30 th August: 14 th Sunday after Pentecost

‘Believe in God but you’d shake a fist at him.’

I’m showing my age when I start a sermon by referring to the band, ‘The Boomtown Rats’! It was 1979 when, as a teenager, I bought their Fine Art of Surfacing album. The best-known track on this album is undoubtedly, ‘I don’t like Mondays’, but one of the others, called ‘Nice ‘N’ Neat’, addressed to a friend who has become a Vicar, has the line, ‘Believe in God but you’d shake a fist at him.’

And those words, I suggest, could equally as well have been addressed to the prophet Jeremiah, judging from his words in today’s OT reading. For the passage is Jeremiah complaining, protesting, shaking a fist at the Lord, while still maintaining his faith in Him (vv. 15–18), followed by God’s response to the prophet (vv. 19–21).

The passage has been set to complement the Gospel, in which Jesus speaks—for the first time—of the necessity of his suffering and death, is rebuked by Peter for saying such things, then strongly tells Peter off, before reminding the disciples that coming after him required them to deny themselves, take up their cross and follow him. It’s ‘nice ‘n’ neat’ that we have a Jeremiah passage to go alongside this Gospel one for, as we heard last week, when Jesus asked his disciples who people said the Son of Man was, one of their replies was that some said, ‘Jeremiah.’ ¹

Like Jesus, Jeremiah has been a willing and faithful receiver and proclaimer of God’s words (v.16), yet has had to face opposition even from his own people (v. 15). As Jesus would do in Gethsemane, Jeremiah is struggling with his God-given vocation, his mission from God, for it is so very hard for him (v. 17b–18a). And as Jesus would do on the Cross, Jeremiah feels abandoned by his God (v. 18b).

For 14 chapters, Jeremiah has exercised his ministry and lived out his vocation to be a ‘prophet to the nations’. ² But it’s been tough, and things are getting him down. What God has given him to proclaim to the people has won him few plaudits and much opposition from them, because his message—God’s message—has been uncompromisingly challenging, calling the people to truly turn back to God. But they have been unable or unwilling to do so, preferring their complacent sinfulness and their vehement disdain of Jeremiah to responding to God’s word through his prophet.

And Jeremiah’s had enough of the battle and complains to God about how hard it has been and still is, about the opposition he’s received, about how even God himself seems to be unreliable.

But he still clings to his belief in God, and he calls upon his God to act against those who are opposing him.

My guess is that very many of us will find that Jeremiah’s experience resonates with ours some or even much of the time. We too may find being a Christian disciple is extraordinarily tough; we too may face opposition from others—even from friends, family or even other Christians; we too may feel that God isn’t always there for us. And we too may want to shake a fist at God. As a preacher, I know that seeking to be faithful to God’s word revealed in Scripture hasn’t always made me popular with my congregations, when I have had to ‘afflict the comfortable’ rather than ‘comfort the afflicted’. And that means that even I have known what it is like to feel as if I am being ‘persecuted’, and—yes—to feel abandoned by God.

And when we feel as if it’s all too hard, as if being a Christian is bringing nothing but opposition and as if even God is silent, we can draw on the example of Jeremiah and give voice to our anguishes in prayer to God. In fact, we must protest and complain to God, shake our fist at God.

For, in truth, when we do that we are expressing our persisting faith in God. And it’s vital that we do persist in our faith, through thick and thin. And this God wants us to be honest with him about how we’re feeling, particularly when things are really hard, and he’s big enough to take and hear and respond to our protestation and complaining. The loss of lament—that’s what scholars call complaint to God in the Bible—is costly, for us and—I believe—for God, too. ³ Believe it or not, we are permitted by our God to tell our God off for how he’s treating us. In fact, he wants us to do so. He does not want us only to be those who praise him. He prefers it when we are open and honest with him about how we’re feeling about him.

Again, like Jeremiah, it’s important that, when we give voice to our complaints to God, we ask him to deal with those who are speaking about or acting against us, rather than taking things into our own hands, just as Jeremiah asks the Lord to ‘take vengeance for me on my persecutors’. The Christian way is the way of non-retaliation, but we are permitted, encouraged even, to ask God to give us just redress, and to ask him persistently. This lament of Jeremiah is just one of many in the Book that bears his name!

Then we need to expect God to respond. Certainly, Jeremiah found that God replied to his complaint. We have the Lord’s reply in the second half of our reading. But the Lord’s reply was probably not what Jeremiah wanted to hear! The reply was not a warm, comforting, reassuring message for him. To be sure, Jeremiah is promised that God will deliver him out of the hand of the wicked and redeem him from the grasp of the violent, but this will only be after Jeremiah has gone back to his ministry of proclaiming God’s word to the people and being battled against by them—again! Cold comfort!

But he is promised, as he was when he was first called (1.8 and 1.19), ⁴ that the Lord is and will still be with him to save him and deliver him, and so his enemies will not overcome him. The Lord promises to strengthen him—to make him like a fortified wall of bronze—and so able to withstand the assaults of his opponents.

Similarly, I believe that God will indeed hear our complaints, our fist-shaking at him, and will respond in some way. But we mustn’t pre-judge what his response will be, as it might not be what we expect or want! It may be an instruction to get back to the hard work, rather than being relieved of that burden—but it will be with a renewed reassurance of the presence of the living God with us which will keep us secure in Christ for eternity, whatever may happen to us in this life and on this earth. And without us having made the protest in the first place, we might not have been given that reassurance.

So, like Jeremiah and like countless others after him, ⁵ we are permitted, in fact encouraged, not to lose lament from our relationship with God, but to make place for complaint, for protest, for fist shaking at him, as long as we cling on to believing in him and remain open to heeding his response to our complaint. For then our relationship with the Almighty, and our ability to serve him, will be fuller, richer, truer than it ever was before. And that is surely supremely precious. ⁶