Rehoboam: the mystery of failure

 

2 Chronicles 10:12-15

¹² So Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam the third day, as the king had said, “Come to me again the third day.”^{(E) 13} The king answered them harshly. King Rehoboam rejected the advice of the older men; ¹⁴ he spoke to them in accordance with the advice of the young men, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to it; my father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.” ¹⁵ So the king did not listen to the people because it was a turn of affairs brought about by God so that the Lord might fulfill his word that he had spoken by Ahijah the Shilonite to Jeroboam son of Nebat.^(F)

1 Corinthians 1:26-28

26 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are...

 

Kid's talk: Quiz between a team of kids and an adult. Every correct answer they move one step closer to the chocolate. By the end of the quiz, whoever is closer to the chocolate gets to keep it. Questions are easy for the kids and impossible for the adult.

Then reveal that while it might look like the kids succeeded and the adult failed, the real purpose of the game was to see who could get closest to me. And sometimes in our life we plan to do things, but we don’t succeed, our plan fails. But God’s plan is always to help us be closer to God. And a great thing about God is that no matter how much our own plans fail, God always wants us to be closer; and another great thing about God is that God can even use our failures to bring us closer together.

Kid questions

1)    True or false: Today at church we are looking at the life of King Rehoboam, who appears in Jesus’ family tree.

2)    Did you know that Rehoboam’s father was King Solomon?

3)    Rehoboam was king in around the 10^th century Before Christ. Did Rehoboam ever meet Jesus, or was he too old?

Adult questions

1)    What is one common explanation for why Rehoboam appears in Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew 1 but not in the genealogy in Luke 3? (M focuses on royalty; L is Mary’s genealogy; L focuses on biological genealogy)

2)    Name any of Solomon’s other children mentioned in Scripture. (Taphath & Basemath – both mentioned in 1 Kings 4 as wives of Solomon’s chief officials)

3)    In which archaeological site in Israel has archaeological evidence for King Rehoboam’s reign been discovered? (Tel Lachish, where archaeologists think they have discovered part of a wall which the Bible describes Rehoboam building)

 

Sermon

“Failure is not an option.” This quote is famously misattributed to NASA flight director Gene Kranz during the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 when an explosion on a spaceship threatened the lives of 3 US astronauts. The quote was actually written for his character to say in the 1995 movie. When it comes to failure, I personally prefer the quote popularised by Adam Savage from Mythbusters: “Failure is always an option.” That much more realistically reflects my life experience!

Failure is not something that's fun to think about. When I was preparing this talk, I was thinking of the failure stories I could tell from my own life, and as I considered each one I felt this deep pit in my stomach. I thought, "I don't want to talk about that one. Oh, I don't want to even think about that one. Ah, I don't want to admit that one." My life has been a series of failures, and while some hurt more than others, all failure can feel embarrassing and shameful.

As a church we're doing a series of sermons on the genealogy of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew leading up to Christmas. I've loved it so far, and I was so keen to get an invitation to give one of these talks. Today we're looking at Rehoboam - not as famous as David or Abraham, but not an unknown like Abiud. In fact, for people who have a bit of Bible knowledge, Rehoboam's name evokes one of the Bible's great failures.

One thing I have always appreciated about the Bible is that it generally paints its heroes as flawed people who - with God - accomplish great things despite their flaws. But more than that, I think the Bible’s message captures something of the mystery of failure itself. The mystery is that even when God’s people fail, God is still there for them. God is not just the God of the winners, and having God on your side doesn’t mean you always win. In fact, God sometimes plans for people to fail.

For those who don't know about Rehoboam, you've probably heard of his grand-dad David: the first of the line of Israel’s kings from the tribe of Judah, famously known as a great warrior, a paragon of faith, a man after God's own heart. Not perfect by any means - he has his share of failures even aside from his terrible actions involving Bathsheba and Uriah. But as history goes, he gets a pretty good rap.

You might have heard of Rehoboam’s father Solomon, who takes the crown after David. He's famous for being blessed by God with great wisdom, for building the temple and for leading Israel into an age of peace and prosperity. Again, he’s not perfect – we heard about that last week from Steve. But in many ways he gets remembered for his successes. Sometimes Solomon's reign is remembered as the golden age of Israel.

