Good morning! Does it ever strike you that, good or bad, we live in a pretty amazing time? I was just thinking that in my lifetime, 47 years…we have seen travel into outer space advance, computers revolutionize every industry, wars break out all over the globe, terrible genocides unfold, the Berlin Wall toppled, the immense power of the Soviet Union broken apart, new nations formed, the system of apartheid in South Africa finally cracked. What an amazing time!

I tend to think that there has never been another time like this. But really, this prophet we have been reading for four weeks now, Jeremiah, was in the same boat. Walter Brueggemann once said “Jeremiah lived at a time of incredible headlines.”

Living near the beginning of the 6 th century BC, Jeremiah witnessed a brief time of greatness in Israel as the nation returned (at least for a few years) to a faithful obedience to its God under King Josiah. He was there when Josiah was killed around 609 BC, and the nation quickly returned to idol worship and self-reliance. He was present at the downfall of Israel when Jerusalem fell finally to Babylon in 587 BC. He was alive when many of Israel’s leaders and people disappeared into exile.

Through all these headline events, the voice of this stubborn prophet continued to speak to God’s people, pleading with them to accept that God was using other nations to bring Israel back into the covenant relationship that they had once enjoyed…that this relationship was more important than the status of the nation.

This morning as we read, first from chapter 11 and then from chapter 17, listen for the ways in which Jeremiah uses one image repeatedly to connect with the people.

I was up on Whidbey Island on Monday, my day off, and it was one of those gorgeous October days we were having, and I put the leash on Lucy and took off for a nice long run. Naturally, while I ran I was thinking of Jeremiah…just kidding! I wasn’t thinking of much of anything, actually. Just enjoying.

But at a couple different points along the way I noticed some trees. Ever since my wife Anne started doing “tree projects” with her art students, I’ve paid more attention to trees. One was on my way out the road. There is a large open area just off the road, and at this time of year it is full of tall brown wildgrasses and low bushes. But a few hundred yards into the open area there was a single tree. It stood out because it was the only large tree for acres around. But it also stood out because it was dead. Tall, gnarled, dark, not a single branch or leaf sticking up against the sky. Dead.

Then as I ran up to the top of a little hill, there was a long row of maple trees that someone had planted near the road. They were easy to notice because at least some of them had started to turn color and were stunningly beautiful. Even though they were starting to shed leaves, they were just so vibrant and had so much life, it was exhilarating.

Jeremiah points us to both death…and life in today’s passages. So as we consider them, let’s ask 3 questions:

1. What’s the problem? (we’ll spend most of our time here)
2. What’s the picture? (that Jeremiah gives us to consider our own lives?)
3. What’s the posture? (we should have before God?)

Jeremiah says the Lord God once called Israel “a green olive tree, fair with goodly fruit.” Now, in the Middle East, that is no small thing. The olive tree and its fruit was (is) a mainstay in agriculture and diet for thousands of years. Olives were served, or olive oil used in every single meal. Olives or olive oil or olive tree wood was used for food, fuel for lamps, medicine, anointing, presenting of sacrifices, furniture. Over time it became a symbol for fertility, beauty, blessing, bounty, peace. In fact, even today our vocabulary still identifies the olive branch as a symbol of bounty and peace (“holding out the olive branch”).

So when God said “ Israel is like a green olive tree, loaded with good fruit,” it was a fine thing, a wonderful thing. It was symbolic of the times when Israel lived in good covenant relationship with God, receiving His love and blessings and returning gratefully their trust and worship. Jeremiah had seen those good times. But not now.

What exactly was so wrong? What’s the problem? Was Jeremiah just a doomsdayer, the glass is always half empty kind of guy…or was the tree really rotten?

“The Lord of hosts who planted you, has pronounced evil against you.” Why? “Because you have made offerings to Baal.”

Baal was a god, or perhaps even a family of gods common in many parts of the Middle East in those days. Baal was symbolic of a religion that came from humankind. A man-made god dedicated to rituals for the fertility of the earth and also represented in the sexual longing and power of human beings.

The worship of Baal through man-made objects (idols) happened in sanctuaries dotting the landscape of Israel, especially in the “high places,” which were deemed to be somehow closer to God. Prostitutes were a consistent presence in all of the sanctuaries and sexual rites were a regular part worshipping Baal.

So the problem is that Israel has gone after other gods of their own making. From the beginning the one true God had forbid it.

You shall have no other gods before me…

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

You shall not bow down to them or worship them.

