Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Mister Bad News

June 28, 2026

Jeremiah 28:5-9
Matthew 10:40-42

Ah, Jeremiah. My favorite prophet. No, really. He is. Despite the fact that, as a college student, I had to take a break after reading the book of Jeremiah because it was so depressing (I told you that story last week), I took a course on this book during seminary that has stayed with me for over thirty-five years now.

In that course I learned about the prophet who might have been called “Magor missabib” in Hebrew, something like “terror on every side” in English. It was a pretty good description of Jeremiah’s message. The nation had failed to meet God’s expectations, Jeremiah said. They had erected shrines to other deities and worshiped them, and they had failed to protect the widows and the orphans, the most vulnerable of the population. Jeremiah had warned that this risked the end of God’s protection for the nation, which was a very small one between the two great empires of Egypt to the south and the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, to the north.

Jeremiah’s warning had come true. Judah’s King Jehoiakim had submitted to the Babylonians as a vassal, but he attempted to break that yoke when the Egyptians won a battle against them in 601. Jehoiakim’s rebellion resulted in a siege of the city and their surrender, during which Jehoiakim died. His son Jeconiah ascended to the throne, but the Babylonians replaced him with his uncle Zedekiah.

The nation had surrendered to the Babylonian Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar II. The king, many civic leaders, and many religious leaders had been removed to Babylon (Ezekiel was one of them). The new King Zedekiah was the choice of the Babylonians.

Into that, Jeremiah appeared wearing a yoke, symbolizing and saying in so many words that Babylon would continue to control Judah for some time as a result of their unfaithfulness. Other prophets, notably one named Hananiah son of Azur, disagreed. In contrast to Jeremiah, Hananiah promised that God would restore King Jeconiah and the other exiles and even return the sacred objects looted from the Temple.

I have to say that this would be entirely consistent with a dominant theology of the day. They fully believed that God’s promise that David’s line would continue forever meant that the nation would always be preserved as well. That theology had been confirmed one hundred and fifty years before, when the northern kingdom of Israel, which was not ruled by descendants of David, had fallen to the Assyrian Empire. Judah, in contrast, ruled by a king from the house of David, had endured.

Why shouldn’t that happen again? Why shouldn’t a nation blessed by God be preserved again?

As Tyler Mayfield writes at Working Preacher, “Prophecy is deeply contextual. The content of a particular prophecy is not eternal truth for all situations. What is an authentic, appropriate, and helpful prophecy in one moment and place can be false, inappropriate, and obstructive in another setting.”

Hananiah spoke a word that promised the nation’s restoration. It was a vision that Jeremiah wanted to see. “May the LORD do so,” he said, “may the LORD fulfill the words that you have prophesied.” Who wouldn’t want their nation freed from foreign domination? Who wouldn’t want to see exiled people returned? Who wouldn’t want to see their friends restored to their homes? Who wouldn’t want to see the Temple once more filled with the objects they called sacred?

But Jeremiah didn’t hear the word of God saying that. He invoked the voices of previous prophets who had warned about disasters and conflicts arising from the nation’s unfaithfulness. Those were the prophets people remembered: prophets like Elijah and Elisha, like Hosea and Isaiah, like Micah and Nahum. They weren’t much more cheerful than Jeremiah, and some of them a lot less so.

As Charles L. Aaron, Jr., writes at Working Preacher, “One prophet, Jeremiah, tells the people the truth. The other prophet, Hananiah, tells the people what they want to hear. One appears to us as the brave preacher who endures scorn for speaking the word the Lord gave him. The other appears to us as the soothing charlatan over whom everybody fawns because he offers near-term hope.”

If you want to discern God’s voice, said Jeremiah, take a look at who tends to get things right.

What he didn’t say – what he didn’t have to say, because I’m pretty sure that he left a pretty big echoing silence – was that he, Jeremiah, had declared God’s judgment against Judah and look: they’d been invaded and surrendered to the Babylonians. He, not Hananiah, had been right.

Who should they trust for understanding God’s will in the present?

To be honest, it didn’t require the voice of God to predict Judah’s likely future in 596. They were under the thumb of the Babylonians and they were going to stay there. It didn’t need divine intervention to keep them vassals of that empire. If God did nothing at all, they would stay just as they were.

Hananiah misread the signs of the times just as much as he misread the signs of the Divine. Oh, by the way, he ended this conversation by breaking the symbolic yoke Jeremiah had been wearing, and the story ends with this sad line: “At this, the prophet Jeremiah went his way.”

