Robert Barron - A Fire in the Heart
Peace be with you. Friends, whenever I have the chance, I love to preach on the prophet Jeremiah. And our first reading for this weekend is from the twentieth chapter of Jeremiah. There's obviously, in Jeremiah, so much spiritual wisdom and all of that, but more than any of the other prophets, we come to know him. His personality comes through. There's more about the life of the prophet Jeremiah, and in some ways, that's the point. In some ways, it's the very unfolding of his life that bears the message he has. The thing about Jeremiah is he's by turns majestic and deeply wise and afraid and angry and frustrated.
You see the whole range of emotion. See, don't think of Jeremiah the prophet as just this guy that from the beginning had it totally together and just was sending out oracles of truth in every direction. He was this person like us, conflicted and confused sometimes, and in the presence of God but not knowing what that means, and afraid of its implications, and all of it. Think of that wonderful passage of the call of Jeremiah. He's a very young man. I mean, the scholars guess he might've been just fifteen or sixteen when he was called. You'll find this at almost every ordination ceremony, this passage when the Lord calls him and Jeremiah says, "Look, Lord, I'm just too young. Believe me, you don't want me". And God says, "Don't say you're too young. I have chosen you".
So from the beginning, he's hesitant, kind of unsure of what the Lord wants. And then the Lord gives him this terrible burden. He doesn't say, "Hey Jeremiah, you're going to announce wonderful, good news, and because of it, you're going to be the most popular person in Israel". On the contrary, on the contrary, he's given a terrible message to deliver, which is Israel is going to fall under God's judgment. God's going to use the Babylonians to punish Israel for its infidelity, its idolatry, its mistreatment of the poor, and there's no escaping it. All they can do really is accept this judgment, surrender to this foreign invader, and accept their exile and defeat.
That's the message. That's the message. Did it make him popular? No; on the contrary, everyone hated Jeremiah. What's one of his nicknames? "Terror on every side," because as he looked around, that's what he heard and saw. The threat of Babylon, yes, that God told him to announce, but also the terror coming from his contemporaries who were so angry with his message. Moreover, they didn't listen to him. So let's say he was like Jonah the prophet. Jonah announces you must repent, and Nineveh repents. They accept it. Even the cattle wear sackcloth. I mean, Jonah is the most successful prophet in the history of Israel.
Jeremiah, the opposite. They don't listen to him. They persecute him. They throw him down in the cisterns. And we don't know this for sure, but very likely he was put to death by his own people. So that's the prophetic career that he has. So with that in mind, listen to the opening line of our passage for this weekend. This is Jeremiah himself speaking: "You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped; you were too strong for me, and you triumphed. All the day I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me".
So this is not someone who is standing serenely in the presence of God, offering a simple word of praise to the most high. This is someone who's saying, "Look, you made me a prophet, but it amounted to being duped, like I was taken advantage of here. You gave me this terrible burden, and now I'm bearing it and everybody hates me". Listen as he goes on: "Whenever I speak, I must cry out, violence and outrage is my message". Right, that's the message he was given to say. "The word of the LORD has brought me derision and reproach all the day". Talk about a "cri de coeur," as the French say, a cry from the heart. This is the religious person, if you want, announcing the word of God in the midst of a culture, in the midst of a people, that doesn't want to hear it.
Now, when you put it that way, does it begin to sound pretty familiar? To be a religious person in the midst of a culture that does not want to hear the word of God? Now, I've had a lot of experience with this. I've been doing this preaching work on the internet. And yeah, look, it's wonderful, and yes, you reach all kinds of people in great ways, but let's admit it, the Western culture today is not exactly open to religion. It's pretty skeptical, pretty critical of religion.
I started doing this work not long after the New Atheists emerged, so Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris and Dennett and all those people. What was Hitchens' famous book, bestseller in 2005 or whatever? "Religion Poisons Everything". So religion is a bunch of Bronze Age mythology. It's clinging to old pre-scientific nonsense. It's superstition, it's child abuse, it's misleading people. And trust me when I tell you, the disciples of Hitchens and company are very thick on the ground. If you are doing your work on the internet today, you meet this extraordinary opposition. Moreover, try speaking now the behavioral implications of a religious point of view.
