Jeremiah 23:23-29

What is most unfortunate in lectionary readings, is they lose the poetry. Readers are often reluctant volunteers who don't bother even going over it once before they get to service. Part of this is due to not opening the Bible and instead using a printed version that conveniently fits on one page.

This passage begins with the last two verses of a poem, then changes to prose. We would have to go back to verse 16 to see it's God who is being quoted. The poem is in the theme of recent lectionary weeks, telling us of God's anger over his people who are listening to the wrong prophets. Then it switches to prose and we get a little more insight into God's personality. He's doing a little hand wringing about how long this is all going to go on. How long is he going to have to hear about that darn Baal guy?

Since this is a person writing it, what he's really saying is, how do I know when it's the real God in a dream or a false one? Devout Christians today describe this struggle of discerning if it is God's voice or their own voice that they are listenting to. For Jeremiah, this is a time when it's assumed there are other powerful beings around who can speak to you in dreams. Or, at the very least, you can have a dream and it could possibly be God speaking to you. The question not asked, and as maybe readers, maybe should be is, why listen to dreams at all? Why not realize that dreams aren't helpful in figuring out what to do while you're awake. They have some use in making our brains work, but they aren't conscious thought, you can't work out a problem in a dream.

But Jeremiah is confident this system will work. In verses 28 and 29, “let that false prophet tell the dream”, but the one who has God's word, well, that's like a fire, like a hammer. Again, looking back to verse 16

“Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you;
      they fill you with false hopes.
They speak visions from their own minds,
      not from the mouth of the Lord.”

So, if anyone says something Jeremiah doesn't like, he can dismiss that because it comes from “their own minds”. Apparently people's minds are some horrible place full of bad ideas. They're like straw. But Jeremiah speaks the Lord's words, so he's got it right. He's got the whole grain goodness.

Isaiah 5:1-7

It might be helpful to see the glossary for a discussion of "good" before reading this.

This passage follows the recent theme of blaming the people God created for the problems they experience. It’s a problem for prophets when their promises from God don’t come true. The problem is explained by human free will. God created us and gave us all these gifts and abilities, including free will. There are of course some rules, but as long as you freely choose to follow those rules, things will work out. The rules are scattered throughout the Bible, over thousands of years. They change, and often are not explicitly listed but rather explained by stories and parables. Whether or not this is a good system is debated endlessly and I won’t be covering that debate in detail.

I introduce the idea only to show how terribly un-useful the Bible is as a guide to solving major societal problems. We expect justice and see bloodshed, the Bible tells us to get back to God. Preachers aren't the only ones saying that today either, it’s people high up in government and professors. I’m sure Isaiah, or whoever wrote this had good intentions. I think Isaiah and I would agree; we are set above other animals in that we recognize a connection to our grandchildren and the progeny that we will never meet. We pass on more than a few tips and tricks for gathering grapes, we create entire systems of education in the hopes the future will be better.

The Bible often attempts to do that, to pass on wisdom. But, here is a good example of the failure of the Bible to teach us well. It is from a time when free will was not understood at all, and even today we are still just getting a grasp on it. We now know that our brains can be affected by any number of external factors. Factors beyond our control, like a child whose mother drank too much alcohol during pregnancy. When we listened to people with mental illness instead of labeling them as demon possessed, we found out they had conflicting thoughts, that they could understand justice, but were driven by some other thoughts toward bloodshed. We found out we could treat them using drugs or by just talking to them.

This passage begins by saying it is a love song. It’s the kind of love I would associate with fathers in the first half of the last century. They would tell their children to think for themselves, but they believed they would arrive at the same conclusions they had. There is a human tendency to honor ancient knowledge. This served us well in a world of slow change and no books, electronic or otherwise. Those fathers assumed their children would just see the wisdom of their wisdom. If they didn’t, they had to just let them go and fend for themselves. He may have felt some responsibility, but there was only so much he could do.

Parents today still reach the same point. They plant the seeds and at some point those plants seem to have minds of their own. That’s tongue in cheek of course. Actual children do have actual minds of their own. They rebel. They see problems with the world and fight to change them. We try to tell them to live within the boundaries and to get what they can from that problematic system and then to work within it to change it. It’s not bad advice, but is it any wonder that they don’t do that? In a rapidly changing world, that message is a lot harder to get across. It might not even be right.

Hebrews 11:29-12:2

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian who was executed by the Nazis for speaking out against them, said you should be able to read the Bible with modern eyes and receive something from it. You can then examine the context and look up Greek words and deepen your understanding. For this passage, I'm just going to look at what's there.

A lot of suffering. Suffering due to faith that there will be a reward. That is a basic human trait, to have hope that what you do will have a result. What's the result they are looking for here? To escape oppression, to conquer a foe, "shut the mouths of lions". And those that did not receive those things suffered torture in the hopes they would receive something better after life. These accomplishments and the efforts that did not have the intended result, are supposed to inspire us to follow in their foot steps.

I'm thankful for people who stood up to the police a few decades ago and led the fight for changes to our unjust laws. I'm thankful for people who walked into fire and explosions to end fascism. I'm thankful to those who left their homes with nothing to find or make a better place to live. But all of those people also had some ideas and some values that I would find abhorrent. I'm am under no obligation to take on their entire world view and work toward the same future they believed in. I knew about things they couldn't imagine before I left elementary school. I can be thankful for their contribution and still judge their thoughts and actions using my modern eyes.

Luke 12:49-56

Not a passage people like to think about when they think about Jesus. Jesus is supposed to be the one that fixed the problems of the Old Testament God who drowned everybody and did all that smiting. As Blutarski said, after smashing the folk singer's guitar in Animal House, "sorry".

That would be too easy if I left it there. And a lot of people do. Verses like this are frequently cherry picked to make claims about Jesus being actually terrible, or at least inconsistent. There is some truth to that, especially if you attempt to paint Jesus as a perfect, loving, compassionate, always calm, always peaceful being.

There never was a literal fire. Fire, baptism, house, these are symbols. Whether Jesus was one person or a composite character, these are teachings. The Sanhedrin were teaching how to live by the Mosaic codes, the Romans had their system of peace, the Pax Romana. Both were failures, as we know for certain now, as many saw at the time, and as this story is predicting. The story is telling us that when you speak up against systems of power, you're going to have trouble. You might even lose the support of your parents or your children or the partners they choose.