Readings: Jeremiah 28:5-9; Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42
Collect: Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.
This morning’s Collect alludes to a famous passage from the epistle of Ephesians: “So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone” (Eph 2:19-20). It’s figuratively a Temple that God is building within us, and the temple is built of living people, from the foundation up. The Collect expresses the hope that the Church might be “joined together in unity of spirit” by the teaching of the apostles, the prophets, and of Jesus himself. Unity in the church is a thing fervently to be desired, but it's not always easy to see how to get there. One reason is that the truth is not always clear, God's will is not always revealed, and we nevertheless have to decide what we’re going to do.
The passage in Jeremiah, our first reading this morning, is part of a story about two prophets. In ancient Israel, prophets were poets, historians, political advisors, preachers. They claimed to be mouthpieces for God. The two prophets here are Jeremiah and Hananiah. They each claim to have a message from God, but disagree with one another about what the message is.
At issue is what the nation should do about the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. In 598 BCE, the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem for the first time. They killed the king, Jehoiachim; they took his son, Jehoiachin, into exile in Babylon; and then they installed a puppet king, named Zedekiah. They plundered the royal palace and the temple. They also took around ten percent of the Judean population — the affluent, the educated, skilled laborers — as exiles to Babylon, leaving Zedekiah and the remaining people to limp along as well as they could.
In the 11 years that followed, Hananiah and others began to prophesy that God was going to save Jerusalem miraculously from the Babylonian yoke. Jeremiah, conversely, had been telling people to submit to the Babylonians peaceably, not to rebel, because God had called Nebuchadnezzar “my servant” (a title he shares with Moses and King David) and was now fighting on his behalf. In one memorable episode, Jeremiah was walking around with a yoke on his neck, to signify that the remaining people would be put to hard service like oxen. Hananiah saw that, and very dramatically shattered the yoke, proclaiming that God will return the exiles and the treasures from Babylon because God was going to fight for his people. No doubt Hananiah and his audience believed that God spoke through him.
So that's the background for the text from Jeremiah that we read this morning. Hananiah predicts peace and prosperity. Amen, hallelujah, Jeremiah says; would that it should be so! But he doesn't believe it. Jeremiah castigates the prophets and priests who comfort the people with “peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jer 6:14; 8:11). So here we’re presented with a story about prophets who predict opposite outcomes. If we grant that God might communicate with people, and if we think that God’s communication might be good to pay attention to, then there’s a problem: to which prophet do we listen?
One answer the Bible gives is: “Problem? There’s no problem”: when a prophet speaks words that don’t come true, of if the prophet leads people to worship false gods, then that’s a false prophet (Deut 13:1-5; 18:19-22). Simple, right? Well, it’s not so simple. For one thing, if a prophet (or let’s say, an investment professional) recommends a course of action — maybe she says buy Bitcoin — you have to make your decision about whether to invest before you can test whether the prophecy is true. Or rather, buying the bitcoin is the test of whether the prophecy is true. The Israelites recognized this problem too. I could show you lots of stories in the Bible that deal with just this problem. There’s a story in 1 Kings chapter 13 in which a prophet lies to another prophet and gets him to disobey God’s command so that he’s eaten by a lion. In the story of Jonah, God gives the prophet a warning for the people of Nineveh, but when the people repent, the prophets’ message proves to be different than his prediction. By Deuteronomy’s rule, Jonah should have been put to death. Ezekiel castigates the prophets for prophesying out of their own imaginations (Ezek 13:2ff). In other words, Jeremiah’s conflict with Hananiah is actually part of a known sub-genre in the Bible. Jeremiah finds himself siding with prophets like Amos who saw nothing but judgment in store; Hananiah sides with prophets like Nahum, who prophesied that God would come — to save Judah, and in judgment on Babylon and its allies.
In our world, too, we are pulled from every side by people who claim that they have divine or arcane knowledge. I guess I am here claiming that God might speak to you from me. Priests and pastors and politicians and pundits all claim that they have special insight into the nature of the universe and of God's involvement with it. But the problem is that they don't agree with one another. One person’s absurdity is another person’s self-evident truth. The way before us is not clear; so what do we do?
Here Matthew’s gospel can provide some guidance: we don’t always know whether the preacher is right, but we can give a warm welcome and a smile. When we reach out in hospitality, we undermine the judgmental feeling that we have to be right and the others have to be wrong. Maybe you don’t feel the need to be right all the time, but I do anyway. Yet, when we reach out to others in love, that doesn’t eliminate the disagreements we have, but it renders them subordinate to the relationship we share. Whenever we welcome someone, we’re welcoming Christ Himself. Whenever we receive a prophet or a righteous person, someone who deserves a reward from God, the reward extends to us. And even if someone gives just a little cold water to the smallest or the least or the outcast, that act is sufficient. Our charity, to use a somewhat archaic but a beautiful word, matters much more than our doctrine.
Now I’m afraid that you’ll hear me saying that beliefs are less important than hospitality and then think that all beliefs are equally subjective and therefore unimportant. Not so. Maybe I can’t decide whether the optimists or the pessimists are right, but so what? Maybe it doesn’t matter so much who gets elected to public office or which religious voices are in power, or what kinds of transportation we use, or who we love, or what foods we eat. As important as those things can be, they are subordinate to the beloved community that God is forming into a temple for God’s true presence. The Collect’s claim is that the teachings of the apostles and prophets are tools to God uses for His building project, so long as the project itself is kept in view. Heed the prophets and learn from the apostles, or argue with them, but do not neglect to be hospitable to everyone who needs it. Because it is this very charity that is the Church’s mission and character, a temple, holy and acceptable to God.
“We are one in the Spirit; we are one in the Lord. And we pray that our unity may one day be restored. And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
