This sermon, preached first on July 21, 2024, continues using these texts from Proper 11, Year B: Jeremiah 23:1-6, which offers God’s dire warning to the shepherds tasked with caring for and protecting their sheep; Psalm 23, which promises God’s steadfastness both through the threat of death and beyond it; Ephesians 2:11-22, which celebrates the unity of all humanity in God; and Mark 6:3-34, 53-56, which references Jesus’ compassion on those who were “like sheep without a shepherd.”
I post it as another example of how we have resources, if not the mandate, within the faith to preach and teach biblically and politically—which, of course, is different from preaching in a partisan fashion.
Perhaps the notions in this sermon may be helpful to those called to preach tomorrow’s texts, in light both of last week’s election, and tonight’s dreadful anniversary of Kristallnacht.
You can find the podcast/audio version to it here:
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Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
It is so good to be here again. Thank you.
So as a refresher for those who were here last week, and as a crash course for those who weren’t, I’m going to do a quick return to the “verbal glossary” of sorts I pitched out from this pulpit last week. You’ll recall that since you didn’t know me other than a vouch from your Pastor, and since I’ll be with you all for a total of three times, I figured that it wouldn’t be a totally bad idea to introduce you to words and to concepts that I use on the regular!
So last week I spoke of the Gospel as an event, namely the good news that Jesus is risen; I grounded the biblical meaning of salvation as health, healing, and wholeness now—rather than what one receives if you believe in Jesus and to be realized only after you die; Christ I yoked to its meaning as a title rather than as last name, and which means Messiah, the One of God for whom we have been waiting, and which was conferred onto Jesus only after his resurrection; and the First Commandment, which Luther defined as God being that in which or in whom you place your ultimate trust, moves us to be mindfully aware of whether the god in whom we say we believe is really the God of our baptized faith.
Yeah, well you may have thought you were safe, but Round Two, words which very much tie into our texts of the day, is coming right up.
First: Public Theologian. I’m an ordained pastor, but my particular role and calling in the Church is to be a public theologian. Public theology is what I do. One of the key elements of my call is to help people not only fuss with what they believe and why, but also to apply their beliefs—their theological framework, if you will—to the broader world. I worry that too often—and not least of all because the Gospel has been regularly reduced to “Your Sins Are Forgiven,” which is true, but not the whole kit and kaboodle of the Gospel—our faith is seen as an individual matter. Me and Jesus. But in the Jewish and the Christian tradition, which is rooted in the Jewish tradition, one’s faith is personal and communal. We are baptized and known by our names, but within a community that promises and renounces together as the communion of the saints.
Not only that, but because we know that salvation isn’t just personal, it has to do with health, healing, and wholeness in the now; and that if we identify as followers of Jesus the Christ, we are therefore ambassadors of Jesus’ salvation—health, healing, and wholeness in the now; therefore we also are constantly alert to where there is death, the threat of death, and the need for salvation which we are baptized, fed, and sent to offer.
Jesus came for me, of course, but we dare not forget that Jesus came for the whole world. So what happens in the world, whether justice is being carried out in the name of righteousness, has a lot to do with power: who is in power, who has power, and whether power is grounded in the goodness and mercy that God intends for this world.
Politics: I realize that these days, this is a dicey one, but hear me out here, not least of all because politics thread throughout our texts today, especially Jeremiah’s and Mark’s, and because I am called to be a public theologian, I am keenly interested in politics.
Because we Christians are baptized, fed, and sent to offer salvation to the world, it is obvious that we can’t help but to pay attention to what is going on in the world, including in the public square, which means Christians pay attention and are deeply invested in politics, because what happens in politics concerns and affects matters of the very things of which God speaks—including in our texts today—that concern access to salvation in the now.
It’s unfortunately newsy that the context of a large swath of biblical texts is political, and that therefore God’s biblical word is political and bears upon the politics of the day, theirs and ours!
Take Jeremiah, for example: his words from today are dour, bleak, and condemning precisely because the kings and priests and purported prophets of the day were acting not in the stead of God.