Rehoboam takes the crown after Solomon dies. As I said, Rehoboam isn't exactly a household name, but if there's one thing he is famous for, it's his failure to hold together the kingdom of Israel.

It's under Rehoboam's watch - in fact, his first act of being king - that the kingdom splits into the 2 tribes who stick with Rehoboam, and the other 10 tribes who leave to follow some guy confusingly called Jeroboam. In true Aussie tradition, to keep it clear we can call our mate Rio, and old mate Jerro.

Rio’s failure is a pretty big failure. I assume none of us run countries - although given the kind of highly capable people we have in this church I might be wrong! But if you were leading a team of 12 people and 10 of them quit and joined another team, imagine how awful you would feel. It would feel worse if it happened in your first week on the job! And it'd feel even worse if the person who did the job before you was your dad, and his dad before him, and everyone talked about what great successes they had been.

When someone fails like this, the question on everyone's lips is obvious: what did they do? But as we see with Rio, the reasons behind what happened are not always as clear-cut as you might think.

Rio was unkind to his people. He didn’t want to serve them. He didn't take good advice. He was more concerned with looking like a strong king than actually being a good king. He threatened people with increased forced labour and the whips of his taskmaster Hadoram, which ended up getting him killed.

This is how Rio lost the kingdom. He could keep control over Judah and Benjamin, the two tribes closest to Jerusalem, but the rest put themselves under Jerro as their new ruler. Very shortly after becoming king, Rio has broken the kingdom in two, and he didn't even get the bigger piece. He failed in his role, the consequences were huge, and that's how he is remembered.

Just sit with that for a moment. Try not to think back to a time where you messed up on an epic scale that people remember.

I had something like this happen. When I was in my mid 20s I was asked to become a leader in the church I was attending - it wasn't a democratic set up like we have here, but my appointment was by a unanimous decision of the leadership. I accepted, and the day I was appointed two-thirds of the leadership quit. They didn't say why. Soon after that the (new) leadership team decided to make some changes which became divisive, and as a result several families left the church - walked out right in the middle of a service - including the now ex-leaders.

I failed, people got hurt, and there are probably people who will always remember me as a failure for that. So I feel quite a bit of empathy for Rio.

Reading this story and seeing some reflections of my own story in it helped me to think of Rio more like a real person in a real situation, and to show a bit of compassion and understanding. I think that's a good attitude for us to have coming into any discussion about failure, whether we're thinking about someone else’s failures or our own. We should try to avoid using someone else's failure to boost ourselves, to make ourselves look better or feel better. I don't know how many times reading the gospels I have thought, "How are the disciples so thick!" as if I would have been any better if I were there with Jesus seeing impossible things happen.

I should make clear that I'm not trying to absolve Rio from responsibility for his choices or their consequences. But there is more to Rio’s story of failure, and this is where it gets complicated.

There's a hint of it in verse 15 (of both 1 Kings 12 and 2 Chronicles 10), where it says "So the king [Rehoboam] did not listen to the people because it was a turn of affairs brought about by the Lord to fulfill his word that the Lord had spoken by Ahijah the Shilonite to Jeroboam son of Nebat."

That's interesting. 1 Kings chapter 11 tells the story. Ahijah is a prophet who during Solomon’s reign rocks up to Jerro one day, tears his cloak into 12 pieces, hands 10 of them to Jerro and says God is going to tear the kingdom out of Rio’s hands and give 10 tribes to Jerro.

And the reason? Not because of Rio’s lack of wisdom or his arrogance or his cruelty. It’s nothing to do with Rio at all! It’s because his father Solomon had forsaken God - the God who had appeared to him twice! The God who had told Solomon specifically what to do, but he didn't listen. Solomon knew this prophecy existed and tried to solve it by killing Jerro – but Jerro escaped and fled to Egypt. And so Rio very likely knew about this prophecy too.

What's it like to live under that shadow - not just the shadow of previous family success. Not even the shadow of previous family failures that shaped your childhood and development. But to live under the shadow of a prophecy from God that because of your father's failure, you are destined to fail.

