Alison Morgan, Holy Trinity, January 2000
Jeremiah 2.1-28
He who has an ear, let
him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
Behold, I stand at the
door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to
him and eat with him, and he with me. He who conquers, I will grant him to sit
with me on my throne.
We
all know that verse. We use it as a picture of God’s call to the individual. It
comes from the book of Revelation, and it was written by the prophet John at
the beginning of the first millennium. But actually John wasn’t writing to an
individual, which is how we usually take that verse. He was writing to a
church, and like most prophets he wrote with both words of hope and words of
warning.
And
I would like to suggest that as we stand here on the threshhold of a new
millennium we too find ourselves standing before words of hope and words of
warning. We have a choice. We can go
two ways. We can settle back into our bright new armchairs, the armchairs of
technological progress, and shut out the horrors of the two world wars of what
I can now call the last century. We can congratulate ourselves on our brave new
world and relax into our comfortable materialism. Or we can dare to look
beneath the glittering surface, dare face up to the disturbing aspects of our
world, and dare to listen to a disturbing God through the disturbing words of
his disturbing prophets.
For
John’s word to the churches was not all glory and triumph. This was the
warning:
For you say, I am rich, I
have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched,
pitiable, poor, blind and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold
refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to clothe you and to
keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your
eyes, that you may see.
So
the question for us today is, which are we: rich, prosperous, needing nothing;
or wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked?
Let’s
pray...
I’d
like to read you one of my favourite poems.
James, James, Morrison,
Morrison, Weatherby George Dupree,
Took great care of his
Mother, though he was only three.
James James Said to his
Mother, ‘Mother’, he said, said he,
‘You must never go down
to the end of the town, if you don’t go down with me.
James James Morrison’s
Mother put on a golden gown,
James James Morrison’s
Mother drove to the end of the town.
James James Morrison’s Mother
said to herself, said she,
‘I can get right down to
the end of the town and be back in time for tea.’
King John put up a
notice, ‘Lost or Stolen or Strayed!’
James James Morrison’s
Mother seems to have been mislaid.
Last seen wandering
vaguely, quite of her own accord,
She tried to get down to
the end of the town - 40 shillings reward!
...
James James Morrison’s
Mother hasn’t been heard of since.
King John said he was
sorry, so did the Queen and Prince.
King John (somebody told
me) said to a man he knew:
‘If people go down to the
end of the town, well, what can anyone do?’
Now
the question, is, why did she go down to the end of the town, and why
was she wearing a golden gown? Well, let me tell you what I think. I think she
went to see the dome. The dome’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it. I was born and
brought up in the borough of Greenwich, and I’ve been watching it go up on what
used to be waste dockland by the river. Nothing could be a better symbol of the
dawn of a new millennium. In the dome we celebrate, at considerable expense,
the glorious heights of our own achievement. In the dome we pat ourselves on
the back and look into a technological future of ever greater prosperity. We
have put the past behind us, and here we stand on the threshhold of a brave new
world.
But
James James Morrison Morrison’s mother didn’t come back. She set off into the
settled future of an afternoon’s adventure, and yet she was last seen wandering
vaguely, quite of her own accord. The settled future of the brave new world turned
out to be an illusion. She got confused. A simple trip to the end of the town
opened up a yawning chasm into which this middle class suburban lady
disappeared for evermore. King John said he was sorry, and so did the queen and
the prince; but still she has not been heard of since. For James, James
Morrison Morrison’s mother, things turned out not to be as settled as she
thought.
So
what is the truth about the new millennium? Are we really advancing into a
brave new world, a world of technological mastery and human achievement? As we
say goodbye to modernism and embrace postmodernism, are we really entering into
a world of new possibilities and ever greater individual freedom? Is that how
God sees it? Or is there not perhaps something else, something more sinister,
beneath the veneer of happy materialism and economic prosperity, something
which only the power of God can crack open - a door which with the prophet John
he wants us to go through, not wearing a golden gown, but knowing that we are
wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked?
On
Friday, June 1st, 1838, the brand new Trinity church opened its doors for the
first time. It opened them to the prosperous middle classes of New Walk, the
Crescent in King Street, and an environment which ran from the open fields of
leisure at the top of Regent Road to the crowded industrial housing at the
bottom. It was founded as an evangelical church, with a commitment to preaching
the word of God and a call to all its members to minister the gospel. And so as
the crinolined members of the Victorian establishment emerged from their
carriages to sit in their named pews, they were asked to give money to
alleviate the living conditions of the poor. This is the Bolton Report of 1842:
‘anything like the squalid misery, the slow, mouldering, putrefying death by
which the weak and feeble of the working classes are perishing here, it never
befell eyes to behold nor imagination to conceive’. In Leicester whole families
worked for up to 15 hours a day in the stocking trade, and still
depended on Poor Relief to keep body and soul together. Housing was cramped,
diet consisted of bread and potatoes, sewage ran in the gutters and collected
in stagnant pools between the houses, and education and medicine were far off
dreams. Infant mortality was 25%, epidemics rife.
