The Lutheran Hour

"Tears, Fires, and a Song"

#90-43
Presented on The Lutheran Hour on June 25, 2023
Guest Speaker: Rev. Dr. Dean Nadasdy
Copyright 2025 Lutheran Hour Ministries

Text: Jeremiah 20:7-13

Our text from Holy Scripture is from Jeremiah 20:7-13.

O Lord, You have deceived me, and I was deceived; You are stronger than I, and You have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me. For whenever I speak, I cry out, I shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the Word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, “I will not mention Him, or speak any more in His Name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. For I hear many whispering. Terror is on every side! “Denounce him! Let us denounce him!” say all my close friends, watching for my fall. “Perhaps he will be deceived; then we can overcome him and take our revenge on him.” But the Lord is with me as a dread Warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble; they will not overcome me. They will be greatly shamed, for they will not succeed. Their eternal dishonor will never be forgotten. O Lord of hosts, who tests the righteous, who sees the heart and the mind, let me see Your vengeance upon them, for to You have I committed my cause. Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For He has delivered the life of the needy from the hand of evildoers.

Let us pray. Lord, put a fire in our bones and a song of praise on our lips. Let Your Word so take hold of us so that picking up a cross is not a cliché but a way of life. Amen.

I must tell you what came over me the first time I read this text from Jeremiah after living away from it for a time. It was the same feeling I had recently when teaching the ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed under Hitler near the end of WW II. It was the same feeling I had in listening again to the Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “I Have a Dream,” and thinking about the killing of Dr. King in Memphis It is not the feeling I would have expected. More likely and fitting would be a response of admiration and reverence toward a hero of the faith, This time around, though, considering Jeremiah’s poem of lament, my reaction was different. I felt a falling short, even intimidation. I felt a strong sense of having it too easy as a follower of Jesus Christ.

I always loved the story told by Alfred Lord Tennyson and others of a monk named Telemachus who in 404 AD was pushed along into the Coliseum in Rome by a mob of thousands who had come to watch gladiators kill one another. He couldn’t believe what he saw. He made his way down into the arena and began to shout, “In the Name of the Lord Christ, let the killing stop!” He got in the way of the action and the crowd booed and hissed. A gladiator pushed him to the ground. He got up again, “In the Name of the Lord Christ, let the killing stop. The crowd threw stones at him as he fell to the ground again. One last time he stood up. “In the Name of the Lord Christ …” And a gladiator ran him through with his sword. He lay dead in the sand. Gradually, first a few, then many, then all walked in silence from the Coliseum to their homes. The gladiatorial contests in the Roman Empire ended that day. What courage Telemachus showed, and what a price he paid!

I remember as a teenager, thinking about being a pastor and imagining myself as a Navy chaplain. In battles at sea, I would save lives for eternity, giving up my own life to save others. Maybe my church would even put me up on a stained glass window. None of it ever happened. It was just a dream.

Considering Jeremiah’s lament, an old sermon by homiletics professor Fred Craddock comes to mind. In the sermon Craddock remembers how in his youth he and a group of young people were at church camp and sang an old hymn titled, “Are You Able?” and he was sure that, if necessary, he was, willing and able to lay down his life for Christ. Fred pictured himself running in front of a train to rescue a child, swimming out to get someone who was drowning. “I pictured myself,” he continued, “against a gray wall and some soldier saying, ‘One last chance to deny Christ and live.’ I confessed my faith and they said, ‘Ready, aim, fire.’ The body slumped, the flag was at half-mast, and widows were weeping in the afternoon. Later a monument is built,” Fred went on, “and people come with their cameras. ‘Johnny, you stand over there where Fred gave his life. Let’s get your picture.’ Fred Craddock continued, “I was sincere then as I have been sincere these 45 years since. I am able to give my life, but nobody told me that I wouldn’t give my life for Christ by writing one big check. Instead it has been decades of writing little checks. Eighty-five cents here, a dollar thirty-nine there. Giving my life for Christ has meant being faithful in the small things over and over throughout my life. Nobody warned me that I could not write one big check. I’ve had to write 45 years of little checks.”

I will be the first to admit that Jeremiah’s prayer of lament is not included in the Scripture to shame us or intimidate us. How we respond to a text is not always in synch with why the text was written, but there it is.

For the record, Jeremiah prays six prayers of lament in the book of Jeremiah. This fifth one in chapter 20 follows his trip to the pottery shop in chapter 18,where a potter takes a pot gone wrong and starts over with it. This is what God will do with Judah for its idolatry, he says In chapter 20 he takes a pottery flask and intentionally breaks it and says, “This is what God will do with the king and leaders of Judah.” Boldly, right in the temple courts, as if writing one big check, Jeremiah then preaches against Judah’s apostasy, predicting her destruction. Imagine that! In chapter 20 the chief security officer in temple, a priest named Pashhur, hears Jeremiah’s prophecy on the temple grounds, and has him beaten, put in stocks for 24 hours, on display in a very public place. Jeremiah becomes an object of ridicule and shame.

