Thanksgiving / Christ the King Sunday (NL3) John B. Valentine
Jeremiah 36:1-8, 21-23, 27-28 & 31:31-34 November 24, 2024

“CAN WE HANDLE THE TRUTH?”

I’ve got to tell you ... folks.

When I sat down at my desk last summer to review the lessons in the lectionary that we were going to be using throughout the Fall as our readings during worship ...

I came up against today’s texts from the Book of Jeremiah ...

And I couldn’t help but thinking ... “Those bozos!” ... ‘they’ being those seminary professors who are buddies of mine who cooked up this Narrative Lectionary that we use in the first place .... “I’m just not sure that those are texts that our folks really need to hear.”

(In fact ... I came this close to making an executive decision ... back in the middle of July ... to just have us read the beautiful closing part of today’s readings ... that piece from Jeremiah chapter 31 ... and leave out all the gobbledegook and those convoluted names that Nina had to joust with just now!)

But this week ... when I circled back around ... when I started thinking about actually preaching on these texts from Jeremiah ...

I found myself thinking just the opposite!

As in “Wow! I was ever wrong! These texts are really, really timely ... and maybe exactly the texts that God’s people need to hear right now!”

It never ceases to amaze me that this Word still speaks ... and still surprises ... even one as thoroughly skeptical ... and thoroughly jaded ... as dear ol’ Pastor John.

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Needless to say ... a little bit HAS changed between the middle of July and now.

• On July 21st ... President Biden announced that he would not be seeking a second term in office .... and

• And later that same day ... Vice President Harris announced that she would seek and accept the Democratic nomination if so offered ...

• And then ... for the next hundred days ... our nation lived through what felt to many of us like a civil war ... or at least a very “uncivil war .... of words” ...

• And then we had that election ... the implications of which will probably reverberate through our nation for at least the rest of our lives.

Now let’s be honest ... folks ... that ‘war’ is not over.

Soon enough ... the forces that pull to the left are going to start pulling again ... and the forces that pull to the right are going to keep pulling in their preferred direction ...

And there will be another election four years from now ... and some may just chalk it all up to ‘politics as usual’.

But we’d be fooling ourselves were we not to acknowledge that what we’ve been through has been a big deal for our society ... and appropriately likened to a war.

• Friendships have been torn apart by that conflict.
• Communities have been torn apart by that conflict.
• Families have been torn apart by that conflict.

Thankfully ... there was little in the way of physical violence over those hundred days ...

But when I look over what has gone down in our nation since the middle of July ...

I’m reminded of something that Aeschylus — that great Greek dramatist from twenty-five-hundred years ago — is purported to have said .... that “IN WAR, TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY.”

Because ... at least to my ears and my eyes ... ‘truth-telling’ ... TRUTH-SPEAKING ... immediately gave way to half-truths and repeated falsehoods and outright lies ... and truth was definitely a casualty of that war.

But if we’d presume that THIS generation of politicians is the first generation of politicians to so blatantly disregard the truth ... we’d best say ‘Think again.’

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You see ... what happened in that quirky text that Nina read.

There’s this king ... the second-to-the-last king of Judah ... the ruler of God’s people... a fellow named Jehoiakim ... who is trying to make his way through a particularly challenging time in the history of the ancient Near East.

And among Jehoiakim’s subjects is a certain fellow named Jeremiah ... who is a prophet of the Lord our God.

Now ... by the time we get around to the part of the story in your bulletin ... earlier in the Book of Jeremiah ... it’s revealed that Jeremiah has already had a couple of run-ins with King Jehoiakim ... such that Jeremiah is officially a persona non grata at the palace and he’s been banished from the Temple as well.

But the Word ... the Word of the Lord ... comes to Jeremiah ... along with a charge to make sure that both the king and the people actually HEAR these words ...

But Jeremiah ... for his part ... can’t deliver them!

So ... rather than preaching those words as a prophet would normally do ...

Jeremiah gets his secretary Baruch to take dictation ... and write Jeremiah’s sermon down ...

And then Jeremiah tells Baruch to go to the Temple ... and read his sermon for him ... so that God’s people might know the truth and that that truth might set them free.

Well ... Baruch ... being the dutiful scribe ... does exactly as he’s told ...

He goes to the Temple ...

He preaches Jeremiah’s sermon ...

And ... believe it or not ... for once ... THE PEOPLE ACTUALLY LISTEN!

