Image: Jeremiah preaching in the Temple, created by Open AI.
A nation that believed that it had been specially chosen by God was outraged. A preacher had gotten up and said that God’s judgment, not blessing, was on them. This preacher pointed out that the way they had treated the most vulnerable among them was not only shameful, it was also directly counter to Scripture. That their trust in the ruling powers was misplaced; that institutions lie. This preacher urged his hearers: Don’t believe the lies. Don’t believe the lies that provide convenient cover for the powerful to do whatever they want to do. Don’t believe the lies that prop up an institution bound to fall someday. Don’t believe the lies that take our trust away from God.
I’m not just talking about the prophet Jeremiah and his Temple sermon we just heard. I’m also talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. and his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered at Riverside Baptist Church in New York in 1967, when he directly linked the civil rights struggle to the anti-war movement. Or the Danish pastor Kaj Munk, murdered by the Nazis after defying a preaching ban. Or the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas, who spoke up against the brutal practices of Spanish colonialists in the New World. And some of you might not like this, but I’m also talking about the notorious sermon preached by Pastor Jeremiah Wright in 2003 in the early days of the Iraq War, best known by the phrase “G- d- America.” And while that epithet got the headlines, the whole sermon exposes the false trust and hope we are prone to place in our leaders. I urge you to read the whole thing. (I’ll link to the transcript when I post this sermon on our website.) Here’s a little snapshot that is equally challenging but didn’t get the headlines:
That we say God understands collateral damage, we say that God knows how to forgive friendly fire, we say that God will bless the Shock and Awe as we take over unilaterally another country – calling it a coalition because we’ve got three guys from Australia. Going against the United Nations, going against the majority of Christians, Muslims and Jews throughout the world, making a pre-emptive strike in the name of God….Jesus said “how can you see the speck in your brother’s eye and can’t see the log in your own eye?” Well, I submit to you we can’t see it first of all ‘cause we don’t see nobody who don’t look like us, dress like us, talk like us, worship like us as brother – and Jesus calls them brother. We demonize them and that makes it all right to kill them because our God is against demons. Then we can’t see the speck most of all because we equate our Government with our God.[1]
Fighting words for sure. That sermon, as well as King’s, as well as Munk’s, as well as Casa’s, is steeped in the language of Israel’s prophets.
And that is what Jeremiah is preaching in the Temple today. Then as now, it’s a First Commandment issue. Jeremiah is one in a very long line of preachers, ancient and contemporary, sent by God to bring a stubborn, hardheaded people to repentance. It’s all over the Old Testament. From the Sinai desert on, the people have trouble trusting God. They grumble against God constantly, even against the manna God provided. After they settle in the land, they are constantly distracted by the gods of the land, falling into ever-worsening cycle of idolatry, foreign oppression, deliverance, and rest. Rinse and repeat. The people have trouble trusting God will be their king, so they demand a king to lead them. And nearly all the kings they have are awful. Even the best kings—David and Solomon—are deeply flawed. Their failures resonate through the monarchy’s history, up until its destruction by the Babylonians some four centuries later.
And so, when Jeremiah gets up that day in the Temple, he is simply exposing an age-old problem. The people have been captured by a destructive theology, sometimes known as “Royal Zion” theology. That is, because God’s chosen king and chosen Temple were in the city, nothing catastrophic could ever happen to it. They could do as they chose without consequence. The wealthy and powerful could continue to exploit the widow, orphan, and migrant, as Jeremiah points out. They could run roughshod over the commandments and then come into the Temple and sacrifice and believe they were right with God. Their theology could be summed up in this bit of doggerel I heard from Pastor Rol:
Freed from the law!
O happy condition!
I can sin as I please
and still have remission!
But Jeremiah has no patience for that at all. He urges them to reject these lies. He points out that once there was another shrine where God placed the Divine Name. It was the shrine operated by Jeremiah’s ancestors, Eli and his no-good sons, at Shiloh. But that shrine is a scattered ruin. The point is clear and devastating. Just because God chose them to be God’s special people doesn’t mean that they aren’t immune from consequences. They aren’t immune from judgment and they definitely aren’t immune from history.
And neither are we. We, like the residents of Jerusalem, have often confused the greatness of our nation with God’s favor and blessing. Or worse, we confuse a particular political philosophy or leader with that favor. And I want to be clear here—this confusion is not limited to one philosophy, ideology, or leader. It is not limited to one nation or one people. Confusing something that is not God with God is common to all peoples, all civilizations, all eras. There’s a reason that the First Commandment is the First Commandment. When the Israelites came out of Egypt, they came out of a place where Pharaoh was god. Sure, there was a pantheon of gods—Horus, Osiris, and the like—but Pharaoh was the only god in Egypt that mattered. And Pharaoh was a cruel god, just as all leaders with divine pretensions are. Time and time again, God tries to impress on the people—and on us—what kind of God he is. God is the God of love, mercy, and peace. This God is determined to bring shalom to all people. This God loves creation so much, and hates the idolatrous traps we fall into so much, that God becomes incarnate in human flesh. God in Jesus Christ walks among flawed human beings, beginning a movement that has God’s shalom at its center. When he runs afoul of the authorities, he doesn’t raise an army. He doesn’t pick up a sword. He knows that won’t solve our addiction to violence and control. In fact, the only violent action Jesus does is in today’s Gospel reading, when he drives the money changers, animal sellers, and animals out with a whip. But that doesn’t mean that Jesus is weak. Far from it. Jesus absorbs the violence and sin of the world in his own body. And in doing so, he shows us who God really is. God is the end of human violence. God is the end of our searching for a god after our own image. In the sight of God, no lie, no propaganda, no ideology, no leader, no nation can stand as a rival.
And thank God. Because we are not at the mercy of the pharaohs who play god every day. We are not at the mercy of data algorithms or corrupt politicians. We are always and only at God’s mercy. God help us remember that our life, our allegiance, our hope is in God first and foremost, not in anything else. And God help us remember that even though we are saved by grace through faith, that grace changes us. Not into someone who wants to believe and live the same old lies, but someone who knows where the truth finally lies—in Jesus Christ crucified and risen for the life of the world. Amen.
© 2025, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit given.
[1] https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/2008-rev-jeremiah-wright-confusing-god-and-government/.