The very reason we have Jeremiah’s words is because he warned that those who claimed to be faithful to God were not representing God’s will in the economies and the politics of the day, and because his words were seen as a faithful prophetic revelation from God, they were preserved in our Scriptures.
As was common to do in his world, Jeremiah refers to the offending leaders as shepherds, albeit with a caveat: they were super lousy, incompetent shepherds. Not one to mince words, Jeremiah lets it be known that God is not happy not one little bit about the lack of care that these shepherds were offering their dependent sheep.
When God ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, says Jeremiah in effect, but the reason God wasn’t happy is because nobody but the kings, priests, and prophets were happy!
Why? Because to their own benefit, these purported shepherds were being unrighteous, unjust, and therefore unholy.
Why? Well, the chapter immediately before our passage today reveals that these leaders were doing “wrong and violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, and shedding innocent blood in this place.” They weren’t giving welcome to the vulnerable or taking care of the least of these—key priorities of God—and were causing, with no remorse, violence that served their cause.
Let’s bookmark Jeremiah for a moment, and spring to Mark, where we find Jesus attempting to get to the wilderness (I’m here to say that it’s no coincidence that he scurried there after last week’s Marcan text, the one in which his cousin John lost his head for speaking an inconvenient truth—a political act from both John and Herod), and yet, not only were the authorities beginning to look for him—challenges to authorities are always sought out…and dealt with—but so were the people who were needing hope. We hear that a crowd “like sheep without a shepherd” (echo-bells should be ringing) sought out Jesus, and found him, and brought their sick to him in the belief that he would offer them, well, salvation. Now.
Rev. Dr. Matt Skinner, New Testament theologian at Luther, says that their need—not them, in contrast to the rhetoric we hear today about immigrants and refugees and the impoverished, but their need—was as offensive to Jesus as the people’s need in Jeremiah’s day was offensive to him. These poor hapless and hopeless people were, says Dr. Skinner, “denied well-being and justice…When Jesus heals people of their ailments, his acts are not symbolic of the salvation he provides. They are a piece of that salvation. Jesus devotes himself to ensuring human flourishing in body, mind, spirit, and community. So too should any church that conducts ministry in his name and in the power of the same Holy Spirit that indwells him…
…Giving support to harassed people, feeding hungry people, and healing sick people have consequences,” he goes on to say. “Those actions alter economies in households and neighborhoods. They transform relationships. They urge people to reconsider old allegiances. They give people hope.”
A re-orienting of priorities based on the values of God alter economies and households and neighborhoods, they transform relationships and old allegiances.
Ooof.
That sounds like, to reference an Old Testament theologian named Walter Brueggemann, a subversion of the main version of the way our body politic works.
Faith in action is political. It’s everywhere in Scripture, and to not lift that up as a core element of the biblical witness and in-real-time fidelity to God is to make the words of Jeremiah and the actions of Jesus into nothing more than a mere tale with no traction. In fact, a famous reformed theologian, some of you may have heard of him—Karl Barth—said that the best theologians should have a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.
See, if we say that the gospel is Good News, and News is something that happened and still makes a difference, then we know that we can’t ignore the prophetic takeaways from Scripture as they reverberate through the present day political turmoils. It would be supremely unfaithful to avoid preaching of the politics of those days, and not draw grounded theological—not partisan, but theological—lines to the politics of this day.
And let me take a moment here to say that Christian nationalism is a Christian heresy wrapped in red, white, and blue, and with the fullness of our baptismal promises to renounce the powers of this world that rebel against God, we must reject it.
A public theologian—and, to one degree or another, every pastor, including your spectacular one, is a public theologian, because they make the theology of their tradition public in their contextually-situated pulpits—wakes up every morning to figure out how to make faith relevant, even in awkward ways.
I want to name a truth, here, siblings in Christ: It’s really really hard, and indeed scary, to be a preacher these days. I want to name that, because you have a banger of a preacher in your Pastor, but to be the best and most faithful preacher she can be, she needs your support, not least of all by way of your trust and your willingness to receive her words, to which she was baptized, ordained, and called to speak. She is a shepherd, with a duty to shepherd God’s sheep. The last thing you want to do is set her up to be at the receiving end of words like Jeremiah’s, or end up like John the Baptist with her vocational head on a platter because she speaks truth here!
