Proper 20
Jeremiah 11:18-20; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37
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I.
We are not always on the same page with those who hear us.
Jeremiah experiences this in today’s reading when he is informed of the plot against his life.
In Jeremiah 11:18-20 we read:
18 The Lord made it known to me and I knew;
then thou didst show me their evil deeds.
19 But I was like a gentle lamb
led to the slaughter.
I did not know it was against me
they devised schemes, saying,
“Let us destroy the tree with its fruit,
let us cut him off from the land of the living,
that his name be remembered no more.”
20 But, O Lord of hosts, who judgest righteously,
who triest the heart and the mind,
let me see thy vengeance upon them,
for to thee have I committed my cause.
There are three things to notice.
First, Jeremiah is gentle and lamb-like, almost like a child.
Second, he is ignorant of the plot against him. In other words, he is not on the same page as those to whom he has been sent to preach.
Let’s take a moment to look back a few verses and read what Jeremiah has been commissioned to preach. Jeremiah 11:2-5 reads:
2 “Hear the words of this covenant, and speak to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 3 You shall say to them, Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Cursed be the man who does not heed the words of this covenant 4 which I commanded your fathers when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, from the iron furnace, saying, Listen to my voice, and do all that I command you. So shall you be my people, and I will be your God, 5 that I may perform the oath which I swore to your fathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as at this day.” Then I answered, “So be it, Lord.”
“So be it, Lord,” Jeremiah says. He and God are on the same page, but it is amazing to think that Judah and Jerusalem are not.
Jeremiah can hardly hide his amazement too when in Jeremiah 11:19 he says, “I did not know it was against me they devised schemes…” because why would they?
God is only repeating the same covenant He’s made with His people since the beginning. Why would restating it lead to a plot to kill the one commissioned to restate it?
But perhaps this is not so surprising since in our day there are churches that want to hear the Bible preached, but who lack a preacher who will preach what the text says.
Or, there are preachers who would gladly preach what the text says but for doing so they are rejected by their congregations.
That is better than being “cut off from the land of the living,” but perhaps not much if it means you get canceled.
Then there are preachers and congregations who are on the same page when it comes to what the Bible says, but their lives are not.
Paul often wrote to his churches, sometimes to correct their doctrine, other times to correct their manner of living. (See: 1 Corinthians 5:1.)
In Revelation 2-3, Jesus dictated seven brief letters to seven churches detailing how they were not on the same page as He was, each pursuing their own agendas.
I said there were three things to notice about Jeremiah in today’s reading. The first was that he was gentle and child-like. The second is that he is unaware that he is not on the same page as his audience, and therefore ignorant of the plot to kill him.
The third thing to notice is that despite this shattering news that evil men are out to kill him, Jeremiah remains committed to God. He says in verse 20:
But, O Lord of hosts, who judgest righteously,
who triest the heart and the mind,
let me see thy vengeance upon them,
for to thee have I committed my cause.
A fourth thing to notice that has nothing to do with Jeremiah’s character but does say something about God’s, is that God reveals this plot to Jeremiah. Jeremiah 11:18 reads:
The Lord made it known to me and I knew;
then thou didst show me their evil deeds.
What the lectionary leaves out, probably because it is too harsh for modern ears, are the next three verses.
If Jeremiah is committed to the “Lord of hosts, who judgest righteously” to whom he prays, “let me see thy vengeance upon them” it is because of these three verses that follow, in which that vengeance is promised. Here they are from Jeremiah 11:21-23:
21 Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the men of An′athoth, who seek your life, and say, “Do not prophesy in the name of the Lord, or you will die by our hand”— 22 therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: “Behold, I will punish them; the young men shall die by the sword; their sons and their daughters shall die by famine; 23 and none of them shall be left. For I will bring evil upon the men of An′athoth, the year of their punishment.”
These men of Anathoth have an agenda and they don’t want any preacher getting in the way of it.
Who were these men of Anathoth?