I think it’s fair to say that we, in the twenty-first century after Jesus, are surrounded by people who are happy to tell us what God’s will is for us, for our church, for our communities, for our nation, and for all the nations of the earth. I also think it’s far to say that I’m one of those voices. If you’d like to know my opinion about God’s will for us, I’m right here to tell you.

So how will you know whether I’m the one who’s right, or among those who are right, or how right I or any of those preaching similar messages might be?

I’d like to say something similar to what Jeremiah did: Go look at the words of the prophets of the past. In theory, that’s a good comparison. Go look for the ones who are Mister or Ms. Bad News. The judgmental ones are right.

In our day, though, we’ve got plenty of judgmental people (and I’d have to include myself among them), but we don’t agree on what to be judgmental about.

Jeremiah found the presence of shrines to other gods in the nation of Judah profoundly troubling. Me, I don’t. It’s trite to say that some of my best friends are Buddhists, but it’s also true that some of my best friends are Buddhists. I’m quite content to let them remain Buddhists as they continue to be kind and compassionate people.

Jeremiah found the abuse of the poor by the powerful to be profoundly troubling. As do I. The gap between rich and poor was probably greater in the sixth century before Jesus than it is now, but it’s much too big now and it’s getting bigger. I am not content to see this nation and this world torn apart by systems that reward a few and impoverish many.

There are plenty of modern-day religious leaders who berate us for living in a religiously pluralistic society. They tell us we should all be Christian. They tell us to remove the Buddhists, the Jews, the Muslims (especially the Muslims), the animists, the Wiccans, the Taoists, the anybody else. Jeremiah might have been there with them. I’m not.

Plenty of these same modern-day religious leaders praise the accomplishments of wealthy individuals. They’ll tell you that wealth is the inevitable result of virtue, and therefore wealthy people are, by definition, virtuous. I think I’ve mentioned before that I think this is really poor theology. I’ll actually call it heresy. Jeremiah would have agreed.

So who’s right? How will we know?

For Christians, there’s a complicating factor. We can’t say that good prophecy comes exclusively from Mr. or Ms. Bad News because… Jesus. Jesus insisted on speaking Good News. I grant you that his good news could be hard on the wealthy, and it could be challenging for the powerful, but there it was: Good News.

I’m not doing well at telling you how to distinguish between the prophets and the charlatans, am I?

Debie Thomas has some wisdom at JourneyWithJesus.net: “As God’s messengers in the world, we are not at liberty to soften the Gospel for the sake of our own likeability.  Jesus has not commissioned us to say whatever is trendy or comfortable or easy or popular.  He has commissioned us to say what is true.  False hope is not God’s hope.  Easy peace is not God’s peace.  And convenient justice is not God’s justice.”

I think I can authoritatively say that if the message benefits a few and burdens many, it’s not God’s justice. If the message promises peace without the hard work of rebuilding broken relationships, it’s not God’s peace. If the hope is entirely disconnected from the reality of today, it’s not God’s hope. If the promise is built on lie after lie after lie, it’s not God’s truth.

Hananiah broke Jeremiah’s symbolic yoke and the prophet went away. The leaders and the people of the nation had made their choice, and they continued to make their poor choices until King Zedekiah’s rebelled about ten years later, resulting in the destruction of the nation and the burning of Solomon’s Temple. Zedekiah’s rule was built on injustice. It was built on violence. It was built on fantasy. It was built on lies. It resulted in disaster, as Jeremiah had foreseen.

May we choose better. May we choose truth.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches – intentionally and otherwise – so the sermon as he wrote it is not precisely the sermon as he spoke it.

The image is The Prophet Jeremiah by Piero della Francesca (ca. 1452) – http://www.wga.hu, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8013834.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Inclination of the Heart

What did God see in David’s heart to choose him? We don’t know. We can only try to imitate his courage, compassion, and mercy (and not his flaws).

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the sixteenth chapter of First Samuel (1 Samuel 16:1-13): the anointing of David.

At the beginning of this section, God spoke to Samuel, the chief prophet of the day, and said it was time to move on from King Saul. Saul had been selected to be the first monarch of Israel, and God and Samuel had become increasingly disappointed with his conduct and his character.

It was time to move on. It was time to select Saul’s successor. This would be — was — an act of rebellion, one that would eventually move into a lengthy civil war between Saul and Saul’s successor.

