11 This is what the Lord says about Shallum son of Judah’s King Josiah, who succeeded his father Josiah as king but who is now gone from this place: He will never return! 12 He will die where he’s been exiled and never see this land again. 13 How terrible for Jehoiakim, who builds his house with corruption and his upper chambers with injustice, working his countrymen for nothing, refusing to give them their wages. 14 He says, “I’ll build myself a grand palace, with huge upper chambers, ornate windows, cedar paneling, and rich red decor.” 15 Is this what makes you a king, having more cedar than anyone else? Didn’t your father eat and drink and still do what was just and right? Then it went well for him! 16 He defended the rights of the poor and needy; then it went well. Isn’t that what it means to know me? declares the Lord. 17 But you set your eyes and heart on nothing but unjust gain; you spill the blood of the innocent; you practice cruelty; you oppress your subjects. (Common English Bible)
“The Power
of Half: How Dividing Something Changed Everything,” Week One
The 57-year-old pastor hardly seemed like the
most worthy candidate for an experiment in homelessness. He had a family and a thriving megachurch in
Sacramento, California, and besides, he had already tried it out for a few days
already—living on the streets for a short time as a part of a fundraiser for a
mission to provide more food and shelter to Sacramento’s homeless population. What more could he learn about just how much
he already had by doing it again?
But return to the streets Pastor Rick Cole did,
this time for two weeks. And the
experience was utterly and completely transformative. I’ll let Pastor Rick tell you himself,
through an interview with Harry Smith of NBC News:
“I’ve
walked past people that stay in some of the places of homelessness. And really almost not even noticed them, not
considered their plight and what’s going on in their life. Now I was living among them,” Cole
(said). “I think I began to experience
how people ignore others. I became the
one ignored. People walked by me like I
didn’t exist.”
“It might
be like, man, those people just need to get a job. They need to get themselves out of the hole
they dug for themselves,” Cole said of attitudes he’d heard—and shared at times—before
his two-week stretch on the streets…
“Once we
try to go to sleep at night, it was really sketchy because there’s people
walking up and down this river all night long.
So you wake up kind of startled, not sure what’s going on. So it felt, actually, very insecure.”
After the
experience, Cole said the “holes” he found were filled with addiction and
mental illness, bad breaks and bad decisions.
Who was he not to help?
“They
matter to God. They matter to me, and
now I’m trying to figure out why they didn’t matter to me before.”
Okay, I have to cave and admit that it is
officially the holiday season, even though I really wish it wasn’t. Hear me out, now—how many of you will wake up
the morning of December 26 and think to yourselves something along the lines
of, “Wow, I’m glad all that work is over with for another year?” How many of us will get to that dangling week
between Christmas and New Year’s and feel like we just OD’ed on everything
pepperminty and jingle-belly? (But if
you still want your peppermint mochas after Christmas, just brew your regular
coffee and squeeze a tube of toothpaste into your mug. Ta da!
You’re welcome.)
Well, if that applies to you, then maybe we need
to halve back on all of the trappings of December? Because this *isn’t* the Christmas season,
not yet—the Christmas season is 12 days long (hence the song. No, really.) and it actually doesn’t end
until several days into January of next year.
But to help us now, in the task of preparing the way for the Lord this
Advent season, I’ve selected a memoir by a father-and-teenage daughter duo,
Kevin and Hannah Salwen, entitled “The Power of Half,” which gets its title
from their family literally liquidating and selling half of their family’s
entire net worth: half of their home value (and subsequently moving into a
smaller home), going from two cars to one, the whole nine yards. And they learn a lot as they cleave away at
their material lives, including exactly how much they have to begin with, and
they decide to give away that half they liquidated to anti-poverty initiatives
in rural Ghana in West Africa. Hear
Hannah’s words about this experience:
If you have
a front door, you have so much more than the people in the villages of
Ghana. Imagine your family living in a one-room
house made of mud, with no running water or electricity. Imagine never traveling more than a few miles
from you home, always on foot. Yet the
people in Ghana appreciate what they have, even though it seemed to me when we
visited them like they had nothing at all.
They take pride in their homes by sweeping them out daily, and they keep
their clothes clean. People used to say
to me, “You don’t realize how lucky you are,” and I would just brush it
off. It was true, of course; I just
needed to recognize it.
But
realizing what you have can be tough.
First you need to start by acknowledging that you have a good life.
And acknowledging that you already have a good
life is exactly what Jeremiah is demanding of King Jehoiakim of Judah.
Now, this requires some explanation, so bear with
me here: Jehoiakim and Shallum are brothers—they are the sons of the last
righteous king of Judah, Josiah, who recovered the Torah scroll and
reinstituted the worship of YHWH after many, many years of worship of idols in
the Holy Land. Shallum only reigns for
about three months before being deposed by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II in 608
BCE; he gets packed off to captivity in Egypt, and we never hear from him again—he
will, in fact, die in exile in Egypt. It’s
like a reality television show, “Judah’s Next Top Monarch,” and Shallum gets
voted off in the first episode.
