Faithfulness In A Jar

Text: Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
Theme: Faithfulness in A Jar
The Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
September 26, 2010
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
The Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

+In the Name of Jesus+

The first few words of today’s message are directed to the dear members of First Presbyterian Church of Denton right here and right now: You are to be affirmed; you are to be commended; you are to be complimented; you are worthy of your high fives; you are to be congratulated for a very good reason: you have sat in these pews, a number of you at the same place, for many Christmases, Easters, numerous Sundays, and countless years. You have heard the Word of God proclaimed from this pulpit time and time again. Even if the minister is moving around the chancel and up and down the aisles, at least the pulpit still stand there like the Word of God: fixed and immoveable. “The grass withers; the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever,” the Scriptures declare. You have heard sermons, homilies, meditations, messages. Some were great; some were good; some were average, some were sub-par, some – you might have said on your way home – “just plain stunk”. We remember that the speakers that have stood here were and are very human.

Now, to members, visitors, guests, and all of you: as this new pastorate begins, I pledge to proclaim the Word of God to the best of my ability, to rightly handle the Word of truth; to put forth the Law of God in all its severity and the Gospel in all its sweetness; to share the advent of the kingdom of God in the world and among us. As far as my sermons are concerned, I have a personal goal. I’ll use a baseball metaphor to describe it. From this pulpit, I will rarely hit a grand slam; occasionally I may hit a home run. Of course, I’ll take a triple or a double. But my hope is that I can at least get “on base” with you each and every week. In addition, I want you to know that I hope be a kind of spiritual janitor, used by God, to clear away the crap, so that the gentle and powerful Spirit of Jesus Christ can come into your lives and do the gentle and powerful work that the gentle and powerful Spirit of Christ does.

As hard as it is to believe, we’re actually less than three months away from Christmas. Remember with me that first verse from the Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light.
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

Don’t leave it at Christmas Eve, take it one step further. The “hopes and fears” of all the years are met every time you and I gather in this place and at this hour. We bring our hopes, and we ask: will they materialize? We bring our fears, and we ask: will they be realized? We bring our sins, and ask: will they be pulverized or sanitized? We bring our souls, and ask: will they be mesmerized? We bring our faith, and we ask: will it be galvanized? We bring our lives, and we ask: will they be energized? About the last thing we want is to leave feeling demoralized.

Periodically, like I shared with the children, it’s important to review some basics – as I did with the robe and stole. The same goes with preaching. What’s the point of preaching when you get right down to it? Is it to be talked at or preached at for no less than fifteen minutes and no more than twenty five? I heard the story of a minister who got up to preach the Sunday sermon. On that day, he delivered the entire Sermon on the Mount of Jesus Christ – found in Matthew’s Gospel, chapters 5-7 – by memory. At the end, one older worshipper said to a person sitting close by, “That was nice, but I wish he would have preached a real sermon!” What is a real sermon? Is it religious entertainment with a few select Bible passages thrown in to show we’re not kidding around? In these days of entertainment evangelism, it’s a good question to ask.

I heard an ad on the radio about a big gathering in Dallas coming up. We even got a piece of mail on it here in the office. A bunch of famous folks are getting together on stage for a seminar on success. Laura Bush, Troy Aikman, Rudy Guiliani, Robert Schuller, Zig Ziglar, and General Colin Powell are among the notables scheduled to appear. I’m sure some good ideas on success will be shared. Carrying that forward, is that what a sermon is supposed to do, to give you some good ideas on how to be a successful Christian in today’s world? People today talk about having not enough time for this or that; they say that they have “a lot on their plate.” They do; I’m not denying that at all. But does the worth of the Christian message consist in how well it delivers time management techniques? Is the point of a sermon to keep the current members coming and, I might add, giving? Is the goal to draw a bigger crowd while we keep an eye on our counterpart down the street and hope that maybe someday we, too, can have Denton Police officers direct traffic out of our packed parking lot?