God directed Samuel to the house of Jesse, a resident of Bethlehem, because Saul’s successor was to be found amongst Jesse’s sons. You might remember this part of the story: one by one Jesse presented his sons to Samuel. One by one Samuel looked at them and said, “This young man looks like a king.” Each time God said, “This is not the one. Human beings see with the eyes, but God sees into the human heart.”

Eventually Jesse presented his youngest, David. “This one,” said God, and Samuel anointed him.

I do wonder what it was that God saw in David’s heart that God did not see in the hearts of Jesse’s other sons. Certainly David displayed a lot of desirable characteristics as we moved through the story. He was brave. He was compassionate. He could be generous and kind. Were those things not in the hearts of the others?

It is also true that David displayed some of the worst of humanity, especially as he became king and lived into that power. He committed sexual assault. He connived at murder. Were these things not in the hearts of his brothers?

The story doesn’t say.

I do think that the potential for evil dwells in the hearts of any human being. I also think the potential to do good dwells in the hearts of any human being. So what was it that God looked for? What was it that God saw?

I think it was not just potential. I think it was inclination. Which way was David likely to go as compared to his brothers, as compared to anybody else? Was he just a bit more likely to choose the paths of righteousness, of courage and generosity of mercy, than were his older brothers? Again, the story doesn’t say except by describing the things that David did later in life.

I hope that each of us will remember how much we can and can’t see when looking upon our brothers and sisters, our family of humanity. I hope that each of us will make our judgments based on what is revealed of character through choices, decisions, and action. And I hope that each of us will, to be honest, do better than David, that we will each emulate his compassion and mercy and keep away from the sins that he committed.

May we each find ourselves viewed in the heart by God, and may God be satisfied with what is there.

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: In the World; In the Truth

May 12, 2024

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
John 17:6-19

Jesus raised this prayer to God at the end of the Last Supper, after a long address to his gathered followers. He’d called them his friends. He’d warned them of his impending separation from them. He’d told them to love one another. He’d promised them the comfort and support of the Holy Spirit.

Then he prayed for them. Debie Thomas, writing at JourneyWithJesus.net, calls the prayer “long, rambling, and rather hard to follow. And though the disciples are meant to overhear the words, Jesus’s tone has an urgency and passion to it that is achingly private. Jesus isn’t engaging in a teaching moment with this Lord’s Prayer; he’s rending his heart.”

Most of the Gospel writers didn’t spend much time with emotion, except for confusion, I suppose. John, in contrast, lingered with Jesus in his pain and sorrow, and with the disciples in their fear and anguish. Beyond that, however, John lingered with Jesus’ deep care for his friends, the love that is emotional. As David Lose writes at DavidLose.net, “Prayer is love. Taking the time to name the hopes, joys, concerns, fears, and thanksgiving of someone you know and bring all of that into the presence of God through prayer is an act of love, plain and simple. It expresses your care, your concern, and your compassion for the one(s) for whom you are praying. And it expresses your trust that they are as important to God as they are to you. Prayer is love. It’s that simple.”

That equivalence might be simple – and I do think Dr. Lose is right to equate prayer and love, and certainly in this passage – but neither prayer nor love are simple in themselves, and they aren’t simple in this passage, either. Jesus said his disciples came from the world, but that they did not belong to the world, and that the world hated them. Despite the world’s hatred, he didn’t ask God to remove them from the world, but to protect them in the world – but such protection had to have its limits. Jesus asked God to sanctify them in the word, in the truth, but he knew and the disciples knew and we know that life in the world as it is makes truth a difficult thing to discern, to understand, and to maintain. Like the ‘amakihi, we come to the ohi’a flower ignorant of its flavor. Like the ‘amakihi, we can be misled by others’ malice, and persuaded not to taste what is good. Like the ‘amakihi, we can even find ourselves feeling sorry for those who know what is good and pursue it when we, in our ignorance and in our acceptance of others’ mistruths, observe without understanding.

We live in the world, but as followers of Jesus we are also not people of the world. We live amidst ignorance, our own and that of others, while we are people of the truth. We live subject to lies and fraud even as we struggle to bear witness to the truth.

In the world; in the truth. It’s a strange place to be, a strange way to live, a strange dance to dance.

Susan Hedahl writes at Working Preacher, “From the perspective of the biblical text, the world signifies the origin of the disciples. They did not come from outside of society but from inside of it, from the everyday people. However, in belonging to Jesus, the disciples have been separated from the world. Still, they must continue to do ministry in it (cf. John 17:18).

