Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
Written for August 22, 2010, but not given

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

So this morning we have the prophet’s call story from Jeremiah. Most of the prophets have a call story, and Jeremiah’s is pretty typical. Its typical elements include a call from the LORD, a protestation from the prophet that he can’t do what the LORD is calling him to do, the LORD’s refusal to accept the protestation, and the LORD’s commitment to be with the prophet as he carries out his divine commission. The prophet Isaiah, for example, has a very similar call story in Isaiah 6. Generally speaking I really like these prophets’ call stories. The University Congregational UCC choir sang a setting of Isaiah’s call story at my ordination. These stories express in poetic form call experiences not unlike my own, and not unlike those of many of my pastoral colleagues.

But there’s always been part of Jeremiah’s call story that I really haven’t liked. It’s the part where the LORD tells Jeremiah, in general terms at least, what it is that he is commissioning Jeremiah to do. Jeremiah 1:10 reads: “See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” What I haven’t liked is the pluck up and pull down, destroy and overthrow part of the story. You see, I don’t much like thinking of God as a destroyer. I think of God as a builder, a builder of relationships, of community, of the Kingdom of God. But here God is telling Jeremiah that part of his divine commission is to pluck up, pull down, destroy, and overthrow. God is telling Jeremiah that his divine commission includes destroying as well as building. And that has never rung true to me. So I haven’t liked it and have pretty much ignored it.

Until today. As I struggled with the lectionary texts for today, trying to come up with something—anything—to preach on out of them, I decided that I had better wrestle with this part of the Jeremiah text to see if there was anything of value in it or whether I would just go on disliking and ignoring it. I thought: The people of the church probably don’t like this part of the text either. After all, Christianity by and large does not think of God as a destroyer. At least, our kind of Christianity here in this church doesn’t. Christianity, after all, doesn’t have a Kali figure. Kali is, or at least originally was, the Hindu goddess of destruction, or the mythic Hindu expression of the destroyer side of the nature of God. Hinduism has no problem seeing destruction as part of God’s nature. Christianity, for the most part does. True, some Christians believe that Jesus Christ will return and destroy the world as we know it; but I don’t believe that, and I doubt that many of you do either. We generally don’t much like thinking of God as a destroyer.

Yet the Judeo-Christian scriptures actually do, on occasion, present God as a destroyer. The most extreme example is the story of Noah, the ark, and the flood. That story begins:

The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’ Genesis 6:5-8

Which is exactly what he did, according to this ancient legend. I always wonder when I see the sweet, idealized pictures of Noah and the ark with all the animals that churches so like to put up in Sunday School classrooms where all the floating corpses are. The story of Noah and the flood is a truly terrible story of God as destroyer. So I suppose maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised that God’s commission to Jeremiah also includes a directive to destroy. Which still leaves us with the question of whether there is anything in these myths of God as destroyer that is of any value to us. Somewhat to my surprise I concluded this past week that there is.

We start with a basic fact of human existence. Humans continually construct systems that impede the will of God, systems that impede the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. We know that we don’t live in the fully realized Kingdom of God, and the reason we don’t is that humans, in their God-given freedom, do things that keep that Kingdom from being realized. Those things include individual sin, but they include a lot more than mere individual sin. Let me give you some examples that occur to me. I’m sure you can think of others.

In the secular realm a prime example of human systems that impede the coming of the Kingdom of God is the infamous military-industrial complex. The term comes from President Dwight Eisenhower, the great American military man, the victor of World War II in western Europe, and then the two term Republican President. In a great speech he gave just three days before leaving office in 1961 he said:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

We have yet to heed his words of wisdom. Although we no longer face a threat from an enemy truly capable of destroying us, we spend more on the military than most of the other nations of the world combined. According to one source I saw, in 2009 46.5% of all world military spending was by the United States. The next largest percentage was by China, at 6.6% of all world military spending. www.globalissues.org And because we spend so much on the military, and because the continuation of a military-dominated economy depends on it, we use that military, often in ways for which there is no reasonable justification. The military industrial complex is a major human system impeding the coming of the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom of peace not through military might but through justice and nonviolence.

In the Christian church there are also human-made systems that impede the coming of the Kingdom of God. Some widely held Christian theological beliefs have that effect. On that I find particularly pernicious is the belief that Jesus’ purpose in coming to earth was only to die as a sacrificial atonement for our sins. That belief, which most people wrongly think constitutes the essence of Christianity, impedes the coming of the Kingdom of God by making only Jesus’ death relevant to us and thereby dismissing the importance of his life and of his teachings of nonviolence and justice for the outcast and the poor, by diverting our attention from this earth to a supposed heaven in the sky that we can reach after we die because of his sacrifice. There are indeed a great many human systems, both outside the church and inside it, that impede the coming of the Kingdom of God. Those I have mentioned are only a few of them.

And God calls us to destroy those systems. Or to use a somewhat more contemporary and perhaps less loaded word, God calls us to deconstruct those systems. To bring them under prophetic judgment, to name them as destructive, and to change them into systems that truly make for peace and justice. To beat our swords into plowshares and to stop spending ourselves into bankruptcy with military procurement and deployment that so far exceed any legitimate security concern we may have. To proclaim good theology to replace the bad theology that is so prevalent among us, to proclaim theology that fosters rather than impedes the coming of the Kingdom of God. Destroying, or if you prefer deconstructing, is indeed part of our commission from God just as it was part of Jeremiah’s commission from God so long ago.

As we deconstruct the systems that impede the coming of the Kingdom of God we always do so nonviolently, for we are Christians; and Jesus Christ taught us God’s way of nonviolence. And we must do so with genuine care and concern for people whose way of life or belief systems are being deconstructed—by, among other things, providing meaningful retraining and employment opportunities for those displaced from a declining military industrial complex. By pastoral concern for people who can’t let go of the old theology that they have believed in all their lives. We are Christians, and we are called to share God’s love with all people, even, or perhaps especially, those who resist or who are displaced by our efforts to change the human systems that impede the coming of the Kingdom of God.

We must always act nonviolently and with Christian care and compassion for all people, but we must act. Just as God wasn’t going to take no from Jeremiah, so God is not going to take no from us. That doesn’t mean that God is going to smite us if we don’t act. God doesn’t work that way; but God is not going to stop calling us to action either. The work of building the Kingdom of God is not only a work of construction. It is also a work of deconstruction. Just as a bomber factory might have to be razed to make room for a new school and a new hospital, so must entire systems be razed to make room for new systems of peace and justice. God called Jeremiah to that work almost 2,600 years ago. God calls us to that work now. May we, like Jeremiah, have the courage to answer God’s call. Amen.