Good Morning St. Andrew’s,
On the 12th day of Christmas my preacher gave to me; a sermon about kings.
On this Sunday, just one day before the Feast of the Epiphany, and a giant snowstorm that will not be bringing gold, frankincense, or myrrh;
When we celebrate the arrival of the Magi, the three kings of Orientar (wherever Orientar is), the escape of the baby king Jesus from the very adult King Herod, and the prediction of God’s own kingship as a type of shepherd king in the Book of Jeremiah;
I’m moved to preach to you this morning about Jesus giving us the power to become subjects. (more on this in a bit)
The Prophet Jeremiah lived and prophesied about 600 years before Jesus was born in a manger.
In the writings of Jeremiah, the prophet, there is very little optimism.
Nearly all of his collected writings, or the writings attributed to him, are filled with dire predictions of destruction and exile.
Out of all of the prophets of Israel and Judah, we receive the most biographical information about him in his book, which helps to show why Jeremiah may have thought the way that he did.
He was called by God at a young age, he was persecuted in his home town by the priests of the local temple.
He moved to Jerusalem and was treated as persona non grata by the temple authorities there, because of his constant calls for fidelity to God, and his symbolic demonstrations, including putting a yoke for oxen on his neck and standing in the temple square and predicting the Babylonian captivity.
He is the only prophet who gives us a clue about how his prophecies came to be written down, which was done by his friend and scribe Baruch ben Neriah.
He lived and prophesied across the reigns of 5 Kings of Judah, from about 626BCE to the year 570, the year the Babylonian captivity began.
We see how he both influenced and was subject to the power of his king (particularly the last, King Zedekiah).
He lived through the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem, the siege of the Babylonians, and the end of the Judaean monarchy that had begun with King David.
Our reading from today, Jeremiah 31:7-14, is part of a very small central section of Jeremiah’s prophecies known as the Book of Consolation, which runs from Jeremiah 30-33.
They are called this, because they are the only chapters in Jeremiah, where the prophet gives any kind of indication that things could turn out okay in the end.
They are the only part of his prophecies that are not utter devastation, destruction, and curses.
It is no mistake that this Book of Consolation was placed by Jeremiah’s editors at the very center of his collection of prophecies.
They tell of a time, when the people who have been subjected under the Babylonian and Assyrian yolk will be free again, and will return to the land from which they were removed.
“See I am going to bring them from the land of the North, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth… with weeping they shall come and with consolations, I will lead them back.”
They tell of a new life of abundance after the despair of captivity.
“I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble…they shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden.”
Priests are mentioned as part of the restoration, ostensibly good priests and not the type that had been taking advantage of the poor in favor of the rich.
What is missing almost completely from this prophecy of consolation and renewal, besides one mention in chapter 30 of King David (the archetypal king), is the idea that Israel will once again be ruled by a king or monarchy.
In Jeremiah’s prophecy, the people will no longer be subjects to either a foreign, nor a domestic king.
The experiment that began with the prophet Samuel warning the people not to desire a king in the lead up to King Saul in 1 Samuel 8 is now bookended by the last prophet of Jerusalem.
The only king that will ever rule over God’s people again will be God and God’s anointed, King David.
Never again would God’s people be subjects… until … Jesus the king of kings.
Now, this idea that I’m setting up may seem contradictory,
Or, let me say this a different way.
This idea that we have been freed from being the subjects of a king in order to become subjects of a different king is contradictory, and I’ve said it this way on purpose.
What does it mean to be a subject? (help me out here, I need you to preach a bit.)
What does it mean to be a subject?
In this sermon, I’ve already used the term a few ways.
To be the subject of a king, meaning that you are…
Subjected, or thrown down beneath the power of another.
Getting away from kingship, you could be the subject of someone else’s conversation, their topic of discussion.
But actually, that makes you an object to be discussed.
Now this idea of being an object brings us to a new type of subject.
To be a subject is to be the opposite of an object;
To be a “me” instead of a “you” or a “she, he, it, or they.”
Last year at this time, we began a sermon series about the seven states of being, about being an “I;”
I see, I understand, I feel, I love, I speak, I will, and I am.
We recognized the importance of being the subject of our own sentence and removing those things that block us from believing that we are worthy.
(If it would be helpful, I will repost those sermons on the website in our new sermon blog that started this year, so you can look back, or share with someone who needs that message of hope and help.)
What I want you to see this morning is that apart from being the subjects of some kind of tyrranical or misguided earthly king,
What God did through Jesus is to make us into a new kind of subject; not the kind who bends the knee, who is an object in someone else’s story, but the kind who can stand up and say, “I am,” and I have my own story.
