Burning Ideas

Jeremiah 36:1-8, 21-23, 27-28

“Burning Ideas”

20 November 2016 St. Andrew’s Military Chapel Singapore

            No one would ever burn books today, right? We wouldn’t reject someone’s ideas without reflection and thought as those ideas might actually improve our lives? We wouldn’t throw someone in jail or ban that person from their place of worship because their words, actions, or appearance made us uncomfortable, would we? We wouldn’t’ dismiss someone because of their politics or theology? We wouldn’t ostracize someone because their faith calls them to do something that seems crazy to our civilized, Western standards? Surely this episode in Jeremiah’s life is an ancient relic from back in the day.

            If only.

            Anyone can go on the Internet and find this sort of behavior in less than 5 minutes. The recent political campaign in the US demonstrates that when we construct our own bubbles and echo chambers only listening to what we want to hear, our perception will be much different than reality. When we only seek information from like-minded sources, we skew our worldview and are worse off. It’s almost as if society is trying to keep us from hearing dissenting viewpoints.

            I’ve never personally seen a book burning, but have you been on Twitter or Facebook in the last year? I can’t stay on there too long because of all the vitriol aimed at and by our “friends.” It’s hard to imagine how we’d treat enemies. Want to see how to rapidly shut down the free exchange of ideas? Post a well-reasoned thought about anything. Within minutes you’ll have people from all over, even the ones you considered friends, telling you exactly why your opinion is wrong and doesn’t matter. People burned books because they offered a different vision of life and challenged our thinking. We’ve just modernized and burn peoples’ ideas from the comfort of our fiber connected computer screen.

            Jeremiah is one who knows what it feels like to have his ideas burned in public. Or should I say, he knows what it is like to watch someone try to burn God’s words.

            Back in his time, Jeremiah was an unlikely prophet. Mostly because he didn’t want to be a prophet and felt he didn’t have the words to become God’s spokesperson here on earth. At various times during his life he questions God’s wisdom in calling him to prophetic words. If you read Jeremiah you find times where it feels like Jeremiah has entered a confession booth telling God his fears and doubts.

            Like most successful prophets, the leadership of the temple and the country didn’t care too much for Jeremiah. He stood as a threat to their carefully crafted societal pecking order and possibly a threat to their wealth and power. So, they began to find ways to eliminate him as a threat. Eventually, they arrest him and banish him from the temple.

            But, when has prison and persecution halted God’s work in the world? Usually it just expands God’s work and connects God with many more people. Faith thrives under true oppression. Look for God’s hand in the midst of oppression and you will find God walking alongside the outcast, the lame, the beggar, the despised, and the least among us.

            Despite his banishment from God’s house, Jeremiah still holds significant influence in Israel. All of his words spoken for God are recorded on a scroll and read aloud in the temple on a fast day, a day of holy contemplation. One of King Jehoiakim’s court reports the scandalous words he had heard. The court summoned Baruch, the soul brave enough to read Jeremiah’s prophecy, to read them again in their presence. This led the members of the king’s court to take the scroll directly to the king. As they read the words on the scroll, the king would cut off what was just read and burn it in the fire. He wanted to keep God’s word from the world.

            The king probably thought that if I destroyed the medium, the message would fade. The problem is, God’s word never fades. In Jeremiah’s case, Jeremiah wrote everything on a second scroll. When people seek to ban or burn books in our age, the ideas that matter keep coming back and never fade. In fact God’s word depends not on the medium of transmission. It will find a way to shine in the darkness. In the darkest day, Christ was preparing for a glorious resurrection. Try as you might, you just cannot contain the Gospel.

            Ideological control, whether by the government or Internet trolls rarely succeeds. Even North Korea can’t fully control the ideas within its own borders, much less keep ideas of justice from finding their way into the country and marinating the minds of the oppressed.

            Ideas that make us uncomfortable tend to have an ability to teach us, to love us, to change us, to bind us together as people. Discomfort is the furnace in which we learn and discover God’s word. Scripture has many hard truths and passages that make the reader squirm in their chair and many times we want to put down the Bible and ask, “what were they thinking including that in Scripture?” If we truly believe that God is still speaking to us, we have to sit with, not dismiss, ideas and people that make us uncomfortable. We have to keep growing so that we can learn what God’s justice and mercy look like in our lives.

Sometimes the noise of those attempting to drown out God’s justice is deafening. Sometimes the darkness of hate seems to overpower the light of those struggling to let justice roll down like an ever-flowing stream. Sometimes the bonfire of ideas on a funeral pyre seems like it’s the last light we may glimpse. However, the arc of the universe truly bends towards God’s justice.

God knows this. Which is why, despite our stubbornness towards hearing and truly living into the Gospel, God continually renews the covenant with each and every person. Sin no longer hangs over our heads because God has forgiven us and remembers our sin no more. It’s why God’s light will always shine, sometimes brightly, sometimes only through a glass darkly. Despite where we think the world is headed, God’s love and covenant are still there and God will still be there for us tomorrow to move us and the world ever so slightly to true understanding of his definition of justice. You just can’t contain the freedom and justice of God.