A sermon by Associate Minister Elsa A. Peters, November 21, 2010
Jeremiah 23:1-6
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These observations about the text in Jeremiah 23:1-6 have informed Elsa’s preaching. This is not a manuscript of the sermon though you’re more than welcome to obtain a sound recording by calling the Church Office at 799-3361.
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The days are surely coming when a leader will rise up. This leader will have power, wisdom and will be known for justice (23:5). In fact, this leader will be known by this name. Justice will be this leader’s name (23:6). But, that time hasn’t come yet.
Now, we are in the state of woe. Jeremiah really likes this word. It appears 10 times in this prophetic book. Woe is me. Woe is you. Woe to the shepherds, too. It’s the only way that Jeremiah can make sense of the world. In his worldview, “hope coexists with doom.” As a young boy, he has visions of almond trees (1:11-12) and pots on fire (1:13-15). Jeremiah tells God about these visions and gets some divine insight, but God doesn’t tell Jeremiah what will happen. God wants Jeremiah to be a “spokes[person], not fortune-teller.” God instructs Jeremiah on the problems in these “fiercely troubled times” – namely this issue of leadership where succession of kings in Judah made the kingdom even more vulnerable to the Babylonians.
We want God to be responsible. It seems God is the one who has “driven them” out and “will gather” them back together (23:3). It is this divine force that has put the people of Judah in this situation in the first place. And yet, the voice of God speaks to the shepherds. God doesn’t blame herself. It’s the shepherds that are to blame for the destruction (23:1). And so, God says to them (through Jeremiah): you haven’t taken care of each other (23:2). This is your doing. God doesn’t snap her fingers and make everything better. She makes a promise that things will get better. There’s no certainty in this. It doesn’t say how it will happen. God just infers that something will change so that there will be less fear, sorrow and those who are lost. Someday, this will happen. Actually, it’ll happen soon. The days are surely coming when this new leadership will come in the form of shepherds. There’ll be new shepherds that will allow for this security. They will replace the failed shepherds. But, what does this say about God?
Jeremiah doesn’t talk about God in this passage. Instead, Jeremiah calls upon God’s voice. He uses God’s voice to underline his point that the days are surely coming when a just leader will come. In this passage, God is not called a shepherd. We are the shepherds.
But, really, it’s too early to be thinking about shepherds. They make their grand appearance not in us but in the story of Jesus’ birth. They are the poor ones working at night in the fields tending their sheep when suddenly angels appear and tell them there is good news coming in Bethlehem (Luke 1:8-20).
Actually, shepherds were there even before that. They were our “earliest ancestors” – wandering people that didn’t build a home in one place but traveled with their flock looking for food. Shepherds of ancient Israel didn’t know where their flocks might lead. They didn’t know what to expect. And yet, they followed the flock, kept them safe and searched with them for the food and water that the sheep needed to survive.
But, we are not shepherds like this. We’ve changed as much as the people that wrote the Biblical text. Like them, we’ve become farmers, artisans, merchants and professionals – but we retain this “mind-set of the shepherd guarding his flock with love for every tender lamb, dedicated to protecting them from the world’s dangers. And in [our] poetry, [we picture] God as a shepherd.” (See Numbers 27:16-17; Ezekiel 34:5-6, 11-12, 31; Isaiah 40:11; Matthew 10:16; Matthew 18:12-14; Luke 15:4-7; Acts 20:28-29.)
This background on shepherds confuses that question of blame. It complicates the players that seemed obvious. At the first reading, we find the shepherds (both the good and bad), the sheep and God. They seem to be separate without any overlap. And yet, for those of us that call God our Shepherd, one must wonder if the shepherds in this passage aren’t also divine. It’s not historically correct, but could this be a mixed metaphor? Does this confusion in language invite us to notice something about ourselves that we hadn’t noticed before? I think it does. I think it asks us one critical question. Namely, are you the shepherd or are you the sheep? Amid all of the language that we claim for God and the leadership that we seek from God’s justice, this text seems to ask who we will be. Who will you be in God’s kingdom? How will you attend to the people in God’s kingdom so that “they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing”? (23:4).