Introduction
On Thursday morning we awoke to the predicted snow. Not the seven inches that were touted, but plenty enough to excite our children. With the pre-school closed, we invited one of Rebekah’s friends around, along with her older sister, baby sister and mother. Before they arrived, at ten past nine a thirteen-year-old friend from the next road rang the doorbell, thrilled that her school too was shut for the day. We had a garden-full of snowman-making, snowball-throwing children.
It’s ironic, then, to read Jeremiah in this week’s Lectionary and read a passage about shrubs getting parched in the wilderness and trees by streams thriving when heat comes. Clearly whoever chose this passage for a Sunday in February was either from the Southern Hemisphere or had a warped sense of humour.
But we know the metaphor ‘when the heat is on.’ We say, ‘If you can’t stand the heat then get out of the kitchen.’ Like Jeremiah we use the image of heat to describe times of trial, difficulty and oppression. Last July when the temperatures hit the nineties (Fahrenheit) many of us found it unbearable. So ‘heat’ is a fitting image for when life is uncomfortable, unpleasant and there is no relief from it.
This heat comes in many forms. It can be personal – lousy work circumstances or unemployment; depression; bereavement; terminal illness for oneself or a loved one. It can be something felt by the church – unremitting decline or opposition from government and society. Heat can come at a national level – economic troubles, war or famine.
You could add many more examples. But we have enough familiarity with the problem from various personal experiences to know this must be addressed. In Jeremiah these words occur in the midst of some general sayings (17:1-13) where the heat is religious and national, due to Judah’s persistent breach of the covenant with God. The heat for Judah is coming from God as he sovereignly oversees international affairs. But I believe what Jeremiah says here stands for heat of different circumstances. He tells us what makes for surviving and thriving through the heat – and what doesn’t. He begins with the bad news and then moves to the good news.
1. Cursed
Verses 5 and 6:
Thus says the Lord:
Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals
and make mere flesh their strength,
whose hearts turn away from the Lord.
They shall be like a shrub in the desert,
and shall not see when relief comes.
They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness,
in an uninhabited salt land.
Something terrible happens to you – someone betrays your trust in a serious way, for example – and you say, ‘I’ve lost my faith in human nature.’ Later someone else goes out of their way to show you great kindness and you say, ‘You’ve restored my faith in human nature.’
Jeremiah would say, what are you doing considering whether to put your trust in human beings in the first place? ‘Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals’ is the word of the Lord, he says. In particular he would say to us, what are you doing as a disciple, one in covenant relationship with God, putting your trust in people instead?
But it’s more than whether or not we naïvely trust human nature. It’s about ‘mak[ing] mere flesh [our] strength’. We’re going to rely on human power and ingenuity to sort things out. In Jeremiah’s time it was about the chosen race saying they would rely on political alliances and armies in order to survive the threat of Babylon. How do we see this today?
Nationally it’s something we see with assuming we can put things right by military might. Or it’s the elevation of economics to a science, if not a religion.
In the church we see it when we look at our declining state and assume that just putting into place a certain programme or following a technique will make everything shiny and new. If we follow the latest trendy idea then our church is guaranteed to grow – or so we think.
What is wrong with these things? Is it always wrong for a country to go to war or form international alliances? Should a government never take any interest in economics? Am I saying that a church should never look for methodical ways of going about the mission she shares with God? Am I advocating anarchy or heads-in-the-sand pietism?
No. The problem is one of idolatry. We are worshipping the wrong things. Jeremiah ties trusting in ‘mere flesh’ with ‘hearts [that] turn away from the LORD’. It isn’t that we should disregard alliances, economics or church programmes, but they must be put in their place. When these things don’t flow from a clear dependence upon God but are lifted up as ideals and ends in themselves, then we are worshipping created things and not the Creator.
You may recall that when Alistair Campbell was the power behind Tony Blair’s throne he was asked questions by American journalists about Blair and George W Bush both being religious. He replied, ‘We don’t do God.’
And that is the nub of the problem: we don’t do God. A nation and a government that doesn’t do God will be ineffective against the heat. Churches can fail to do God, too, when they idolise the techniques of religion rather than the heart of faith.
What about individuals? Suppose your ‘heat’ is to do with serious illness. What if you put all your trust in medicine but it cannot cure you? You will end up in desperate straits – ‘a shrub in the desert … liv[ing] in the parched places of the wilderness’, as Jeremiah says. It will be the same if your problem is financial and you trust your own native wit to get a job but fail. That trust will prove misplaced. You will not survive the heat. For in both cases you won’t be doing God.
