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May God Thy Gold Refine

July 1, 2007

Jeremiah 7:1

Pastoral Intern Brent James

Today is a day of celebrations.  We are celebrating the payoff of our Christian education wing, and at 12:00 p.m. we are going to be celebrating the birthdays of more than fifty people who will turn 90 years or older in the life of our church.  I think that’s something to celebrate!  And I’m celebrating, because it’s also my birthday, but while I may feel like 90, I’m only turning 34.  In preparation for this celebration today, Libby asked me to create an invitation for the birthday.  I decided to pull pictures of major events and people from a 90-year-old life; and so there were pictures of WWI, WWII, Franklin Roosevelt and Television, Kennedy, Vietnam, Google, and this week we can place the iPhone on that list!  90 years, what a life, so many experiences to live through.  When you stop and consider all the ways in which the world has changed it is truly baffling.  What an amazing time to be alive! 

As we come to our text, we realize that the prophet Jeremiah also lived in a time of remarkable change.  In your bulletins you have an insert that I think might help you follow along a little better.  In Jeremiah’s day, the Assyrian Empire was the dominant superpower in the Middle East, but during Jeremiah’s life Assyria’s authority was coming to an end.  In 612, the Babylonians and the Medes had destroyed the Assyrian capital, Nineveh.  But there remained a pocket of power concentrated in Egypt.  So in 609 you have a vacuum with two main pockets of power — the Assyrian-Egyptian block and the Babylonian-Mede block.  Now unfortunately for Judah, it just happens to exist on the I-5 interstate of its day, between these two power groups.  You see, if you wanted to march an army from Babylon to Egypt or vice versa, you couldn’t march them across the Saudi Arabian desert, a journey which would kill them.  Instead you had to march them north along the coast of Israel, up and across to the Euphrates, and then down into Babylon to insure fresh drinking water and food.  In 609 Pharaoh Neco of Egypt marched his army to support Assyria and Josiah the beloved, righteous king of Judah who had sided with Babylon went out to fight Neco on the plains of Meggido.  And (tragedy) Josiah fell in battle.  Neco was victorious and placed his own puppet Jehoiakim on Judah’s throne.  All of this occurred in 609 — the year Jeremiah’s temple sermon, our text for today, was proclaimed.  Jeremiah’s world had been turned upside-down.

One more piece of background is that about a hundred years earlier, in 722 BC, the Northern Kingdom of Israel had fallen to Assyria, and during the lead-up to that event, the prophet Isaiah prophesied about the southern Kingdom of Judah (Is. 37:35), “For I will defend this city (Jerusalem) and save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.”  And low and behold, just as Isaiah prophesied, Judah did not fall to the Assyrians, but they were able to exist as an independent tributary of Assyria.  This led to the creation of a pop-theology in Judah, which we refer to as Temple theology.  Since Jerusalem was the site of the Temple and the seat of David’s throne, Jerusalem was a safe place, and God would never allow Jerusalem to fall because of the Temple and because of his promises to David.  Though they might be punished for their sins, God, out of concern for his own reputation, would never allow Jerusalem to be conquered. 

And so we read in Jeremiah 7:1: The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2 Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord.  3 Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place.  4 Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” 5 For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, 6 if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, 7 then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever. 

We will be celebrating the 4th of July this week, and I chose this text this morning, because I think that it is instructive with regards to the relationship between nationalism and the worship of God.  Now teaching on nationalism on a Fourth of July weekend is a bit like dancing ballet in a minefield — it could be a breathtaking work of art, but it could be a pretty bloody, explosive affair.  Just for clarification, I’m aiming for art this morning.  And I hope it might give us something to chew on as we celebrate our heritage this coming Wednesday; that God’s blessing isn’t a quid pro quo of our national identity, but His blessing comes as a result of our aligning our ways to His. 

The first thing that strikes me about Jeremiah’s sermon is the timing.  We can only appreciate the atmosphere of fear that must have weighed heavy on every Judean’s heart during this tragic time.  Judah is out of control of its own destiny.  Their king is dead and they are bonded to a declining world power at a time when Babylon is on the rise.  An awful amount of change had been exacted on this tiny nation.  It must have felt like the days after September 11th.  You know, in times of distress and war, people want to hear reassuring messages:  it’s going to be alright, God is still on our side, we will be safe, God will take care of us, we are God’s chosen people.  But Jeremiah, this prophet of God, resists the impulse to tell people what they want to hear.  He has a message from God, and he goes to the busiest intersection of Jerusalem —the gate of the Lord’s house — and proclaims it out loud, “Do not trust in these deceptive words, the temple of the Lord.”  This temple theology is bunk!  The temple, this symbol of national identity will not keep you safe, it will not keep you in God’s good graces.  As Americans we have a hard time grasping this because we are so rooted in a system that separates the powers of church and state, but in Jeremiah’s time the temple, the house of YHWH, was the source of political power.  Temple theology had devalued YHWH to the status of mascot god.  In an odd sort of way, the Judeans had turned the Temple and their national identity into an idol.  Jeremiah is trying to get them to recognize that God is not all that concerned with Judea’s identity as a nation, as a people with a national identity, as he is with how Judeans live their lives day by day and year by year.

