June 28 2026 sermon: the Pub test/the reality check
Jeremiah 28:5-9
5 Then the prophet Jeremiah spoke to the prophet Hananiah in the presence of the priests and all the people who were standing in the house of the Lord, 6 and the prophet Jeremiah said, “Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord fulfill the words that you have prophesied and bring back to this place from Babylon the vessels of the house of the Lord and all the exiles. 7 But listen now to this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people. 8 The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. 9 As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.”
Psalm 13
1 How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I bear pain[a] in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
3 Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
4 and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;
my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.
5 But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the Lord
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
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A prophecy of peace is easy to swallow, but needs a higher standard
Jesus’ peace is real, messy, personal, and powerful
Turns out Jesus is closer to Jeremiah than Hananiah
—
Morning all!
I come from a non-religious family, some might even say an anti-religious family. Belief in the supernatural was not a thing I was primed for as a kid. So when as a young adult I became a Christian, I didn’t really know how things like prayer worked. I just assumed they didn't.
At university there was a shortcut to the local shopping centre that went through a stand of gum trees, and in the late spring early summer magpies made their nests there and swooped unwary uni students making their way over for a cheap lunch. So students would leave large sticks at either end of the path: you pick one up, wave it over your head as you walk, and then deposit it at the other side for the next student coming back. Clever anti-swoop solution. But I thought confidently, “Oh, I don’t need a stick anymore. I’m a Christian now. God loves me: I can just pray, and the magpies won’t swoop me.”
Imagine the blow to my faith when I got swooped along with every other student, as if I were no different at all! Did the magpies not get God’s memo?
Now no-one ever promised me that Christian faith meant never fearing magpies. But it was a belief I could come to from how my first church talked about God and life. And as a church in a comfortable middle class area, it was easy for working class me to look around and think all these Christians had a charmed life compared to mine. They weren't suffering - or not the same things I was anyway.
But trusting God against magpies wasn’t just a belief I came to because of how God and Jesus were explained to me; it was also something I think I desperately wanted to be true. I wanted to believe that my newfound faith was real, powerful and transformative; that I didn’t need to worry anymore because now that God had my back things were going to be different and better.
In our passage today, God's people were at war and they have lost. They've lost territory: they're down to one shell of a city. They've lost leadership: their king has been replaced by someone appointed by a foreign power. They've lost people: their best and brightest captured and carried away to be servants of their enemies. God's temple has even been robbed of its treasures. For God's people, things are looking pretty bleak.
But now a new prophet has come on the scene, Hananiah, and he's making some big promises. He says God will reverse their fortunes: the war ended, the captured people returned, and God's temple treasures restored. Most amazingly, he says God will do it all in just 2 years.
We're not given the details on the thinking behind Hananiah's claims; he's not given the space in Jeremiah's book to explain his theology. Different theologians see different links in his message. Some see a harkening back to Torah, God's laws, and God's promises that these will always be God's people, and God will always be with them as their God. Others see a link to Isaiah's prophecy rescuing Jerusalem from an invading army, as happened in the time of Hezekiah when the Assyrians invaded, about 120 years before. So like us thinking about the first World War.
Either way, those links highlight something about Hananiah's prophecy: it's not coming out of nowhere. We are possibly not steeped enough in Torah or Isaiah's prophecies to make those connections instantly ourselves - I'm certainly not, I read them in commentaries on Jeremiah. For us Hananiah's name itself gives something away. ‘Hananiah’ literally means “God is gracious”. I think it's fair to say that Hananiah's message boils down to something like, “Our God is gracious, therefore surely this war can't last more than two more years before we win.”
And this message was not regarded sceptically by many who heard it. It was highly attractive to God's people at the time. It seemed to fit with their understanding of who God is and what God wants, and how God relates to them. And also, things were really bad, and they were desperate for good news.
It's in this context that Jeremiah, God's prophet at the scene, says to Hananiah, “Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord fulfill the words that you have prophesied.” Because he agrees: wouldn’t it be great if it were true?
After all, who doesn't want less suffering? Suffering sucks! Today's psalm expresses this so powerfully. Psalm 13 is my favourite psalm because of how simply it expresses the reality of what it's like to suffer in front of a loving God. It asks God, “How much longer must I bear this pain and sorrow? How much longer will bad people hold power over me? Hello, God? Have you forgotten about me? Are you hiding from me? Can I get an answer please?”
When we are suffering, when things are desperate, we want a god who is powerful and loving and active. Two out of three don't cut it.
If you've never been there, then like Jeremiah I say, “Amen! May the Lord do that for all of us.” But I know I've been there. I lived there for quite a time. I had my mail delivered there. And I think a lot of people live there, in that place where there is suffering and pain and sorrow, where there's bad people doing bad things seemingly unchecked, and meanwhile God is… where? Doing what?
That's the attraction of Hananiah's message: it aligns with a positive understanding of God and promises what we really, really desperately want. There are some big damn problems in the world today. You can choose your own adventure: think for yourself, what's something that would make the world a better place if God fixed it within two years?
And Jeremiah is not disputing Hananiah's assumptions: God is gracious, God is loving, God does love us, God does love everyone! But Jeremiah does question Hananiah's conclusion. Not because it's impossible - saving Jerusalem from invaders was something God did only 120 years before. He questions Hananiah's prophecy because it doesn't take into account the big and complex picture of God that's come before.
Jeremiah says, “The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.”
