Straw Is Not Wheat
Jeremiah 23:23-29
Am I a God nearby, says the Lord, and not a God far off?Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord. I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, “I have dreamed! I have dreamed!” How long? Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back—those who prophesy lies and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart? They plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal. Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? says the Lord. Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?
Luke 12:49-56
“I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what constraint I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain,’ and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat,’ and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time
Straw is not Wheat
This summer we have been on a survey tour of the Old Testament. We’ve looked at Amos, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, and now, this morning, we take up a text from the book of Jeremiah.
If you are looking for a study guide to the Old Testament, I recommend Walter Brueggeman and John Collins. These are the commentaries I use, and I find them quite helpful. I will have source citations for Brueggeman and Collins in the written text of this sermon which we will post on the church website.
The book of Jeremiah, as Bruegemann puts it, is a book filled with deep feeling, primarily of grief and mourning, but also with hope for the future.” The book is “exceedingly complicated and multilayered” rich in imagery and metaphor. It is a response to the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC.[1]
Growing up differently.
So, it’s good to be with you in church this morning. Most of us here are at an age that we can remember when things were different. When my brother and I were kids growing up, we had to observe Sunday rest. We didn’t call it the Sabbath. But looking back, I see now that’s what we observed. Sunday was God’s day. We didn’t do any work on Sunday. We weren’t allowed to work on Sunday. It was God’s day. We went to church. We dressed in our good clothes for church, you know, wear your Sunday best. Then, after church, we would have a nice lunch. And then, a quiet afternoon. We stayed home. We could read a book. But we couldn’t run outside or play rough games outside. We rested. We certainly didn’t watch TV or go to the movies. And then in the evening, we would go back to church for the Sunday evening service.
On Sunday’s when I was a kid, our family observed the Lord’s Day. It was beautiful. Now, looking back, I see how beautiful it was. And I miss it. Sundays were a day of rest. But things are different now, and they will never be the same.
However, observing a day of rest is a good thing. I can’t tell anyone else what to do, but my own opinion here is, I think it would do us all some good to observe the Lord’s Day like this again. In fact, that is what we are doing right now. I wish more people could do this, could find the benefits of doing this. I believe our world would be a better place for it.
But who am I? God changes hearts, I don’t. I am not going to change the world. I’m just me, just this one person right here. I do what I can do. And I will let God do the rest. I don’t control the world. I don’t control much of anything. God changes hearts, I don’t.
Some background on the book of Jeremiah:
Speaking of changes, let’s take a look at Jeremiah, and you’ll see where I’m going with this. In general, the Old Testament prophets wrote about two things, that is, they responded to two catastrophes: Assyria and Babylon.[2]Remember last week, from our discussion of Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah wrote to Jerusalem in response to the crisis of the Assyrian invasion in 722 BC. The Assyrians destroyed Israel and much of Judah. They laid siege to Jerusalem, but the siege was not successful. They did not capture Jerusalem.
This week, we fast forward a few hundred years to the 6th century BC, and we are talking about the catastrophe of Babylon. In 587 BC, the Babylonian army destroyed Jerusalem and took the people, forcefully deported the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to Babylon. The book of Jeremiah is a response to the crisis of Babylon, that is, the crisis of the Babylonian invasion and exile. The book of Jeremiah is a book of grief and lamentations.
Bringing the story to life.
Now, I want to bring this story to life for you. I want to show you how it really does apply to us, right here, today, in Searsport, Maine. This is what is so great about reading the Bible. Once you get into it, once the door opens, so to speak, the Bible comes alive. The stories of the Bible come alive, and we begin to see how they apply to us. Otherwise, if not, if they don’t come alive for us, then they are just old stories on dusty old scrolls, good for nothing, just boring old scrolls that we shouldn’t care about at all. But these stories can come alive for us. They come alive when we put ourselves in their shoes, so to speak. When we find ourselves in these stories.
So, let’s imagine that tomorrow, an army invades Maine. Say, the Russian army. Or it could be the English army. Or the French army. It really doesn’t matter. But an army from a foreign country invades Maine. Tomorrow. This army rolls into Searsport with big trucks and tanks. Their fighter jets fly overhead and drop bombs into Searsport harbor. The oil depot blows up. The wharf blows up. Foot soldiers on Main Street Searsport walk into shops and houses and drag people outside. The soldiers load the citizens of Searsport into trucks and take them away. The people become prisoners. And they never go back home. They are forced to resettle in another land, far away, who knows where. Maybe in Siberia, maybe in the Sahara desert. They are forcefully deported.
There, in their new land, the people from Searsport, Maine form a community. They are a community of refugees, living in exile. They miss home. They want to go back home. But most of them will never go back home. Most of them will never go back to beautiful coastal Maine. They will die in Siberia, in exile.
