Twelfth Sunday After Trinity

Sermon preached by Olga Fabrikant-Burke

“Why is my pain unceasing,

    my wound incurable,

    refusing to be healed?

Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook,

    like waters that fail.”

 Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, once said that “The words that we use in prayer, if they are to be serious, have to be words that take us to the edge of what we can cope with, outside our comfort zone.”

 There is certainly no shortage of raw, piercing honesty in our passage from the Old Testament for this Sunday. As the prophet Jeremiah shakes his fist at God, there is honesty about doubts in the darkness, honesty about disappointments and setbacks, radical frankness about festering resentment, and even anger that borders on rage. There is no attempt at sugar-coating anything in these striking verses.

 We sing to God, and we praise him. We request divine assistance in times of trouble and bring our petitions before him. But do we tell God what we really think? In this difficult text, Jeremiah owns up to a whole gamut of thoughts and feelings that many of us would be more than a little reluctant to admit we have. It may be that we are afraid of offending God and accidentally getting on his bad side. Perhaps we have developed a very particular image of what a true Christian ought to say and do so that we end up feeling ashamed of emotions that, from our perspective, do not live up to those imagined standards. In fact, it need not be outright anger with God that we hide and try to suppress; it could just be a sense of being overcome with weariness and despair.

 As I prepare to be ordained a few weeks from now, there are days when I feel utterly excited and grateful to the point of tears, even if more than a little nervous. But the truth is that throughout my ordination training, there have been days, more than I care to admit, when many of Jeremiah’s words would have hit a little too close to home. I suspect many of us have walked down these paths.

 Jeremiah, known as the Weeping Prophet, was a true prophet, the real deal, a spokesperson for God himself, set aside from the moment of his birth for divine service. Elsewhere in the book that bears his name, we learn that Jeremiah has the privilege of standing in the council of the Lord—that is to say, he has access to the divine throne room itself, where God surrounded by his angels deliberates. Jeremiah sees and hears the divine word first-hand. And yet. Jeremiah laments and complains with abandon. Not only that, but he goes as far as to accuse and attack God. The divinely appointed prophet behaves in ways that we would describe as virtually blasphemous. The prophetic vocation subjects Jeremiah to unending suffering; to Jeremiah it represents a curse. “Under the weight of your hand I sat alone.” God seems unreliable and indifferent, unfair and false. “Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.”

 It is in the Gospel that Jeremiah’s candid honesty receives a definitive divine response. God does not shower Jeremiah with a barrage of platitudes, like “Everything happens for a reason.” There is no, “There, there, it will all work out in the end.” It is not even, “True, it’s not easy, but I will give you strength.” What serves as the ultimate divine response to the darkness is Jesus, the suffering Messiah, the crucified Son of God, who takes off his royal robes and wears a crown of thorns. God does not simply witness Jeremiah’s suffering, to register it and judge it later, but he enters deeply into his agony. God is not a witness standing on the sidelines. On the contrary, in Christ, God experiences human suffering and becomes a participant with us in our struggles. In fact, Jesus takes upon himself, in his own body, the sort of suffering that Jeremiah, for all his hardships, could not even conceive of. The divine path is lined with crosses and paved with blood.

 What emerges with ample clarity from our readings today is not, in the first instance, that the dark places are part and parcel of human existence or indeed of Christian life. We hardly need extra reminders that life is no bed of roses. Instead, these passages give us permission to be utterly honest about the valleys of darkness that we walk through. We are granted permission to complain. We have permission to lament. Again, Rowan Williams makes the point that the Church should be a natural place for honesty, where we need not be afraid. In our prayers and in our churches, before God and one another, we can be truthful to what we are experiencing. That is the kind of disciples we are called to be.

 The best image that perfectly encapsulates the honest living to which we are called comes from our epistle. Writing to the church in Rome, Paul says, “Let love be genuine.” Now, the Greek word that we translate as genuine or sincere means literally the opposite of the actor wearing a mask. The good news is that we don’t need to hide behind masks with ourselves or one another, nor do we need to wear a mask before God.

 Amen.