Well, they were Jeremiah’s own kinsmen, the people from his hometown. Jeremiah 1:1 tells us:
The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilki′ah, of the priests who were in An′athoth in the land of Benjamin….
If Jeremiah is starting to remind you of Jesus, that’s for good reason. In Mark 6:4 we read:
And Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.”
The men of Anathoth and all of Judah and Jerusalem had the Lord’s name on their lips, but they did not have the Lord’s agenda in their hearts.
Jeremiah 5:2 says:
Though they say, “As the Lord lives,”
yet they swear falsely.
And Jeremiah 5:12-13 describes the kind of prophets they like to listen to:
12 They have spoken falsely of the Lord,
and have said, ‘He will do nothing;
no evil will come upon us,
nor shall we see sword or famine.
13 The prophets will become wind;
the word is not in them.
Thus shall it be done to them!’”
It’s a bit like the preachers of today who refuse to make the connection between the confusion, strife, violence, unjust laws, threat of war, and even a recent plague and the hand of God.
We are a nation under judgment.
This is because we are not on the same page as God. We are driven by our own agendas.
II.
Today’s readings are talking about both the durability of the word of God and the lasting agenda of the gospel.
We’ve just looked at Jeremiah, so let’s turn now to the reading from Mark.
As we heard last week in Mark 8:31, we hear it again this week in Mark 9:31, Jesus’ disconcerting message that:
The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.
The last time Jesus said this, Peter rebuked Jesus (Mark 8:32). This time Mark tells us in 9:32 that:
…they did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to ask him.
We see two things going on here.
First, Jesus and His disciples are not on the same page.
Second, they are too afraid to ask Jesus for clarification. They are afraid to even try to get on the same page as Jesus.
Perhaps this is because last time, instead of trying to get on the same page as Jesus, Peter tried to impose his own agenda on Jesus only to have Jesus rebuke him in the harshest possible way.
Mark 8:33 tells us that Jesus turned:
…and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter, and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men.”
The point that both Jeremiah and Jesus are making is that God’s word and the gospel will flourish. They are durable and will survive threats to it and even the death of those prophets sent to preach it.
The same cannot be said of the people and nations who refuse to hear it.
Put another way: God’s agenda, His decree cannot be thwarted.
We can throw our agendas up against it — “Let us destroy the tree with its fruit” — but God’s agenda will be carried out.
Isaiah 46:10 puts it this way:
“…My counsel shall stand,
and I will accomplish all my purpose.…”
Now, let’s take a closer look at what’s going on in Mark 9:33-37.
The disciples are having a discussion. Jesus calls them out for discussing who among them is the greatest. In Mark 9:33-34 we read:
33 And they came to Caper′na-um; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you discussing on the way?” 34 But they were silent; for on the way they had discussed with one another who was the greatest.
Notice that before they were afraid to ask what Jesus meant by His “Son-of-man-will-be-delivered-into-the-hands-of-men” agenda.
Now, they are too afraid to answer Him as to why they were arguing about their own competing agendas.
So, Jesus admonishes them. Mark 9:35 reads:
And he sat down and called the twelve; and he said to them, “If any one would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”
In other words, Jesus is saying, “If this is going to work, you have to stop worrying about your place, about where you fit in. Drop your agendas.”
What the disciples need is a dose of what James 3:13 calls wisdom:
Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good life let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom.
Because this wisdom, what James calls “wisdom from above” in verse 17, is sown by God, it brings what James 3:18 calls:
“…the harvest of righteousness [which] is sown in peace by those who make peace.”
Later, in James 4:1, he asks and then answers:
What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members?
Here we have apostles arguing over their own greatness, the plotting men of Judah, Jerusalem, and Anathoth, yet despite their opposition, Jeremiah recommits himself to God and to the preaching of God’s message, and Jesus tries once again to explain why He must suffer and die.