This past Monday I met a man whose father is a minister at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano. I told him that last Sunday I was ordained in the Presbyterian Church and I was wondering if he heard of Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church. He said that he had. I said that, as far as Presbyterians go, it was a big one – having over three thousand members. He told me that Preston Hollow Baptist Church has over thirty thousand members. FPC Denton has a little over one third of one percent of the membership of Prestonwood Baptist. Is that what solid Biblical preaching is all about, to get from one third of one percent to thirty thousand or more? At the end of John chapter six, Jesus had only twelve people with Him, and one would betray Him. Numbers are important, but they’re not all-important. Oh, the guy told me they have a Starbucks inside Prestonwood too.

Is good preaching a matter of therapy with a spiritual twist? Is it all about reassuring people that God is there for them when they’re fit to be tied because I-35 is a parking lot during rush hour? Is it about psychology? Does it consist of telling people that “I’m okay and you’re okay”? Is it about saying to people “There, there now, it’s going to be alright”? Is good preaching saying that “God loves you and the rest of us are working on it? “ Does it show people how to stop climbing up the metaphorical escalators of life that are actually going down?

You deserve to know your new minister’s view of preaching, and I’m going to share the main points now. I don’t ever want to preach at people or down to people. I want to preach alongside people because we’re in this together. For the first twenty five years of my life I sat in the pews like you are. I went into seminary in 1983 with a handful of thoughts about what a solid sermon was all about. It had consistent elements that kept boiling down to about five items.

It was based, for starters, on a Bible text. Secondly, it had a kind of awareness to it – both in terms of its hearers and of current events that are swirling around their lives. Third, it spoke in language that people could understand; it was not professorial; it did not condescend to them, and neither was it an exercise of the minister’s ego. Here’s the fourth element: it was centered like a laser-beam on the person and work of Jesus Christ – the crucified and risen Son of God, the promised Messiah, and the Savior of the world. A professor of mine once said: “A solid sermon has legs and a mouth. It stands up and speaks out for Jesus Christ.” Fifth, the solid sermon has a goal. It can be a faith goal or a life goal. It seeks to instigate, to ignite, to instill, to inspire, and to enhance that great gift of faith in God. The solid sermon can help you discern what God would have you do with your life right here and right now, and it will help you make use of the resources that God has provided so that such can happen. There you have it; I just wanted you to know.

So we come to this morning’s Bible text, the Old Testament reading from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. The events recorded took place nearly twenty seven hundred years ago – far across the Atlantic ocean, through the Mediterranean Sea, all the way to the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean, to a day’s journey or so going further east on land. In short, it was long ago and it was far away – a “once upon a time” kind of thing. Immediately, the critics scoff. How can obscure events twenty seven hundred years ago have any relevance to the here and the now with our ever so modern and ever so urgent problems? Let St. Paul respond to that question. It’s in his letter to the Roman Christians. Commenting on the Scriptures, he says: “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” Is it irrelevant to endure? Is it irrelevant to be encouraged? Is it irrelevant to have hope? It seems to me that these are physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual commodities that people are crying out for!

Think for a moment about the biggest problem you have had to face in life. Maybe it happened long ago. Maybe it’s going on right now. Whatever the case, it was or is huge. How do we deal with or handle the big problems? There are only a few ways. One way is to get away – or, in other words, to deny that the problem even exists. I remember the story of the farmer and his wife who went down into the cellar when a tornado came that eventually destroyed their house and barn. They climbed out of the cellar and looked around. The wife began to cry. The farmer said, “At least the wind ain’t blowin’ and the rain ain’t comin’ down anymore.” Another way is to go around the problem. You admit that it is a problem; you fuss and moan and groan about it, but you really don’t do anything about. Another way is to go through it alone. That has people saying “I can handle it; it’s my problem, and I’ll deal with it.” You take, as they say, “ownership” of it but you refuse to ask for help. And here’s a final way: acknowledge the problem; hand it over to God, and walk through it with Him!