So, if God isn’t all that concerned with national identity what does he care about?  Verse 5.  Amend your ways; act justly one with another, do not oppress the orphan and the widow. Were we to take this passage apart, it would be easy to preach five hours on this text, but I won’t, and all God’s people said Amen.  But there is one specific act of amending one’s ways that I want to dive deep into, because it is so relevant to our national discussion today:  Jeremiah’s temple sermon says, God will dwell with you in this land if you do not oppress the alien.  The Hebrew term for alien is ger — perhaps in our day we might use the term immigrant.  Ger is a man who, either alone or with his family, leaves his village and tribe because of war, famine, or pestilence, and seeks shelter elsewhere.  In fact, this language is still found in our culture.  We still use the phrase, “illegal alien.”  Now the really interesting thing about that word ger is that most Judeans, most observant Jews know it well because it figures into the very beginning of their story as a people.  The first use of the term comes from Genesis 15:3 the passage where God promises Abram that his descendants will be a numerous as the stars in the sky, and he says in verse 3, know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens (ger) in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years.  But even before that, in Chapter 12, God tells Abram living in Ur, “Go from your country to a land I will show you and I will make you a great nation.”  Abram was an immigrant dependent upon the kindness and the generosity of the Canaanites.  Later on, when famine came to Canaan, Jacob and his 12 sons came to Egypt as ger, immigrants dependent on the goodwill of Pharoah.  The Jews are a people whose identity was formed as immigrants.  And Jeremiah says to Judah, if you want to continue being a nation, if you want to be safe and secure, if you want YHWH to bless you, amend your ways; do not oppress the immigrant.

I’ve placed on the front cover of the bulletin Emma Lazarus’ marvelous poem, The New Colossus:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. 
From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. 
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Now I know that there is inherit danger in trying to directly apply a message addressed to Judea as though it was being preached to America, but I have to wonder, is it possible that America has been blessed because we have welcomed the refuse of foreign shores, the homeless, the helpless, the tempest-tossed?”  Could it be that we have been blessed because we have taken up that mantle as the mother of exiles?  I can’t know for sure.  But Jeremiah’s sermon assures me that God is not pleased when a nation of immigrants decides to oppress and take advantage of immigrants.  I want to make clear I have no desire to articulate a political opinion right or left this morning.  I recognize that we have an immigration problem in this nation, a problem which desperately needs a solution, and I don’t want to advocate political point of view, but I do want to address a moral situation.  If I look at an individual (red, yellow, black, or white) and my first impulse is to see an immigrant or an illegal before I see a human being in need, I think I’ve stepped outside of the will of God.  If I allow my fears about safety and security to warp a heart that God has commanded to be full of love, we ought to remember God’s call in Leviticus 19:34:  “you shall love the ger, the immigrant, as yourself, for you were immigrants in the land of Egypt,” and if we don’t do that I think we are stepping outside of the will of God.  If I open the Oregonian as I have recently, and read about immigrants not far from this sanctuary being exposed to horrible conditions, being cheated out of fair wages, made to work in unsanitary conditions only to be uprooted from their lives and families and face deportation: knowing that we have to uphold the law, but if all I choose to see are those illegals getting what’s coming to them, instead of seeing the tragedy of their human condition, then I think we are living outside of the will of God.  And if, God forbid, I make a profit off their misery, off their oppression, and I think we who are shareholders should take notice, not only am I existing outside of the will of God, he might just call me and my people into judgment.  No one in this room, I hope, willingly sets out to oppress aliens, but if you’re like me, perhaps sometimes your heart gets calloused to the human condition of those who clean our offices, who work in the back of our restaurants making our food, those who pick the fruit in our fields, and rather than seeing a human life, a human story, we see an immigrant.  Deep down we know what they’re getting paid, we’ve know what housing, food and health care costs but we don’t want to go there because it’s not too pretty of a place.  And rarely does it cross our mind that the guy making the burrito, or the guy picking the fruit might just be an Abraham, or a Jacob, or an angel of whom we are unaware.

I think we find in Jeremiah’s list of amending your ways God’s immutable word for us today that all of these acts (and we’ve only considered one today) — treating each other justly, seeking the welfare of the poor (the orphan, the widow), of not following after other gods, treating immigrants justly, humanely, — are the marks of a healthy society, and when we neglect our ways, the ways in which we live out our moral lives and say, “No, God will bless our nation, the Temple of the Lord,” when we sing God Bless America with no thought of how we treat each other, our immigrants, our poor, of how hard we are following after God, we allow our society to slowly but surely decay on the inside while keeping a glossy religious-nationalistic veneer on the outside.  And that is a recipe for decline; that is a recipe for judgment.

Now in closing, notice what God doesn’t say.  He never says, “Don’t celebrate your nation,” he doesn’t forbid celebrating one’s national identity, He doesn’t forbid our singing, “America, America may God thy gold refine,” as long as when we sing it we mean it personally; we don’t ask God to bless some philosophical construct of a nation-state, but rather we say, “May God my gold refine.”  And rest assured that God will refine that gold when we treat each other justly, when we treat the poor and the immigrants with dignity, God will bless our effort to build healthy societies.  God states explicitly; I will save you, I will dwell with you, I will rescue you if you amend your ways; worry less about being Judeans, worry less about being Americans, worry more about being a human beings who are good, loving and just. 

Because in the final account, we are all pilgrims and sojourners; we are all strangers in a world not our own.  In the final account, as we approach this table, we remember as Christ’s followers our true and final kingdom is not of this world.  We are a people who live in the hope that one day the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of Christ, and on that day He shall reign forever and ever as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.  And what an eternal celebration that day will bring.  And the good news, my friends, is that there are no visas, no papers, no waiting period for entrance into the kingdom of Christ.  He asks only that we respond to the call, “Come O Sinner, poor and needy, bruised and broken by the fall, Jesus ready stands to save you full of pard’ning love for all.  He is able, He is willing, doubt no more.”  May we allow him to save us, to make us members of his kingdom, and may his love and grace strengthen us to amend our ways in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost!  Amen.