I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, "I have dreamed, I have dreamed!"… but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully.…Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?

            As I recall, I first tasted the wrath of God in third grade.  My friend Donny Blanchard and I missed the afternoon school bus and decided to walk home.  Actually, Donny was in fifth grade, and it was all his idea, but I have to admit I went along with it.  The walk was longer than either of us realized, and included a very unpleasant stretch of highway.  Miraculously, we made it home, nearly two and a half hours later, and there my troubles began. 

            I soon learned this had really been the wrong thing to do.  My mother was beside herself with worry and grief, a reaction which changed in a heartbeat to something else which I will talk about in a minute.  That would have been bad enough were it not for the additional problems posed by who we were.  At the time, my father was vice chief of the Strategic Air Command, and Donny’s dad was commander of the Eighth Air Force.  This was in the middle of the Cold War, and lost children of general officers were considered a matter of national security.  So when we did show up at the gates of Offutt Air Force Base, we caused considerable consternation, were ushered into police cars and whisked off to our quarters where my mother greeted me, relieved, mortified, and, very suddenly, livid.  I don’t think I will ever get her expression out of my memory.  She got down on my level and put her face about three inches from mine.  Her eyes were narrow, she was flushed, trembling, and her breath was hot.  I felt my legs turn to jelly.  She put her finger in front of my nose and wagged it sternly in time with her words, “Don’t you ever—EVER—do anything like that again—EVER, do you understand me?!”  Somehow I managed to stammer out a “Yes, ma’am,” but part of me wanted to die right there, and I thought I well might!  Surely, in the words of Jeremiah, her word was like fire, and like a hammer to break the rock in pieces.  Years later when I first read this passage, I remembered the incident and thought, God had nothing on my mother. 

            Now, I raise this because the very idea of an angry God has gone out of fashion in mainline Christianity.  Even though the wrath and judgment of God are everywhere in Scripture, we seem embarrassed by it; I hear all the time the notion that this is an image of an “Old Testament God”, not the God of the New Testament who is a God of kindness and niceness.  The Gospel reading Marc read, ought to throw cold water on that idea for any of you who cling to it, and I assure you there are plenty more where that came from.  Just as the Hebrew Scriptures are an abundant witness to God’s generosity and grace, so the Christian canon frequently shows the stern face of God.  Actually, there are nearly forty references to God’s wrath, or similar expressions, in the New Testament, but you won’t hear them much in church since the overwhelming majority of them were expunged from the lectionary of the 1979 Prayer Book in our progressive effort to mandate anger management for the Most High.  And that is a shame.  We need the anger and the judgment of God, in the same way I needed my mother’s wrath on that particularly bad day in third grade, for the simple reason that this kind of wrath and judgment is the evidence of God’s love, rather than a denial of it.

            For God is furious at the things in us that would take away our lives or make us less than he intended us to be or that motivate us to use each other and the created order in the fulfillment of our own narcissism.  He is outraged by our injustice, beside himself over our petty dishonesties, our greed and selfishness; he is livid, always, on behalf of his little ones, unremittingly angry about the atrocities we visit upon the poor and over the way we insulate ourselves from these realities, whether they are at our doorstep or half a world away, as if we were sleep walking.  Most interestingly he is angry at our self-involved anger, the wrath of the world, the way we take umbrage over our offended pride, our personal rights, and use that anger to victimize others or to stand aloof from their need.  And God is especially riled up when his name is used to justify any of this behavior.  That is why Jeremiah inveighs against the false prophets, the “dreamers” as he puts it, who manufacture a word from the Lord out of their subjective experience and deliver it to the people as if they were speaking for God.  We know from other passages that these preachers of Jeremiah’s time were specialists in telling the people what they wanted to hear; even though the society was rotting through with corruption, idolatry, and the oppression of the poor.  The pulpits were full of fanciful spirituality aimed at helping people avoid the truth.  Jeremiah was the lone exception, much to the resentment of his colleagues.  His point was that the word of God has a power no other word can equal:  that is how you recognize it—power to change the way things are, to awaken people to who they are and what they ought to be about, power (in the words of the Puritans) to convict people of sin, bring them to repentance, and start them down the road of reforming their lives.  Merely human agendas are not interested in these things; they would rather flatter us, trivialize our concerns, or lull us back to sleep when we are in danger of waking up to the genuinely frightening condition of our own souls and the world around us.  Jeremiah took the way of the honest preacher, and paid for it all his life.  Jesus followed his example, and paid even more.  But, especially in Jesus’ case, the sacrifice was worth it, when you consider the results. 