This is the paradox of Rio’s failure: Rio was unwise, unkind, and unresponsive to his people, and so he failed. But God also planned for Rio to fail, and Rio failed. If you fail when God’s plan is for you to fail, does that mean you succeed? It’s all a bit of a mess.

What stands out in the midst of this messy situation is that God’s focus remains on relating to people. Through all of this, God wants people to take God to heart, to relate to God with love, to walk in God's ways of service and kindness to others, to listen when God speaks, and to take God seriously.

And this is the focus again and again in this story: Solomon refuses to listen to God, and God determines to strip his son’s kingdom from 12 down to 2. Solomon seeks to fix this – not by listening to God, but rather by trying to have Jerro killed.

Rio probably heard this prophecy and saw his father’s attempt to fix it. Was Reo trying to fix it by looking strong and cruel, as Solomon had been? After all, if you think Solomon was a successful king, then you’d try and emulate him, right?

Rio definitely tries to fix it later in the story. After the northern 10 tribes secede, Rio goes back to Jerusalem and forms an army. He might have lost the kingdom, he thinks, but that wouldn’t stop him taking it back. He broke it; he was going to fix it - with force if necessary.

But then God speaks through a different prophet and says to Rio, "Don't go and fight your relatives. Go home; this thing is from me."

And this time, Rio listened. He turned his army around, he heeded God’s words and he went home. That's a part of the story that doesn't so often get told. God’s focus is on relating to people, and this time when God spoke, Rio listened.

Meanwhile Jerro, new king in the north, makes a different choice. Earlier when the prophecy was made that Jerro would be king of 10 tribes, God offers to build Jerro into an enduring kingly family, just like King David, if only he will walk with God. Instead, Jerro builds two huge golden calves for people to worship. He literally followed Israel's wilderness playbook of how to not walk with God.

In fairness, Rio is not much better. Five years later, we’re told that when Rehoboam's rule grew stronger and more established, he abandoned God. Again. Only 5 years later.

Then Egypt invades. Now, Rio stands on the brink of losing it all, losing all that he had left - a failure that would be even more complete than his loss of the 10 northern tribes. But Rio and his officials humble themselves before God. Again. And God relents. Again.

And I love this. Rio is not a sterling example for a bunch of people sitting in church wanting to know how to walk with God better. But he’s a brilliant example of how God never turns away from us. God doesn’t absolve us from the consequences of our actions: if you make choices that are harsh, unkind and cruel, then the consequences of those choices may well be that people get hurt. As the kids say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

But no matter how foolish you’ve been, no matter how big your failures, if like Rio and his people you turn around to God and say, “The Lord is in the right”, then God will meet you there. Just like he did for Rio. Just like he offered to Jerro and the northern tribes.

That was the Apostle Paul’s experience too. Paul, who wrote our NT passage in 1 Corinthians, also knew a thing or two about being a failure. He devoted his life to rooting out and destroying the Christian church, only to end up instead being a part of it. He ended up getting arrested, taken to Rome, and being executed for it.

But Paul was convinced that God uses the foolish, the weak and the lowly in this world. Because God loves them. God pays special attention to them. Paul saw that happen throughout the Hebrew scriptures. And he saw it in Jesus, who was also falsely charged and also executed. People saw Jesus as a failure. People still do. People mocked Christians for worshipping a crucified God. Metallica wrote a song about it called “The God That Failed” in 1991 on the black album, which I listened to as a kid. There’s probably more up-to-date examples that people would know who are more in touch with modern culture than I am.

But Jesus was everything Rio wasn’t. Jesus was kind. Jesus came to serve. Jesus didn’t care about looking strong; he cared about walking close with God, and walking close with people, especially those the world labelled as failures.

That’s perhaps the biggest paradox of all: that so much of what the world calls failure is just another path God sees for calling out to people to walk closer. So many of those who the world calls failures are people God especially cares about and wants to be close to.

I’ve said that our church is full of gifted, accomplished and highly capable people. But on the off chance there’s anyone listening who feels like a failure: your life hasn’t gone to plan, you haven’t been able to do the things you think you should have been able to do, you weren’t given opportunities or benefits others had, you haven’t lived up to the expectations of your parents, you’ve had some big failures in your life that you’re still ashamed and hurt by – you’re my kind of people. But more importantly, you are God’s kind of people. God’s plans don’t just accommodate failures. God’s plans actively include, involve and target failures like us. Because God has chosen the failures of the world to abolish the world’s successes.