They own that they must change ... and they want to hear more!

But then the king ... King Jehoiakim ... finds out what is going on ... and the king doesn’t like the prophet’s message ... he doesn’t want to hear the truth ... he prefers his ‘alternative set of facts’ ... as it were!

So the king has Baruch arrested ... and confiscates the manuscript he was carrying ... and has it locked down in the palace archives ... so as silence both the messenger and the message.

And then the king gets one of his lackeys to read Jeremiah’s sermon to him ... and as he does ... bit by bit ... after each time he reads a paragraph or so ... the king orders him to take out his penknife and slice off the part that he’s just finished reading ... and toss it into the fire.

And then ... for good measure ... he sends the palace guard ... his version of the DOJ ... to hunt down and lock up those who’d been responsible for the generation of this message in the first place.

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Do you see how timely a story this might actually be for you and me ... and for the society in which we live???

• WE don’t have any politicians who prefer alternate sets of facts ....

• WE don’t have any politicians who would ever think of weaponzing their version of the DOJ against their political enemies ....

• WE don’t have any politicians who would try to control the dissemination of any and all information that might possibly make them look bad ....

I mean ...

• Apart from President Biden’s team doing everything they could to hide from the American public the toll that aging seems to have taken on the sitting President ...

• Apart from President Trump’s team being categorically unable to admit that their side lost the election back in 2020 without offering a shred of actual evidence ...

• Apart from Vice-President Harris’ team doctoring video to make Mr. Trump appear as cognitively and physically compromised as President Biden ...

• Apart from Vice-President-elect Vance doubling and then tripling down on comments about migrants eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio ...

Everything’s just fine. Ha ... ha ... ha.

And so ... at least part of the point of this morning’s lesson is that politicians get into real trouble ... and get the nation they are leading into real trouble ... when they can’t ... when they won’t ... face up to the truth.

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But it seems to me that another point of this here lesson is that there is price to be paid by anyone and everyone who won’t face up to the truth ....

Be they a prince or a politician or a pauper or whomever.

I mean ... you do know that most us ... in our bathrooms in our homes ... have a couple ... three ... four ... truth-telling devices ... don’t we???

I kid you not ....

• How many of you have a thermometer stashed away in your bathroom?
• How many of you have a scale?
• How many of you have a mirror?

All of those things ... each in their own way ...is a truth-telling device.

Now ... I know ...

• None too many of us relish having to pull out the thermometer to determine if we are actually running a fever ...

• And I suspect even less of us relish the idea of stepping onto the scale and staring down that digitized bit of truth ...

• And maybe even LESS of us look forward to taking a long, hard look at ourselves in the mirror ...

But the purpose of each and every one of those devices is to tell us the objective truth about ourselves ... and to tell us in ways that are pretty hard to refute.

Sure ... we might prefer to comfort ourselves with “alternative facts” of our own making ...

• That we don’t really have a fever ...
• That our weight is right about where it should be ...
• That we look just fine ...

But the fact of the matter is that addressing what’s amiss is well night impossible if you don’t know the truth about your reality in the first place.

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You see ...

The message of the Prophet Jeremiah ...

The message that had been written on that scroll that eventually got sliced up with a penknife...

The message that King Jehoiakim didn’t want to hear and definitely didn’t want to disseminate ...

Was that God wasn’t pleased with God’s people.

Jeremiah’s message was that the people of God ...

• needed to repent ... and
• amend their ways ... and
• return to the Lord their God.

But the king didn’t want any of that ... because he was the king ... and he liked his position at the top of the heap ...

And he knew that any talk about change might necessarily be particularly costly for him.

Jehoiakim couldn’t ... or at least ‘wouldn’t’ ... handle the truth ... and ... in large part because of it ... a mere eleven years later ... the nation-state of Israel is hauled off into exile ... and the city of Jerusalem is destroyed.

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But where does that leave us ... folks? Are we willing to handle the truth?

• The truth about ourselves?
• About our society?
• About this world in which we live?
• About our relationships with our neighbors and about our relationships with God?

Maybe let me leave you this morning with this one thought ... the thought I started with this morning ... the one that says:

Wow! I was ever wrong! These texts are really, really timely ... and maybe exactly the texts that God’s people need to hear right now!

For it never ceases to amaze me that this Word still speaks ... and still surprises ... even one as thoroughly skeptical ... and thoroughly jaded ... as dear ol’ Pastor John.