See, I have often said that a rostered leader is not called to serve a congregation. That might take a person in a pew aback, right? We say that “so-and-so is my pastor!” And you would be absolutely right.
But the pastor’s primary responsibility is not to the congregation—if it were, then the relationship between congregation and pastor would be more akin to employer and employee, or customer and ware-purveyor.
But that’s not how it works in the Church.
The pastor’s primary responsibility is to the gospel.
Rather than being called to serve a congregation, a rostered leader is called to serve the gospel in a congregation. That means that the rostered leader is constantly alert to where there is death, where there is fear, where there is grief, where there is unrighteousness, where there is injustice, and where, then, words of salvation—health, healing, and wholeness—can be preached.
That is what being a good and faithful shepherd looks like on the ground. They might get bawled out by the sheep, but better that than bawled out by God!
Justice and Righteousness.
You hear these words laced through our First and Gospel readings today.
They are often bound together, because biblically, they are entwined with one another.
Justice, in Hebrew, is Mishpat. It means retribution for a wrong. It means a societally agreed to answer to an assault. It is punishment.
Righteousness, in Hebrew, is Tzadek. The word can also be translated as “alignment,” as in what the late Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler described happening when his bunged up car was brought to a Jerusalem mechanic, and when the repairs were done, the car was pronounced, “Tzadek,” as in properly aligned. To be righteous, to be tzadek, is to be properly aligned with God.
When coupled with mishpat, you have not retributive justice, which is what mishpat is when left to its own devices, but you have restorative justice, which means not just the punishment of wrongs, but the righting of them.
I often joke that when I’m angry about something, I write the letter when I’m indignant (that is, seeking justice), but I send them only when I’m sure I’m righteously indignant!
Righteousness, you see, when coupled with Justice, creates a culture the likes of which is sung about in the song of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who spoke of the poor and meek being lifted up, and the hungry being filled, but also the wealthy and the fed being notched down to a place of equity rather than gluttony and hubris. It aspires to shared dignity, the valuation of all humanity, the restoration of well-being for the lowly and the mighty. It seeks to call out and call in. It calls a thing what it is, and then recalls the person to who they are called to be.
This entanglement surfaces again and again and again in the Bible.
It is the word that God speaks to God’s people, and the word that God expects God’s appointed shepherds to speak too.
Years ago, and I mean years ago, as in about 15 years ago when my daughter was 3-5 years old, we were having a struggle getting to church. It was a bit of an issue, because Else, who is many forms of magnificent, and excels in ways too many to count, did…does…not like to hurry. And on this Sunday, we had to hurry.
I tried everything: playful challenges, modeling, stern scolding. Finally, I knelt down to her level, and I said to her this:
“Elsegirl, sweet one. We need to get in the car now to go to Church, because if we don’t, we shall be late. Once we do get to Church, my dear girl, you will hear Jesus tell you how much he loves you. And if you listen carefully, you will hear Jesus tell you something like this: ‘Elsegirl, I love you so so much. In fact, I love you so much that I gave you a mama. I gave you a mama who loves you so much too, and because I love you and your mama loves you, I want you to listen to her!”
And my daughter crossed her arms, furrowed her brow, and said, “I don’t wanna hear Jesus say that.”
Siblings in Christ, we come to church to hear that Jesus loves us.
And he does, so very much.
But sometimes he says things we don’t want to hear.
And one of the ways he loves us is by telling those of us who are marginalized, hated, disparaged, and lied about, that they are, no matter what the world and the politics of the day say, worthy and treasured and sheep worth saving.
But Jesus might love others of us by saying things that may challenge, anger, and offend us. Jesus is forever calling us to be more tzadek, more properly aligned with the First Commandment and the gospel and the way of the one we call Lord and Christ.
And he loves us by giving us shepherds, like your pastor, who love us too, and cherish us so much that they preach God’s word faithfully, relevantly, and reverently, with justice and with righteousness, with newspaper and with Bible in hand, oriented to nothing other than God’s revelation of love, faithfulness, and concern for the salvation-in-the-now for you of course, and for the whole world.
