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Jeremiah from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel |
Reckless Lies
Week of Monday August 16, 2004
Lectionary Readings
Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:1-2, 8-19
Jeremiah 23:23-29
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56
Across the street from our house my neighbor's beat up Pontiac sports a clever bumper sticker: "Don't believe everything you think." This was the unhappy but divine message that God called the prophet Jeremiah (650–580 BC) to speak to the religious and political leaders of his own nation. The lectionary for this week from Jeremiah 23:23–29 is but a snippet from a long, depressing and in some ways frightening section which in my Bible is headed "Lying Prophets" (23:9–40).
To the prophets, priests and kings of Judah, Jeremiah proclaimed what sounded like an unpatriotic, seditious, and judgmental message: "Stop giving our people reckless lies and false hopes. Stop betraying them with your message of comfort and hope. Destruction is just around the corner." With biting irony and bitter sarcasm Jeremiah compared the words of Judah's false prophets to the pagan predictors of Baal. Their actions were worse than Sodom and Gomorrah (23:13–14). He ridiculed their message to the people as "false hopes" and "reckless lies" (23:16, 32). Like a "false dream" (23:32) they assured Judah that everything was fine, when, in fact, they were about to awaken to a genuine nightmare of national destruction. To speak so bluntly, wrote Jeremiah, made his heart break and his bones tremble (23:9).
For his twenty-three years of faithfulness to God's call upon his life (25:3), Jeremiah got what we would expect. He was beaten (20:2), received death threats (26:8), imprisoned (37:15), thrown down a well (38:6), and derided as an unpatriotic crank and traitor. Almost no one listened to him, but in the end history proved him right, and you can read about it in any eighth grade history book. In 586 BC Babylon ravaged Judah and Jerusalem, just like Jeremiah had warned, and despite all the reckless lies and false hopes of the lying prophets and priests.
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Icon of Jeremiah |
The crux of the false prophets's message was self-aggrandizement and denial: "No harm will come to you!" (23:17). Every once in a while, I think about our many modern day myths, truisms and slogans, propagated by both church and culture at large, that play to my own selfishness. The French sociologist Jacques Ellul thought of these as "commonplaces," deeply entrenched beliefs that only a curmudgeon would question, but which, unhappily, also happen to be false. Like junk food, they taste great, but in the end they will kill you.
Here's are a few contemporary "reckless lies and false hopes" that I love to love. You might try your own hand at this.
* I deserve perfect health or the medicine to get me there.
* I am entitled to all the passionate sex that the tabloids describe and the movies depict.
* There is a solution to every problem that I have (if only I pray hard enough).
* I would be happier in a bigger house in a better location.
* I would be happier in a smaller house, or a newer house (less work), or an older house (more charm).
* I wouldn't be such a mess if it were not for my family of origin.
* I would find more fulfillment in a different job.
* My kids should enjoy straight teeth, the best universities, challenging jobs, financial success, model marriages, and otherwise make me proud.
* Wired magazine assures me of the beneficent powers of technology.
* From The Prayer of Jabez I expect "a front row seat in a life of miracles."
* I will give more when I get a little more. Just a little more, enough to be secure.
* Fill in the blank on sports, leisure, vacations, wealth creation, the boss, your spouse, politics, in-laws, etc.
Aware of how often I prove St. Augustine's definition of sin as "the heart curved in on itself," I think of my neighbor's bumper sticker and ask God to help me not to believe everything I think (and pray and hope).
The text from the epistles this week (Hebrews 11:29–12:2) is just the tonic I need to combat the sickness that Jeremiah diagnosed. Normally, I read this great chapter 11 of Hebrews as a sort of hall of fame. It is replete with people of faith who did exploits for God, "conquering kingdoms, shutting the mouths of lions, and quenching the fury of flames" (11:33–34). But this week I read more closely and carefully, and I discovered a different category of saints. Alongside these mighty saints who "gained what was promised" (11:33), in two verses I read of many saints who "did not receive what had been promised" (11:13, 39). Here is how the latter saints are described: "Others were tortured...some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated—the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and in holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised" (11:35–39). These saints would have been right at home with Jeremiah; they would not have equated or confused their personal fortune with their Christian faith.
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Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem, by Rembrandt |
I have grown more circumspect in my journey with Jesus as I battle the "sweet dreams" and "reckless lies" of today's false prophets. I resonate when Kathleen Norris laments how little we like being told that conversion is a lifelong process, and not something I can cross off my list next week, next month or even next year. Norris reminds me of Irena, one of my students at Moscow State University, who once remarked in class, "You Americans make being a Christian sound so simple and easy; for us Russians it is more difficult." Or again, for every nagging question that keeps me awake at night staring at the ceiling, St. Chrysostom (354–407) reminds me that "we do not know wholly even what is given in part, but know only a part of a part." I then rest a little easier in my ignorance. To take a third example, I don't like to admit it, but I find Saint Augustine's (354–430) prayer true to my own experience: "Lord Jesus, don’t let me lie when I say that I love you...and protect me, for today I could betray you." It is, St. Augustine observed, a very short step from loving God to lying to him. So, I honor those many believers who "did not receive the things promised," at least not in this life, and who did not succumb to the "sweet dreams and reckless lies" of false prophecy.
I think we want to live Christianly somewhere between the two Bens. If you surf your cable television you will find the televangelist Benny Hinn, who comes perilously close to peddling what Jeremiah might call the "false hopes" of name it and claim it. That is, all the many promises and blessings of God are yours for the asking, here and now, just pray in faith. The lectionary text from Hebrews reminds us that the "already" of God's coming kingdom is, for now, tempered by the "not yet." At the opposite extreme, I just read Walter Isaacson's wonderful biography of Ben Franklin. This Ben was some sort of deist. He had a firm belief in a benevolent deity, but his god was an absentee landlord who did not stoop to dirty himself in the petty affairs of every day life. Don't expect this Ben's god to intervene in your life much, if at all. That too is a "reckless lie." Don't listen to either Ben. Jeremiah would say that God's word comes to both of them like a fire to straw or a sledge hammer to rocks (23:29). Rather, whether God calls you to endure floggings or suffer torture, to tame lions or quench flames, pray to be "commended for your faith" regardless of your circumstances (Hebrews 11:39).
