This Week's Sermon: "Success," Jeremiah 22:11-19

Jeremiah 22:11-19

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.

18 Therefore, this is what the Lord says to Jehoiakim son of Judah’s King Josiah: They won’t grieve for him, saying, “My brother, my sister!” They won’t grieve for him, saying, “My master, my majesty!” 19 They will give him a donkey’s burial, dragging him outside the gates of Jerusalem and dumping him there. (Common English Bible)

“Escape Routes: How the Christmas Story Points Us Forward,” Week One

As kids—I know I did as a kid—we often come up with something entrepreneurial to try to raise money to supplement our meager allowances. A lemonade stand. A dog-walking service. My cousins and I once took rocks from my uncle’s yard, cracked them open with hammers to expose their sparkly, glittery innards, and then tried to sell the rocks back to him. Which we successfully did, purely (I believe) out of pity.

Fewer of us undertake such an endeavor with no such monetary reward, or one that involves significant monetary sacrifice. But an elementary school kid in Cambridge, Massachusetts, named Liam Hannon has in a ministry to feed his homeless neighbors, as the Boston Globe conveys:

“It started because I didn’t want to go to summer camp,” said Liam, a fifth-grader at the Morse School. “I just wanted to give back to my community because some people might need it.”

Scott Hannon, 49, liked the idea. “I said, ‘Great! Let’s go rent a food truck and make lunches for a bunch of people.’”

But his son gently pointed out the obvious. “Liam was like, ‘Dad, they live right there.’”…

The Hannons’ apartment overlooks Central Square, and Liam, like most kids growing up in a busy city, sees people panhandling, some not far from the building where he lives.

One day, he got up the nerve to approach the strangers in need, with his father at his side, and gave out 20 meals he’d handpacked…

Son and father now know their regulars by name…They have vegetarian offerings and make lunches for people with peanut allergies. Together, they’ve prepared spicy stews and vegetable dishes, but their staple is a homemade PB&J.

Scott said they began by spending a few hundred dollars of their own money. Now they’ve set up a gofundme.com account and go to local food banks to pick up needed supplies.

There are two critical aspects to Liam’s story I want to draw your attention to: one is the financial sacrifice involved, with his family spending hundreds of dollars of their own cash on feeding people. The other is holding these people in a high enough regard to care about their needs and preferences, like allergies or a vegetarian diet. Honoring those needs and preferences means that you see the person as a person, with human dignity. In caring for others, that matters. For Christ, that matters.

This is a new sermon series for a new church year—while the calendar year doesn’t turn over for another four weeks, the church year begins with the season of Advent,  a preparatory time set aside for us to live out the exhortation of John the Baptist, who, quoting Isaiah, encourages us to prepare the way of the Lord and to make straight His path.

We look at our own path to Jesus and typically want it to be as straight and as easy as possible as well—a simple beaming up to the mother ship when the time comes would do for us, never mind the fact that the journey is what defines the destination.

So how can we prepare a way when we are trying to escape the world upon which that path rests? Can we instead escape the hell we create in this world and this life, confident that our doing so veers us away from hell in the next?

That is the premise of a book by Johann Christoph Arnold, a pastor in the Christian communitarian church, the Bruderhof, who sadly passed away this past spring. Just before he passed, I had settled upon his book, Escape Routes, as the template for this year’s Advent sermon series, and I hope to do that justice. We begin with a passage from his chapter entitled “Success:”

“We’re always in danger of ending up possessed by our possessions. When this happens, it is a sign that we have lost our dignity as human beings and become mere tools for creating wealth. Inevitably, we’ll treat other people as tools too. Strangers to our own humanity, we’ll find ourselves adrift just when we thought the good life was within our grasp. The real truth is that money and happiness are incompatible. Jesus said, “It is as hard for a rich man to enter heaven as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.”

“A hard saying,” Jesus’ disciples murmured. It’s hard, because you don’t have to be Bill Gates to qualify as rich—not in the eyes of a malnourished child in Iraq or a refugee family in Bangladesh or Mexico. Relative to millions in the world, many of us are the man who may have trouble entering heaven…

We are facing a…clash between good and evil, heaven and hell, the culture of life and the culture of death. The low prices that fuel our comfort depend in part on the suffering of people we don’t see, in sweatshops and factories we prefer not to imagine.”

Jesus may offer us an escape route from the trials and tribulations of this world, but if all we see Him as is that escape route, then we have made Him into a far smaller Messiah than He is, or ever was. If we are to escape our hurts and pains, it is going to be through helping others escape their hurts and their pains.

It is hundreds of years before Jesus, but that is the fundamental truth that Jeremiah condemns Jehoikaim for forgetting. The king of Judah has ensconced himself in his own lavish palaces and possessions, and has defined his own worth from them, rather than from his birthright as the earthly king of the people of God. This earns him the rebuke we read today from the prophet Jeremiah, who sees the coming Babylonian conquest—as other Hebrew Bible prophets do—as divine

punishment for the excesses of the kings and men of power in Judah.

How terrible it is, then, for someone to build for themselves a palace and a stable of possessions on the back of injustice, with worth being placed in the possessions themselves rather than in the people who have made them—and in the people who cannot make them. The things we accumulate for ourselves are not the ends in our lives—as the old saying goes, he who dies with the most toys…is still dead—yet at every turn, that is exactly how we treat our things: as the ends.

Consider that the stereotypical American dream, which Arnold touches on in this chapter, is fairly well-established at this point in time, and is really very similar to the way of life Jehoiakim has become accustomed to: a well-manicured, prosperous household that looks great on both the inside and the outside, that is the source of admiration—if not outright envy—of our neighbors, and which projects an image of both stability and financial means to the outside world.

What an absolute crock.

Prosperity, at its most basic level, needs to be redefined and then removed from the pedestal of worship upon which it rests.  Jesus was not prosperous in any earthly sense of the term. He was homeless, relied on financial backers, and never came up with anything like Facebook or Uber.

Yet still He and His teachings have changed the world.

The sacrificing of resources to lend human dignity to others was at the core of that ministry—up to and including the sacrificing of Jesus’s life as one of those resources.

It is Christ-like, then, to sacrifice of yourself to lend human dignity to others, whether as dramatically as Jesus or as humbly as young Liam Hannon. It is Christ-like to embrace as your own not the stereotypical American Dream, but the Bethlehem Dream, the Nazareth Dream, the dream which says that your prosperity is defined not by your economic worth, but by your spiritual worth.

That’s a simple, but life-changing concept. We get asked what our net worth is, or ask what someone else’s net worth is, and what if that response came in spiritual net worth, not material net worth? Your worth to God, rather than to the almighty dollar, and your worth to the Holy Spirit rather than to a nameless, faceless economy of scale.

According to the latter, Jesus wasn’t successful or prosperous at all. He was an abject failure. But according to the former…He changed everything.

Spiritual worth, then, can be prosperity. Indeed, that is prosperity. It is success, redefined and reimagined.

I wish you as much of that success as possible in your own path towards Jesus, even if—especially if—it makes *your* path a little less straight, and His a little more so.

Because in truth, that may well be what the church is in a bit more need of this particular Christmas…a path that is bit most twisty and windy for ourselves, but because of that becomes a bit straighter and easier for Jesus as revealed in the guise of other people.

We’re one week down, with three more to go until that Jesus is indeed revealed. Keep the faith, my brothers and sisters. We’ll arrive at Bethlehem soon enough.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington 

December 3, 2017

Original image courtesy of TripAdvisor.