Jeremiah 2:31-37 "Prone to Wander . . ." Scott Hoezee

During the 1930s many people wanted to believe the best about Adolf Hitler. Few could stomach the thought of another war--the memories of the Great War were still vividly burning in the minds of many in Europe and America. So many denied Hitler's rather obvious megalomania, denied his raw hunger for German breathing space and the expansion of the Vaterland. Even more distressing, however, were those who did acknowledge some of Hitler's true character but who nevertheless found ways to embrace him, accept him.

On May 19, 1933, columnist Walter Lippmann wrote an article in the New York Herald Tribune, reporting on a speech he had heard Chancellor Hitler deliver in Germany some days earlier. Lippmann praised Hitler's statesmanlike manner, claiming that Hitler was clearly the very embodiment of the same civilized people who had produced Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, and Schiller. Yes, Lippmann noted, the Germans did seem hungry for territorial expansion. Yes, there appeared to be some fairly obvious harassment of Jews going on in Germany. But not to worry, Lippmann soothed his readers' minds: those Jews were serving a useful purpose by slaking the German thirst for conquest. The Jews, he suggested, were a kind of "lightning rod which protects Europe." In short, better the Jews in Germany suffer than the Dutch in Holland or the Poles in Poland. If Hitler needs to slap someone around, let him so slap the Jews. Lippmann, by the way, was himself Jewish.

Some weeks ago we pondered sin in its more aggressive, attack mode in the form of blasphemy when we thought about the day the Pharisees directly called Jesus a devil. Sin can take such overt, titanic forms which involve a frontal assault on goodness. But sin can just as often, and just as devastatingly, take the form of flight, of wandering, of turning aside and just letting evil go. You don't need to attack the truth to do damage--sometimes simple evasion will do the trick. You deny what you know, shuck responsibility, duck your head.

In its flight mode sin happens through sheer inactivity, not activity. We later claim we didn't notice wasn't going on, or we did notice but didn't want to interfere. In the Lippmann example we see a classic example of sin as flight or evasion. Contained in that story are three key characteristics of this kind of sin: conniving, minimizing, and cocooning. First Lippmann connived by looking the other way in the face of glaring evil. At the same time Lippmann made a left-handed acknowledgment of what Hitler was doing but then minimized it. Finally, Lippmann encouraged Americans to cocoon, to believe that so long as we and most of Europe were safe, we could ignore what was happening in Germany.

Lippmann, of course, was hardly alone in this. England's Neville Chamberlain persisted in such thoughts for years until it was finally too late. Winston Churchill could not get his countrymen's attention in those years leading up to World War II. The Members of Parliament likewise preferred to connive, minimize, and cocoon, leaving London for their country houses each weekend and ignoring Hitler's multiple invasions of other nations. As Churchill sneeringly once said, "The members of Parliament take their weekends in the country while Hitler takes his countries on the weekend."

Jeremiah knew all about this face of sin. Israel's great prophet of lament was well aware of how people could willfully wander from God and so forget God's words. Once they put some distance between themselves and God they would commit terrible sins. But then later they would claim innocence insofar as God had not been close by enough to prevent their sin so how could they have known any better!? Israel was like the man who murdered both parents but then begged the court for clemency seeing as he was, after all, an orphan! Israel scattered from God's presence, acting as though the bright lushness of God's holy indwelling of Israel were a desert, a place of darkness, the kind of place you move out of for some place better. In truth, God was Israel's oasis and the rest of the world was the harsh wilderness. Israel conveniently reversed that, believing the lie that the oases of life were elsewhere. So they wandered away from God.

First they drifted away and so forgot what God had said. Once this self-imposed spiritual amnesia was in place, they sinned with abandon and yet claimed they hadn't known any better to begin with so how could they be blamed, criticized, or judged?!

So much of this particular facet to sin depends on self-deception. We convince ourselves that we don't know any better--that maybe we never knew any better--even though deep, deep down we know this is untrue. The farther we wander from God, the more distant the light of God's presence becomes. The more daylight we put between God's Spirit and ourselves, the easier it is to believe that no matter what happens in our lives, we ourselves are not at fault. How could I, after all, be expected to know or do any better? First we willingly wander off into the darkness, and then we blame God for not providing us with any light by which to see.

