This week I was privileged to attend a Leafs hockey game as a guest. The tickets that I had been given were right behind one of the goals – a marvellous vantage point. I loved every minute, and the Leafs won – God be the glory! I watched the game with great interest. But, before the game began, I was astonished by the behaviour of a couple who were about five rows in front and below me, right behind the net that was filled, at that time, by the Leafs’ goalie.
In fact, the game had not even begun. Reimer had taken his place in the net, and these two individuals of questionable taste stood up and started to belittle him. They said, “You are no good. You leak like a sieve. It’s going to be a terrible game. You had a rotten season last year. You were dreadful.” And they went on and on with these comments to him. He just kept skating back and forth, trying to rough up his crease, ignoring these people, who clearly anyone would have heard had they been within three thousand miles of the Air Canada Centre, they were so loud!
People were telling them to sit down and be quiet. It was great! It was better entertainment than the game. But, I thought, “Isn’t this incredible.” There are people who will do this sort of thing and get a thrill out of doing it, but to do it before the game had even begun and a puck had come towards the net seemed to me to be very, very difficult and strange. Well, I feel a bit like that this morning.
I feel I have to come to you with a text and a verse that begins with something really quite horrible. It sounds dreadful. On the face of it, I would rather just avoid it. I am sure every preacher from the Lectionary today would say, “I would rather not deal with it.” Before the game begins, we have a phrase, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man.” Or, a more inclusive version, “Cursed are the ones who trust in mortals.” I am starting off my sermon therefore with a curse. Believe it or not, I am cursing you. I am cursing all of us.
“Cursed are the ones who put their trust in mortals. Cursed is the man who trusts in man.” It sounds tough. It sounds unflinching and unbreakable. It sounds like a prophet. I would like to think, in the words of the great poet Shania Twain, that it will be “Up, up, up! Up from here!” but I am not sure that is the case, for this text grasps us and it holds us. “Cursed is the man who trusts in man. Cursed is the one who trusts in mortals.” It sounds harsh. Jeremiah seems to go on even beyond that.
He implies that those who trust in the flesh, in humanity, and in the things of the flesh will be forced into exile. They will dry up and shrivel up, like a tree that is next to a dry bed rather than a living stream of water. On the other hand, those who trust in the Lord, they will prosper, they will be blessed, they will be ones who will gain great joy and put down roots, and have those roots securely firm from the rivers and the waters that pass by. It is a dark contrast: trusting in the flesh; and trusting in God.
As James Calvin Davis, a biblical commentator, points out, this can pose some problems for us. In a superficial reading, it might appear that reality suggests the opposite. It often appears that those who trust in the flesh, those who are self-absorbed actually seem at times to prosper. They seem to flourish. Good things seem to happen. But there are those who trust in God, who are people of faith, who seem to suffer and have difficulties. Reality says to me at times, Jeremiah might have it wrong. Jeremiah might be confused.
Jeremiah would be steadfast. He would come back at us and say, “No! No! No! Those who trust in the flesh will be disappointed. Those who trust in the Lord will be secure.” And indeed, throughout Christian history, others have lined up behind him. John Calvin, in his Institutes wrote on this very text, “Those who trust in the Lord will find that He is the fountain and the source of every good thing.” Augustine says the same thing in The Confessions. Saint Thomas Aquinas says this in the Summa Theologica. It is there in the writings of Wesley and his great sermons. They believe that those who ultimately trust in the Lord will in fact find blessedness, and those who don’t trust in the Lord will not.
It is sometimes more nuanced than that. Recently, I have been reading about Theresa of Avila, that mystic from Spain in the sixteenth century. I am not usually one who reads the Roman Catholic divines, and she was made a Doctor of the Church just thirty years ago. Yet, Theresa is exceptional! She was brought up in a very wealthy home in Spain. Her father was a businessman and was able to afford all the luxuries and the pleasures of life. He gave her all the benefits that life could bring: a first-class education, the knowledge to be able to dance and to write and to be steeped in poetry. She was someone who went to the finest convent schools and was steeped in religion. Yet her family was also shunned.
They were shunned and never completely amongst the elite because one of her grandfathers was Jewish. Therefore, they could not enter into Spanish society with the fullness that their wealth would suggest. Nevertheless, Theresa grew up well with all the benefits of the world and all things before her. Even so, in her heart there was a hunger. She had all that the world had to offer, but she needed something more.
There came a point in her life when one day she was in church and there were the normal rites and rituals and prayers and everyone was just going through the acts of their worship, fulfilling their liturgical obligations, when she was grasped by the goodness of God in Christ. So great was this that, as Victor Shepherd writes in an account of her life, she says: “So great was my distress when I thought how ill I had repaid Christ for those wounds of the Cross that I felt as if my heart was breaking and I threw myself down beside Him and wept.”
For Theresa, before the good things of God, in this case, the sacrifice of Christ, her only reaction and response was to have a broken heart and feel that she needed more than the world could give her. She understood Jeremiah. Like Calvin and the others, she got it. Those who trust in the flesh in fact will be deceived, but those who trust in the Lord will be blessed. How do we understand this? How do we make this a reality in our lives?
I think we need to make a distinction between what I call penultimate and ultimate things. By penultimate, I mean secondary things. You see the problem is, when we look at the passage from Jeremiah, we judge it by our own standards, by the standards of secondary things. Secondary things, the things that are not as important as we sometimes think they are, and are attractive to those who are easily deceived. Jeremiah suggests that the heart is easily deceived, and that the human heart can succumb to the temptation and the deception of things of this world.