And
in midst of all this our predecessors did their best. Trinity set up a school,
and a servants’ Bible class, and a special service for the slum kids of Oxford
St. We formed a body of Parish visitors. We issued coal, lent blankets, and
sold new clothes at 2/3rds of the cost price to the poor. We supported the
attempts of the Temperance movement to get the men to drink coffee instead of
beer. And we issued them with tracts. But still we lived and moved in the world
of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, trying to bring relief to those who were
born into the pages of Charles Dickens and Mrs Gaskell. We alleviated the
suffering of the poor, but we did nothing to change it. Why; because we were
stuck in our culture. England was a society of two nations, the rich and the
poor. The rich were rich only because the poor were poor; and they had too much
to lose for radical action. A generation earlier, at the beginning of the
Evangelical movement, Wilberforce had called for what he called ‘real
Christianity’ - that is, countercultural Christianity - and given his life to
the abolition of slavery. His Victorian successors were slow to follow suit
with the more local evils of their own day; and ‘real Christianity’ gradually
came to mean the cult of morality and respectability for which we remember them
now. And so the congregation of Trinity church continued to come in their
carriages, wearing velvet bonnets trimmed with ostrich feathers, silk shawls,
lace collars, crinolenes and multiple petticoats; whilst working kids spent
Sundays in bed so their only underclothes could be washed, and a man would get
2 months hard labour for stealing a handkerchief. They did their best; but
perhaps now we can see that they never really did more than alleviate the
symptoms. They were unable to look at their culture from the outside and bring
the word of God into it. What they gave was charity; it wasn’t the gospel.
Of
course we got there in the end. England is no longer two nations. We live in an
age of prosperity. We’ve put in the sewers. We’ve built new houses, we’ve set
up schools and passed employment acts. We’ve got electricity, we’ve won 2 world
wars, we’ve founded the NHS. We now have all the things the ordinary people of
Victorian times did not. We have come out of the wilderness into a plentiful
land, where we enjoy fruits and good things. From want we have come to plenty.
So
what do we conclude. Not primarily that we should be proclaiming a social
gospel. But rather that we should be trying to look with the eyes of God at our
society, and see what the issue is today. For there still is an issue, there
still is a God who looks down and longs for his people to come close to him.
But the issue has changed. It always does. We live in a new culture. It is no
longer a culture of rich and poor. It is the culture of the dome, a culture of
achievement and technological security. We have built ourselves a nest of
comfort. And yet perhaps it is not as safe as it seems; perhaps we too find,
with James James Morrison Morrison’s mother, that it leads to confusion, and
ultimately to death. It feels like a cocoon, but perhaps it is more like a
glass bubble, a bubble like the bauble on a Christmas tree, shining in the
darkness, glittering with golden light, but oh so fragile. Think back to John. You say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I
need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and
naked. That is the reality. And prosperity is the illusion. The working
people of the new millennium are not to be found struggling from bread and
potatoes to cholera to rags and exhaustion and an early grave. The working
people of the new millennium are to be found in Dixons on a Saturday afternoon.
The working people of the new millennium are housed, paid and cured of their
diseases. We don’t think our needs are about life and death; we think they are
about possessions. We have it all. We’ve got it cracked. We live in the age of
the future, a new age. We stand on the threshhold of a brave new world. And we
have the dome to prove it.
Or
do we?
Three
years ago for me the bubble burst. The door bell rang. On the step I found
Tony, come to tell me Roger had been hit by a lorry on the London Road. Most of
you know about it, most of you prayed with me through it. But as Roger
struggled for his life in intensive care, for me the world changed. As I cried out then to God, I found myself
catapulted into a fourth dimension, into a spiritual world of intangible
reality which seemed so much more real than the material one. And God
responded, and I found myself in harness with him, battling against pain and
death, and winning in prayer by the exercise of some kind of spiritual energy,
by the power of silent words and wanting it, demanding it; and finding God
spoke and I knew what he was saying, and he was with me, and with all of us.
It
happened again in Africa, where I went last summer as part of a mission team.
