Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

How many of you have seen the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral?

It’s a British film from nearly 30 years ago that traces the lives of a group of friends as they experience… well, four weddings and one funeral.

The writer/director, Richard Curtis, went on to make Love, Actually, one of the classic Christmas movies.

A few years ago, Hulu created a miniseries of the same name.

With ten hours (rather than just two) to tell the story, a new group of friends experiences even more drama and laughs as they navigate life together.

And, yes, there are still four weddings and a funeral.

The titular funeral is for the husband of a woman we really don’t like at first - it’s actually watching her grieve that helps us empathize with her.

We learn that her husband’s family is English nobility, so they have all sorts of ideas about the way things should be done - from shipping her son off to boarding school to how the funeral will run.

One of the great joys of the show is watching this woman, who’s always been afraid of her husband’s parents and the strings that are attached to their great wealth, stand up to them and make the funeral something that honors her husband and his love for their son.

I love that scene because one of the great joys I have as a pastor is doing weddings and funerals.

I know that sounds strange - people get the wedding part.

But the funerals?

Who enjoys funerals?

No one.

I don’t.

But I’ve found that being invited into a family’s grief can be really sacred.

The opportunity I have to help them grieve well, to honor their departed loved one, to navigate the complex and complicated emotions that come with grief.

It’s not fun, but it’s deeply good.

Weddings and funerals are some of the ways we mark out our lives.

They mark times of transition - from one family to another, from life to death.

That’s why every culture in the world has wedding and funeral rituals.

So what does it mean when someone doesn’t attend one?

It’s a signal flare that something is very wrong, isn’t it?

So you can imagine that, for God to tell a prophet to withdraw from weddings and funerals would be a sign something is deeply wrong.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to see today.

But before we go there, let’s begin with worship.

Let’s center and ground ourselves in God’s endless love for us.

Message

I know a lot of Christians these days who feel like Black Sheep - the one who doesn’t fit in.

Not from the larger culture, but from the Church.

Now that’s not necessarily a new phenomenon, but when I was growing up, you felt distance from the Church because you were drifting from faith.

Today, though, a lot of the folks who are feeling this sense of isolation, of being the weird one - it’s not because of weak faith.

It’s actually the opposite

And it’s not because they’re drifting or backsliding or wandering from their faith.

It’s actually our faithfulness to Jesus that’s making us feel like outsiders to our own faith.

The people who claim to represent Jesus don’t actually look very much like him.

This is the experience of the prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah lived in the years leading up to the Exile, one of the most apocalyptic and formative events in the history of God’s people.

Jeremiah was born into a world in the shadow of the Babylonian Empire, and the little nation of Judah spent decades trying to figure out how to survive Babylon.

They made payments to the emperor to keep him from conquering them.

They entered into alliances with other nations.

This was the big point of contention, because these alliances involved adopting the other nations’ gods - a sort of cultural exchange.

This idolatry was a violation of the covenant between God and God’s people.

It was a signal that God’s people didn’t trust that God’s way would preserve them, protect them and provide for them.

The people continued to give lip service to God, but their actions showed they preferred to trust the power of the nations around them.

Sound familiar?

If you can relate, then this series is for you.

We’re spending a couple of months with Jeremiah, to bear witness to his faithfulness and ask what we can learn about how God is calling us as a Black Sheep church today.

We began by looking at how a prophet’s work is grounded in a deep knowledge of and love for God - especially important since God’s people usually ignore prophets until tragedy strikes.

We saw that God hates idolatry so much because it warps us away from who God created us to be.

And last week, Ashley XXXXX.

Turn with us to Jeremiah 16.

Today, we’re exploring another of Jeremiah’s prophecies.

Like the others we’ve seen in this series, this one is provocative and shocking.

Today’s message can be summed up by a meme, actually - and I bet you’ve seen it.

[Image] This cute little doggo was drawn by K.C. Greene in his webcomic Gunshow back in 2013.

It’s shared these days as a way to express self-denial - the house is on fire, but we’re all sitting around, sipping coffee, pretending everything is just fine.

There’s a plea in the This is Fine dog.

We want him to get up.

To grab a fire extinguisher or at least get out of the house.

Because when the house is on fire, you can’t go about business as usual!

That’s exactly what we’re going to see in Jeremiah today.

God warns him that things are not okay, so no one should be going about business as usual.

Let’s listen to what God tells Jeremiah to do - or rather, to not do:

God tells Jeremiah not to marry or have children because of the coming catastrophe.

The Exile is going to be so bad, so brutal, that he shouldn’t bring children into it.

You might recognize that impulse - it’s one we hear more and more these days in the face of the impending climate catastrophe.

An increasing number of younger folks are choosing not to have kids for exactly this reason - they don’t want to raise kids in a world hurtling for disaster.

This is something worth exploring, but I want to hold onto it for a minute.

Because as shocking as God’s instructions to Jeremiah are, they’re part of a larger thing God is calling the prophet to do:

A few notable things in this bit: first, some key words.

In verse five, God warns:

Jeremiah 16:5 (NLT)

I have removed my protection and peace from them.

I have taken away my unfailing love and my mercy.

These are three really important terms in Hebrew.

The first is one you’ve probably heard - shalom.

Shalom is the state God intends for creation, the goal of everything - living in the peace and harmony for which we were created.

When we talk about peace as a fruit of the Spirit, this is what we’re talking about.

When Jesus promised to give us peace, this is what he meant.

This is the deep, inner peace mystics seek.

It’s the bedrock that enables us to weather the storms of life.

This peace, this shalom, comes from God.

And here, God tells Jeremiah that God is withdrawing shalom.

But that’s not all.

The next word - rendered here as ‘unfailing love’ - is chesed.

This is a word that doesn’t have a good English equivalent, but it’s the sort of formal love that accompanies covenants.

So you know at a wedding when couples promise to be faithful ‘for better or for worse’?

There’s an acknowledgement in there that life isn’t all rainbows and puppy dogs.

That sometimes love looks like doing the right thing whether you ‘feel’ it or not.

That’s chesed.

God’s announcing the removal of his covenantal obligations to God’s people.

And that’s shocking, but so too is this last bit - mercy.

The Hebrew connotes the tender feelings that accompany a deep relationship.

The word sometimes gets translated ‘compassion’.

This is the more emotional side of the covenant, the personal stake God has in this ongoing relationship with God’s people.

God is removing God’s shalom, God’s chesed and God’s mercies.

This strikes us as incredibly harsh, but we forget that this is in response to decades of God’s people not honoring the covenant.

Every time they made an alliance with a foreign power, they were saying to God, “We don’t want to be in this covenant with you.”