This is why the word that is used to describe the deception of the heart in this passage has its roots in the name of Jacob. Jacob himself, in the Bible, was one who could not be trusted and was deceitful. Jeremiah looks at his nation of Judah and he says, “Can you not see? Can you not understand how easily deceived you have been by your heart because you trusted in these secondary things? You have trusted in wealth, and you believe and you judge whether or not life is successful on the basis of whether you have accumulated great wealth. That is the deceit of secondary things! You have placed your trust in idols and Gods, like Ashtoreth and you have committed yourself to the Gods that you see rather than the God that you don’t see. Don’t you realize that you have been deceived? You have put your trust in military alliances with other powers around the nation and have trusted those powers to take care of you. Don’t you understand you have been deceived? You heart has been deceived.”
Jeremiah was trying to stress to the people that now is the time for them to turn and trust in God; not to trust in those secondary things. The real sin here is not just about moral choices. It is not just about whether or not we make the wrong choices in life. That is what sinning has been reduced to in our culture: just making the wrong choices. It is more than that.
He argues that it is the heart that is deceitful; it is not just a matter of the choice. It is where your affection is, where your passion is, what you really honestly, deep-down believe. Your moral choices arise out of where your heart is, and that is what Jeremiah is getting at. If you place your trust in those things that are secondary, you will make the wrong choices. It is where your heart is. The heart that is so easily deceived.
I have been thinking about that a lot recently, because it seems to me that the effect of having our hearts in the wrong places, not only affects ourselves, but it affect others as well. For Jeremiah, the fact that the nation of Judah was trusting in gods and alliances and wealth and power was having a devastating effect on its very own people. I think when we place our trust in secondary things it has an effect on others. I think it has an effect on the homeless. I think it has an effect on the jobless. I think it has an effect on the poor and needy within our society.
This is because if we are so consumed with the secondary things, we don’t even see the need for the first things that are right before us. Our deceitful hearts are so clouded with our wrong priorities that we do not see and are blind to the needs that arise before us. Is that not why there has been such a lack of passion, I think, just compassion for the people in Attawapiskat and the state of the conditions in which fellow human beings are living? We can make all the arguments in the world as to how and why this should or should not happen, but if Jesus were here walking by us, would he not say this is like the beggar on the side of the road that the Samaritan reaches out to and everybody else just walks by. This is because, where your heart is causes you to see what the needs are.
I see this happening in my beloved South Africa now, never mind the high profile and unfortunate death of Ms. Steenkamp and whatever that has transpired there will come out, but the reality is that it is a nation at the moment that is destroying young women’s lives. The number of rapes and beatings is so serious that it is an epidemic!
It is interesting that the preachers in the mid-1990s, when all the changes of Apartheid came about, rallied behind the government and supported the idea that Apartheid should end and were right in doing so, but also gave a word at that time and I have gone back and looked at some of those sermons, and they say things like, “Okay, we have been set free from tyranny but unless we are a nation that truly trusts in the Lord, not in one political party, not in political power, not in just the search for wealth or acceptance but in truth, we will not flourish and we will not prosper.”
They were right: for the effect of trusting in secondary things means that you are blind to the primary things that need to be addressed. Where this violence against women is coming from is the heart and a deceitful heart. Oh, we like I think at times to paper over the cracks of our human deceit and we try to put on the pretence that sin is not sin that everything is okay, when it is far from okay.
In one of the great authorities of our culture, Readers Digest, I was reading a true story and, don’t be too pious, I am sure you thought about this yourself. A man goes into a parking lot and he accidentally backs into a Porsche that belongs to somebody else. He dents it badly. He is about to drive away when he see that there is a crowd of people still in the parking lot who have seen him. So he thinks, “No, I better do something about this. I must do the right thing.” He sits there and he gets out a piece of paper from the dash of his car and he writes with a pen and I am quoting this directly from Readers Digest: “A number of people around me think I am leaving you a note that includes my name and address. But, I am not!”
And that was the sum total of his note! I love it! Deceit covers all things!
Jeremiah says, “Look, we are doing this as a nation.” He is saying to Judah, “We are doing this as a nation. We are deceiving ourselves by the pretence of being religious, but we are not trusting God.” So, what about ultimate things? Well, ultimate things I think are the things that are durable and last. They are things that do not decay and shrivel, are not deceitful and a sham; they are what we see when we look at God. This is, I think, one of the most magnificent passages in the Bible, where Jeremiah says, “Look, those who have a heart and trust in God are just like a tree that is planted by a river.”
I think he had in mind the Psalms. It is hard to know which came first: Jeremiah or the Psalms. Psalm 1 says the following: “But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night. The blessed will be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither, and whatever he does, he shall prosper.”
Jeremiah says the same thing: those who trust in the Lord are like a tree on a river bank that is able to draw moisture and no matter the dryness and the deceit and the sin in the world, God is there and provides strength and sustenance.
We owe Jeremiah a lot. Western culture owes Jeremiah a lot. Our faith owes Jeremiah a lot because Jeremiah was the one, of all the writers in The Old Testament, who identify that it is from the heart that true trust arises, that the heart is the seat of emotions and thought and faith and that it is from the heart that only deceit can arise but so can faith. The problem is that if we plant the wrong seeds and we stretch the penultimate things, then our hearts are broken. Nobody, I think, in English literature has captured this more eloquently than Lord Byron, who wrote in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage the following words: “The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted. They have torn me, and I bleed. I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.”
Byron goes on to say that it is from his heart that he knows that he had planted the wrong seed.
The seed that is planted in God bears fruit. Oh, I know that from the outside, from those who worship at the God of the penultimate, it might appear in our materialistic age that this is just not true. But from the divine point of view, it is true. Those who trust in the Lord will be blessed. Theresa Avila, near the end of her life wrote these words after a great mystical experience: “Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. All things pass away. God never changes. Patience attains all things. He who has God finds he lacks nothing, for God alone suffices.”
Jeremiah would say “Amen!”
And, on that positive word, I end the game today! Amen.