Am I saying that the sick individual should stop consulting doctors, thrown away their pills and just pray, as some Christians counsel? Am I saying that the unemployed Christian should not actively look for work and simply wait trustingly? No. It’s a case of where we place our trust. Because it’s too easy to slip into the routine of trusting our abilities or the talents of experts. They may help us. But ultimately they are not God, and to trust them will leave us like parched shrubs in the wilderness heat.
2. Blessed
Who is blessed, then? Verses 7 and 8 tell us:
Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord.
They shall be like a tree planted by water,
sending out its roots by the stream.
It shall not fear when heat comes,
and its leaves shall stay green;
in the year of drought it is not anxious,
and it does not cease to bear fruit.
The blessed people are ‘like a tree planted by the water, sending out its roots by the stream’, rather than parched shrubs. It isn’t that the heat doesn’t come to them – it comes just as much as to anybody else – but they have resources, because their trust is not in human strength but the Lord. These tree-like people are evergreens, says Jeremiah. And what’s more they also bear fruit all year round – even in the heat. Why? Trusting in the Lord doesn’t always get you out of the heat, but it is the way of putting roots down deep to find the source of water on which to thrive.
This, then, is not the kind of trust that magically vanishes all our woes. It is the kind of trust that grows in grace, holiness and mission even when oppressed by the heat of the day. Whether it’s a serene, peaceful trust or one that comes with questions depends as much on our personalities as anything else.
What does this trust look like? At the outset it is a matter of surrender to God. It is a trust that says, Lord you stepped out in covenant love to this world including me when you sent your Son and he died on the Cross. I accept all that you have done for me and in response I hand my life over to you. Your weakness is more powerful than human strength, your foolishness wiser than human thought. I bow the knee to you. I place myself in your hands, whatever happens.
It is this surrender, this unreservedly placing ourselves in the hand of God and at his disposal that is a source of strength when the heat comes. For when the trials come we know God has allowed them. We may well have huge questions about why God has allowed them, but they are in the context of God being the covenant-making and covenant-keeping God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the making of the new covenant his Son felt the heat, but he is the God of death and resurrection. Whatever happens, we are in his hands.
Surrender may sound like a quiet, passive thing and for some it is. For others it feels like a huge physical effort to move oneself into a position of relinquishing control of one’s life to God. But whatever it feels like it is essential.
This trust is not only about surrender, whether it feels peaceful or not, it is also about something else that is definitely active and full of effort. Jeremiah speaks of the tree by the water ‘sending out its roots by the stream.’ But ‘sending’ is too weak a word: ‘thrusting’ would be better. The tree thrusts its roots out by the stream to pick up moisture. God wants to sustain those facing heat and thus the risk of drought and dehydration with his water from the river of life. But we need to reach out for it. In fact we need to be pretty intentional and serious about it: we need to thrust out our roots to pick up the water.
What’s more, it’s no good waiting until the drought comes. A tree doesn’t wait for a shortage of precipitation in the atmosphere in order to send down roots. It gets on with it. If you are not in a life crisis now, start getting into good habits.
But what are these habits? I can’t expand all of these here, but let me just outline the twelve that Richard Foster elucidated in his classic 1978 book Celebration Of Discipline. He broke the habits, or disciplines, down into three groups of four. The first group he called the ‘inward disciplines’ and consist of meditation, fasting, prayer and study. The second group, the ‘outward disciplines’, are simplicity, solitude, submission and service. Finally the third group, the ‘corporate disciplines’, include confession, worship, guidance and celebration.
You may not be able to practise all of them every day! – And nor should you! But he draws on the Scriptures and the rich traditions of the Christian Church to outline the sort of disciplined approach we need to build into our spiritual lives in order to thrust out our roots and pick up the water of life. And that surely means we need to find somewhere to start. Maybe it’s fasting: some Methodists are re-adopting an ancient pattern of John Wesley’s, to miss lunch on Fridays and devote the time to prayer. It could be about seeing where we might simplify our lives for the sake of God’s glory. Those of us with pre-school children might long to put solitude into practice! And so on. There may be a lot of things to do, but every journey starts somewhere. Get the wheels turning. Or – to return to Jeremiah’s metaphor – start thrusting your roots towards God’s water.
Conclusion
Do you feel like the heat is on right now? Human beings can certainly help but do not elevate them to the level of God and come crashing down when they fail you. Let us put our trust in the One who made an eternal covenant with us in his Son Jesus Christ. He will not necessarily remove us from the heat, but he will hold us safely in it.
Perhaps things are like a pleasant spring breeze for you now, rather than the fierce sun of a relentless heatwave. If they are, use this opportunity to thrust out your roots towards God’s river of life. Start practising a more disciplined Christian life so that you may reach out for all the blessings God has for you that will sustain you when the heat turns in your direction.
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