And he doesn’t help his cause either when Pashhur releases him the next day. Jeremiah renames Pashhur, giving him the nickname, Magor-misabib, which means “terror on every side.” It was one of Jeremiah’s favorite phrases, favorite of saying what would happen to Judah when Babylon came rolling in with destruction.

Lest we think all of this bold, life-risking, big-check-in-your-face prophecy comes easily, here, just here, is Jeremiah’s fifth lament. We know about laments. There are at least 60 psalms of lament, both individual and corporate. In the lament we often see the movement of the one in prayer from complaint to trust and even praise. Jeremiah’s lament here is no different. He accuses God of persuading him, even seducing him into being a prophet. It’s not at all what he bargained for. Instead of adoring crowds and faithful followers, he has become a laughingstock. He is mocked. Now they’re calling him, God’s prophet, “Magor-misabib,” “terror on every side,” because all he can talk about is Babylonian terror on every side. Even my friends, says Jeremiah, are waiting for my downfall. The Word of the Lord that was his delight and weapon has become an object of ridicule.

And then there is the turn in Jeremiah’s lament “Yet, “says Jeremiah, “when I try to be silent, and not mention the Word of the Lord, there is a fire in my bones, a burning inside, and I can’t hold it in. The Lord is with me all right,” he prays, “my enemies will not succeed.” It’s amazing, Jeremiah talks to God the way few of us do. He bares himself before God. He borders on blasphemy in calling God a deceiver. In Jeremiah’s prayer, though, we watch him move to renewed trust in God to get him through, And it turns on this fire in the bones that will not let him be silent. So how does this lament end? With praise! With a song! For heaven’s sakes!

“Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord. For He has delivered the life of the needy from the hand of evildoers.” From tears to fire to praise! And lest we think it was all roses and hoorays from there, in the very next verses of Jeremiah 20, the prophet considers how miserable his life has become and gives us yet another lament, in which he curses the very day he was born!

It’s all very intense, resolved and then unresolved, at peace and then at war with God and himself. We know Jeremiah as “the weeping prophet.” When Michelangelo painted Jeremiah in his group of six prophets on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, he gave us Jeremiah as an old man, hunched over, his hand holding up his bowed head, staring at the ground, no doubt lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem and the price he paid in predicting it. He is burdened and tired. He has the look of a big check writer.

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who gave us the term “costly grace.” He was describing Christians who receive the grace of God and show how costly that grace was for Christ in their own lives of service and sacrifice. Cheap grace, Bonhoeffer taught, is grace without repentance, grace without the cross, grace without a price, grace with no checks, great or small. “Whoever would come after Me,” Jesus said, “must deny himself, pick up a cross, and follow Me.” “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” Jesus said, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Bonhoeffer called it in German, “Stellvertretung,” a vicarious, substitutionary, representative action of being there for others the way Christ has been there for us.

“You will be hated by all for My Name’s sake,” Jesus told His first disciples. “But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” “So everyone who acknowledges Me before others, I also will acknowledge before My Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies Me before others, I also will deny before My Father who is in heaven.” So many of those first followers of Jesus endured to the end, writing one huge check of service, sacrifice, and martyrdom!

Then there are the little-check people, wanting to be stand-up-for-the-truth martyrs and feeling more like two-bit pretenders, wannabe heroes in the kingdom. Jeremiah leaves me feeling that way, because God asked more of him than he could deliver, and he delivered anyway.

Is it that God expects less of us? Is it that the times are different and require less of Christians?

I keep hearing that North American culture is post-Christian, a secular society a culture in which the fastest-growing religious group among us is the group with no religion, no connection to any organized faith. During the recent pandemic, our places of worship were quiet for too long. Along the way, perhaps we were quieted in our witness. Faith and politics have become so inter-laced, we don’t know where one ends and the other begins. We have become confused and content to be safe within our tribe, comfortable with those who share our faith and politics. The little checks we write in witness will be with those we know and trust. They cost us nothing. We need to hear Jeremiah today. We need to pray like Jeremiah. We need talks with God that are intimate and real, conversational prayers, honest and rich with feeling. We need to be real with God, telling God everything, even what shows us to be less than righteous, less than perfect. In such prayers God shapes us for witness.

And we need Jeremiah because he shows us what we must feel again as costly grace Christians, a fire in our bones that will not let us be silent in a godless culture. We must live a life so close to the Word that it creates a burning within us. We have stories to be told and told again, songs to be sung again and again, songs of praise, songs of promise. The checks we write in terms of witness are made out in prayer and in a growing zeal for the Gospel, and then they are cashed out in life. They are expressions of the praise we will not relinquish ever in our prayers to God. We need Jeremiah because in Jeremiah God challenges us to write the check, great or small, even if we don’t feel like it, even if the world around us seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Write the check, Jeremiah tells us, because the fire in your bones will not let you do otherwise. Write the check with tears in your eyes and praise on your lips. The fire in our bones is no threat of an impending invasion, but the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Good News of life and purpose for a generation that has left God behind.

