SERMONS

Proper 15C
August 19, 2007

By The Rev. Sylvia Czarnetzky

Jer. 23:23-9
Psalm 82
Hebrews 12:1-7, 11-14
Luke 12:49-56

Monday or Tuesday of each week, I usually take my first look at the Bible readings for the Sunday coming up. I look at them, whether I’m preaching or not, because I write a Scripture Reflection for Children’s Church each week. As you may or may not know, at 8:45 and 11 each Sunday, while we are having “big church” in here, in the Chapel, the children are having “little church” over there, in the parish hall. Children’s Church is led each Sunday by volunteers (usually parents). These brave souls lead the children in Sunday worship that looks and sounds a lot like what we do in here. They sing and say prayers, and take up a collection (usually, lots of pennies), that one of the children brings forward with the offertory in big church.     The only real difference between what goes on in little church and what goes on in big church, is that the service in little church is tailored to take into account the attention span of small children.

My contribution to Children’s Church each week is to write a Scripture Reflection based on part of one of the Sunday lessons being read in “big church.” My reflection has two parts:  First, I select and paraphrase a bit of scripture from one of the Sunday lessons – a little “nugget” of scripture, if you will. Then I write a reflection on that scripture that, I hope, will invite the children in to the Bible story somehow. It’s kind of nice that what the children hear in “little church” is also what the parents hear in “big church,” so maybe they can have a conversation about it (hint, hint) in the car on the way home from church or at the Sunday lunch table. It also starts getting children ready for “big church,” when they get older.

But it means I have to decide, early each week, which part of the scripture for that coming Sunday might be most suitable for little children. This week, I quickly ruled out the gospel! It seemed a little too scary for little kids, what with Jesus talking about bringing “fire to the earth,” and division in families.  I just didn’t want to read  to the children about “scorching heat,” especially given that we’ve just lived through the hottest week  of the summer! It’s not exactly Jesus, meek and mild! But the other consideration for me when writing a reflection for children is whether there might be a point of connection for them between the text you choose and their little lives -- whether there might be some “way in” or access point that the children could use to connect the Bible story to their  lives.

I will admit that it’s sometimes a real stretch to find this point of connection. For example, this week’s reflection in Children’s Church is about the passage in Jeremiah about wheat and straw. In Jeremiah, the true word of God spoken by true prophets is compared to wheat and, by contrast, the word spoken by false prophets is compared to straw. In my scripture reflection, I gave a simplified account of how, “after wheat is harvested, the wheat is threshed,” which “separates the wheat kernels from the straw.” The wheat kernels are ground into flour, which is used to make bread and cookies and cake.  And there’s the connection. Little children could talk for days about cookies and cake, and it’s a way to help them understand how we extract from the wheat plant the “good stuff,”      and leave behind just straw, which is not good to eat.  The straw left behind after wheat is threshed is not good for much of anything, except maybe as bedding for animals on the farm. So we end up with a single, fairly simple idea in the reflection: real prophets are like wheat – they are good for people, because they help people hear God’s word and help them get closer to God.

False prophets are like straw – they are bad, because they don’t give God’s people any real “nourishment.” and sometimes actually lead people away from God! And the more I thought about this wheat/straw business the more I began to think that it might offer a pretty good “way in” to the scripture for the rest of us. I really think that today, there’s quite a bit of “meat” for us on the Jeremiah “bone,” and I’d like to dig a little deeper into the Jeremiah reading, to see what insights it might offer.

I won’t bore you with too much background about Jeremiah. He lived in Judah and Jerusalem in about 587 BC, and he was a prophet, which is to say, he was the bearer of God’s word to the people. The  passage in our lectionary today is just a small part of a much longer speech in the Book of Jeremiah, condemning false prophets.  (Miller 750) In the verses leading up to our lesson for today, Jeremiah  goes off on the false prophets.  He rants and rails against them. (Peluso-Verdend 165) I’ll quote a sentence or two to give you the “flavor” of Jeremiah’s rant:

“...[T]he prophets of Jerusalem…commit adultery and walk in lies; they strengthen the hands of the evildoers, so that no one turns from wickedness. Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I am going to make them eat wormwood, and give them poisoned water to drink;…’” (Jer. 23:14-5)

You get the general idea.

