A sermon preached by Pastor Lewis Polzin on February 13, 2022 at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on Jeremiah 17:5-8. You may play the audio of the sermon here.
A mostly unedited transcript of the sermon follows the jump:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The text this morning is from the Prophet Jeremiah, the 17th chapter:
Thus says the Lord: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”
Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
It's an interesting juxtaposition we have with Jeremiah and our Gospel lesson from Luke, where we have in Luke, a somewhat familiar thing where Jesus is preaching what we normally call the beatitudes. Luke has a different emphasis than Matthew. While Matthew records all of Jesus’ sayings, Luke's ideas certainly portrays the woes that Jesus speaks. And so we have in Jesus's sermon, in his beatitudes, this idea that there are those who believe in him and those who do not believe in him. As you look at them, it’s not that being rich is necessarily bad. It's when you trust in your riches, as opposed to trusting in God, that's a woe. It’s not bad to have food to eat, but when you make satisfying your belly your god, this is idolatry. It’s okay to not be weeping, but to seek out distraction to the point of letting it take over your life, this shows a lack of devotion to God. It’s not bad to be praised, but to seek adulation, to do everything to be noticed like some kind of Instagram influencer, notoriety is your god.
Luke has woes in his beatitudes. That doesn’t mean that Matthew missed them but that Luke wants you to hear them. A woe is like a condemnation. I know it’s an outdated word for today. A woe is the opposite of the benediction. The Lord bless you and keep; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord look upon you with his favor and give you peace. That’s a benediction, a good word. It’s a statement of fact. It’s not a wish. It’s not just hope. The Lord will do these things because it’s his benediction.
But the woes are something else. They also are facts, they will happen. The woes are a malediction, a bad word. They indicate that the Lord is doing this very troubling thing upon those who will not make him their God but seek out the gods of the world. There is no consolation from God when the woe is pronounced, because the woe leads to death, just like the prophets who were condemned under the Law of God.
Jeremiah is the same. He warns us of the woes to come. Cursed is the man who trusts in man. That's very much the same thing of speaking woe upon somebody. It’s not just to know that a person is cursed, but it’s a pronouncement of it, it’s a condemnation, it’s a damning someone to hell. And who is cursed? The man who trusts in man.
A man who trusts in man doesn’t realize that their trust only goes so far as life. But death comes for all. You put your hope in somebody, you love somebody, someone who’s dear to you., someone you trust, someone that's close to you, someone that looks like you, someone that acts and behaves like you. The problem is man is always going to let you down. And if you do that, it's kind of like a shrub that grows up in the desert. A shrub in the desert has to access to water. Sure, it might rain for a hot minute, but the water disappears and no roots can form. So, when the heat and the sun come down on the shrub, it dries up and it tumbles away. Think of the old Westerns, where these tumbleweeds blow through town. This shrub had held on for dear life, gasping for breath, but the wind takes it away and all it is is a nuisance.
We put our trust in another person, the one who looks to us to be God, but never quite is, and we do this all the time. We do this with our parents. I mean, that's where we all start out as children. We look to our parents as if they are gods to us. They provide for our needs. We fear them because they can punish us and we love them because of who they are and what they do for us. But, your parent is always going to let you down. I can't tell you the number of times that I've let down. My two kids, just in the six years that I've been entrusted with them, know what that’s like. I can’t tell you the number of times that I do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing and completely break their spirits, or where I get mad at them for no reason except something that's going on in my own personal life or stresses. And that just weighs on them. And they don't know why dad is angry. They put their trust in me to protect them and I let them down. It's very easy.
If that becomes habitual without teaching them the right thing to do, which is to put your trust only in the Lord, which is to have me repent and teach them what forgiveness is and how we're made right in Christ, if you don't do that, you end up with bitter children who look at their parents and, and say, well, I'm not going to mess up my kids the way that you messed me up. No, that's probably true. They're probably not going to mess up their kids the way that their parents messed them up. They're going to mess up their kids in whole new, different ways because they're putting their trust in man, even themselves. And they make themselves out in that moment to be God, as if they are the arbiters of what is good and right and true.