It’s not that God can take our failures and turn them into successes. God can do that, but that’s not the point. It’s because God’s success is measured entirely on what gets us walking closer together: closer to God, and closer to each other because that reflects the love and mercy of God. And that’s not how the world around us measures success. And it’s probably not even how we measure our own success. But it’s the one thing God really cares about.

So if you want to walk closer to God, remember the words of Adam Savage: “Failure is always an option.”

 

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And this choice had consequences, in fact pretty much exactly the result Jeroboam feared: all the Levites and the priests - the tribe that God had set aside to serve God specially, and to live that out among the rest of God's people - left the northern tribes to go and live in Judah. 2 Chronicles 11 paints this picture of the priests and Levites strengthening Rehoboam's kingdom, helping the southern tribes to walk with God for three years, because Rehoboam listened to God.

 

What's it like to live under a shadow - not just of family success, but to live under the shadow of a prophecy from God that because of your father's failure, you are going to suffer the consequences? We can see how Solomon responded to the news: he didn't try to set things right, to seek God's forgiveness or change his ways. Instead, we're told he tried to have Jerro killed, forcing Jerro to flee to Egypt till Solomon's death. And remember: Rio was born the year before Solomon took the throne, and this happens late in Solomon’s rule. Rio probably knew about this prophecy.

Maybe the thing that drove Rehoboam to his poor decision-making was fear of losing the kingdom as had been foretold, and that's why he pushed so hard to look strong and even cruel, as Solomon had been, and successfully. Or maybe he was like his father and didn't take God's real message into account: to take God to heart, to relate to God with love and to walk in God's ways of service and kindness, to listen when God speaks and to take God seriously.

That's looking back. What happens when we look forward in Rio’s story? When the northern 10 tribes secede, Rio goes back to Jerusalem and forms an army. He might have lost the kingdom, but that wouldn’t stop him getting it back. He broke it; he was going to fix it - with force if necessary.

But then God speaks through a different prophet and says to Rio, "Don't go and fight your relatives. Go home; this thing is from me."

And he did. Rio turned his army around, he heeded God’s words and he went home. That's a part of the story that doesn't so often get told. This time, Rehoboam listened to God. Meanwhile, Jeroboam in the northern tribes was doing the opposite. It's actually really sad: God is so keen on having a relationship with people that God offered to Jeroboam the rebel the same relationship God had with David! God desperately wanted the chosen people to continue to stick close and walk in God's ways with a godly leader.

But Jeroboam made a different choice. Out of fear of his new kingdom falling apart as people sought to travel back to Jerusalem to worship their God at the temple they built, Jeroboam disobeyed God and built two huge golden calves. He literally followed Israel's wilderness playbook of how to not walk with God.

And this choice had consequences, in fact pretty much exactly the result Jeroboam feared: all the Levites and the priests - the tribe that God had set aside to serve God specially, and to live that out among the rest of God's people - left the northern tribes to go and live in Judah. 2 Chronicles 11 paints this picture of the priests and Levites strengthening Rehoboam's kingdom, helping the southern tribes to walk with God for three years, because Rehoboam listened to God. We’re told that Rehoboam was wise in his leadership over the southern tribes, and later that conditions in Judah were good.

Now I wish I could say that Rehoboam lived happily ever after and walked close with God forever more. But no. 2 Chronicles 12 tells us that when Rehoboam's rule grew stronger and more established, he abandoned God. Again. Only 5 years in.

Then Egypt invaded. Now, Rehoboam stands on the brink of losing it all, losing all that he had left - a failure that would be even more complete than his loss of the 10 northern tribes. And so Rehoboam and his officials humbled themselves before God. Again. And God relented. Again.