In Africa too the western bubble bursts. In Africa the sun rises round and red
over a world of pain and need, a world where reality is not cushioned by
medicines and cars and millennium parties. It’s a world of spiritual powers and
needy people, a world of disease and death, a world where man seems as
insignificant as the plumes of scattered smoke that rise from amongst the
trees. And yet if you know him, God is there. He’s there in the air. You can
feel him, touch him, breathe him. In Africa there are no props. There can be no
false security. Only dependence on God. And that is why the gospel is spreading
in Africa. In Africa it is obvious that they are wretched, blind, pitiable,
naked and poor. In England, our whole society is based on the assumption that we
are rich, and that we have prospered. That’s what the millennium was all about.
And yet in our heart of hearts we know it isn’t true. The party is over. And
yet nothing has changed. The pain of daily living is still there. Roger and I
know that people’s lives fall apart in January; because in January the bubble
of celebration bursts, and we face reality once again.
Now
it was into just such a world that God sent the prophet Jeremiah. Like us,
Jeremiah stood on the threshhold of a new era. Like us, he lived at a time of
economic prosperity and relative complacency. We look backwards and forwards
from the year 2000; the pivot for Jeremiah was the year 587, the year in which
Jerusalem fell and the people were taken into captivity in Babylon. In the
period preceding that event God spoke repeated words of anguish and rebuke to a
self-satisfied population which insisted on ignoring the impending danger -
words which have an alarming ring of appropriateness to them as we read them
today. This is how he began. Chapter 2, verses 1 to 13. [It will help if you
have it open]. Now in this passage Jeremiah is making a number of points.
Point
1. You have come from need to prosperity. Vs 7
Point
2. You came there by the hand of God
Point
3. Now in your prosperity you have forgotten you ever needed God (vs 11), and
Point
4. You are drinking from cracked cisterns instead of from the fountain of life
(vs 13).
So,
in our material prosperity we forget our need of God. We rely on ourselves.
There have been times of devotion to the gospel in this country ( look at vs
2), but now is not one of them. And yet why not? We have come from a
wilderness, a land of drought and darkness, material and spiritual; and into a
plentiful land (that’s vs 6 &7). But as a nation we have abandoned God, and
gone after worthlessness, and so become worthless (vs 5). We have a political
leadership which says all is well and builds domes to a bright new future, and
PR men who congratulate them on the prosperity they have brought and reassure us
that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. And a church which does
not say, ‘where is the Lord’, but goes with the culture and supports the status
quo (you’ll find that in vs 8).
The
picture goes on. Verse 20. Under every high hill and under every green tree we
bow down, verse 27 worshipping trees and stones. It happens at Glastonbury. It
happens with crystals. It happens at Stonehenge. Verse 23 we are like a restive
young camel interlacing her tracks, in her heat sniffing the wind, lustful for
anything that passes by. It goes on in the town centre every day. In the
pursuit of consumer goods. Happiness is sought in a full plastic bag from Toys
R Us, or HMV, or PCWorld. Anything, anything, as long as we buy something. And
then what. The bubble bursts, and death intrudes, like it did for me in the
intensive care unit, and again in Africa. Like it does for each one of us when
sooner or later we are forced to face up to the intrusion of pain, evil and
death in our lives. And then anguish comes. Verse 27. ‘In the time of their
trouble they say, ‘arise and save us’.’ And they find in horror that no answer
comes. ‘For where are their gods, says the Lord, that they made for themselves?
Let them arise, if they can save you.’ Death is an outrage. I don’t think this
nation went into mourning because it loved Diana. It went into mourning
because she stood for our culture, and our culture doesn’t work. When Diana
died, the golden bauble fell off the Christmas tree and smashed into a thousand
pieces.
So
what do we make of our society? We have changed our gods to those of
materialism and pluralism. We have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living
waters, and hewn out cisterns for ourselves, broken cisterns, cisterns that can
hold no water. Our whole world is built on assumptions: assumptions about human
need and human fulfilment, assumptions about Western privilege, and assumptions
about reality itself - assumptions which we question no more effectively than
our Victorian forebears questioned theirs.