Jeremiah is still talking about false prophets at the beginning of our lesson when he asks, in a “mocking or sarcastic tone” (Peluso-Verdend 165): “Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord.  (Jer. 23:23-4)

God seems to be asking:  Do you actually think you false prophets can hide your evil deeds from me? Do you really think I don’t know what you’ve been up to?  That you claim to be speaking my word, but are actually telling lies in my name and leading my people astray?  The next question that God asks zeroes in again on the dangers of trusting false prophesy: God asks, “What has straw in common with wheat?” What has false prophesy – straw – in common with true prophesy – wheat? And the short answer is: Not much. Straw doesn’t have much in common with wheat –  straw is that stuff left over after the wheat kernels have been extracted.  It is chaff.  It is the stuff that blows away in the wind when you throw your threshed grain up into the air – the straw and the trash blow away, and the grain falls back to earth, for you to gather, clean, and store in your barns.  (Borosky 97)        The process separates the grain from the straw, the wheat from the chaff.  The grain we are meant to keep, while the straw we mean to get rid of. The grain of wheat is what nourishes us; (97) It is why we planted the wheat crop in the first place. But the straw is nutritionally worthless to us; it will not nourish us in any way.

So, if we follow the analogy we’ve just made to its conclusion, then false prophesy is nutritionally useless to us – its word will not feed us or bring us closer to God;
true prophesy – the authentic word of God passed along to God’s people – is the wheat; it is the word that nourishes us;and brings us closer to God.

So it follows, I think, that if we ourselves are in some fashion bearers of God’s word, then the call is clear: Whether we are preachers and teachers like Alston and me, or Sunday School teachers, or whether we witness to others about our faith at other times and places, our task is the same -- to be wheat!! To bear the true word of God so that others may be nourished by it.    

Sometimes, though, we are on the receiving end of God’s word. It may be mediated through the words and actions of other people, or through our individual reading of the Bible, or our work together, in community in Bible Studies. If we are on the receiving end of God’s word, then our struggle today is the same as the struggle of those in Jeremiah’s time -- to discern what is the true word of God and what is not (Tillich 3); to distinguish true testimony from false; to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It seems to me, then, that the image of wheat and straw has much to recommend itself as an access point into the scriptures for today. But let me suggest another metaphor that might be equally fruitful in our search to bear God’s good news and to hear God’s good news. And it comes from the very next line in the Jeremiah lesson.  God asks, “Is not my word like fire?” “Is not my word like fire?”
We all know what fire does.  It burns. It consumes. But it can also illuminate. (Miller 755) But wait.  Doesn’t fire do something else?    Can’t fire have another function? To refine?  To purify? Jesus says in our gospel, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.”  (Lk. 12:49) What if the fire that Jesus is talking about, and the fire that Jeremiah speaks of a refiner’s fire?   (NJB 705)

Now I know about as much about precious metals as I do about plant physiology, so I have to rely on others for help.  And many years ago, someone gave me a story about woman in a Bible study that was studying the prophet Malachi. They read the passage in Malachi that said, God “will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.” They didn’t know what that meant, so she offered to do some research on what a refiner and purifier of silver actually did. So she called up a silversmith and asked whether she could watch him work, without telling him why. Here’s what she found out: 

As she watched the silver smith [sic], he held a piece of silver over the fire and let it heat up.  He explained that in refining silver, one needed to hold the silver in the middle of the fire where the flames were hottest as to burn away all the impurities….

She asked the silver smith if it was true that he had to sit there in front of the fire the whole time the silver was being refined.  The man answered that yes, he not only had to sit there holding the silver, but he had to keep his eye on the silver the entire time it was in the fire.  If the silver were left even a moment too long in the flames, it would be destroyed.

The woman was silent for a moment.  Then she asked the silver smith, how do you know when the silver is fully refined?  He smiled at her and answered, “Oh, that’s easy – It’s finished when I can see my image in it.”    Amen.

Works Cited

Anderson, Bernhard W.  Lent. Proclamation: Interpreting the Lessons of the Church Year, Year C. Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 1997.

Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke.” The New Interpreter’s Bible.  IX. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995.  3-490.

Miller, Patrick D. “Jeremiah.” The New Interpreter’s Bible.  VI. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001.

The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Eds. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph AQ. Fitzmyer, & Roland E . Murphy.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990.

Peuso-Verdend, Gary. “The Season of Lent.”  Proclamation: Interpreting the Lessons of the Church Year, Year C. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

Stendahl, John. “The Season of Lent.” New Proclamation, Year C 2000-2001. Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2000.  149-200.

Tillich, Paul. “The New Being: Is There Any Word From the Lord?” 1995. Religion Online website.  

The story about the silversmith was given to me by a member of a Bible study at Church of the Advent, Sumner.