“But what exactly is ‘the world?’ It should not be defined to mean a place antithetical to the goodness of creation. Rather, it is the persons and forces opposed or indifferent to the things of God embodied in Jesus.”

The created order, in and of itself, is not the problem. Genesis asserts that God created, and what God created was and is good. That means that ignorance, in and of itself, is also not a problem, or at least it’s not an intractable one. The ‘amakihi didn’t know that ohi’a was good. All he had to do was try it to find out whether it was or not. Because he didn’t make that test, he remained ignorant. But if he had made that test, if he’d followed the guidance of his nose (I would guess that ohi’a flowers smell pretty good to an ‘amakihi), or the example of the other birds feeding on the lehua, he would have learned something and been glad to know it.

Learning can be a wonderful thing.

Lies, on the other hand, are not.

As Melissa Bane Sevier writes in her blog, “When lies are passed off as truth, when sexual misconduct and gun violence garner a shrug, when the ones Jesus loved the most are refused adequate access to healthcare, when those fleeing terror and tyranny are denied refuge, when the environment is sacrificed for greed, and when all these things are defended by religion, then our concepts of κόσμως collide.”

“Kosmos” is the Greek word John used and which has been translated as “world.”

My purpose today is not to encourage you to tell the truth. I am in favor of it, to be clear. Tell the truth. It’s a Good Thing.

My purpose today is to encourage you to discern the truth, and to maintain the truth, and to cling to the truth amidst all the efforts other make, have made, and will make to shake you from it or pull you away from it. We people of the truth are surrounded by people who will mislead or misinform or encourage us to misinterpret – and yes, people who will tell out and out lies in order to defraud or defame.

Test the things you hear, or read, or see, friends. Compare one assertion to another. Is this new thing you’ve heard consistent with other things you know? Is it supported by facts? Is there a larger or smaller number of people who believe it?

Majority belief is not a guarantee of truthfulness, not even close. In the world of science, it took a long time to verify some of the things Albert Einstein proposed in physics – and Einstein himself objected to developments in physics that have since been experimentally affirmed. Look at Christian accounts of the news of Jesus’ resurrection. For a period of time on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene may have been the only person who knew the truth, that he had risen – and nobody else believed her.

Still: check to see what others know or believe.

Could somebody know what they claim to know? That’s a harder question in these days of free-floating information, but a lot of the claims people make on the Internet make me wonder: Who could know this? If someone claims to know what somebody else is thinking, but they’ve quoted no speeches or public statements, if they’ve had no direct experience with the person, if there’s no writing or correspondence to quote, well. How do they know what they say they know?

Employ the old Roman question, “Cui bono?” “Who benefits?” Attributed to a Roman judge named Lucius Cassius, “Who benefits?” helps us to decide the likelihood of someone attempting to mislead. Somebody saying something that doesn’t benefit them is more likely to be telling the truth, or at least the truth as they understand it. Somebody saying something that does benefit them – particularly if it’s something that’s contradicted by other sources – well, they’re more likely to be lying.

A corollary, of course, is to know the history of someone and their habits of truth-telling. One of the well-known stories attributed to the Greek storyteller Aesop is that of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” In the tale, a shepherd would get lonely, holler that there was a wolf, and the villagers would come up and he’d have company. Eventually they recognized his habit of lying, so they stopped coming – and, of course, that’s when the wolf came.

Somebody with a habit of lying might be telling the truth. But you’d better approach those assertions with a good amount of skepticism and a lot of tests.

And pray.

I’m not urging prayer so much as a search for definitive answers. Personally, I’ve managed to deceive myself in prayer more than once, convinced that God was telling me something that, in the end, I had to admit came from my own voice. That first group of Christians used casting lots to make room for God to influence the selection of a twelfth apostle, but I note that they’d already done their work to make sure God chose between two solid candidates.

I urge prayer to settle your soul in the pursuit of truth with the One who has called you to Truth. I urge prayer to affirm your commitment, and to calm the emotions that can distract you. I urge prayer because, first and last, the search for truth is a sacred task, a holy occupation, a prayerful endeavor. I urge prayer to that God may hold you gently and guide you firmly.

We live with ignorance. We live with lies. We live firmly in the world.

We also live as seekers of the truth. Seek, my friends. Seek: and find.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches. Sometimes they’re improvements, but they’re always differences.

The image is La Ultima Cena (the Last Supper) by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo – http://sitevasari.free.fr/Vasari/Tableaux/IMAGES/M/Murillo/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84355889.