I love this. Rehoboam is not a sterling example for a bunch of people sitting in church wanting to know how to walk with God better. But he’s a brilliant example of how God never turns his back. He doesn’t absolve us from the consequences of our actions: if you make choices that are harsh, unkind and cruel, then the consequences of those choices may well be that people get hurt. As the kids say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

But no matter how foolish you’ve been, no matter how big your failures, if you turn around to God and say, “The Lord is in the right”, then God will meet you there. Just like he did for Rehoboam. Just like he offered to Jeroboam and the northern tribes.

That was the Apostle Paul’s experience. Paul, who wrote our NT passage in 1 Corinthians, also knew a thing or two about being a failure. He devoted his life to rooting out and destroying the Christian church, and ended up instead being a part of it. He ended up getting arrested, taken to Rome, and he was executed. But he was convinced that God uses the foolish, the weak and the lowly in this world. Because God loves them. God pays special attention to them. Paul saw that throughout the Hebrew scriptures, and he saw it in Jesus, who was also falsely charged and also executed. People saw that as a failure. People still do. People mocked Christians for worshipping a crucified God. Metallica wrote a song about it called “The God That Failed” back in 1991 on the black album.

But Jesus was everything Rehoboam was not. Jesus was kind. Jesus came to serve. Jesus didn’t care about looking strong; he cared about walking close with God, and walking close with people, especially the failures.

 

 

 

And I didn't even have a lot of pressure to succeed growing up! There's no family business I was expected to carry on, no class standard I was expected to meet. My mum was very hands-off and said I could do whatever I want, and that it was my responsibility to work however hard I needed to get myself there. I can't imagine what it's like to have parents who push you to succeed, who are trying to live vicariously through your success, or who see your failures as impacting on their good name or the status of the family. Even the idea of being forced to do piano practice is foreign to me.

Today we live in a social media world where people share more about their lives than ever before, but generally what people share for public consumption is their successes, things that make them look smart or pretty or rich or cool. Social media didn't invent that of course - the saying "don't air your dirty laundry in public", meaning not discussing family problems or personal secrets outside the home, was apparently made famous by Napoleon Bonaparte! - but social media gives people more opportunity to present a curated version of their lives.

 

I can't relate directly to Rehoboam on this one - I've never had a prophecy made about my failures, at least not that I know about. But when you work in full-time Christian ministry, or even when you are trying really hard in your life to walk in God's ways and take God seriously, when things don't go as you planned and everything falls down it's easy to see the failure as God's will. But it doesn’t  When Penny and I were in Namibia as missionaries and we got the news that the government was not renewing my visa, we tried everything - everything! - to try and stay. We felt strongly that it was God's plan for us to be in Namibia, that God had worked powerfully to make the path and to raise the cash to get us there and keep us there. But when no matter how hard we tried, nothing worked to stop us from having to leave, we felt like God was saying "Time to go." But that did not stop me feeling like a failure, that this was a result of my bad decisions, like if I just did things differently none of this would have happened.

 

 

Rio’s son Abijah, who took the crown after Rio died, described what happened to his father as a rebellion by Jerro and "worthless scoundrels" - (this is from 2 Chron 13:6-7) - "when Rehoboam was young and irresolute and could not withstand them."

At the time he says this, Abijah is fighting a war with Jerro. Rio’s son is trying to convince the other side that they should follow him as the rightful king in the line of David. So it's not surprising he would try and downplay his father's failure. And the story goes that Rio spurned the counsel of his father's advisors in favour of the opinions of his mates who he grew up with, so the picture of a young and weak ruler sounds reasonable.

Here's the thing though: we're told elsewhere that Rio was 41 years old when he took the crown. Not exactly a spring chicken. He was born before his father Solomon even became king! For Rio’s son Abijah to have been older than his father when he took the crown, he'd have to be born when Rio was 16. Not impossible, but it's still quite a claim to make about your father being young and irresolute when he was 41. Chances are Abijah was younger than his dad when he became king, and Abijah was only king for 3 years, so I feel like him calling Rio 'young and irresolute' is a bit rich - maybe a way of pointing to himself as strong and mature.

Sometimes people want to talk about other people's failures - maybe our failures - in ways that fit their own narrative. I've had the dubious honour of having my employment history argued about between news media publications and a sitting politician on record in Hansard. Neither side of that debate was seeking to protect my interests, but rather to score points for their own positions. So I feel close to Rio right now.