The Jesus whom we follow, He wrote the biggest check of all. His payment covered the sins of the whole world. There were little checks along the way for Jesus, the ridicule, the testing, the charge of being demonic or even insane, the betrayal, the desertion;—all of that along the way. But in one great, courageous act of obedience to His Father, He wrote the big check that saved the world and bought you and me out of slavery to freedom.

We do not float effortlessly as Christians from one victory to another. We are not called to a life of peace on every side but to a life of witness, a life of bearing crosses. It may not be as grand as we imagined or as costly, but as Bonhoeffer wrote, “When God calls us, God bids us come and die.” For some it will be one great sacrifice. For most of us, we’ll give our lives away for others a little bit at a time. It will begin at home and with our neighbors. It will not always be easy. And should we weep along the way like the prophet Jeremiah, God will keep that fire in our bones burning and that praise on our lips singing. Tears, fire, and a song! This is who we are. Amen.

Please pray with me, Lord, call us again to prayers of honest struggle, to a Word that will not let us go, and to witness, small and great, that follows the way of the cross. In Your strong Name. Amen.

Reflections for June 25, 2023
Title: Tears, Fire, and a Song

Mark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour and joining us now, here’s Lutheran Hour Speaker, Dr. Mike Ziegler.

Mike Zeigler: Hello, Mark.

Mark Eischer: I enjoyed Dr. Nadasdy’s thoughtful messages, especially how he described the Christian life of service and sacrifice as writing checks both big and small. How does that idea of writing checks maybe relate to the idea, the doctrine of, vocation, of spending ourselves down through our various callings in life?

Mike Zeigler: I think of it in terms of promises: making promises, keeping promises. So much of our life is wrapped up in the promises that we make and keep or fail to keep. If you’re a follower of Jesus, we are taught to see all of those little promises in the light of the big promise that God made and kept by sending Jesus. But without Jesus we might be tempted to see making and keeping promises as a way we accumulate more for ourselves, manipulating people or using them. Or we might try to be self-sustaining and keep as few promises as possible to be independent. But in Jesus we can see that promise keeping activity like He does. That is, we use it to build greater bonds of trust, loyalty, mutual care and concern for others.

Mark Eischer: Dr. Nadasdy warned against writing checks quietly exchanged within the safety of our own tribe. He says they cost us nothing.

Mike Zeigler: Yeah. Again I think it’s helpful to think about even say the transfer or the exchange of money as promises made and fulfilled. So for example, if I hire a professional to fix my roof and he’s my go-to guy for repairs, I know he is trustworthy and so there’s very little risk in that exchange. It doesn’t cost either of us because we’re both getting what we want. There’s no sacrifice. I pay him, he does the job, and it works. But let’s say I go to a new guy and I pay the bill, but he doesn’t fix it right. And I don’t find out about it until after he skipped town. That’s costly; that was a sacrifice.

Mark Eischer: And that’s why we’re always cautious entering into any sort of business deal with someone we don’t know or someone that hasn’t been referred to us by a trusted friend.

Mike Zeigler: Yes, and so what Dr. Nadasdy was saying about Christians in a relational sense, our greater mission is not to avoid that risk, never reaching out to a new person because they might cost us something. No, our mission, our witness, is to venture out of the safety of our tribe, of what we already know, to bring new people in who don’t know Jesus, who are not yet in His family, even though that’s going to cost us.

Mark Eischer: Now you’re not saying that as a Christian I should hire someone who’s unqualified to fix my roof.

Mike Zeigler: No, no, probably not. Although if you think about it, it depends on your goal. Maybe you do hire someone unqualified, probably not to fix your roof, but maybe say the kid in the neighborhood to mow your lawn, even though you know he’s not going to do as good a job as a professional would do. So you eat the cost temporarily or in the short term because you care more about the relationship. Maybe the kid doesn’t have a dad and you’re being a mentor to him. And so likewise, Christians eat costs in their vocation. So they donate time or money to ministries that don’t give them personally anything tangible to show for it, no profits. Or they take a job in a social service realm that doesn’t pay as well as the industry’s standard. Or they stay faithful in a marriage even when it’s not as fun as it used to be or stay committed to a local church even if someone there upset them.

So that is what I think Dr. Nadasdy means about writing checks. We’re not seeing the world primarily in terms of payment and reward, but in terms of long-lasting relationships and self-giving love, because Jesus has got us covered for all eternity. We can be like Him. We can see people as the true treasure and invest in them long term and build up those relationships over time and ultimately for eternity.

Music Selections for this program:

“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.

“Lord, It Belongs Not to My Care” by Richard Baxter and Carl Schalk. From Safe in God’s Faithfulness by the Concordia Seminary Chorus (© 2007 Concordia Seminary Chorus / ©1978 Augsburg Publishing House) Used by permission.

“Lord of Our Life and God of Our Salvation” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.