Hark, the Cry
“Hark, the Cry”
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 18, 2022
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 Psalm 79:1-9 Luke 16:1-13
First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho
Pastor Andy Kennaly
“My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.” Jer. 8:18
I remember this Luke passage read in church 30 years ago. It was the focus of a sermon preached by Roger Durham at John Knox Presbyterian Church on Westport Road in Louisville, Kentucky back in the early 1990’s. My wife and I participated in that congregation while I was in Presbyterian seminary. It was just down the road from where we were living. I even got to serve my Field Education placement at that church for a year, which was helpful because most of my Field Ed work was with Cedar Ridge Camp just outside Louisville because I was interested in church camps and conference centers. I didn’t really want to do a church placement, but I had to, so it was nice to have the more personal connection for that assignment. Roger was not only my pastor but became my mentor during that time. We met weekly to talk about life and ministry, part of the official supervision process, but an important grounding in a time when life seemed open-ended, confusing, and there were more questions than answers.
I remember him preaching a sermon about the shrewd steward, and for some reason it stood out for me. Perhaps it was because Pastor Roger, at some level, seemed to me to be living it out. He was someone trying to navigate the challenges of ministry, and a few years later he and his wife, who was also a pastor, got a divorce, and he left parish ministry. I lost track of him all these years. After a search online, I see he’s on Facebook and his little boys now have children of their own.
Small world. I looked up John Knox Presbyterian Church on Westport Road, they have a website, they’re trying to get an online presence after the Covid scene closed worship in the sanctuary. Wouldn’t you know that I know their current pastor. Years ago, when I was in Oregon at First Pres. La Grande, Pastor Susan Barnes was in Baker City, about an hour away, south of La Grande. We were in the same presbytery, and I remember Shawna and I went and had supper at their place with her and her family.
Well, she’s even further to our south now as the Transitional Pastor for that congregation in Kentucky, what many of us call, an Interim Pastor. She went there just before the Covid pandemic hit, so she’s been there almost two or three years now.
That’s how Presbyterian circles are, they overlap. Years can go by, then you stumble upon former contacts in our connectional church. It doesn’t matter which part of the country, which region, or the presbytery or synod; eventually you see people that are familiar. And like Bill Love likes to say, “There’s always a Sandpoint connection.” I looked through some of the friends listed on Roger’s Facebook, sure enough there’s are a couple of mutual friends, one of whom has many Sandpoint connections. Small world. Everyone facing challenges, moving here and there, shifting careers, growing families, and there’s still some overlap as life goes on.
This morning’s scriptures echo this and help us when these themes overlap. Certainly, the ancient Hebrews had a difficult time when a major empire acted on their land. They suffered as others invaded their land, destroyed their town, and killed family and friends. Small town, small world, no one was exempt from the tragedy the prophet, Jeremiah is dealing with as God’s people suffer unrelenting, inconsolable pain. Overlapping circles in that case meant that if they were not killed, their loved ones were, or someone they knew. Everything they had come to assume in life is now in question. Even their image of God and religious assumptions no longer work for them. They are in exile.
“My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Hark the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land….” (Jer. 8:18-19a).
Small town in Luke too. The shrewd manager is commended by the one he cheats. His actions help him hedge his bets as uncertainty opens a chasm in his life, and he’s going to jump into without knowing what the landing will be like. The story is dynamic and complex and seems to be missing something, perhaps something was edited out over the years, I don’t know. But it ends with something that carries through, a lesson that has weight and merit and deep wisdom to it. Maybe it sounds familiar to those with a church background as we hear, “You cannot serve God and wealth.”
Welcome to stewardship season! The fall focus of many churches where pledge drives begin, and financial commitments are made. What a way to kick it off: You cannot serve both God and wealth. The Greek word for wealth in this passage is mamonai, or mammon. Sounds kind of like our word for “money,” but it’s more than this. Mammon, for us, would be better called, “the system.” You cannot serve both God and the system, which includes money, but is so much more.
When you’re devoted to the system, whatever culture or institution or industry, or family dynamic that may be, when the system gets challenged life becomes very difficult. The system defends itself. But sometimes, either the system collapses or one grows beyond the system, evolves, and what once worked no longer works. This can be very stressful, draining, and calls everything into question. If that doesn’t work, what does? It is not a stretch to put our voices into Jeremiah’s text, to put our lived reality into the painful expressions of ancient prophecy: My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.
That’s one thing about this passage that even biblical scholars cannot agree on. Who is doing the talking? Who is quoted at this passage? Whose joy, whose grief, whose heart? Is it the prophet who agonizes over watching his fellow people suffer? Is it God, who wants the people to live into the depths of love and presence and awareness, yet they fail in this and anguish is the result. Perhaps it needs to be open-ended. If this voice is God, and the prophet, then maybe there is room, it could be even us.
The trio of voices share those words together as lament overlaps. If we put our faith in the system we are let down, we suffer because systems are limited, finite, and cannot capture that beyond words, the indescribable, the transcendent. Serving the system backfires.
One system that is breaking down is the church. As post-modern culture becomes more dominant, traditional institutions, including and especially the church, decline. Post-modern people do not speak of God, and traditional ways of knowing or understanding faith do not work anymore, indeed they are resisted. The vocabulary and assumptions of life in the church are too much for many and don’t translate in a ‘spiritual but not religious’ context.
Somehow in the exile experience, God’s truth remains, love continues to fuel creation, to sustain life, to call and guide. One new normal collapses into another and there are more questions than answers. I’m not here to fix it. How to make it better is beyond me. The lament and struggle of these scriptures is ongoing, if we’re honest. But so is the call to wholeness and the wisdom which declares you cannot serve God and the system.
May we trust in the depths of our soul that we are not opposed to God but are of God. Traditional religion and expressions of contemporary doctrines don’t promote this, the system is against us. May we have faith for the exile journey with God. Amen.