Reading this story and seeing some reflections of my own story in it helped me to think of Rio more like a real person in a real situation, and to show a bit more compassion and understanding. I think that's a good attitude for us to have coming into any discussion about failure, whether we're thinking about our own failures or someone else's, or even if we are thinking that God's plans have somehow failed. We should try to avoid using someone else's failure to boost ourselves, to make ourselves look better or feel better. I don't know how many times reading the gospels I have thought, "How are the disciples so thick!" as if I would have been any better if I were there with Jesus seeing impossible things happen.

 

 

I should make clear that I'm not trying to absolve Rio from responsibility for his choices and their consequences (or my own for that matter!).

Romans 10:5-15: Jesus is generous with us

A couple of weeks ago a work colleague mentioned that making a curry is too hard: they don't like the stuff that comes in jars because it's bland, and they don't like how fiddly it is to measure out all the different ingredients to make it from scratch. But they love eating nice curry.

So I mentioned that I buy these curry spice blends from a place where we used to live in Sydney, and Penny and I really like them. I actually buy big bags of these blends, so I offered to bring in enough to make a curry to see if they liked it. The next day I was delivering to them a little sachet of red powder sufficient to make a kilo of chicken tikka masala. They were very excited.

Why did I do this? There are lots of reasons why people do things, even good things like giving away curry mix. Am I secretly a shill for the curry industry? Does the spice mix company pay me a referral fee? Or perhaps I am trying to curry favour with my workmate? (See what I did there?) The good action itself doesn’t actually tell you why I did it.

There’s a famous quote that is often, and apparently incorrectly, attributed to St Francis of Assisi, “Preach the good news at all times; use words when necessary.” (For your interest, some think this saying is inspired by a line from the Franciscan Rule, which says - in gender neutral language - "Let all preach by their deeds.") And I agree. Our words and our actions should absolutely line up as best as we can make them do so. For many of us, the ‘good news’ is that we can have a relationship with Jesus: God who came as a human to make that relationship possible. And for many of us, our relationship with Jesus includes loving our neighbour, standing up for the poor and oppressed, standing up to injustice, and showing mercy and compassion to our enemies.

But if we think about our relationship with Jesus simply as a bunch of rules that we have to follow, then we need to be especially righteous, we need to have everything together, we need to be sterling examples of Christian purity and virtue before we could ever talk about Jesus with anyone else. This might be what Paul was talking about in his letter to the church in Rome when he says Moses talks about righteousness coming from the law, saying: "The person who does these things will live by them".

But that's not Paul's model. In contrast, Paul ties everything he is proclaiming to another verse from the Jewish scriptures. It's the other verse he quotes from Moses that starts at verse 6. And this quote from Deuteronomy 30:11-14 is, in my reading, the absolute heart and soul of this bit of Paul's letter.

First, Paul makes it clear that the word we proclaim is Jesus, not some system of rules. Second, he says when we talk about our relationship with Jesus, the Word we proclaim isn't far from us. We don’t have to reach up into heaven to find Jesus. We don’t have to reach into the abyss of death to find Jesus. Jesus is not that far away! No, Paul says the Word is near you; in your mouth and in your heart. The Word is Jesus, the Jesus we have a relationship with right now. That's the word of faith we proclaim.

And it needs proclaiming – I mean speaking out with words – because even though we may do all the things out of our love for Jesus, simply doing them may not make clear to someone else why we do them. They might think we’re trying to show we’re better than them; or that we’re judging them for not doing things; or that we have underhanded motives. 

In Namibia I once got mistaken for a human trafficker when I was helping run a food program for school children. Only when I explained, “I’m from the bible college in the city; I’m working with a church in your neighbourhood” did they realise I was not there doing seemingly good things for underhanded reasons. The words explaining ‘why’ mattered.

Okay, so we need words. What words do we use? This passage in Romans is full of expensive words and expensive phrases. Righteousness. Faith. Righteousness that comes from faith. Confess. Believe. Lord. Raised from the dead. Salvation. Never put to shame. Call on. Good news. All these phrases mean something important about God and our relationship with God, and God's relationship with us. And what these words mean is the subject of extensive thought and consideration, and even argument and disagreement. You see, expensive words cost a lot to understand.

