Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "The Summer is Ended, and Are We Not Saved?"

Text: Jeremiah 8:18-19:1

Let us begin our journey by returning to ancient Judah, where the prophet Jeremiah was speaking out to the people of Jerusalem.

First, the prophet Jeremiah cries out, "My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land" (v. 18).

And the people respond, "Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?" (v. 19).

Then the Lord Yahweh enters into the conversation, proclaiming "Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?" (v. 19).

Once again the people cry out, "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." (v. 20).

Then the prophet Jeremiah speaks once more, saying "For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me." (v. 21).

Again, the Lord Yahweh speaks, declaring, "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?" (v. 22).

And, finally, the prophet moans, "O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!" (9:1, but v. 23 in the Hebrew text).

What a depressing conversation! Aside from the memorable and mystical phrase about "the balm in Gilead," this hardly seems like a text that we would want to listen to – anymore than did the people of ancient Judah and Jerusalem.

For most of us Presbyterians, we don’t even connect very well to "the balm in Gilead," even though it is the title of a well-known African-American spiritual (found as Hymn 394 in our Presbyterian Hymnal). But, for many others – especially African-Americans, "the balm in Gilead" is much more than just a spiritual title, it is a mandate for social justice and congregational action. In that spirit,

The Balm In Gilead, Inc.™ is a not-for-profit, non-governmental organization with an international mission to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS throughout the African Diaspora by building the capacity of faith communities to provide services, HIV/AIDS education and to build support networks for all people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. . . . The Balm In Gilead has established, and continues to develop, educational and training programs specifically to meet the needs of faith communities that strive to become centers for HIV/AIDS ministries, education and compassion. While continuing to broaden its work within African American communities, The Balm In Gilead is working in partnership with faith communities in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zimbabwe to effectively address the horrendous challenges of HIV/AIDS.

This brings us, in a round-about fashion I admit, to the African stop on this morning’s imaginary journey. Something extraordinary recently took place in West Africa, in the nation of Ghana. There, in Accra, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches held its 24th General Council last month. At that gathering, Clifton Kirkpatrick, the stated clerk of our denomination, the PC(USA), was elected unanimously to a seven-year term as president of the WARC.

After his election, Kirkpatrick, said, ""I had real questions about this (coming from the US), because the driving sources of the growing economic and political and military divide in the world are from the US, though not all of them." He said in an interview that his election may be a sign that delegates understand his church is among those in North America who are working to create a different kind of world and have spoken against economic injustice and the US war on Iraq. Kirkpatrick declared, "We are called to transform the world and that’s why we want to transform the church. We want to overcome empires of control and domination to build a world where five or 10 per cent of the population doesn’t control so much of the world’s wealth," He concluded his interview by saying, "The church is a missionary society. In some sense we are chosen by God to be God’s agents to transform the world. It’s at the core of who we are as a people."

The other extraordinary result of the WARC meeting in Accra was the publication of the Letter from Accra. This four-page letter is aimed at the members of all the congregations belonging to the World Alliance of Reformed Churches – covering some 75 million members in every continent.

This morning, I want to share with you just a few highlights from the Letter from Accra. You can read the entire document by going to our congregational website, where you will find a link to the WARC website where the Letter from Accra is posted.

Listen now to some portions of the prophetic Letter from Accra:

. . . We perceive that the world today lives under the shadow of an oppressive empire. By this we mean the gathered power of pervasive economic and political forces throughout the globe that reinforce the division between the rich and the poor. Millions of those in our congregations live daily in the midst of these realities. The economies of many of our countries are trapped in international debt and imposed financial demands that worsen the lives of the poorest. So many suffer! Each day, 24,000 people die because of hunger and malnutrition, and global trends show that wealth grows for the few while poverty increases for the many. . . .

