Sermon: You Gotta Serve Somebody
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Sermon: You Gotta Serve Somebody Texts: Jeremiah 20:7-13; Matthew 10:34-39; Romans 6:15-23 Date: June 19, 2005
Preacher Fred Craddock tells a story about a friend of his who was the pastor of the largest church in a small city in Tennessee. In many ways he was a very successful minister, except his church was full of problems. Whatever you said or did, the way the pastor reported it to Fred, there was a big problem. He got sick and tired of it. Fred saw him downtown one day and said, “How’s it going?” He answered, “Terrible. I’m thinking of quitting.” “Aw, you’re not going to…” “Why not?” “Oh, you don’t want to quit.” He said, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to buy a little piece of land over in Arkansas in a rice field, and I’m going to build my own church. It’s going to be a study where I can do my work, and it’ll have a beautiful tall spire, and that’ll be it. No sanctuary. No Sunday school rooms. No fellowship hall. No members. Just me and God.”[1] Sound like your kind of church? Sounds like what the prophet Jeremiah would have liked at the moment he has this outburst in the 20th chapter. Just me and God. Except for maybe the God half. The prophet is absolutely worn out and frustrated by what God has called him to do. He is so angry that he strikes out not just at his former friends who mock him for his so-far unfulfilled prophecies of doom but also strikes out at God who gave him this exasperating job. He brushes right up against blasphemy as he complains about being roped into being a prophet: “You have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed.” The Hebrew verb translated “enticed” may also be translated “seduced, led astray.” Eugene Peterson’s translation says, “You pushed me into this, God, and I let you do it!” A bit startling, don’t you think? A prophet’s speech covered in Tobasco sauce, peppery and sharp. One of my commentaries suggests that like Fred Craddock’s friend the pastor, the sense of having been deceived and misled by God was “not because his prophecies appeared to lack fulfillment but because they lacked any adequate response in the hearts and minds of his hearers. What Jeremiah looked for was to be taken seriously as a mouthpiece of God…He reasoned that if God had truly called him to be a prophet it was God’s responsibility also to ensure that his calling as a prophet was respected and acknowledged by those to whom he testified.”[2] He really felt like God had let him down, since he was the object of scorn, a laughingstock. He’d like very much to quit, maybe build a little synagogue in a rice field where there would be no members, no one to warn, no one to mock him. But when he tries to quit prophesying, he can’t. He can’t quit and he can’t modify the message. In Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation, “If I say, ‘Forget it! No more God-messages from me!’ The words are a fire in my belly, a burning in my bones. I’m worn out trying to hold it in. I can’t do it any longer!” So Jeremiah continues in his prophecy and looks forward to the day when he will be proven right, and he wouldn’t mind a bit if God visited some justified pay-back to his enemies. Lord, you have enticed me, you have overpowered me…There is no direct answer from the Lord to Jeremiah’s lament. If there was, what do you suppose it would be? How would God answer the prophet’s anguished accusation? Have you ever wanted to shake a fist at God for enticing you into discipleship? How do you think God would address you at the moment you feel ready to chuck the whole religion because you don’t care to go where you are being led? Do you think God would kindly suggest to Jeremiah that he tone it down for a while, maybe take a Caribbean cruise, get some rest? Then when he returns, tan and refreshed, he could recast the message into some more palatable self-help tips for living in difficult times that would go down easier among his friends? Does that sound like God? After all, God is love, right? Hmmm. That doesn’t exactly sound like God. Sounds pretty human, though. Consider a “Corn Flakes Parable.” In 1890 John Harvey Kellogg, a physician and a Seventh-Day Adventist, was the medical superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, the Western Health Reform Institute. Dr. Kellogg promoted a meatless, low-dairy diet that included his original idea of a dry cereal which we would today call granola (he also created the world’s best-selling breakfast food, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.) Doc Kellogg could well be called the grandfather of today’s health-food movement. As a health revolutionary, he tirelessly condemned the evils of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. One of his patients, Charles Post, also a Seventh-Day Adventist, saw profit as well as good health the spiritual purity in Kellogg’s radical ideas about diet. Charles Post joined the revolution against the nineteenth century American diet of greasy pork, beef and starchy foods. Post set up his own health clinic and created his own health foods: Postum, Grape Nuts, and Post Toasties. They were health prophets, if you will. But walk down the breakfast food aisle of the grocery store now and what will you see? There are still Grape Nuts and Corn Flakes and granola there, but they’re a little hard to find among the Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Capt’n Crunch, and the various incarnations of chocolate frosted sugar bombs passing for breakfast food. Do practitioners of faith do to God’s Way what food manufacturers have done to cereal? There is among humans what Edward Hays calls “a creeping conspiracy of compromise that creates a junk-food religion.”