But all these words are there to describe our relationship with Jesus. And if we have a relationship with Jesus, then that is something that is not far away from us. Jesus is near to you. He's in your heart, in the very source of your life. He's yours in a way that he will never be mine, because you are you. I think part of the reason there is so much thought and consideration and even disagreement about these expensive words and what they mean is because we all experience our relationship with Jesus differently, because we are different people and Jesus relates to us in different ways. But he is not far from us; he is near us. He is in our hearts, even if all our lives look different.

We probably don't even use a lot of these expensive words to describe our relationship with Jesus anyway. I don't know the last time I described anyone as 'lord' (except my landlord), or described someone as 'righteous' (except when watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a kid in the 80s). I'd say our own words are the most real way we can describe our relationship with Jesus, because our own words are, well, they’re ours. 

Last week Steve asked, “Where have you seen God this week?” It would be crazy if everyone had the same answer, right?

I can’t describe your relationship with Jesus to you, I can only describe mine in my own words. Jesus is the Word, and the Word is not far from us; it is near us. It is in our mouths, even if all our voices sound different.

And Paul says when it comes to us being different, Jesus isn't just tolerant of our differences. Jesus isn't just accepting of our differences. No, Paul says "there is no distinction; the same Lord [Jesus] is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him." When it comes to relating to who we are where we are, Jesus is generous!

A few weeks ago, Belinda gave a couple of cracker sermons on some of Jesus' parables about sowing seeds in fields. She painted a picture of God being liberal and generous and even reckless in spreading that seed, that good news about Jesus, regardless of whether the ground is hard, or thorny, or rocky, or good soil.

That’s the picture we see here too. Jesus is generous with us, and in two ways. First, he is generous in that he gives us his very self, he comes close to us personally, he lives with us in our hearts. Jesus is generous to us.

But secondly, Jesus is also generous with us in that he gives us to others. When Paul says, "How are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?" he's not talking about a church commissioning or a missionary fundraising program. He's saying every one of us can proclaim Jesus because we are all sent by Jesus. Jesus gives us everything we need, because our relationship with him is what we proclaim. He's the Word we are proclaiming. We carry Jesus in our hearts and in our mouths not just for ourselves, but also for others, because just as Jesus loves us and is generous to us, he loves others, and he is generous to them by giving them us.

In God's eyes, we are all uniquely special, and God is uniquely and specially generous with each of us. Jesus gives you a relationship with him that is exactly for you, that fits exactly into your heart, that can be best described in your words.

But there is some overlap. I use my own words to describe how I met Jesus, how I walk with him, how my life is different because I know him. But other people understand those words, and they may understand your words better than they understand mine. Jesus translates himself into something that other people can understand, and each of us are his translators into our own language.

When I say ‘translation’ and ‘language’, I don't just mean into different national languages, although that's a great start. If you don't have a shared language with someone, communicating is incredibly limited. Even if you do have a shared language, you are limited to the vocabulary of the least proficient speaker, and that can be tough. An Indian colleague at work tried to share with me a recipe for a curry they made for me to try (I assure you this sermon is not sponsored by Big Curry!). But they simply didn't know the English words for some of the ingredients, and my Hindi is unhelpfully non-existent. We were left with "Indian vegetables" as the best understanding we could reach. If we had both spoken the same language with the same proficiency, I would know what was in that curry!

But even if you share a language, cultural differences are as important to communication as language. When we first got to Namibia – where the national language is English – I paid for something at a shop using PayWave. But I didn’t know that PayWave was brand new to the country, like had only been introduced that week. The checkout assistant said “You need to insert your card” and I said, “No, I don’t” and waved my card. They said, “You need to enter your PIN.” I said, “No, I don’t.” Suddenly it was approved and they looked at me shocked and said, “How did you do that?” And me, fresh off the plane from Australia, said sarcastically, “Magic.”

But in Namibia ‘magic’ has a very different and significant role in culture. She thought I was using muthi, evil magic, to pay for things without money, which is a claim muthi users often say they can do. She suddenly got very visibly frightened of me, she recoiled, and I realised my mistake and quickly apologised and explained I was from Australia and this technology is normal there. A huge blunder on my part, because even though we were both speaking English, I did not understand the culture.

