Jeremiah 1:1-3
“’Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore’”
September 30, 2007
Associate Pastor Doug Forsberg
For many, hope is in short supply.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that many students turn to Cliff Notes in their time of need. Of course, I’m sure none of the saints gathered among us this morning has used them. If you don’t know what Cliff Notes are, they are summaries of major works of literature that allow students to “read” a book in a fraction of the time it would take to actually read the book.: think Moby Dick in ten minutes or less.
I recall that my 10th grade English teacher, who was quiet, caring woman, had a special hatred of Cliff Notes. Even the mention of these “study guides” brought out a cruelty I hardly knew existed. Of all the vices in the world, reading Cliff Notes was the most heinous, and those caught doing so were subjected to punishments I hesitate to speak of this morning. Let’s just say that our entire class made sure we read every word of Catcher in the Rye.
I am reluctant to do this, but I want to let you on a little secret. Believe it or not, there are Cliff Notes for the book of Jeremiah, and you don’t even have to go out and buy them. They’re right there at the beginning of the book where 52 chapters of text are condensed into three short verses in which we discover the themes, characters and plot of Jeremiah’s life and ministry. As we look at these Cliff Notes to Jeremiah, we will be struck with the ways in which hope is expressed in the themes, characters and plot that make up this book of the Bible. Now, just as in high school and college literature classes where you can’t know a book without taking in its details, the details that make up the rest of Jeremiah can’t be missed, but these three verses speak of more than we can imagine, if only we will open our hearts and minds to God’s word.
Let’s pray together: Father, the we are in need of a hope that is found in you alone, so we pray for the Holy Spirit’s presence with us this morning, illumining your word and granting our hearts and minds understanding. We ask this is the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Listen to the word of the Lord as it is found in the prophet Jeremiah 1:1-3:
“The words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, one of the priests at Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin. 2 The word of the LORD came to him in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah son of Amon king of Judah, 3 and through the reign of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, down to the fifth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah son of Josiah king of Judah, when the people of Jerusalem went into exile.”
This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.
There we have it: plot, characters and themes; the whole of Jeremiah in three verses. Let me try to paint a picture for you of what these three verses tell us about the situation of Jeremiah’s life and times. In the movie The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is in her bedroom when suddenly a huge storm comes and a tornado whisks Dorothy and Toto away from her farm house and into a new place full of strange sights, sounds, and animals. After surveying this scene for a few moments, Dorothy says, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” Dorothy’s observation is right on the money, for she and Toto are in Oz and everything she thought she knew is turned upside down. She doesn’t know who to trust or follow. What had been a generally secure, comfortable life in Kansas now becomes a frightful, uneasy journey up the Yellow Brick Road and Dorothy is left with little hope for the future and her return to Kansas.
The world that Jeremiah lived in was war torn, insecure, deceitful, frightful and uneasy. The people of Judah had decided they were better off worshipping multiple gods rather than Yahweh, the true God. They wanted to cover all of their bases so they accumulated idols on every street corner, engaged in ritual prostitution in various temples and even sacrificed their children seeking to please other gods. In the midst of all this, they found themselves caught between superpowers like Assyria, Egypt, and Babylon. Everything they trusted in was being torn down; all the institutions that formed the foundation of their society were crumbling. There was no security and no sign of comfort, and hope was in short supply because the Lord had been forgotten.
Jeremiah speaks into the vast emptiness and discouragement of his time, and he speaks to our time as well. Friends, as we face the difficulties of our day we must ask ourselves where we place our hope. If our hope is in anyone or anything other that Jesus Christ it is misplaced, so the text before us calls us to hope in the Lord, the one who makes all things new.
In order to understand where such hope comes from we need to dig into this text, for hope is written all over it. When we do so, we find that the people of Israel placed their hope in their kings. Three of these kings are major characters in Jeremiah and they ruled as the sons of David. God had promised David that he would always have a son ruling on the throne in Jerusalem. This promise came with an obligation that David’s sons serve the Lord in obedience. Of the four kings mention here only one was obedient and his name was Josiah. His father Amon was an evil king who followed the ways of his father Manassah who bowed down to idols and was said to have filled the streets of Jerusalem with blood. Josiah was different than his father and grandfather, but his sons Jehoiakim and Zedekiah resumed the evil practices of those who had come before.
Jeremiah’s ministry lasted more than forty years. The people marked their years and the passage of time according to which son of David was on the throne, but these sons of David lacked his faithfulness and zeal for the Lord.
What is important for us to see as we read of these kings in the first three verses of Jeremiah is that whether they were faithful or not, they were not the be all and end all of leadership in Jerusalem. They were instead representatives of the true King who always rules in justice and righteousness. The inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem failed to remember Yahweh; they failed to acknowledge their true King, and so they marked time by the progress of their human kings who thought they would continue to rule whether they obeyed Yahweh or not. Much of what follows in Jeremiah is a critique of these kings and the wickedness they allowed in the land. Through Jeremiah, Yahweh repeatedly calls the people to hope in Him alone, yet they fail to do so even as their world becomes increasingly terrifying.