            The “results” can best be appreciated through the lens of the two thorniest questions tied to the wrath of God.  The first is, how do we square the judgment of God with his love?  The answer to this is easier than we might think.  It was because I knew my mother loved me that her wrath was effective; it corrected me without crushing me, as the letter to the Hebrews suggests is always the way of love: discipline that chastens but does not kill.  “O think me worth thine anger … so that I may see thy face,” the poet and preacher John Donne once rhapsodized in prayer.  We generally don’t want to go anywhere near this kind of talk, because so many of us have experienced truly dreadful things at the hands of abusive teachers of religion, and I am not in any way countenancing such practices.  But the healing of this sort of experience does not lie in pretending that true love is without wrath.  Jesus himself reserved special wrath for the teachers of religion who would “bind a heavy burden on the backs of the people, and lift not a finger to help them carry it.”  In fact, our very outrage over these horrors is a clue to God’s own anger, which is always on the side of the innocent.  Having said this, however, we must also say that the witness of Scripture declares unequivocally that wrath is not enough; if we are to be changed for the good, what we need in the face of our sin is not only God’s anger, but God’s mercy.  In fact, we need God’s mercy in a way that puts an end to his wrath.  That is the mystery of the Cross:  God in human form offering himself in the satisfaction of God’s own justice.  Isaiah puts it this way:  “By his wounds he reconciled us.  Upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and by his stripes, we are healed.” This is the offering that silences the judgment that stands against us, more than we ourselves can ever give, so that God’s mercy may have clear ground in our hearts to work the changes in us that only His mercy can accomplish, to turn us into a people of repentance, joy, discernment, humility and charity, mindful of our own failings, angry at the right things, bold in the word of truth, and always merciful and compassionate to all those around us who, after all, like us, are simply doing the best they can to find their way along the road of life.  

            That brings us to the second question:  if God is so angry at the horrors of this world, then why doesn’t he do more about it?  Why does he allow people to be torn to pieces by disease, by accidents, and by our own human cruelty?  Why do the wicked prosper while the innocent suffer and the rest of us stand by watching?  I will address only one aspect of this mystery for the moment.  We are what God is doing about the horrors of this world.  We are the ones called to preach the word of the Gospel, life-changing and life-giving, to the ends of the earth, teaching people to observe all that Christ has commanded us.  We are those called to act like Christians and not just talk like Christians.  To the extent we do not do this, we are part of the horror, worse even than the dreamers of Jeremiah’s day, since we claim to know the Savior whom they did not.  But to the extent that we allow ourselves to walk as a people awake in the world, guided not by our own dreams, but by the incarnate and risen word of God who is Jesus Christ, filled with his Spirit and obedient to him, we have the power to end the horror.  For if the word of God’s judgment is like fire, like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces, we should not be surprised to find that the word of the Cross which puts an end to this judgment is stronger still; that it can open graves, raise the dead, give hope to the hopeless, heal the sick at heart, overturn in a moment the condemnation of a lifetime, in the twinkling of an eye bring a man, a woman, a child out of the shadow of death into God’s marvelous light, if we will only believe it, share it, and act upon it.   We who bear this word in the world have really only one choice before us all the time, one theme to govern our prayer, one temptation and one promise continually to lay before the throne of grace and ask God’s power to conquer and fulfill: shall we dream our own dream, or shall we hear the living and active word of God, be doers of it, and so conquer the wrath of the world with the love of Christ, in whose name all things are possible?