Proper 8, Year A
Psalm 89:1-4,15-18; Jeremiah 28; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42
I.
This morning, I would like to examine with you the problem Jeremiah’s words create. We are in the twenty-eighth chapter, at the sixth verse.
The problem is that the true prophet, Jeremiah, appears to agree with the false prophet, Hananiah. The prophet Hananiah makes this prediction:
“Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the LORD’s house, which Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon.”
There are two problems with this.
The first is that three chapters before—and nearly a decade before in real time gone by—Jeremiah spoke a very different prophecy from the one Hananiah makes in this morning’s text.
Jeremiah’s prophecy stipulated that “...after seventy years are completed, [then] I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chalde′ans, for their iniquity, says the LORD.”
Well, which is it? Two years or seventy? Hananiah’s more optimistic prediction or Jeremiah’s gloomier one?
Perhaps the fact we are reading from the Book of Jeremiah this morning gives away the answer. History records Jeremiah’s words were true, Hananiah’s false.
That is the first problem, easily resolved in hindsight. But the second problem remains to this day, and that is the problem I would like to address.
The problem is this. After Hananiah’s false words, Jeremiah, who knows they are false, seems to agree with them.
He says in verse six, “Amen! May the LORD do so; may the LORD make the words which you have prophesied come true, and bring back to this place from Babylon the vessels of the house of the LORD, and all the exiles.”
This gives the appearance of the true prophet, Jeremiah, agreeing with the false one.
We know Hananiah is a false prophet because in the very next verse, verse seven, Jeremiah says, “Yet hear now this word which I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people.”
Jeremiah proceeds to overthrow Hananiah’s prophecy, and, by the end of the chapter Hananiah lies dead.
But why did Jeremiah even give the appearance of entertaining a lie? Why did he pay lip service to a false prophet?
Jeremiah says, “Amen” to Hananiah’s words.
He gives his Amen.
He says, “Amen! May the LORD do so.”
It would be as if I were to stand in this pulpit and declare that Jesus Christ is not the Son of God and for you all to say “Amen.”
I would be damned for saying it and you would be damned for agreeing with me.
So why does Jeremiah do it?
For thirty-three years I watched the Episcopal Church try to figure out how to purge me without saying why.
I left in 2024. The book is the reckoning.
Pre-orders fund the print run. → Exile and Return: A Pastor’s Reckoning with the Mainline Church. Hardcover, ships by Christmas.
II.
Both today’s Old Testament reading and our gospel reading from Matthew talk about the sending and receiving of prophets.
We are still in Matthew chapter ten—now in our third week. Also now in its third week is our reading of Jesus’ commission of twelve apostles.
For two weeks in a row, I have expounded on that solemn warning in Matthew 10:15, “Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomor′rah than for that town.”
Today’s short lesson, three verses only, verses forty through forty-two can be taken as the opposite of verse fifteen.
This morning, Jesus says in verse forty, “He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me.”
Jesus then says in verse forty-one: “He who receives a prophet because he is a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward, and he who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward.”
Those towns that receive the apostles—and their prophetic message—will receive a prophet’s reward.
Between a judgment worse than that which befell Sodom and Gomorrah and the receiving of a prophet’s and righteous man’s reward lies the key point of Jesus’ instructions: receiving someone is not a neutral act.
You are making a statement—a non-neutral statement—when you receive a prophet. You are saying his words are true and the truth is not neutral.
The truth takes sides. The truth is on God’s side.
It takes wisdom and discernment to tell a true prophet from a false one.
Wisdom and discernment are qualities Adam displayed in the garden, before he fell into sin.
Discernment. Adam showed discernment in recognizing the qualities innate to each creature and naming him according to his kind.
Wisdom. Adam showed discernment in recognizing Eve as one of his own kind and wisdom in naming her accordingly: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2:23).
Adam received the prophetic word of God and received his prophetic reward, a wife to call his own. The woman became the righteous man’s reward (Proverbs 18:22).
Not only was man created good, but now, through the ordinance of marriage, he was given the capacity to remain good, to propagate good—good children in his own image and likeness—through the ministry of his wife in childbearing.
Eve also received the prophetic word from her husband but lacked the discernment to challenge the serpent.
She gave her Amen to the serpent’s lie.
And this is the problem we are presented with in this morning’s reading from Jeremiah. Did he also give his Amen to a false word, a false prophecy, a lie?
How then is Eve’s Amen different from Jeremiah’s?
III.
The answer to that will help us understand why our own Amens fall short—why we consent to evil and receive lies into our hearts.
“Amen! May the LORD do so,” Jeremiah says to the false prophet, whose words were otherwise pleasing. That’s the tip-off right there, the clue. The deception is pleasing.
Jeremiah continues: “May the LORD make the words which you have prophesied come true, and bring back to this place from Babylon the vessels of the house of the LORD, and all the exiles.”
The restoration of stolen national treasure and fellow countrymen—that is a pleasing promise! These are words it is easy to consent to, to say Amen to.
Recall what Eve saw: “...the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6). So why did her Amen lead to the ruin of the human race?
Because her Amen was not to the word of God nor to the prophet of that word.
She said yes neither to God nor to her husband who taught her God’s word.