So
Jeremiah’s call is a call to walk away from the false values of a culture, and
take God seriously. We stand on a threshhold. The bubble is bursting. We have
been drinking from cracked cisterns, cisterns of false security, of confidence
in ourselves, of consumer values. The taped up certainties of the modern world
are looking increasingly battered. Science has failed to explain the universe,
increased prosperity seems only to have brought increased discontent, and the
3rd world is screaming at our door. This is what one commentator says: ‘our
known world is under judgment and is ending, the known world of moral
certitudes, technological superiority, political dominance and economic
monopoly’. The task of the church is to take the gospel out of the box we
allowed that world to put it into, and to listen to God’s voice afresh. For God
is an awesome God. We like to comfort ourselves with the thought of God’s love
in the troubles of our daily lives. But do we dare stand before God as he is, the
God whom Jeremiah knows? Jeremiah knows God as the power who made the earth and
established the world. Jeremiah knows a God whose word is like fire, and like a
hammer which breaks the rock in pieces. Jeremiah knows a God who is hurting
because we have forgotten him, and trusted in lies; a God who expects a
response, and threatens to shame us by lifting our skirts up over our faces if
he doesn’t get one. And yet he also knows a God who will rush to meet us if we
turn to him, to restore and renew us, and to give us once more the waters of
the fountain of life. All these things are in Jeremiah.
So
what does God want of this Jeremiah to whom he speaks so clearly? Jeremiah’s
job is to paint a different picture, to free us from the dominant values of our
culture. Jeremiah is a poet. He does not write in prose, to explain it to us,
to tell us what to do. He writes in verse, to inspire us. He writes to give us
a vision of a God who is big, bigger than the God of the conventional religious
tradition, and certainly bigger than the secular God of the dome. He writes to
open our minds to possibility, the possibility of stepping out of a false world
and into the unseen world of spiritual reality, the world of acknowledged pain
and yet the world of untold possibility. He invites us to move with God from
the old modern culture of certainty into a new postmodern world of changing
values.
How
then are we to respond to Jeremiah? I think in the same way that he speaks to
us. Think of your life as a painting. You have a broad canvas, on which all the
elements of your daily life are painted against the backcloth of our culture.
The dome is there, the Shires is there, the leisure centre is there; the Houses
of Parliament and the M25 and Microsoft and Channel Five. And in there
somewhere are you, with your family or your friends, your job and your car,
your cell group and this church. Now round that painting is a frame. It’s a
nice frame, a strong wooden one, tinged a pleasant shade of blue. The only
problem with it is, it doesn’t fit the picture very well, because the picture
keeps wriggling. Little ripples of tension run across the canvas, and the frame
shifts, and minute cracks appear. You try not to notice. Every so often you
adjust it, hoping no one will see you. But it’s getting worse.
So
what do you do? If you listen to the unspoken assumptions of the world around
you, you will continue to fiddle and adjust. But Jeremiah offers you a new
possibility. Jeremiah’s bombshell is that you need to throw that frame away.
The world is changing, the picture won’t keep still any more, and it is God
himself who is trying to get out of the cracks.
So
if you want to listen to Jeremiah, and you’re willing to throw away the frame,
the next thing you need to do is ask, where am I in the story? You could be in
one of two places. You could be amongst the people to whom God speaks, drinking
from cracked cisterns, worshipping the idols of our culture, idols whom God
says have no more solidity than scarecrows in a cucumber field. These are the
idols of the visible. The idols of material comfort and of illusory control.
They are the idols of a tamed God who can be relied on to give you good things,
and of a faith which lives in a compartment. The idols of the dome, idols of mastery,
control and security. The idols of choice and leisure and affluence.
And
if that’s you, Jeremiah calls you to return to the living God, to the fountain
of living waters. He calls you to acknowledge pain, to face up to uncertainty,
to give up the illusion of independence for the reality of dependence on God.
He calls you to step out of the visible world of static certainties, and to
embrace the moving canvas which has no edges. He calls you to engage with God,
and to ask him what he wants of you in the shifting sands of the postmodern
world.
But
perhaps that’s not where you are. Perhaps you find yourself not with the people
and their cracked cisterns, but with Jeremiah himself. Perhaps you are called
to speak words of warning and of life, to envision a new world, to offer access
to the fountain of living waters to other people. We fight shy of offering the
gospel to other people, because to do it is in itself a countercultural act. We
like to fit in. We like to conform. We don’t like to take risks. But the people
out there are drinking from cracked cisterns and struggling to keep the wooden
frame of their lives in place. They need the gospel. They are searching
for it, in all the ways our new age makes possible. But they are searching in
the wrong places. Later on Jeremiah talks about two sorts of people. The shrub
in the desert, withered and parched. Or the tree planted by water, which does
not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green and it continues to bear
fruit. We do have something to offer, an answer to human hurt and to human
hope, a reality to replace the illusion. What we have to offer is life itself.
So
behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the
door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.
For
you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you
are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy
from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to
clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve
to anoint your eyes, that you may see.
Amen.