But let's get a bit more specific. When we flee God, what kinds of things can and often do take place? Well, for one thing we become more vulnerable to peer pressure. We conform to the group we're in. We go along to get along. We avoid rocking the proverbial boat. We willingly surrender our conscience to the larger group and later claim we had no choice but to go along with the pack. "Everybody was doing it, Mom" the teenager cries. In the face of the collective, what choice did we have but to toggle off our personal responsibility? Someone, somewhere is doubtless responsible--probably even someone else in that collective pack we were running in. Somebody in there is guilty, but it's not me.

That is one form that sin as flight can take but another are those conniving and minimizing aspects we mentioned a few moments ago. We feign ignorance and deny the truth. In the past I have mentioned the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya, who was jailed during the Soviet years for her dissident poetry. While spending time in the gulag, Ratushinskaya and the other women were often threatened with the extra harsh punishment of shizo: a kind of solitary confinement whose physical rigors were fierce enough, the gulag officials warned the women again and again and again, as to render a woman sterile. Over the years Ratushinskaya herself spent 120 days in the confinement of shizo and sure enough in later years found herself unable to have children. Of course, now the same officials who used to threaten female prisoners with this side-effect claim with a straight face that there could never possibly be any connection between shizo and infertility. Shizo, they now say, was boring, yes, but harsh enough to cause infertility? Preposterous!

Other examples of sin as wandering and fleeing from the truth could be multiplied. Giant corporations are able to function as well as they do because they employ large numbers of people who are organized in a complicated hierarchical structure. Such a structure allows corporations to function. But that very same structure can be used to let responsibility fall between the desks when something goes wrong. When Firestone tires were rolling along nicely, the company had no difficulty claiming full credit for their longstanding, superior product. You don't produce quality tires like that by accident, after all!

But then SUVs started rolling over in fatal accidents. Suddenly the highways were littered with rubber that had peeled off Firestone tires the way the skin slips off an onion. And suddenly the folks at Firestone all but claimed they had nothing to do with tire production! It was Ford's fault for making those tippy SUVs. It was Ford's fault for telling people to under-inflate the tires. Meanwhile Ford said that Firestone said it was fine by them to under-inflate, and anyway didn't most of those bad tires come from a factory that had been run for weeks by temporary workers while the regular employees were on strike?! Everybody in both firms did absolutely everything right. No one did a thing wrong. So how come close to 200 people are dead? The answer seems to be the collective shrug of hundreds of shoulders attached to people in expensive suits.

Sometimes we connive, sometimes we minimize, sometimes we scapegoat. But at others times we quite literally take flight, hit the road. Absentee fathers leave town and never again speak to mother or child. Then there are those who, though they never leave home, they nevertheless become so wrapped up in their own little worlds as to ignore responsibilities at home or at church. "Not enough hours in the day, not enough days in the week," we exclaim, and so we convince ourselves that we are victims of an earth that turns too quickly, of watches that run too fast.

Or we can cocoon, insulate ourselves from the problems of our world by holding difficult matters at arm's length. Television informs us of one tragedy after the next and yet we feel no compulsion to do anything about it. The news folks are not telling you this stuff so that you'll do something about it but to keep you watching. If you actually got up off your couch to go do something about what you've just seen, CNN would lose a viewer. If that happened often enough, their ratings would sink. And then what!?

We wander, we flee, we run, we hide, but in and through it all what we do above all is put some distance between ourselves and our own responsibility. Ultimately and chillingly, however, what we also do is put distance between ourselves and the God who knows (with a certainty that makes us squirm) precisely how responsible we really are. We want to say, "I didn't know any better," but God keeps saying, "By my Word and Spirit I long ago told you better!" We want to say, "I didn't realize what was happening," but God keeps saying, "I made you smarter than that!" We want to say, "It was someone else's fault," but God keeps saying, "I was watching you the whole time--want to know what I saw?"

Frighteningly, even those of us who would never dream of attacking God or actively doing anything to alienate ourselves from God may nevertheless find that by evading the truth we end up evading Him who is the way, the life, and the truth. So how can we combat this particular feature to the sin that constantly is making a grab for our hearts? Allow me to close this evening with three inter-related suggestions.

