Good and Worthless Shepherds: A Meditation on Jeremiah 23, for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost

In the time of Israel before the Babylonian Captivity, there was a general sense of prosperity and peace.  Unfortunately, this time of general peace and prosperity also came in a time of wide spread disregard for God and His Word.  While many had resources to spare and no foreign army was threatening the life of the nation, there was great apostasy going on throughout the land:  the people engaged in financial abuse of their neighbors, various forms of sexual immorality, and multiple forms of idolatry, just to name a few.  What made it all the worse, was that the shepherds who God had ordained to call His people to faith and repentance by His Word, had largely abandoned that same Word, substituting their own for His.  Whether it was the people who left God and His Word first and the shepherds followed to appease the people, or it was the shepherds who left God and His Word and the people followed them, the end result was the same:  divine judgment was coming like a fiery whirlwind to consume them both.  The focus of Jeremiah’s 23^rd chapter is the specific and eternal condemnation justly coming to the shepherds for their apostasy, and their abuse of the Office God had entrusted to them for the good of His people.

Their time is not so unlike our own.  Here in 21^st century America, our financial system is rigged to reward those with money while perpetually abusing those without it.  We tell our children that education is their ticket out of poverty, and then we send them off to schools they cannot afford, saddling them with enormous debt that makes them slaves of the banks for decades afterward.  If a person steals $10,000 from a bank, they go to jail for a very long time, but if a Wall Street broker or company CEO/CFO steals billions, they retire with their fortunes while the people they defrauded lose their retirement funds.  In terms of sexual immorality, we protect in law pretty much any sexual perversion we can dream up.  Fornication has been institutionalized in youth culture, and celebrated by celebrities of every genre; adultery is the norm, having its own social media hook up sites; divorce is rampant, as spouses can abandon each other and their children at will and without immediate consequence through no-fault divorce laws; homosexuality is not only condoned, but championed as a protected class under law, and taught to children as normative in the youngest elementary school classrooms..  In our time and place, greed and self gratification are driving principles that undergird the way we approach everything from entertainment to medical care… and with advances in technology, we can do these things faster and more efficiently than any generation which came before us.

When it comes to idolatry, the violation of the first commandment, our civilization excels.  We enshrine a generic god in our governing documents which many assume to be the Christian God, but which in fact is so amorphous that anyone can pour any identity into it they wish.  Though a majority of Americans are Christians of one stripe or another and assume a Christian God when they recite things like the Pledge of Allegiance, read the Declaration of Independence, or examine the back of their printed money, in reality that generic god is never identified with the Most Holy Trinity in our legal system.  A Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Deist, Pagan, Satanist, or even a self worshiping Atheist can all pour their individual deity into that generic term for god… and in practice, that’s exactly what they do, because our system of government is built on the idea of a syncretistic national god everyone can get behind, and everyone can assume will support our Constitutional rights and laws.  While our founding may have been much more homogenously Christian in assumptions and practice, we now have a place in our civilization for every god, every sacred text, and every rejection of the Triune God that people can organize around.  When it comes to idolatry, like greed and sexual immorality, we’re way ahead of ancient Israel.

First, it’s important to remember that the United States is not Israel.  God did not descend upon Mount Rushmore to deliver the Ten Commandments to George Washington, nor did He guide the Puritans’ ships to Plymouth Rock in a pillar of cloud by day or a pillar of fire by night.  America is not Israel, and we cannot read ourselves into Scripture that way.  What Jeremiah wrote by the Holy Spirit was directed to Israel, even though it was also written for us (just as it is written for every nation, tribe, and culture on the face of the earth across history)—and that’s a key distinction.  The real question becomes why God wrote these words of His for us, and as always, that boils down to the revelation of His Law and Gospel with Jesus at their center.

Do we have rampant sin in our day and place?  Absolutely.  Do we have shepherds in the pastoral Office, called by God to deliver His Word to the people, who prefer to deliver their own words instead?  Indeed, and far too many.  As we look at ourselves, pastors and laity, believers and unbelievers alike, the Law revealed in Jeremiah’s 23^rd chapter should terrify us to our core.  If God would deal with His special people of Israel with such great severity (military devastation and captivity by Babylon, disease, death…) for sins much less rampant than our own, we should tremble in fear for the just wrath of God which is surely coming toward us.

It’s probably alien to most Americans to think about themselves as worthy of judgment, but it’s true—both individually, and as a nation.  It’s probably not vogue to think of God as having a limit to His patience with us, and bringing a calamity upon us that justly overwhelms both us and our children.  But we should remember that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever—He is forever just and good, forever the Judge of the Universe He created and sustains, and forever offended in His very being by the evil we cavalierly commit.

But it is also true, that God has revealed Himself as forever being love and compassion; as a good and faithful Shepherd who will tend to His people, even to the point of dying for them.  Where earthly shepherds fail to both live up to and proclaim God’s Eternal Word, God has Himself sent His Eternal Word into our flesh that He might forever unite us to Himself through His Cross.  All the judgment we deserve, that we have brought down upon ourselves both in this world and the next, He has taken and placed upon the shoulders of His only begotten Son.  Jesus becomes for us the Good Shepherd who excels all earthly shepherds, and who gathers together in Himself all His people by His grace.  There, in the embrace of our Good Shepherd, all His people find His call to faith and repentance:  all His undershepherds who have failed to reflect His Law and Gospel rightly, and all the people who have failed to receive it rightly, there find in His deadly wounds the price of their salvation.  It is a salvation not accomplished by human works or faithfulness, but by divine satisfaction—a salvation freely given and freely received, for Christ’s sake alone.

To all people, and even to we fallen Americans, comes the Word Made Flesh.  He speaks to us His terrifying Law which reveals us for the sinners, and sinful nation, we are; that we do not deserve His prosperity, providence, nor peace, but rather to be wiped off the face of His good earth.  Yet He also speaks to us a Gospel sweeter than any other words in all creation:  that He has suffered and died for all mankind, and even for sinners so gluttonous, debauched and idolatrous as us.  To us and to our nation, the Good Shepherd calls all to repentance and faith, that He might renew us again with His forgiveness, life, and salvation.  To you His Word has come.  Hear Him, believe, and live.  Amen.