Communication goes even deeper still! Maybe you're a member of a subculture: a club or hobby or interest group or even workplace that has a special set of experiences or jargon that might be incomprehensible to many people, but speaks deeply to those who understand it. Any regular attendee of Canberra Baptist is a member of a subculture, and you know we have a special spiritual language we use – I touched on it earlier: words like righteousness, faith, baptism, or bible verses can be utterly foreign to those around us.

I was talking with a couple of workmates recently about stress and anxiety, and one of them – who has just recently started attending church – misquoted Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount talking about the birds being clothed by God. I said, “Oh it’s that the birds get fed without farming; it’s the flowers that are clothed”. And the other workmate said, “What on earth are you two talking about?” So I took a few moments to explain what Jesus was talking about: that if our relationship with God is good, it can help us to worry less about everything else. They had simply never heard this saying of Jesus.

Communication extends to our whole life experience. When Penny and I were forced to leave Namibia suddenly, we were devastated. We didn't know why we had to leave. We felt uprooted, directionless. When we couldn't return to Australia because of COVID restrictions, we felt homeless, unwanted. It was awful. What made it worse was that no-one we spoke to really understood what we were going through. Many people talked about it like it was a holiday. But then other missionaries started reaching out to us and telling us their stories: how wars, disasters, political upheavals had forced them out of their countries of service, often suddenly and quite frighteningly. They reached out because they understood. They shared their stories with us because they had been through it too. And we realised we weren't alone - in that moment, these were the people who spoke our language. We shared a common tragedy.

Our backgrounds, our interests, our personality and our lived experience - even the bad experiences, perhaps sometimes especially the bad experiences: the struggles, the doubts, the difficulties – they give us a special language that opens doors for communication that might not be available to someone else. When we're talking about our relationship with Jesus, it's something very personal to us, and so of course our language, our experiences will be a part of the words we use.

That might make it obscure to some, but really, really interesting and meaningful to others. Paul says, "How are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?" The way Jesus is close to you in your life might be the exact language someone else can really hear.

And if you think, "Well, I'm so unique, I will never find someone who would click with my very strange and different experiences and way of living and thinking and talking", then I've got good news for you! Because while there are some great benefits to hearing from people who have similar language, culture and experience, sometimes it is the difference between us that makes a message heard!

Just this year in NAIDOC week I was struck by how different my experience of knowing Jesus is to that of the First Nations brothers and sisters we heard from in our church service. I am struck by the key role country plays in the faith experience of some First Nations Christians. I have benefited from hearing how actions like deep listening are important to spiritual life. Not only does hearing the stories of people different to me deepen my understanding and connection with those people, it can also serve to deepen my understanding of God and my relationship with God too!

And sometimes it’s not about being the same, and it’s not about being different; it’s just about being there. Paul tells us that those who hear good news think the feet of those who bring it are beautiful. It’s their feet rather than their mouths because it costs something to bring the news. I don’t even mean reputational risk or persecution, I just mean effort, even if that effort was just a couple of steps. Me giving that curry mix to my co-worker wasn’t free – but it didn’t cost me much either. It cost me one serve of curry mix and a zip-lock bag. That opportunity for them to hear only came because I was willing to pay the cost with my feet: to make the small effort to share something I enjoy that they might also enjoy. They really liked it, by the way.

Jesus is near to us. He is in our heart, his Word is in our mouths. Our lives as Christians have probably not been all flowers and sunshine. We live real lives, with highs and lows, like everyone else. I know my relationship with Jesus has been a real relationship, with closeness and with fights. But it means something to me, something unique, something special. And sometimes we see other people in our lives and think there’s an opportunity where they might benefit from that special relationship too. Maybe they want to know how you’ve coped, or why you’re doing what you’re doing. So share it with them. It’s not a huge thing. To refer back to Belinda’s sermons on seeds, it might be just a mustard seed. But from little things, big things grow. Who knows? Maybe Jesus is being generous with you to them.

sermon: the Pub test/the reality check

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.

—

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.”