Too Great a Burden (Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28)

On Friday morning, at a news conference announcing an arrest in the murder of Charlie Kirk, Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, made an impassioned plea for people across this country to take ownership of their actions at this time.

Cox said, “We can return violence with violence. We can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — is it metastasizes. Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”

“History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country,” Mr. Cox continued, “but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.”

The governor is, of course, right about this. Left to their own devices, cycles of violence rarely starve, but can rage for years, generations even, and breaking them requires people to say, “No, I’m not going to feed this monster anymore. I’m going to choose a better way.”

A quote from Martin Luther King Jr. shared at our Bible study Monday night is on point, “I have decided to stick with love,” King remarked, “[because] hate is too great a burden to bear.”

A lot of what we heard, and saw, and felt this week is evidence of hearts and minds that are shaking, at times even crumbling, under the weight of that burden.

What you and I must be about when we gather here in Christ’s name is helping each other to put that burden down and “to stick with love.”

In order to help us get started with that important work this morning, I want to share with you a passage from a devotional book written almost twenty years ago by Bishop Rueben Job.

The passage comes from the book’s opening section in which Job explains the problem that he intends to help his readers solve. This is where he makes his diagnosis, so to speak, before writing his prescription.

I’ve actually had this passage in my notes for some time and watching this week’s events unfold, I was struck by how timely the Bishop’s assessment of our predicament remains.

Job writes,

We live in such a fast-paced, frenzied, and complex world that it is easy to believe we are all trapped into being someone we do not wish to be and living a life we do not desire to live. We long for some way to cut through the complexities and turbulence of everyday life. We search for a way to overcome the divisiveness that separates, disparages, disrespects, diminishes, and leaves us wounded and incomplete. We know deep within that the path we are on is not healthy or morally right and that it cannot lead to a positive ending. We fear that there is no way out. (p 7-8)

I think it’s fair to say that the pace at which we are living has become faster, more frenzied, and more complex since these words were written, our divisions more profound, and we have all been diminished by the disrespect and disparagements we have hurled and by which we have been hit.

The path we are on isn’t good, and we have to find an off-ramp before it gets too late.

In another time and another place, the Prophet Jeremiah preached to a people who had come to that point.

We’re working our way through Jeremiah’s book this season so I covered a bit of the book’s background and context last week. You can watch that sermon online if you need a refresher, but it’s sufficient for our purposes today to say that after an era in which corruption, waywardness, and injustice dominated the hearts and lives of God’s people in Judah, Jeremiah ministered as the consequences of those actions became apparent.

Being a prophet in ancient Judah, Jeremiah described those consequences with characteristically dramatic flair,

[And the LORD said,] “At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem: A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward the daughter of my people, not to winnow or cleanse, a wind too strong for that. Now it is I who speak in judgment against them.

“For my people are foolish; they do not know me; they are stupid children; they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil but do not know how to do good.”

As we heard in this morning’s reading, Jeremiah goes on to describe a desolate scene in which the kingdom is stripped of all things good and life-affirming.

“I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.”

When we’re learning to read the Bible, it’s vivid images of desolation like this that grab our attention. Hot winds, earthquakes, eclipses–these are some of the prophet’s pyrotechnics, but in the art of prophetic stagecraft, such things are always used to illuminate or point us back to the spiritual or moral point.

In this case, it’s not a hot wind that should make us sweat, it’s our capacity to so completely lose the plot that we end up working against our own best interests and doing that which we never wanted to do.

In Jeremiah’s words, we become “skilled in doing evil but do not know how to do good.”

Or as Saint Paul described a similar conundrum, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

Or as Martin Gore of Depeche Mode translated this abiding truth into a song lyric,

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time

For the wrong reason and the wrong rhyme.

On the wrong day of the wrong week

I used the wrong method with the wrong technique.

Seeing our personal struggles in oracles like these, we must admit that our best efforts at doing the right thing often miss the mark and that by what we have done and left undone we’ve helped to create an environment and propped up systems that are actually capable of working against God and God’s desire for Creation.

We’ve done wrong.

Clearly stated, we are sinners, yet confronted by sin’s consequences, we proclaim Jesus as the way to forgiveness, healing, and holiness.

Years ago I had the opportunity to meet with a church group that was visiting New York to attend a seminar on global hunger and related issues of mission and social justice. The seminar’s organizers invited me to speak to the group about the way in which our Methodist tradition informs and enlightens our approach to such matters, an opportunity I took to share something about John Wesley’s method for encouraging people to live holy lives.

You see, John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, isn’t one of the figures in history who argued that the Church was teaching the wrong things. No, Wesley, for the most part, was okay with what the Church had to say about Jesus, but he was terribly disappointed with the way Christians of his day were following him.

Listless, joyless, indifferent to their neighbors’ struggles, filled with vice and void of virtue—Welsey saw these in parishes and pews everywhere he went, working against God’s desires not only for Christians, but for all people–that we would be free, and whole, and loved, and loving.

We can think of Wesley, then, as something like a sign flashing along the roadside telling us, “Take this exit. Get off here. Go another way. Follow Jesus where he leads you. ”

I told that group how Wesley wanted Methodists to discover in Jesus a model for how to love, and to think, and then to love better. And I told them how, in order to facilitate that kind of spiritual growth and discipleship, Wesley gave us three simple rules to hold ever before our hearts and minds–Do No Harm, Do Good, and Stay in Love with God.

Three Simple Rules–that is, in fact, the title of Bishop Job’s book that I quoted earlier. Three rules to help us break destructive cycles, heal sick thought patterns, starve hungry monsters, and center us in God’s love and grace–Do No Harm, Do Good, Stay in Love with God.

This week it felt like finding a faithful way forward in our “fast-paced, frenzied, and complex” world became even more challenging. We have every reason to believe that some of the loudest voices in our country will only get louder as they continue to monetize rage, foment divisions, and diminish the suffering of those they label as “them,” or “the other side,” or “not like us.”

As Jeremiah said, we are “skilled in doing evil but do not know how to do good.”

With God’s help, however, we can learn and I pray that we will as we heed the wisdom of Scripture and our Faith in this moment and choose the better way.

We can starve the monsters that would destroy us and, by following Jesus, we can be agents of forgiveness, mercy, and reconciliation. In fact, we must center qualities like these as the hallmark of our witness and our life with God.

We must “stick with love, because hate is too great a burden to bear.”

Amen.