This is exactly what happened in 587 BC to the people of Jerusalem. In 587 BC, Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. After a long siege, the Babylonian army broke through the walls of Jersualem and destroyed the city. Then, the Babylonian army rounded up thousands of people and marched them to Babylon. They were forcibly deported. This was the crisis of Babylon, the Babylonian exile. It was a huge change. It was an irrevocable change. Their lives were never the same again.
People’s lives changed, and they were never the same. So, too, our lives change. We get older, our health changes, our situations change, our country changes, we go through a crisis, we lose people we love, and we wonder what happened. We don’t recognize ourselves anymore, we don’t recognize where we live anymore, and we feel like we are losing control of everything. We want it all to go back to the way it used to be. And this is precisely the position of the Jerusalem exiles in Babylon, 2,611 years ago.
Expressing God’s anger
The text we read this morning is from this time period. The Jerusalem walls have fallen, and the people have been scattered. Jeremiah expresses God’s anger at the lying prophets, the false prophets who are not really prophets. These so-called prophets are actually liars and scammers. They are fake. They are offering straw and pretending it is wheat. And so, Jeremiah delivers this message to the people. It is a message from God.
“Let the prophet who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat?”
Some words are straw, some are wheat.
This summer, I have been growing some grass to fill in patches in our yard. There are some bare patches that need to be repaired, so I got some grass seed and scattered it, then put straw over the top of the seed. Straw is good for that because straw doesn’t’ have any seeds in it.
Straw is the stalk of the plant. In general, cereal grains like wheat grow as tall grasses. (And by the way, straw is not very common here in Maine because we don’t grow wheat the way they do out in the western plains.) The grain, the food part of the plant that we eat, is in the head, the top of the grass. But to harvest the grain, you have to cut the entire stalk and then separate the grain out. It’s called “threshing” I’m sure you know. You end up with grain, the wheat, in one pile, and straw, the stem of the plant, in another. The straw is good for some things like mulching vegetables and strawberries and patching bare spots on your lawn. But it’s not good to eat. There is nothing good to eat in straw.
“What has straw in common with wheat?” This refers to God’s truth. The false prophets speak lies in God’s name. They mislead the people. They take advantage of the people. They are scammers and liars. But a true prophet speaks God’s truth. A true prophet speaks living words, words that feed people, words that are powerful, words that are like fire, words that are like a hammer that breaks rock in pieces. These words are direct and true. They are not straw. They are wheat. They are words that feed us.
The message of the prophets
There is a pattern we see in the prophets. In general, the message of the prophets, over and over again, was a warning to the people. “Do not lose your way.” “Do not stray from God’s teachings. And what are God’s teachings? Take care of the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable, because a society that does not take care of the weak, the poor, and the vulnerable is a failed society. And a failed society, a society that does not take care of the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable, becomes a monstrosity. Such a society becomes a dog-eat-dog society, a brutal society, a sink or swim society, an abomination.
(I did not make this up. It’s all right here in the Bible. And it’s the lesson of history, over and over again.)
And yet, we continue to hear the words of the lying prophets, the fake prophets. We hear them still today. And what are they saying? They preach the message of self-centered individualism. They preach the message of greed and power. It’s the message of narcissism, the “all about me” message. It’s all about me. Everything is about me. I, me, mine. I, me, mine. That is the message of the false prophets. It is straw, not wheat.
Luke 12:49-56
Now let’s take a look at Luke’s Gospel reading for this morning. Jesus continues on his way to Jerusalem, teaching and preaching along the way. In Luke 12, Jesus speaks in the prophetic tradition. He echoes the Old Testament prophets. “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! Father against son and son against father. Mother against daughter and daughter against mother.”
What is going on here? This seems out of character for Jesus. This is not the sermon on the Mount. Jesus speaks as a revolutionary here. He is going to rock the boat. He is going to shake things up. In fact, the Gospel message is revolutionary. It turns the tables upside down. The Gospel inverts the accepted power structure. Jesus preaches that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Jesus is saying that things are changing. The times are changing, and it is not going to be easy to follow him. He is preparing his disciples for some rough times ahead. There is going to be trouble, he is saying. People are not going to like you. You will be criticized. Even by your closest family. “They will turn on you because of me,” he says. “People will hate you because of me, he says.” Because my message is radical. My message turns the world upside down.
Conclusion
Dear People, as you know, things are constantly changing. Each day brings something new. Look for wheat, not straw. Look for God’s truth. So today, we have time to step back and consider all the changes in our lives. Enjoy today, this Sunday, this day of rest, and I encourage you to take some time to reflect on your life, and all the changes you have seen during your lifetime. We are truly blessed to be able to enjoy this day of rest. Amen? Amen.
[1] Walter Brueggemann and Tod Linafelt, And Introduction to the Old testament, The Canon and Christian Imagination, 2nd edition, (Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, 2003), 209.
[2] John Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 2nd edition (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2003), 349.