But there would be reason to vote him off—in just
those three months of his kingship, he managed to completely disregard the
religious reforms of his father Josiah, meaning there was an immediate return
to the worship of idols. Then after
Shallum gets voted off the island, Jehoiakim rules Judah for eleven years,
until 597 BCE. As it happens, he is no
better than his big bro, but we’ll get to that.
So this is the time frame in which this
particular prophecy from Jeremiah happens—about 600 years before the birth of
Christ. And to put that into
perspective, 600 years ago, Columbus had not yet sailed to North America; in
fact, in the year 1414, he would not be born yet for another 38 years.
And here’s the thing: the conquering of Judah
that will happen about 10-20 years after this passage, in 586 BCE, (and the
destruction of Jerusalem, including the temple to YHWH) so utterly defines
Israel’s identity and history as a conquered people that over six hundred years
later, it still gets referenced in parts of the New Testament, especially in
Revelation. That’s how big a deal this
defeat will be, though, like I said, at this point in Jeremiah’s career, we are
at least a decade away from it.
But Jeremiah is already warning King Jehoiakim
about it—the coming Babylonian army, Jeremiah says elsewhere in his book, is
divine punishment for the exact sorts of sins that he lists off here to
Jehoiakim: refusing to pay his employees, building himself grand and
unnecessary palaces, and cruelly “spill(ing) the blood of the innocent” and “oppress(ing)
his subjects.”
And if you think we don’t practice those exact
same sorts of sins today, I have news for you.
Wage theft—the not paying or underpaying of one’s employees—is a
practice that has cost American workers literally hundreds of millions ofdollars of rightfully earned wages. The building
of grand and unnecessary palaces? Well,
maybe not as much here in Longview, but elsewhere, as nearby as Seattle, you
can pick up a 17,000 square foot house for a cool $11.8 million.
And spilling the blood of the innocent and
oppressing the people? I would be remiss
if I didn’t at least speak of Ferguson, Missouri, today. A lot of folks have said to me that this isn’t
about race, but let’s consider the title of the sermon for a minute: realizing
how much you have. And I look out on our
little congregation and I see mostly white faces, including my own. Do any of us wonder if our lives might be
different if we woke up tomorrow and were African-American? Do we think there will be people out there
who would treat us differently because of that one change, even if in every
other respect we were to wake up tomorrow exactly the same?
Because while I’m white, I’m also ethnic—I’m
Armenian-American, and just ambiguously enough that most folks can’t peg my
ethnicity. In my still-young life, I
have had racial slurs hurled at me from people who thought I was Chinese,
Jewish, and Arab. And I’m white. So let’s consider what people of color go through,
then, and maybe we might realize what privilege we have in being white.
We don’t need a show of hands here, but is my
talking about this making any of y’all feel a bit uncomfortable? Good.
Sometimes that’s what preaching needs to do. I’m not entirely comfortable right now,
either—I was nervous putting this into the sermon, because I know it’s easier
for me to just talk about the Christmas season.
But being Christian has never, should never, be about doing what is easy
versus doing, ultimately, what is right.
And so Jeremiah lays all of this at the feet of
the king, and rightfully so, because in the absolute monarchies of old, that is
exactly where the buck stopped: the throne.
And in our own lives, ultimately, the buck stops with us as well. We can choose, every day, if we are going to
be a good person and a faithful follower of Jesus, or not.
That is why Jehoiakim’s excesses so galls the
prophet Jeremiah, and ultimately, so galls God.
He could easily choose to follow in the footsteps of his righteous
father, King Josiah, and he chooses not to.
Similarly, we can choose to follow in the footsteps of our own righteous
father, God, and yet we still will at times choose not to. Which is why we need prophets like Jeremiah
in the first place, to hold us accountable to tell us when and where we are
slipping.
Part of where we slip, though, is so often forgetting how much we have--and not just the possessions, but the experiences, the memories, the stories that make up our lives as well.
It is partly why I ended up doing this year’s
Advent sermon series on Jeremiah. In
years past, my Advent series have usually been on Isaiah, because Isaiah is the
Hebrew Bible prophet who most explicitly foretells the coming of Jesus: it is
Isaiah whose book prophesies “behold, the virgin shall bear a son, and she
shall call him Emanuel, which means God-with-us,” and it is Isaiah whose book
prophesies the coming of the suffering servant to set the people free.
But Isaiah lived long before the Babylonian
exile. He did not live to see everything
taken from his nation and his religion.
He had things that Jeremiah could only dream of having. As do we.
Harken back to the story of Pastor Rick at the
very beginning of my sermon: it wasn’t just the money that he had and the
homeless did not: he talked so much about the regard and respect that people
gave him as a pastor that was not given to him as a homeless man.
Think of what you have—what other people would
long to have and give anything to have.
And then ask yourself how, instead of hoarding it for yourself like a
certain king of Judah, you can begin to give it away, bit by bit, piece by
piece, as your gift to a desperate world this Christmas.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
November 30, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment