ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

TRINITY 1, 2009 EVENSONG & BENEDICTION
Sermon preached by the Vicar, Fr Moses

Jeremiah 7.1-16; Romans 9.14-26

"As for you, do not pray for this people, do not raise a cry or prayer on their behalf, and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you." Jeremiah 7.16

If I were to stand in the courtyard on Easter Day or some other great festival , and say to you that God had told me he would not be present in your worship and you should go away, and that I was forbidden even to pray for you, because he would not listen, you might conclude that there was something far wrong with either you or me. Human nature being what it is, you would probably decide that the problem was with me; that the Vicar had gone mad and phone the archdeacon.

We expect priests to pray for their people, to stand before God on their behalf; but what about prophets? We think of them as taking their stand before the people to speak on behalf of God, as Jeremiah was doing in our passage tonight. But in the Old Testament, we see that it was also one of the responsibilities of the prophet to stand before God on behalf of the people; of a sinful people. Such intercessory prayer can be seen in Abraham, Moses and Ezekiel. But for Jeremiah, such intercession for the people is prohibited and deemed fruitless.

Prophetic intercession had changed God's mind; so he forbids it to prevent even that possibility. The word used does not suggest that the prohibition is permanent, and Jeremiah will intercede for the people later. But at this point, the Lord will act against the people and wants no intercession to stop his intended correction of their misdeeds.

Jeremiah stands in the gate of the Lord's house, the Temple at Jerusalem, on God's instructions to address the people who are there for one of the great festivals on which all the people of Judah were expected to be there to worship: "Amend your ways and your doings and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: 'This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.'"

His sermon addresses the two perennial and connected themes in prophetic teaching:

Jeremiah's words sound like a kind of entrance liturgy; they echo entrance Psalms like 15 and 24 which speak of the moral qualifications, the manifestations of a holy life, appropriate for those coming before the holy God.

"Lord, who may dwell in your tabernacle? Who may abide on your holy hill? Whoever leads a blameless life and does what is right, who speaks the truth from his heart." Psalm 15

"Who can ascend the hill of the Lord? And who can stand in his holy place? Those who have clean hands and a pure heart, who have not pledged themselves to falsehood, nor sworn by what is a fraud." Psalm 24

In the psalms, these come in the form of questions. For Jeremiah, there is no need to question: the answer, the lack of qualification is clear. His words forbid entrance until the conditions met. They do not succeed in this and they result in him being put on trial.

Reform is still possible. "For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly with one another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I well dwell with you in this place..."

The Hebrew text is ambiguous. It may mean as our version does: "then i will dwell with you in this place" or, as others do, "then I will let you live in this place." Either reading is plausible and interpreters from earliest times have failed to agree.

The general exhortation for people to change their ways so that the Lord may dwell there or let them dwell there. The two are not mutually exclusive. Indeed one goes with the other.

The repeated mantra "The temple of the Lord", may be words which had been said to Jeremiah. People may have remembered God's promise in Isaiah to preserve the temple.

But what their slogan did not take into account was God's own decision to remove the protecting shield from the temple and the people. For, rather than reflecting a nation whose life conforms to the holiness and righteousness of the God of the Temple, these words conceal a society rotten to the core. They are a lie. The only way they can be made true is by a radical alteration of moral life.

Jeremiah spells out what this entails: dealing justly in all human relations, not taking advantage of the weak and powerless but protecting them, not committing violence, not worshipping other gods but giving unqualified devotion and loyalty to the Lord.

Here we see a set of fundamental principles governing Israel's covenant life as God's people.

"Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, 'We are safe!', only to go on doing these abominations? Has this house which is called by Name, become a den of robbers in your sight?'"

These rhetorical questions spell out the indictment and highlight the outrageous contradiction between extensive violation of the covenant's requirements and worship of God in the temple. This people have no shame and the Temple is no place of worship under these circumstances - it is literally a gathering place for thieves, adulterers, extortioners and the like. The "congregation of the Lord, the house which is called by name" has been made a lair for criminals. So, there is no remedy but to get rid of it.

The Lord tries to shake the confidence of the Judeans by reminding them of an earlier instance when the people's sins brought judgement and the destruction of the Lord's house - the sanctuary at Shiloh. Such an extreme measure comes only after persistent reminders and warnings, matched only by even more persistent ignoring of such danger signals. All the characteristics that would seem to guarantee the protection of the Temple are spelled out to underscore the enormity of the situation. It is the house "called by name", the place in which the people trusted, the place given by God to their ancestors and to them. None of these is sufficient to save it and them now. God will cast this people out of his house and out of his sight.

Well, the Lord has not told your priests that they are not to pray for you, - not yet any way - but it is their duty to warn you that the basis of the new covenant, as well as of the old - is the love of God and neighbour set out in the Ten Commandments and Jesus' Summary of the Law. To think that we can love other gods as well as the God is folly. The gods we are tempted to worship are of course not idols of wood or stone; we are far too sophisticated for that. They are ones of prosperity and security. status and self-image: more subtle but no less dangerous for that.

Those of us who worship in a magnificent church like this one always need to be reminded that it is a means and not the end; lest we make of it an idol. We who enjoy and draw comfort from its worship and life, need always to listen to the warnings which our worship and preaching contains. Each morning at Mattins we say in the Venite: "Harden not your hearts as your forebears did in the wilderness ...when they tested me." (Psalm 95) At Mass we begin by recalling our sinfulness. When we think that we stand, believe that we are secure, we must beware, lest we fall!

Our preacher at Corpus Christi, Bishop Stephen Conway, said to me after the service: "How do you cope with all this religion?" My initial response, only partly in jest was: "I don't inhale". What he meant was not a criticism of the splendid liturgy we had taken part in, but a recognition that it can all be a seductive and corrupting luxury: "drowning in honey". I have been thinking about that question on and off since then. My response includes a number of things. First of all, much of our "religion" here is not grand ceremony and beautiful music, it is a rather austere and plain diet of office and mass, day after day after day. In the morning it is preceded by silent prayer and meditation. Even when it is done with splendid ceremony and gorgeous music, it includes serious preaching; not just the tickling of a congregation's ears with a few amusing anecdotes and thoughts. Serious preaching requires sheer hard work, long hours of study and preparation. And then, while there is a "Sunday Opera" element to life and ministry here, there is much more than simply putting on a good show. This place is about people and their relationship with God and, in God, , with each other; their problems and anxieties. This is a serious business with no room for the dilettante or the purveyor of cheap sentimentality.

Time does not permit me to do justice to the other great figure in tonight's readings: St. Paul. The passage we heard from the Letter to the Romans is part of the section in which Paul speaks of his yearning for the salvation of his own people the Jews; those who seem to have rejected Jesus as their Messiah. One reaction would be simply to reject them, and plenty of Christians have done that, but he cannot because he believes that God has not. We too are often tempted to reject those who do not believe, or do not believe like us, or once did and have ceased to. We are tempted to write them out of the book of the living, out of our concerns and care, out of our prayer and mission. But to think and act as if they have no place in God's heart is to risk excluding not them, but ourselves.