The pattern of Israel’s covenant history with God was one in which idolatry always crept back in. Always. Hoping in gods made from human ingenuity that one could see and touch always seemed more attractive than trusting in the One God who could not be seen. It was always easier to worship a stone or a statue as an object that filled the sanctuary and drew one’s attention…than it was to come onto holy, silent ground before the God who was unseen. Even the temple of Jerusalem was a series of empty spaces. Places for people to meet with God, to worship, to pray…not to see or touch.

Most of the time when we read scripture, and see the many references to idolatry, it sounds like ancient and primitive history to us. It has nothing to do with me. But I think it has everything to do with us. It just looks a little different. If idolatry is the worship of a thing, the placing of something in the place of primary importance in our life…then what are our idols?

No, they’re not stone statues. Yet we have them.

One we hear often today is “happiness.” Our feeling becomes the driving force of our life. If we’re not happy, we frantically change everything in our life…spouse, job, friends, gender, whatever it is. Life becomes a consuming quest for happiness. It’s an idol. And oh, that we might know more of the difference between a feeling of happiness and joy…a deep-rooted knowledge of God that can transcend circumstances.

Money or material possessions are almost too easy to correlate with idolatry in this country. The drive to earn more, save more, spend more, have more, make sure our kids have it better materially than we did is something we put at the top of the list. We’ll sacrifice our integrity, or huge chunks of time to pray over the idol of things. As a nation, we would go to war, we have gone to war and we perhaps are in a war now that has a lot to do with maintaining a certain standard of living.

The third idol I thought about was this: the status quo, the way we are used to living. This afternoon some of us will meet to discuss a phenomenal book by Timothy Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name. The title comes from an old negro spiritual about the book of life that says “Ain’t you glad, ain’t you glad that the blood (of Jesus) done sign my name.” It’s a true and chilling story of racism and murder in North Carolina. The author, Tim Tyson (who is white), was a 10 year old boy at the time, the son of a social activist Methodist minister.

As I re-read it this week, I was so struck by people’s tenaciousness to stick to what they had always known. Tyson interviewed a number of white people who lived in North Carolina in the 1960’s and 1970’s who just didn’t think there was a racial problem. Some of them still don’t! All the African Americans they knew were working in wealthy white homes and living their own separate lives, and that seemed to be a very good arrangement, so what was the problem?

Tyson’s dad, the Methodist minister, was nearly run out of his church in the 1960’s for inviting an African American, the president of a college in North Carolina, to preach in their church on “Race Relations Sunday.” In fact he would have been run out of town if it wasn’t for Miss Amy.

I want to read a little of that to you. This passage takes place on Saturday night, before the black guest preacher is due to preach. A special meeting of the church board (naturally all white males) has been called to force Tyson’s dad to revoke the invitation, and Miss Amy showed up:

“Miss Amy” Womble was sixty, an “old-maid schoolteacher,” her neighbors would have said in those days. She walked with a limp. Miss Womble had been a first-grade teacher to most of the people in that room. The community honored her, but nobody had any idea what she thought about the burning social issues of the day…

Miss Amy slowly hobbled to the front of the room and told the silent group of her former students a story.

There was a case up near Chapel Hill recently, where a teenage boy went around a curve too fast and was killed in a car crash. So they thought. He was down there by the side of the road and they were just waiting for the ambulance to come and take him to the funeral home. There wasn’t any signs of life.

But then an airman from Pope Air Force Base stopped. He was home on furlough, and he saw the boy lying down there and he scrambled down the embankment and opened that boy’s mouth. And he saw the boy’s tongue stuck back in his throat, and he ran his finger back there and pulled out that tongue, and then gave that boy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

By the time that ambulance got there, that boy was walking around alive as you or me. And the next week they had a big dinner up at the fire station…for that airman, celebrating how he had saved that boy’s life.

What I haven’t told you is that the boy who had the wreck was white, and that airman that saved him was a black man. But that’s the truth, and I want all of you fathers to tell me something.

She looked searchingly around the room.

Now, which one of you fathers would have said to that airman, “Now, don’t you run your black fingers down my boy’s white throat?” Which of y’all would have told that airman, “Don’t you dare put your black lips on my boy’s mouth’?”

My father (writes Tyson), who retold the story in later years, including the day he preached Miss Amy Womble’s funeral, said “I have never heard the voice of the Lord with such thunder, such wisdom, such love.”

The board voted 25-14 to go ahead and invite the preacher. So there’s a good ending to that piece of the story. But can’t you just hear and feel it? Tyson’s dad felt it all the time. “Don’t rock the boat. Don’t move too fast. Things are fine the way they are.”