In Mark 9:36-37 He shows them what He means:
And he took a child, and put him in the midst of them; and taking him in his arms, he said to them, 37 “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me.”
Jesus is acting out the substitution that will take place later on the cross right then and there with the child and He is telling His disciples that they need to be doing the same thing.
They need to be setting aside their agendas (after all, a child has no real agenda, or at least no power to make it happen) so that they can be useful to God in accomplishing His agenda and purpose.
The same goes for us.
III.
This is hard for us because we lack humility, and we certainly aren’t going to let a child take our place or determine our agenda.
(Even if some helicopter parents think they are slaves to their children’s agendas, they’re not. It’s the other way around. Children need fresh air, unsupervised time, and dirt. They also need animals to look after.)
Anyway.
Matthew’s version of this event adds a few more details. In 18:2-3 Jesus says:
2 And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them, 3 and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus is likening the disciples to children, but with childlike humility comes special, divine protection. In Matthew 18:5-6, Jesus says:
5 “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
It is clear that Peter did not have this humility when he rebuked Jesus and it’s clear that the disciples, in arguing about who was the greatest, didn’t have this humility either.
In their arrogance they set themselves against the gospel, this durable Good News of God, and they also risked removing themselves from divine protection.
They risked becoming no longer the “little ones” whose tempters had better watch their necks to keep them free from millstones.
Incidentally, Jeremiah — “gentle lamb” Jeremiah — knew he had this divine protection precisely because he was humble enough to preach God’s word as he received it and not as he thought it should be preached.
Too often we set competing agendas against each other instead of trusting in the durability of God’s word and God’s protection of that word.
Jeremiah’s enemies truly think they can put their agenda over and above the prophet’s and God’s.
In Jeremiah 11:19 they say:
“Let us destroy the tree with its fruit,
let us cut him off from the land of the living,
that his name be remembered no more.”
They think they can destroy the word of God by destroying the prophet. Kill the messenger to stop the message from getting through.
In James 3:15-16, James calls these agendas that oppose God’s word “earthly, unspiritual, and devilish,” adding:
For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.
I can think of four disorders, all of which lead to vile practices.
First, agnosticism. The agnostic does not want to know God. It is not that the agnostic cannot know God. Romans 1:19 makes it clear that he can:
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them [in nature].
To be an agnostic is not to adopt a neutral attitude towards the existence of God, it is to adopt a hostile one.
Rather than an attempt to weigh the evidence for and against God, the agnostic suppresses the truth. Yet he calls himself wise for doing so.
This leads directly to the second vile practice, irrationalism. It is irrational to argue against the thing you claim you can’t know, because by arguing against it, you demonstrate that you do, in fact, know it.
I’ll give you an example of this from a conversation I had just this past week. I got a text from a college freshman, a friend of my stepdaughter’s, asking me to look over an essay she wrote.
She was discussing with her classmates the whole idea of being “non-binary.” She wanted to point out to her friends that their position was irrational and was asking for me to critique her argument.
She made the argument that the “non-binary” her friends insisted on as having some meaning or substance presupposed the very “binary” they claimed had no meaning.
By dismantling “maleness” or “femaleness” they lost any point of reference for the replacement genders they wished to assert.
She sent me her essay because she didn’t think anyone on campus would be receptive to her rational, orderly thinking. Our universities have descended into the pit of irrationalism!
Irrationalism leads invariably to a third vile practice, distortion. The meaning of the words “male” and “female” have been distorted, but so has the plain meaning of the word of God, the Bible.
God’s word is creative, meaning that by His word He creates, and the Bible is the written record of that creative revelation. Nature is the unwritten record of that revelation.
The point is that there is God-breathed meaning in both Scripture and nature, so to argue that both occurred by chance is to argue from a distorted view of reality, a view that is anchored in an irrational suppression of the truth.
This leads, fourth and finally, to a rejection of revelation.