So talking about God and all that is one thing, but now start talking about how your life should change because of your religious beliefs. Try speaking today in the public forum about the infinite dignity of every person from conception to natural death. Good luck. Talk about terror on every side. We live in a culture, of course, that's largely calling for abortion on demand up until and even beyond the moment of birth. We have a culture where in many, many states in our country, euthanasia is a given; state-sponsored killing of the elderly now, even if your life is not immediately threatened.
Now, you stand up and say, "Well, the Lord has commissioned me to say that human life should be respected from conception to natural death". You'll start feeling like Jeremiah pretty quickly, seems to me. Try urging that everybody, black, Hispanic, Asian, immigrant, Muslim, gay, everybody, should be cherished and respected. Try saying that in every corner of our society today, which is basic to a biblical perspective. At the same time, try saying to people who are completely bent on the ideology of selfcreation that you've got certain moral responsibilities, that there's a structure to your moral and sexual life that has to be respected. Try saying that in the public forum. Good luck.
As I say, in a culture that is constantly affirming, "No, no, it's totally up to me; it's my prerogative to determine who I am and how I live," try announcing that there are realobjective moral values that ought to be governing the way we live. You'll hear terror on every side pretty quickly. You know what you're going to hear? Listen again to Jeremiah: "All the day I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me... the word of the LORD has brought me derision and reproach all the day". I mean self-pitying maybe a little bit, but not far from the truth, especially in the West today when you announce religious values.
Okay, so you're saying, "All right, Bishop, that's a pretty depressing message". Well, in a way, yes, I'm trying to move into the space of Jeremiah because that's where he lived. He didn't live in a space of success. He didn't find joyful success in the work he was doing. He found derision and mockery and rejection. Okay, okay, so therefore we give up? No. And here now is the last and in some ways most important part of this message. Having said all of that, and I'm not going to gainsay a word of it, having said all of that, the terror-on-every-side dimension of being a prophet, listen to what he says: "I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it".
Terrific. This is now the other side of the Jeremiah experience. All of the negativity, he's completely upfront about it; doesn't hide it, doesn't disassemble, doesn't pretend it's not there. No, no, no. He fully acknowledges that. And he's tempted. You can hear it. He's tempted to say, "I give up. I'm not going to do this anymore". I've sensed it. I think anyone who's been involved in preaching and teaching in a public way has felt that. "I mean, forget it, I've had it. It's too much criticism. I just want to withdraw". "But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it".
What's the word of God like? It's like this fire. The prophets often use that image of consuming the scroll of the word of God, and it's like honey in the mouth. It's the sweetness of the word of God. And there is something about it, everybody, when you turn to the Scriptures; you take in this word, which I know, I know, is often deeply challenging, but you can't resist it. What does St. Paul say? He was very much a Jeremiah figure too, wasn't he? St. Paul. Always meeting with success? On the contrary. They stoned him and they chased him out of cities and they persecuted him. They finally put him to death. I mean, Paul had the same experience Jeremiah did, but yet Paul can say, "Woe to me if I do not evangelize".
Same thing, that the word of God got so deep into St.Paul that he could not, not evangelize. That's Jeremiah too. "How could I keep this in? It's like a fire in me". Well, that's the space, everybody, that all prophets have to move into. And I've said this to you before, but it's basic Catholic doctrine that every single baptized person is anointed priest, king, and prophet. Your priesthood is exercised every time you go to Mass, every time you pray, every time you intercede; that's your priesthood. Kingship, every time you order things toward the kingdom of God. Prophecy, every time you speak the word of God. Just for rare people like Jeremiah and Paul? Uh-uh, every one of you, every single one of you, baptized a prophet. What's it going to be like?
"Look, I don't want that responsibility, Lord". Well, all right, that's Jeremiah. "Terror on every side". Yeah, expect it. Especially today when you announce the word of God, expect a lot of opposition. Okay, all right. But then, but then, it won't let you go. If you let the word of God deep into your heart and your mind and into your body, it will not let you go. It becomes a fire burning within you, and you cannot contain it. You will say, "Woe to me if I do not evangelize". So there you are, everybody. Read this section, chapter 20 of Jeremiah. It's like all the texture of being a prophet is on display, all the emotion and experience of being a prophet. Profit from his experience and become yourself a great prophet. And God bless you.