We see this in the world today, don’t we, these people who say, put your trust in man, or put your trust in science that man comes up with, or put your trust in all these different agendas that are thrown at us, put your trust in politicians, put your trust in all these political ideologies, put your trust in whatever it is. It is going to let you down somewhere, a person is going to do something wrong, say something wrong, have a secret revealed about them that, well, it's just going to rub you the wrong way. If you put your trust in the person and that's what ends up happening, your trust is going to be completely destroyed. You're going to dry up and you're going to wander through this world with no life in you whatsoever. You're just going to be a nuisance. You're just going to be in the way. You're just going to be blowing in the wind.
But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. That's a big difference, because when you put your trust in God, you all of a sudden begin to realize that you're putting your trust in God because of God. You're putting your trust in God because of what he's done for you. You're putting your trust in God because of who he is to you. And you're putting your trust in him because he himself is trust.
Trust is an interesting word in the Greek. It's the word pistis, which we often translate as faith. Faith and trust are very much the same thing. Our trust, our faith is in the Lord because our faith comes from and is, in fact, the Lord’s. You do not have faith that you've created in him. It's been given to you. You cannot rely on faith that you can somehow make within yourself. It must be trusted from outside of you, because if it's something that you create, if it's something that you can come up with, then it's dependent upon you, just as if you put your trust in man. But when we put our trust in the Lord, when we put our faith in the Lord, when we recognize that everything that we have in this life, is from the Lord, then we grow. As this world moves us towards everlasting life, if we come to realize that that is from the Lord and our life is the Lord, and he is our only hope, our only trust, then, then we grow up, not as shrubs that can't find water, but as trees that find themselves next to a river.
We’ve all heard the phrase that something is like drinking water from a fire hose. That's what it was for us in seminary. When our professors would teach us in class, it was like drinking water from a fire hose. You can get sips. You just can't get it all. And that's what it is to be in the Lord. The water races by you. You can't get everything, but there you find a sure foundation in that water. There you are provided for all of the time. There you are given everything that you need and more. In rivers, not only is there water, but there's new dirt, which means new nutrients, a way for you to grow up and have life and have it abundantly. Rivers flood, rivers retract and that's good because it brings new life to all of the vegetation that grows in and around it. This is what the Egyptians would look forward to every year when the Nile would flood. It would come up and fill its land with all kinds of nutrients that would come from down river. And then it would recede so that everything could grow.
And we are so much like that. If you are trusting in the Lord where the water races over you, more than you can even bear, and as it retracts and recedes, you find that you have everything that you need for life. You have food and you've got drink. You've got life itself coming from God. This is what it is to put your trust in the Lord. After all. this Lord is Jesus Christ, the one who hung upon a tree for you, the one who took your sins to himself so that you wouldn't have to bear them yourself. And as he takes your sin from you and puts it upon the cross, you find that you are now free to flourish. There is no malediction for you. There is no malevolent disease for you. The people gathered to hear Jesus, heard his word and were healed. So, too, are you healed unto everlasting life.
You are given every good gift even as all the evil in you is taken away. As sin and death are taken from you and placed on the cross, you are left free to flourish, free to life with the bad stuff of life and sin coming to you. This is the reason for the death of Christ, that you would have life. That's what Paul is saying. That if Christ is not raised from the dead, then your faith is in vain, your trust in the Lord is in vain. But, because Jesus is raised from the dead, you too will be raised from the dead. And if Jesus has life, then you have life because of him, because of the cross, because of what he's done for you.
And then, when the hardships of this world come upon you, when drought comes, we can look at that, not as a forsaking of love, but as a time to teach us to wait to know that the Lord will indeed still come, the water will still be provided. We can bear up under a drought. We can bear up under the scorching heat because the Lord has shown us that he is good and will provide everything that we need. It's true. The world is going to come at us with everything that it has. It is going to try to burn us to a crisp, and why? Because it sees that it can do that to a whole bunch of people who put their trust, not in God, but in man. So, the world thinks it can do the same thing to us, but it can’t.
The world, it doesn't see the river that flows in and through us, the world does not see how the word of God is pushing into us and bringing us life so that even if they were to chop us down and make us nothing, it's still can't take away the life that we have in Christ. The world is going to hit us with everything and we will endure because what we have is greater than the world, what we have is greater than the drought that it wants to give us. The world can’t make a drought when the Lord has given rivers of living and abundant water.
So put your trust in the Lord, look to his word, look to his sacraments, see how he feeds you, see how he nourishes you, see how he waters you and gives you everything that you need in this place and even more as you go out. And know that this, what you have now is merely a foretaste of that life which is to come. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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