Proper 7, Year A                                                                            Jeremiah 20:7-13
June 19, 2005                                                                                Psalm 69
St. Margaret of Scotland Episcopal Church                                       Romans 5:15b-19
The Rev. Linda McCloud, Vicar                                                      Matthew 10:16-33

  “The Lord is with me like a dread warrior”

             About two weeks after I moved to Moultrie, I got new next-door neighbors.  Now I’m no longer the new kid on the block, but can welcome these other people.  It wasn’t hard to figure out what the husband does for a living.  He drives a company car which he parks beside mine when he isn’t working.  The car has big signs painted on it that say “Moultrie Police.  Dial 911.” 

Since my own brother is a retired police officer, I feel good to know that I have a police officer for a neighbor.  I feel protected.  An added bonus about these new neighbors is that both the husband and the wife are also trained as paramedics.  I have even more angles covered than ever before.  I feel a sense of safety.

            It’s interesting, isn’t it – how we go about building our safety nets?  A safety net for some is having financial independence.  For others, it’s land and family.  Some people consider good health a safety net.  They are the ones who would say, “If you have your health, you have everything.”  For yet others, it’s having the appropriate education which will enable us to have the freedom to work at jobs we enjoy.

            For Jeremiah, the prophet in our Old Testament reading for today, his safety net was a sense of the presence of Almighty God.  Jeremiah had “trouble with a capital T,” but rested his hope in the fact that the Lord was with him “like a dread warrior.”  God would be a protective presence for Jeremiah -- sort of like having his own police officer next door.  And yet God never goes off duty.  But even God wasn’t safe.  God made demands on Jeremiah.

            Let’s face it – Jeremiah had a really difficult job, and he needed God’s protection.  He needed to feel that the Lord was with him like a dread warrior.  This is how Jeremiah could speak with a power and authority that came from beyond himself – a power not of his own making.  Jeremiah was an outsider in his own community because he could not help but speak for God through this power.

            Jeremiah is the one who tells us that no one can hide in secret places from God who fills heaven and earth.  The prophet trembled at having to speak on behalf of Almighty God.  Who among us would not tremble at such a daunting task?   

The first twenty-five chapters of Jeremiah speak in defense of divine justice.  That takes a lot of energy.  But Jeremiah complained that God had snookered him into this task.  God had “enticed” him, and Jeremiah had fallen for it.

            Last summer, I got a sense of the trauma that Jeremiah had suffered.  I made my first trip to Israel.  It was August, and it was hot – but it was a dry heat.  I had been awarded an academic prize – the Griffin Fellowship – from my seminary, which provided me with the funds for summer study in the Holy Land.  I enrolled in a course of study at St. George’s College in Jerusalem entitled “The Palestine of Jesus.”

            It sounded so benign, as if it would be lots of fun to travel under the protective umbrella of being a student.  But as it turned out, there were only seven Americans gathered in Jerusalem for this class.  I felt as if I had been snookered into this trip.

            I wasn’t naïve about travel to Israel.  I had heard that getting through Israeli security at the airport was not easy.  But I wasn’t expecting it to be as tough as it was.  When my fellow traveler and I said we were going to St. George’s College, the El Al Airline security people sequestered us in a corner at JFK airport in New York.  Here we were – Americans in our own country, and we were not allowed to walk about freely in the airport.

            Upon arrival at St. George’s I felt I had been enticed to that country by my own desire to learn, my sense of adventure, and by the brochures from St. George’s.  Harsh reality set in very quickly.  St. George’s was housing an Israeli dissident who had just spent eighteen years in jail for blowing the whistle on Israel’s nuclear weapons program.  That’s why the airport security people were watching us like a hawk.

            But that security issue was only the beginning.  On our second day in Jerusalem, the people from St. George’s took us to a Palestinian Refugee Camp near Bethlehem.  This camp was set up by the United Nations more than fifty years ago.   

Although most of the people in that camp are angry, some seemed resigned to live and die there, and many have done just that.  The spokesman who greeted us bragged that they had thirty-five martyrs, and that he had nothing to lose.  That was not what I went to Israel to see and hear.  But even so, I came back home with a deeper sense of God’s presence in my life.

            One day when our group was touring some excavated ruins in Jerusalem, we came across some square caverns hewn out of the stone.  There were iron grates covering the entrances, and the caverns were about twenty-five feet deep straight down.  The professor for our class said those were cisterns.  He continued by saying, “It was such a place as this that Jeremiah the prophet was held prisoner.”  It must have happened to him in the summer heat, because starting in December the cisterns would be filled with rain water. 

            Poor Jeremiah.  No wonder they called him the weeping prophet.  If someone threw me down in that hole, I would cry too.

            But ill treatment was not the only thing Jeremiah had to cry about.  Jeremiah had the very difficult job of telling his fellow Israelites that they were going to be taken into captivity.  Life as they knew it would be forever changed.  They would be sent to Babylon in what is now modern-day Iraq.

Jeremiah’s job as prophet threw him into the political turmoil of his time.  Since a prophet’s job is to speak for God, Jeremiah spoke the truth to power and paid the prophet’s price.

            Like all true prophets, Jeremiah had tried to get out of the job by claiming his weaknesses.  But God was with him like a dread warrior, and would not let Jeremiah off the hook. 

Not everything Jeremiah had to say was bad news.  He also had some good news – such as the fact that the descendents of these captives would get to return to Jerusalem and start over as forgiven people.    

            And that’s where our Gospel lesson for today picks up.  Jesus was also a prophet, and he also wept over Jerusalem, but Jesus was so much more.  Jesus was prophet, priest and king.  If you remember last week’s Gospel lesson, Jesus had chosen twelve apostles from among his disciples so that they could assist him in his work. 

This week we learn about their mission.  It was fraught with danger.  They were being sent out as sheep in the midst of wolves.  They were not to be naïve about the possibility that they would have to suffer, or be betrayed, just like Jesus.   

But they were not to worry about what to say to the judge if they got arrested for speaking for God.  They would know what to say when the time came.  They were not to stress out, because God would be with them like a dread warrior.

            Have you ever had the experience of a deep sense of the presence of God in a traumatic situation?  Perhaps at the sudden death of a friend or loved one, you felt such peace that you could not explain it.  Or have you had an automobile accident and kept the presence of mind to get out of the car alive?

Or  -- have you ever felt that you had an appropriate answer at just the right time that was so good you surprised yourself by speaking it?  Have you considered that such a response might come from beyond yourself – from the Holy Spirit of God who never leaves you or forsakes you.

            In her book Calling, A Song for the Baptized, Caroline Westerhoff says this:

            “The power coursing through our bodies and our hearts is God’s power.  We have the right to use it because of who we are – God’s people – and God has given that authority to us.  Power used with appropriate authority furthers God’s reign of peace and justice, bringing order and life.”

            Westerhoff goes on to point out that such power is “victorious over everything we can do to deny it.”

            God’s power is like fire shut up in our bones – the fire that Jeremiah dreaded and loved all at the same time.  This power in us, by virtue of our baptism, is what keeps us coming to church Sunday after Sunday.  This is what makes us notice the social ills around us and try to do something about them.  This power is the search engine that finds our consciences for us.

            Because we have the presence of God in our lives every day, we can leave the safety of this building and represent God in the world.  We are a mission church.  I hope we feel a sense of mission to bring others into an awareness of the safety of the presence of God in their lives.  God just might have some surprises for them, as well as for us.