Adam was made and received God’s commandment before Eve was fashioned from his side, so surely he must have taught her.
He was her first prophet, the serpent a cheap imitation.
Yet she consented to her own word—not the serpent’s, not Adam’s—but her own.
She said Amen to herself.
Jeremiah gave his Amen but then refuted Hananiah.
Jeremiah’s refutation of Hananiah takes place in the temple.
Twice we are told it takes place “in the presence of the priests and all the people who were standing in the house of the LORD.”
The temple was not neutral ground. It was the LORD’s ground—the LORD’s house. The very building itself bore witness to the truth and against Hananiah’s lies.
Likewise, Eve’s apostasy did not take place on neutral ground. It took place in the garden—God’s garden.
Nature itself bore witness to the serpent’s deception and Eve’s beguilement.
So, when creation and temple both bear witness to the same truth, how could either say “Amen” to the lie?
For that matter, why do we still utter rebellion against the LORD?
Jeremiah says to Hananiah in verse sixteen, “This very year you shall die, because you have uttered rebellion against the LORD.”
Paul says something similar in Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death.”
If we say Amen to Paul’s words, then we’d better be careful that we are consistent with what we say Amen to.
Amen means “let it be so.”
It is the very opposite of rebellion.
How do we move from rebellion to “Amen”?
The answer is we don’t.
God must put the Amen in our mouths.
He must subdue our rebellious hearts, even if that means He has to break them.
Eve found that out the hard way.
Jeremiah, as we heard last week, did too.
He almost gave up his prophetic ministry.
He said, “I will not mention [God], or speak any more in his name” (Jeremiah 20:9).
IV.
I think that might explain Jeremiah’s Amen to Hananiah’s false prophecy. It was the Amen of a broken heart.
It was the Amen of a man so beaten up by telling the truth—so exhausted—that it became tempting to hope (if not actually believe) that the liars might be right.
In my own ministry, I must confess, I have sometimes harbored that hope.
Jeremiah must have wondered, “Wouldn’t it be nice if Hananiah were right? Wouldn’t it be great if Babylon were crushed in two years, our friends released and brought home, and our temple restored? Why, that is almost something I could say ‘Amen’ to. Let it be so, Lord. I decree it.”
Likewise, I at one time harbored the hope that the progressive capture of the church might not be so bad. That there might be a way to have “communion across differences,” to “walk together separately.”
I am, of course, speaking of the split that occurred in my former denomination over same-sex marriage.
But “walking together separately” really just means walking alone, which is how Jeremiah often felt.
I think this is why Jesus says, “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil” (Matthew 5:37).
It is why elsewhere in his prophetic book Jeremiah says, “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14, 8:11).
Our false Amens—or, I should say our Amens to falsehood and our consent to wickedness, public and private—are what nailed Jesus to the cross.
The wages of sin is indeed death, as the Apostle Paul says, and so it is fitting that “In that same year, in the seventh month, the prophet Hananiah died.”
Hananiah dies as a judgment executed on his own lying words—comfortable words to be sure—but a false prophecy nonetheless.
Christ dies as judgment on those words, which are also our words—because we like to take the prophetic word, the Bible, and make it say only comfortable things.
So Christ must die in our place to tell us the hard things that are true.
Sin has no place in His kingdom and He will die before letting it gain a foothold there.
V.
This is Paul’s entire point in Ephesians 5 when he says the church—the bride of Christ—is the righteous man’s reward.
Jesus is the righteous man who speaks truth, and we—who are His church—are His reward. The church is His reward.
What a stunning reversal! What a poor bargain for Him, but what an incredible gain for us.
It is as if Hananiah’s words come true after all.
The temple of Christ’s body is restored on the third day, and those led captive into exile by sin are set free.
You see, false prophets are always reaching for something true.
Hananiah even utters the prophetic slogan, “Thus says the LORD of hosts…”
It’s just that this slogan, like our modern-day prophetic-sounding slogan, “Love is Love,” is more true than those who say it can ever realize.
Jesus says, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” John 15:13.
Yet, almost no one who says “Love is Love” is willing to die for anyone, least of all for those to whom he says it—those Jeremiahs, those the world calls “preachers of hate,” those conservative Christians.
What Eve lost for her natural children—inherited goodness—is restored, by adoption, to the Bride of Christ, the church, the righteous man Jesus’ reward.
As adopted children of God we are born again.
Our goodness is no longer natural, but supernatural; no longer inherited, but imputed—given to us freely, through no merit of our own.
This means that finally, we are able to say Amen to the truth: “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3).
And so I ask: what kind of Amen are you making?
Because it’s not a neutral word.
Are your Amens the Amens of a heart broken by sin, with sighs so deep only the Holy Spirit can hear them, or are they the performative Amens, the kind everyone can see and hear?
You know what kind of Amens I mean. The virtuous kind. The “this is not who we are” kind.
The Amens that signal you are safe, obedient, willing to go along with the lie, to make the compromise, to turn a blind eye, and to make sure that the true prophets get cancelled—or nailed to a cross.
Preached on June 28, 2026, by the Rev. Jake Dell at First Congregational Church of Woodbury, Connecticut.