I don't think this is the sarcastic sick burn that we could read it as, where Jeremiah is saying he's right because he's prophesying disaster and Hananiah's wrong because he's all peace and love. Even Jeremiah’s own prophecy isn’t all disaster - it is a lot disaster, you can look into that yourself for more detail - but he still says things will get better, just in 70 years or so instead of only 2. And in the meantime, he says God will still be with the people even if they aren’t in their promised land, even if they don’t have a massive temple, and even if they aren’t in control or winning everything. Jeremiah's prophecy has depth, it acknowledges the reality of life's struggles and sufferings alongside the history of God's relationship with people.
And it acknowledges something else too: that while God is always powerful, loving and active, how that active love and power are expressed in the world changes as the world also changes. Sometimes the world changes and God responds to that change; and other times God's love and power actively change the world in a way that elicits a response from the world.
In Jeremiah's time, God's people had not been the agents for justice, mercy, sacrificial love and faithful reliance that God had tasked them to be. So God responded in a way that would change their culture, change their minds and change their hearts to recentre God's priorities as their own. And that involved losing wars. The change God wanted to see couldn't be done in 2 years. It couldn't even be done in 2 generations. It actually took God hundreds of years of offering grace after grace, sending prophet after prophet telling, asking, begging God’s people to change, before this disaster came that would teach God’s people what it meant to be God’s people without freedom, without land, without a temple, all those things that assured them God was on their side. Now all they had was God.
And at the same time, Jeremiah says God actually has business with their enemies too: that their enemy's cruelty and oppression was wrong, that God has been really patient with them too, but that patience with them will also have its limits.
Half a millennium after Jeremiah, God's active love and power would actively change the world in the form of Jesus, the Christ: the ultimate prophet prophesying the ultimate message of peace, a prophecy of peace so huge that it took claims of death and resurrection coming true for it to be known that the Lord had truly come as that prophet.
And in one sense, Jesus' prophecies of peace are even more unbelievable than Hananiah's: Jesus promises a relationship of peace being possible between God and all people everywhere forever... and it will happen in just three years from when he starts preaching it!
But the more we dig into Jesus and his powerful promises of peace, the less they look like a simple Hananiah prophecy that ensures us safety from swooping magpies because God is gracious. Old Testament scholars Gerald Keown, Pamela Scalise and Thomas Smothers write that Hananiah’s prophecy “gives voice to the enduring temptation to claim the Lord’s promises, to trust in God’s choice and protection, to hope in the face of terrifying upheaval that everything will be put back the way it used to be … It is the temptation to use God's own promises to resist the change that a true encounter with God requires of every person.”
An encounter with Jesus is a true encounter with God. When Jesus promises peace, he says he does not give peace as the world gives. The world gives promises of peace that may actually happen, sure, but they also don’t last. When I was writing this sermon over a month ago, one reason I didn’t want to use any current wars as illustrations was because I wasn’t sure if the war would end before I got up here to preach. But then I realised even if a war did end, this is exactly the sort of promise of peace that we see in the world: a promise to stop one conflict even while many others rage on, to stop conflicts only to start them again because things are just put back the way they used to be.
Jesus promises to ease our burdens, to free us from fear of an uncontrolled future into faith in an in-control God, to assure us of the love and presence of God even in situations of sickness, conflict and pain. And Jesus gives us an opportunity to respond to that love and peace with hope and joy and change: a change that embraces God and his purposes, a change in our own lives and in our relationships and in our communities.
In that way, Jesus and his promises are far more like Jeremiah. Because part of that promise is that when we accept that opportunity to change ourselves and to change our relationships and to change our communities, there will be opposition.
In Matthew 10:34 Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword”, and he describes how conflict between family members arises as a result of his coming, because Jesus’ peace will change some members of a family and not others, and that can cause division.
In Mark 13, Jesus prophesies that wars, disasters, and famines won’t stop because he’s come; in fact, Jesus says because of him people will be arrested, beaten, and betrayed for following him, because Jesus had changed them and they are working to bring that change to others, to their communities, who don't want the change that comes with a real encounter with God.
As a church, I definitely think we prophesy peace. We share a message from one who some call the Prince of Peace. We value peace and we want to see it spread. But I think we also try to make sure that the peace we prophesy is not the attractive, shallow peace of a God who we say is gracious but who doesn’t ask anything of anyone, even those who are unloving, unjust and ungrateful.
We can’t be promising that God will protect us from swooping magpies, because the moment it doesn’t happen people will see that our message is bad. The peace we are promised and that we promise doesn’t end wars, it doesn’t end family division, it doesn’t end suffering - not yet. The peace we are living, the peace we need to be talking, needs to be the real, troubling, comforting, doubting, difficult peace that is what we really experience with God; a peace that offers us an opportunity to change ourselves, and to change the world in ways that do mean less suffering, less oppression, less injustice.
Real peace lets me get up here and preach from Psalm 13: a lamenting, a questioning, a doubting, a complaining psalm. You know I was a Christian for 13 years before I first heard a complaint psalm preached on in a church… and that was because I preached it! These expressions of complaint and doubt and questioning are part of the peace we are promised. They’re part of our experience in life with God, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that they are part of God’s message of peace too: a peace that's allowed to ask where the peace is, when the peace is coming.
Psalm 13 doesn’t end in silence after asking about the whereabouts of God. It doesn’t end with a promise that because I cry out God comes and fixes everything in two minutes or two days or two years either. It ends with trusting that God is loving, that God deals bountifully with us, and that the God we encounter is with us. That's a peace we can share.
“As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when
the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.”