In the midst of this terrifying world, the first three verses of Jeremiah reveal an important theme of Jeremiah’s ministry: the word of the Lord comes to Jeremiah. Some time ago EF Hutton made a series of great commercials for TV in which whole groups of people would stop talking and listen to one other person. The commercials would include the line, “When EF Hutton talks, people listen!” Well, you’d think the same would be true when Yahweh speaks, but sadly that is not the case. Instead, people tend to cover their ears and abuse the ones through whom God speaks. Throughout Jeremiah we find phrases like “The Lord says,” “The Lord declares,” and “The words of the Lord;” yet those who hear these messages don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that the Lord is speaking to them. In these initial verses of Jeremiah the word of the Lord comes to Jeremiah and to the people of Jerusalem, even as their world is crumbling around them.
Verse one begins by telling us that we will hear the words of Jeremiah and then in verse two we’re told that the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. How do we make sense of this? Whose word is being spoken here? My sense is that God’s call on Jeremiah’s life was so intense and forceful that Jeremiah could not help but speak the words given to him by God. Jeremiah’s life, his entire being, was driven by the word of the Lord that came to him.
We know this to be true because we know some of the things God commanded him to do and say to the most powerful people in Jerusalem. God could have chosen to remain silent in the midst of the rebellion of His people, but he didn’t. In the word of the Lord that comes to Jeremiah, there is hope, for God is speaking to his people and making Himself known to them. How else would they know that what was crashing was actually hindering their relationship with God? How else would they know that the Lord was causing all of this to happen? The word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah made clear that Yahweh was at work and that he couldn’t be controlled by the kings, priests, false prophets or the people.
The people wanted to control Yahweh in order to establish some control over their lives. They went to other gods to ensure that it rained and that their animals reproduced. They sought other gods who might better control their status among the kingdoms in a shifting political landscape. Although the Lord had proven himself to them on so many occasions, they simply would not trust or hope that he could provide for them in a world turned upside down. The end of verse three reveals the climax of the plot of Jeremiah; the people go into exile. All of their attempts to control their world end up in the complete loss of control. They lose everything they sought to keep, and all of this happens in accordance with the word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah.
Think on this: the same Lord who brought the people out of Egypt, through the desert and into the Promised Land, the same Lord who established them in the land, the same Lord who provided judges and kings, the same Lord who made his temple in Jerusalem that he might dwell with them, this same Lord sends the people into exile in Babylon. For those living in Jerusalem and Judah in that day it would have been as if world had come to an end. Exile was failure; exile was the end. How could this happen? For Jeremiah and those who believe the word of the Lord that came through him, the better question is how couldn’t this happen? Jeremiah had been speaking of it for forty years. The people had been warned. In addition, even as he spoke of exile and destruction, Jeremiah also spoke of restoration and gave glimmers of hope for a new day when the exiles would return to Jerusalem.
Had the people been able to trust the word of the Lord concerning their destruction, perhaps they also would have trusted His word to them concerning their restoration. In the terror and panic caused by the nations around them and in the apostasy caused by their worship of idols, the people could not or would not hear God’s word, losing their opportunity to remember the One who rules over all and makes all things new.
These first three verses of Jeremiah give us a glimpse of the hope found in the themes, characters, and plot of the rest of Jeremiah. For 2500 years Jeremiah’s words have spoken to God’s people whenever they have found themselves in the midst of a world that seems to be falling apart. It certainly speaks to us as our world spirals out of control. The great project of modernity is crashing down all around us, nations and terrorist organizations are at war, our national, state, and local leaders seem unwilling or unable to tackle the real and difficult issues of the day, the world hardly notices that children are abused and killed everyday for the pleasure of adults, the institutions in which we have trusted seem to be crumbling, fraying at the seams, and the very real possibility of dirty bombs destroying whole cities seems all too possible. We live in an insecure and uneasy time.
We shouldn’t be surprised at this. What we must do is place our hope and our trust in the One who rules over all. Over and over again, God’s people have been tempted to place their trust in people and institutions that they thought would lead them into security and ease. Let us not do the same thing. Instead, let us renew our hope in the Lord who is at work in the world. Hoping in the Lord does not mean that we pull away from the world and its problems with an attitude that it’s all going to burn anyway. Instead, we are called to be in the world pointing to the One who promises to make all things new. Think of the confession of faith made in the midst of terrible danger by Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. They were willing to die before they would bow down to an idol, yet they were also willing to speak the truth of their hope in God to those who needed so desperately to hear it. In our day, how can God’s Word penetrate the darkness of the world if we won’t bear it in difficult places?
Of course, there are times when our own lives seem to be on the brink of collapse and hopelessness, times when we feel trapped by circumstances beyond our control, times when we know that we are no longer in Kansas, wherever that was. Perhaps sickness, death, the loss of a friend or job or faith make us think that our world is coming to an end.
Jeremiah feared for his life and faced the insults of a whole nation; and he reminds us that Yahweh rules over all. Verses 1-3 conclude with the people being led off to exile. Life as they knew it came to an end. Out of that ending we know that the Lord brought them back to Jerusalem to a new beginning and reconstruction of hope. Later, out of that community, Jesus was born. Many thought his life ended on the cross. Little did they know that in that ending was a beginning, for the resurrection has brought a rush of hope into the world, “Where O death is your victory? Where O death is your sting?” The pain and hopelessness of endings in our lives are real; we feel them, but they are not God’s final word, for all things that end in Christ are made new.
Brothers and sisters, let us examine our lives. Where have we placed our hope? If our hope is placed in anything or anyone but Christ it is lacking and unable to make sense of the difficult times in which we live; therefore, let us hope in Him.
Help us to do so Lord; help us to do so.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.