If Jesus Christ is not Lord over all, he is not Lord at all. That is why we find in the Bible a constant criticism of idolatry, emphasized in our Reformed tradition. To declare faith in the one true God is to reject divided loyalties between God and Mammon, dethrone the false gods of wealth and power, and turn from false promises to the true God of life.

We know that this does not come easily for any of us. Yet our hope lies in confessing that the power of the resurrected Christ can overturn the idols and the modern gods that hold the world captive to injustice and ecological destruction.

Therefore, we invite you, in Reformed churches throughout the world, to take this stance of faith, standing against all that denies life and hope for millions, as a concrete expression of our allegiance to Jesus Christ. . . .

God’s mission involves your congregation and each of ours in fresh and challenging ways today. How can we share the message and liberating love of Christ’s life in those places where suffering and death seem to reign? This much we discovered for certain in Accra: more than ever, faithful mission today requires our connection – really it demands bonds of belonging – between one another as churches. The challenges we now face in proclaiming the Good News will simply overwhelm us if we confront them as individual churches alone.

In today’s world the divisions between the North and the South, the rich and the poor, and the powerful and the powerless, grow sharper and seek to isolate us from one another. That’s why mission requires us as churches to belong more deeply to one another, overcoming those divisions through the work of God’s Spirit as an evidence of the hope that is offered to the world. In our inclusive fellowship here in Accra, we have experienced a taste of this hope and seek to share it with you. . . .

If confessing what we believe as Christians requires our spiritual and practical resistance to economic injustice as well as environmental destruction, then we need new depths of spirituality. This isn’t mere political activism; we’re being called to a spiritual engagement against evil, and for that we need our lives to be deeply rooted in the power of God’s Spirit. To put it simply, we need, as never before, the transformation of our lives promised through Jesus Christ. . . .

Our prayer for you is that God may reveal to you in fresh ways how our faith is deeply connected to all of life. May none of us ever live our faith insensitive to brutal suffering and indifferent to urgent cries from our world. May all of us know the power of God at work in our Lord Jesus Christ to overcome evil and offer to all the world life in the fullness intended by God.

And now, let us return on our imaginary journey through space and time to ancient Jerusalem – perhaps with new insight into the conditions that brought the prophet, the people, and the Lord Yahweh into such a profound conversation.

Jeremiah decried the state of affairs in which the people of his day were living. He saw the coming destruction of their comfortable way of life, and he suffered for knowing it. And, although the people had offended their God through idolatrous behavior, even the Lord Yahweh suffered with the people. Ultimately, according to the vision of Jeremiah, no healing seemed possible, only weeping "day and night for the slain of my poor people" (9:1).

It may seem like a long and sinuous road from ancient Jerusalem to modern day Accra to our own Dallas, but it is all too easy to connect the dots. We need only see the injustices in our own society and in societies around the globe in our twenty-first century. We need only experience the occasional illness when adequate health care services are unavailable or beyond our means to know the daily suffering of millions of children and adults around the globe. We need only witness the growing divide between the rich and the poor.

In the end, two choices are before us: we can choose to be like the people of ancient Judah, who – focused on their own problems – cried out, "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." Or, can we join our 400 brothers and sisters from around the globe who met last month in Ghana, and wrote to us their profound Letter from Accra.

Now, take one final step in our journey by recalling the final proclamation of Jesus in this morning’s Gospel lesson. It is a direct challenge to all of us: "You cannot serve God and wealth" (Luke 16:13).

In the light of our texts from Jeremiah, from Luke, and from Accra, can we imagine ourselves being a congregation that stands for justice for all, here in Dallas and around the globe? Can we imagine challenging the way of the world, blunting the power of the rich, and strengthening the spirit of the poor? I believe that the answer is yes. Working together and praying together, we can honor God rather than wealth. We can invert the lament of the people of ancient Judah. In the spirit of transformation, we can declare, "The summer is ended, and are we not saved?" Thanks be to God. Amen.

© 2004 Robert V. Kemper (e-mail: rkemper@trinitypresdallas.org)