Martin Buber made this kind of subjectivity famous in his 1923 book, I and Thou.
In that book, Buber muses and philosophizes on the difference between being a subject and an object.
His two propositions are this: 1. People usually relate to the world in a relationship of “I to it.” We either use or experience objects that are separate from us.
In this mode, whether we are using a pair of scissors or a person, they are simply an “it.” There is no further relationship.
2. There are “I-Thou” relationships, in which each person relates to the other as “you,” as another person.
In this mode, we recognize the humanity of the other person, whether they are someone we talk to on a regular basis, or someone we notice sitting on a park bench, but don’t actually interact with.
We can enter into this kind of relationship with anyone we meet through a positive perception of them as another person, who is worthy of personhood.
Think about how this perception might change the violence that we see so often…
Or the way we think about people who live in poverty around the world, or who are forced to work in order to create our abundance and comforts…
We can enter into that relationship with nature as well.
Think about how this perception might make us reconsider endangered animals, whose habitats are taken away for human progress,
Or the empty spaces in creation that are dumping grounds for our waste…
And we change enter into relationship with God like this, because God is also no longer an object, but a person.
What Buber ultimately leans toward, is every Episcopalian’s favorite part of the baptismal covenant, “to respect the dignity of every human being.”
And we do this by recognizing that through Jesus, we have received the power to become this new type of subject, a new “I am.”
That doesn’t seem so hard, right?
And actually, we know this, if you have an interaction with someone at a gas station and then they go and put that on Facebook from their perspective (either good or bad), you know that the other person is an “I am;”
They show you, and the rest of the world, what their experience of your interaction was.
Before the internet, we may never had had access to that person’s inner-world, their subjectivity.
What is difficult, though, is what is then implicated by this new subjectivity is our new responsibility to one another.
If I have received the power to become “I am,” through the kingship of Jesus, then I also have to recognize that you have also.
To tweak Buber just a bit, we have to move beyond “I-Thou” and eventually get to “an I for an I.”
Not the “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” which Jesus decimates in his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, but a new kind of “I for an I;”
The letter “I.”
Too often, though, we still treat one another as if “you” and “it” are the same thing.
I had a friend this week, who got some chicken from a small local restaurant that wasn’t quite cooked all the way.
Now, in the age of Yelp and social media, what would you expect a person to do, if they received poor service like this?
Well, my friend reached out personally to the restaurant and said, “hey, this chicken that I received wasn’t quite done all the way.”
From their side, the restaurant manager said, “I’m so sorry, we will refund your money…” and then added, “thank you for not putting us on blast on the internet.”
From the restaurant’s response, I think we can all tell, what the majority of patrons do, when an error like this occurs; they don’t treat the small business owner as a person “I-Thou” or “I-I”, they treat them as an entity “I-it.”
There is no relating human to human, when you put someone on blast on the internet.
Now, I understand that we get frustrated in this world of corporate efficiency with spending hours on the phone with robotic voices and message systems, and who knows if the advent of AI will make this better or worse,
But this digital age that we live in makes the idea of recognizing subjectivity even more important.
Martin Buber concluded his book I and Thou, by suggesting that every relationship of “I-Thou,” or (as I’m suggesting it be modified) “I for an I,” is a microcosm of our relationship with God.
When Jesus came down, and became a baby, an object of veneration for shepherds and wise men, an object of fear and murderous disdain for King Herod,
God, the great “I am,” became a living “I am” within time and space, so that we could have a new “I for an I” relationship with God;
Not a punishment system, but a relationship system for the consolation and redemption of creation.
Through Jesus, God is showing us that the only way forward into a new age, a new kingdom come, is through relationships that respect the dignity and this new kind of subjectivity for every person.
The Word for you this week is this; in this world where it can be so easy to deny the personhood of those around us;
If you have been struggling with advocating for your own personhood, know that it is okay to be an “I” and to stand up for your experiences.
If you are like the rest of us and have no problem advocating for yourself, remember that other people are also people and deserve relational responses rather than face-to-face hot-takes and withering internet take-downs.
If we want to live in a just society, in the new type of kingdom that God is offering through Jesus, that vision of consolation according to Jeremiah,
Then let me suggest that the heart of that mission is the internal work of fighting against those things that encourage us to objectify one another, and to embrace the power that Jesus has given us to become a new type of subject in the kingdom of heaven;
So that when we get to heaven and put on our robes, our shoes, and our crowns as the old spirituals say,
God will greet us not with the judgement of “an eye for an eye,” but with the welcome of an “I” to an “I.”
Amen.
Comments