Last week I read that Billy Graham, probably one of the most famous preachers in the history of Christianity, has met with every U.S. president since Harry Truman. Speaking of President Truman, Truman, oddly, didn’t care much for Billy Graham. In his biography, Plain Speaking, he is reported to have said: “He was never a friend of mine when I was president. I just don’t go for people like that. All he’s interested in is getting his name in the paper.”

Long ago and far away in the city of Jerusalem, sat a King of Judah by the name of Zedekiah. Zedekiah had a problem of the huge variety. His nation, which he governed, was about to be besieged, attacked, and destroyed. The survivors would become refugees and be deported. It is not as though he hadn’t been warned. That pesky little prophet Jeremiah, the representative of Yahweh, had been foretelling that for quite some time.

In the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma, there’s a verse that goes like this: “We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand.” That’s what the child of God, the child of Yahweh, thought about the promised land which was the land they inhabited: it was grand. Their identity was tied up with it. But now they would lose it and, with it, their identity.

What did the king do? He put that pesky little prophet, the representative of Yahweh, under house arrest. Like Truman didn’t care for Graham, Zedekiah didn’t care for Jeremiah. He had been an equal opportunity irritant who had bothered Zedekiah and his last four predecessors.

Zedekiah’s handling of the problem was a combination of the first three ways I mentioned: denial of the problem, trying to get around the problem, trying to go through the problem alone.

Meanwhile, Yahweh slips into the story. Quietly, unobtrusively, and with only a few people knowing it, God, in so many words, tells Jeremiah to get hold of his cousin and then purchase the cousin’s land. Buy the property. Close the deal. Render payment in full. Sign the papers, have them notarized, and store them in safe place. Back then, that safe place was an earthenware jar. Today it might be a file cabinet under lock and key, or a bank vault, or a pdf file on computer connected to a secure database.

This little incident has to be close to the lunatic fringe. I mean, the last straw was on the horizon; the enemy was at the gate; the country would cease to exist; the promised land would be stripped from its people and their identity along with it. We need God to charge in with the F-16s and the 82nd airborne! God tells Jeremiah, “Buy some land.” What? Huh? That’s sheer lunacy. I hope Jeremiah bought it on the cheap – because the bottom was about to fall out of the Judean housing market! There wouldn’t even be a Judean housing market anymore.

But Yahweh, God, our God, as is God’s way, is always ahead of the curve; like a grand master at chess, God is ten moves ahead of the opponent. He anticipates the question. Why buy the land – including all the paperwork that goes with it and put that paperwork in a jar? The answer is short. In English, it’s only twelve words. Yahweh says: “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” My friends, the earthenware jar is a sign of God’s faithfulness which always calls upon people to trust. In this story, it is faithfulness in a jar. In other words, it is God saying: “We have a problem; we’re not going to deny it. We’re going to be in this problem, walk through this problem together, and come out on the other side of this problem safe and sound. Look at the jar. You have the sign. You have my word on it.”

It wasn’t the first sign that God gave, and it wouldn’t be the last. The best and greatest sign God gave came later, and it didn’t come in a jar. It came in the form of a human being – a human being like you and like me. This human being is Jesus Christ, the incarnate son of the living God. He lived a perfect life, a sinless life, a holy life – not to prove a point, but to give that life as a gift to us. He Himself faced a huge problem – in fact, the most gargantuan problem the world has ever known. He didn’t deny it; He acknowledged it. He didn’t try to get around it; He endured it. He didn’t blink; He stared it down. The problem was the debt of our sin and the hellish interest rates that are attached it. In that death on that cross, the debt – like those papers in the jar – was marked “Paid in full.” And the resurrection of Jesus trumpets the truth that He made it – not away from, not around, but -- through the problem safe and sound. Why? It is because God is faithful; it is because God loves you; it is because God wants you in on the party. The God we belong to is grand! Amen.