve been quite proud of all the ministry and activity going on here. But if we can be church without the building, what does it mean for us to have so much time and money and energy invested in so much building?

We say we are followers of Jesus, a counter-cultural troublemaker who so ticked off the religious powers and the state that they killed him. If we are his followers then surely we should look a little like him, but we don’t look all that counter-cultural, and we are rarely troublemakers who enrage the powers that be.

_______________________________________________________

I couldn’t help thinking of Lenny Duncan and his critique of church when I saw today’s Old Testament passage from the prophet Jeremiah. If Rev. Duncan says some things church people don’t want to hear, Jeremiah’s words so enraged his audience that he was arrested, imprisoned, and threatened with death on multiple occasions. He was declared a traitor for calling on people not to resist the Babylonians. Israel’s defeat was ordained by God, said the prophet, the natural outcome of their failure to be the people God had called them to be.

Jeremiah justly earned the reputation of a doom and gloom prophet with his constant words of judgment, predictions of defeat and exile, and his attacks on priest and king alike. But the prophet never totally gave up on Israel. His hope wasn’t rooted in some latent goodness in Israel itself. His hope was rooted in the nature of God, and in God’s commitment to Israel and to humankind.

The days are surely coming, says Yahweh, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt — a covenant that they broke… But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says Yahweh: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Israel had a heart problem, a condition that could only be repaired by transforming their hearts. “The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care,” Emily Dickinson famously wrote. But the wants of Israel’s heart had led to destruction. Only transformed hearts whose wants mirrored God’s could make things right.

___________________________________________________________

I wonder how our wants line up with God’s wants, with Jesus’ wants. Ideally, they should be much alike, but the church often cares a lot about status, prestige, and appearance, none of which mattered to Jesus. Especially in these times of church decline, congregations and denominations worry endlessly about institutional survival. We fret over budgets and whether there will be enough money. But Jesus said we should be willing to lose our lives for the sake of the gospel.

Upstanding member of the community is practically a synonym for church membership, but I doubt Jesus was ever referred to by any of those terms. And the word Christian has come to mean little more than halfway decent, as when a neighbor of America’s latest mass murderer said, “They come across as a good Christian family,” 

Like Israel, the church often has a heart problem. Our wants, our desires, our priorities look little like God’s. Perhaps we need God to write on our hearts, to transform them so we want the same sort of things that Jesus did. Perhaps we need to let go of many of our institutional assumptions and conventions and allow Jesus to live and work through us.

That is possible, you know. In his letter to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul talks about the transformation that happens to us through Jesus. He speaks of hope that emerges even in the midst of suffering, adding, and hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

As a result, people who once lived in ways counter to God’s desires have become obedient from the heart, says Paul. The Holy Spirit, the presence of the risen Christ within us, can transform us so that we long to be more like Jesus, so that we do look more and more like Jesus, and the world can see Jesus in us.

That is what it means to be God’s chosen vessel, and that is what we are called to be. Not a religious institution, not a pillar of the community, not a lovely building, but the living presence of the risen Christ who shows the world a different way, a radically counter-cultural way, a way that will cause trouble, the way of Jesus. But that will take transformed hearts.

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Yes, God. Please! Please.