First, if one of the darker effects of wandering from God is the kind of spiritual amnesia Israel claimed in Jeremiah 2, then perhaps one way to combat this is to remember God by staying in touch with God's Word. When we thought about the corrupting aspect of sin last Sunday evening, we suggested that a way to avoid the fragmentation of corruption is to maintain good spiritual hygiene. We also said that one of the key practices of such hygiene is pondering and knowing God's Word. So also here: we are less likely to forget God (and so less likely to feign ignorance) if we are regular students of the patterns of creation and of God's desires for this creation.

A second idea is to accept our assignment as God's imagebearers, and to do so overtly. We are not perfect or all-knowing beings. There are plenty of things of which we are genuinely ignorant at any given moment. There are plenty of times when we make mistakes out of complete ignorance, too. But what we cannot forget is that we have been created by God in ways that make us irretrievably responsible. We don't know everything, but we know a lot, particularly about situations related to our work, to our own families, and to the choices we ourselves have made in times past. We cannot always claim ignorance, cannot always say we didn't know any better. Often we did, and deep down we know it.

The more you willingly (and delightfully) dwell in God's light, the tougher it is to hide anything. We cannot cocoon ourselves in front of the TV and say that we really didn't know that maybe we should do something about what we see. When you live in the wide open spaces of God's all-embracing love and compassion, you cannot wrap yourself up into some self-absorbed wad of ego and claim that you never realized you yourself were likewise to be compassionate toward those with AIDS, toward the starving or the homeless.

None of that will do for people who bear striking resemblance to the God of the universe. None of that will do for people whose knowledge of God's loving compassion is regularly fed by their study of that God's Word. None of our feigned ignorance, none of our blinkered tunnel vision, none of our supposedly limp moral paralysis in the face of peer pressure will cut it with God. Whenever we find ourselves wishing we could deny the spark of the divine in us, then we can know we are headed for trouble.

Third and finally, we need to be on guard against self-deceptive, self-protective patterns of speech. Do we sometimes (or maybe often) find ourselves saying things like, "I was only following orders. Business is business. Everybody's doing it. That wasn't my area of responsibility in the firm. I didn't want to make waves. Wouldn't have made any difference if I had spoken up. Not my problem. These things happen--whaddya want me to do about it!? Yeah, well, don't expect me to change the world, you know!" The more we find ourselves saying things like this, the more likely it is we are evading something.

Lewis Smedes once wrote that seldom does evil attempt a wholesale takeover of a person's heart in one fell swoop. Rather, the devil's more typical style is to whittle away at us, slicing a sliver of conscience here and shaving a wisp of integrity there. We are enticed to make little compromises with the larger deceits around us until one day we discover that we have vacated the control center of our hearts. Suddenly we find it difficult to distinguish the truth for a lie, and oddly we find it difficult to look God in the eye, too.

Perhaps a similar but opposite tack can combat such a gradual takeover. Day by day we can open ourselves up to the Holy Spirit to help us combat sins large and small. Perhaps a key way to prevent ourselves from evading God is to let ourselves be again and again invaded by God's Spirit. Perhaps we need to find ways when sitting behind our desks, fixing mufflers in the shop, and working in the kitchen to let thoughts about God intrude upon our minds. Maybe the more we look for ways actively to make connections between our Christian identity and our workaday world, the more we will minimize the possibility of our trying to claim ignorance or of just letting things slide day after day, week after week.

These are not easy suggestions. Many of us find our minds plenty crowded as it is--the last thing you need to hear your pastor suggest is finding still other items with which to be occupied when a million other things are clamoring for your attention most days as it is. Perhaps hearing me say this tempts you to respond, "Give me a break! You can't expect me to think that way, to try seeing everything through the lens of my faith! That's not my job. I'll leave theological reflections to pastors and professors. I've got enough going on." But that very reaction is just another example of flight, of wandering from God.

According to an old legend, three demons once came to try to conquer the world. The first one tried to sway people's hearts by loudly proclaiming, "There is no God!" But most did not believe so obvious an assault on God. The second demon wooed people with the cry, "There is no sin!" But too many people kept noticing what was in the newspaper every day fully to buy that line. The last demon, however, took a different tack. He knew that many people believed in both God and sin. So he decided not to cry out anything but merely to whisper into people's ears, "There is no hurry!" And this demon won the hearts of untold throngs of people who were only to happy to relax and wait things out. Amen.