[3] Why would we do such a thing? Perhaps to avoid being in that worn-out, frustrated, laughed-at, burning-in-my-bones place Jeremiah was in. So how would God answer poor Jeremiah? We Christians could turn to the New Testament to see what Jesus, who reveals God to us, might say. Unfortunately, there’s not much relief this morning for a beleaguered prophet. In today’s gospel we hear some of Jesus’ more demanding sayings. “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword…Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Well. That’s just not very nice. One would almost be led to conclude that God was the composer behind that old country song, “I beg your pardon…I never promised you a rose garden.” Does that sound like God? If God doesn’t, apparently, promise a rose garden, what does God promise that would entice anyone into a life of faith? Today’s reading from Romans reminds us that what God promises is liberation. Liberation. Freedom. But a strange kind of freedom, one that is hard for us 21st Century Americans to grasp. What God offers is freedom to choose a new kind of obedience. Paul makes the claim that human beings are bound to obey someone or something. “You are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness.” Thanks be to God, he writes, that you who were slaves to sin have been set free from it and have become slaves to righteousness. You have been freed from sin and are now enslaved to God. Much better! Because the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God once one has chosen to be enslaved to God is eternal life. I have thought and thought and thought this week about whether Paul’s assumption that we will be enslaved to something is true. I have, as you might, too, an aversion to the language of slavery. That makes it hard for me to receive even the good news that Paul is sharing here. I did think right away of Bob Dylan’s song from his overtly Christian era: You gotta serve somebody. You may be an ambassador to
England or France, But you're gonna have to serve
somebody, yes indeed You might be a rock 'n' roll
addict prancing on the stage, But you're gonna have to serve
somebody, yes indeed You may be a construction worker
working on a home, But you're gonna have to serve
somebody, yes indeed Is that true? Suppose it is. Suppose there is no such thing as a free agent among human beings. Suppose you get to choose the master you align yourself with—which the Bible affirms again and again, in spite of Jeremiah’s agitated words about being overpowered by God. God does not compel us to walk in God’s way. We must choose it. Even though the life of faith isn’t always a picnic, a walk in the park, a rose garden, wouldn’t we still choose to be free from the old life of sin? You’re gonna have to serve somebody; why would you choose selfishness, greed, addictive pleasure, hard-heartedness when the road to righteousness is offered? One preacher linked to textweek.com says bluntly in connection with this text that sin is stupid. I like that. It cuts to the chase. Paul is eager to convince his readers that to return to a life of sin when you’ve been offered freedom from it is stupid. As Proverbs 26:11 says in its colorful language “Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who reverts to his folly.” The life of faith is not always easy or pleasant. It really isn’t—if we try to sell it that way we’re marketing Corn Pops rather than the whole grain Bread of Life Jesus revealed himself to be. But even at its most demanding the life of faith is richer and more freeing than the life addicted to sin. You might really want to bag it some days. Jeremiah’s not the only one who got tired of trying to preach and live God’s word in a deaf world. Fred Craddock tells another story about a friend of his, a nurse in a tuberculosis hospital. She resigned the other day. She has fellows in there with one lung, half of one lung, or less; little bitty guys lying up in bed. At night, sometimes with nothing but pajamas and robes on, they tie sheets together and sneak out through a window, door, or any way; go to a liquor store; get all liquored up; and come back in the chill of night, wheezing and coughing. She gets the oxygen, she nurses them, she goes over another eight-hour shift. She’s a beautiful woman, but her legs have those big knotted veins from standing sixteen hours to bring this little frail fellow back to breathing again. Finally it clears up. He’s breathing again; she takes away the oxygen; and he ties the sheets together and goes out the window to the liquor store. And she quits. Why should I care? He doesn’t care! Let him die. The next morning she goes back to work.[4] Why in the world? I expect that within her there is “something like a burning fire shut up in [her] bones.” [Jeremiah 20:9] A divine compassion burning that will not be put out. Never forget that the burning fire leads somewhere we want to go. “Now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life.” [Romans 6:22] Or in Peterson’s translation: “Now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way!”[5] You’re gonna have to serve somebody. Serve the One who promises you Life, arduous life, purposeful life, compassionate life, real life, eternal life. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Craddock, Fred Craddock Stories St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001, p. 104-05 [2] Clement, R. E. Jeremiah, an Interpretation Commentary. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988, p. 122 [3] Hays, Edward A Pilgrim’s Almanac: Reflections for Each Day of the Year Easton, Kansas: Forest of Peace Books, 1989, p. 42 [4] Ibid. Craddock, p. 41 [5] Peterson, Eugene The Message:
The Bible in Contemporary Language Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002
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