That status quo was of primary importance. It was something humankind had created. Racial bigotry and discrimination was a manmade thing people would die for. It was an idol. It remains an idol.

The thing about idolatry is that when we begin to create gods…we inevitably make them in our own image. After all, the thing we know and love the most is usually ourselves. So our God ends up looking an awful lot like we do.

It is why we need so much this God of the Bible, the one who is so Other than we are, who comes from outside of us, who acts in history in surprising ways and who will not be controlled.

It’s why we need to turn to scripture to find out what God is like, and then figure out who we are and what we are to be doing…rather than studying ourselves and finding what/who we think we are…and then determining what God must be like from there.

So the problem is idolatry. And Jeremiah says that no amount of religious marching around, no rituals or temple sacrifices will erase what is going on in your hearts. “But with the roar of a great tempest he will set fire to the olive tree…and its branches will be consumed.” That’s the problem.

This is the picture that Jeremiah presents us with in chapter 17, again using the images of bushes or trees. The first image is for those who

“trust in mere mortals,

and make mere flesh their strength,

whose hearts turn away from the Lord.”

If this sounds very close to “idolatry,” then I think we’re listening correctly.

The first picture is of a shrub in the desert. Shrubs are lowlying bushes, and in this case ones which don’t get much water. Parched, desert, uninhabited, salt land. I couldn’t help but think about that part of Washington state as you head east on I-90 and head down the big hill towards Vantage and the Columbia River. As far as your eye can see, it’s just low bushes and sagebrush. The middle of a desert. It looks dead.

The interesting thing is that those plants are actually not dead. They’re just not particularly alive! Or rather, they’re alive but they aren’t what you could call “growing.”

They’re just sort of there, hoarding the little bit of water they ever get. I think about the times in my life when I have been farthest away from Christ…physically alive, but not really alive. Never saying “I don’t believe in God,” but also not near the things that encourage me to be near to God…scripture, prayer, people. Never saying “I reject God’s presence in my life,” but just sort of getting along. A shrub in the barren desert.

But what a great contrast the other picture is. “Those who trust in the Lord are like a tree planted by water, right by a stream of water.

Healthy trees need water, and lots of it. Some will process as much as 200 gallons of water per day! That’s a lot of water. But when a tree gets that, soaking it up from the fertile ground around a stream… there’s no fear when it gets hot. No anxiety over drought. The leaves become healthy green, and it puts out good fruit. All because it’s close to water.

What does that look like in a human life? Healthy, not living in fear and anxiety, bearing good fruit?

We have a preconception, I think, that if we really trust in the Lord and bear that good fruit, it will look pretty spectacular. Front page news, or publishing a book or being recognized and acknowledged by a lot of people.

I don’t think that is necessarily true. I have a good friend who once said he deeply wanted four things:

1. To be a good friend to his children.
2. To be a good friend to his wife.
3. To be a good friend to a small number of people.
4. To be used for the kingdom in some way.

Doesn’t sound quite so spectacular or like front page news. But those are hugely important things, and to live them out requires being close to a good water source.

Now, there’s no secret for a Christian where that stream is. Suzzanne read Jesus’ words earlier. “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.” Christ the Stream, Christ the River. The one who washes us clean, the one who quenches our thirst.

Are we just trying to be a happy person, trying to get along, stuck chasing after an idol we maybe didn’t name as such, but it is that? It takes more. Drink deeply of Christ. Return to God. Jesus is the evidence that God never quits on his people.

When I ran back down the hill that afternoon on Whidbey, I took one last look at that solitary dead tree out in the open ground. That’s when I saw it. Near the ground, low enough that the tall grass had hidden it from me, was one more limb coming out of the main trunk. It wasn’t dark and gnarled and dead like all the rest of the tree, but alive with new growth and leaves.

Jeremiah doesn’t teach a bunch on the theory of what our posture towards God should be…he just models it. I imagine him on the ground, on his knees as his voice shouts out in verse 14…and it would actually read better if I put back in a couple pronouns which it assumes:

You Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed;

You Save me, and I shall be saved;

For You are my praise.”

Our best posture, according to Jeremiah is to come to God in praise and worship. No matter what dark place we might find ourselves in, the very idea that God has not given up, will not give up, that from the very charred ashes and dead stumps of our lives comes new life…in Christ…calls us to respond in worship. Which is all He wanted in the first place.

Let us pray.