The other day I was defending the faith on X against an account named “Anti-theist Pizza” who wrote:
Is that why you people never get around to providing actual proof and evidence for the supernatural when asked? Don’t even say the Bible is proof and evidence for supernatural phenomenon either. Anyone can write anything down….
You can see all the vile practices I’ve just enumerated above in this quote.
He seems to know what he is arguing against — the supernatural — yet denies any knowledge of it. By his own agnosticism, he doesn’t know enough to affirm or deny this thing he calls the supernatural.
Yet he persists — like my young college friend’s friends’ denials of the gender binary — in irrationally defining himself in terms of the thing he denies (in this case the God he denies) which is on display in his X handle, Anti-theist Pizza.
At least he and I would agree on the reality of pizza.
My reply was simple enough. I wrote:
What evidence would you even accept? By definition there’s never going to be any natural evidence for it.
Despite man’s irrational descent down the ladder of vile practices, God’s word proves durable.
In an awesome display of God’s own humility, He takes it upon Himself to demonstrate just how durable His word is.
In Mark 9:31, Jesus says:
“The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”
God’s word is durable because it is the word of eternal life.
Peter says in John 6:68:
“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life….”
IV.
I said before that we are not apt to humble ourselves, let alone likely to let a child take our place.
But Jesus humbles Himself, lower than a child, to the level of a criminal.
Both Jeremiah 11:19 and Mark 9:31 point us to the cross: “Let us destroy the tree with its fruit…,” “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him….”
Both passages go on to tell us that the prophet’s message and the gospel’s truth will survive the attempts of the wicked to suppress God’s message by destroying the appointed messengers.
Once the gospel work is accomplished, that is, once they kill Jesus and He rises again on the third day, two things will happen.
First, the gospel will be preached to the ends of the earth, but the preachers of the gospel will face opposition.
In Mark 13:9-10, Jesus tells His disciples:
9 “But take heed to yourselves; for they will deliver you up to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake, to bear testimony before them. 10 And the gospel must first be preached to all nations.
The gospel also sifts the hearts of those who hear it. You cannot hear this message and remain agnostic. You cannot feign neutrality.
Jesus says in Mark 16:15:
He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.
Second, the disciples are told that they will sit in judgment upon Israel, receive back a hundredfold for all they have lost, and receive eternal life.
In Matthew 19:28-29, Jesus tells them:
“Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of man shall sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 29 And every one who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life.”
What Jesus is telling them is that if His disciples would just set aside their agendas of what they think the word of God should say and simply speak the word of God, if they set aside what they think the gospel should say and simply preach it, they will see just how durable and sustaining that word and gospel is.
It will sustain them and fulfill them better than their own agendas ever could or would.
V.
So, we need to set aside our agendas so that the gospel can flourish.
To do that we first need to commit to God. Jeremiah 11:20 says, “But, O Lord of hosts… to thee have I committed my cause.”
I preached a whole sermon last week on how God vindicates His prophets, those preachers of God who tell the truth about God and His creation.
Second, we have to ask. James 4:2 says, “You do not have, because you do not ask.”
This means we need to pray. The world is at war and fighting because it does not take the asking of God seriously.
Sunday is no longer the sabbath. You will not have peace if you put little league before church. I would love to see blue laws come back but short of that, Christian, you can opt out.
Fathers, you especially, you can opt your wives and children out of all the distracting nonsense. Connect with other believers. Support the brethren who have been cancelled, those against whom the wicked have devised schemes and done evil.
Maybe more men would stand up and resist the tyranny that looms over us if they knew the local church had their back. What would that look like?
Third, we have to ask rightly. James 3:3 admonishes us:
You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
We ask wrongly when we ask God to fulfill our agendas.
Jeremiah, James, and Jesus know that the godly live in an ungodly world and that ungodliness easily makes its way into the church.
It finds its way because we bring our agendas into the church.
Let’s stop. Let’s let the word of God be the word of God.
Let us pray:
Grant us, O Lord, not to mind earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to cleave to those that shall abide; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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