Hilton Head Island, SC – June 13, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Jeremiah 14:11-16; Matthew 7:21-23
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And the Lord said to me: “The prophets are prophesying lies in my name; I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision, worthless divination, and deceit in their own eyes.” – Jeremiah 14:14 (RSV)
The prophet Jeremiah lived at the end of the seventh and the beginning of the sixth century BCE, which is to say, about 630 to 580 BCE, or so. He was such a prophetic grump that any similar pronouncements such as he made are called “jeremiads.” A happy chap he was not.
Early on in his long 52-chapter prophecy, Jeremiah thought that the Egyptians were about to conquer Judah, but he was wrong. It was the Babylonians who conquered Judah and destroyed Jerusalem, and they did it in 587 BCE. But the point is this: Jeremiah knew that there was something very rotten in the state of Judah, and Jeremiah knew it was going to destroy the political viability of the Jews. He wasn’t sure exactly what was going to happen, but he knew it was going to be devastating, whatever it was.
The common misunderstanding of the words “prophet” or “prophecy” is that they connote “predictors of the future.” Often the prophets did do that, and often they were right, but sometimes they were wrong. Jeremiah was wrong about the Egyptians, for instance.
The true vocation of prophets is to proclaim a biblical perspective on what is going on in any society or culture at any given time. That is to say, they attempt to declare what they believe is God’s unique judgment on the behavior and values of peoples in their own settings and circumstances. Those are the issues which most concern prophets, whether they are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or religiously unaffiliated.
Since we happen to be Americans who are living in the United States of America in the 2020s, what does God have to say about us? No doubt God has many things to note about contemporary American culture, such as the growing gap between the very wealthy and everybody else, our treatment of Blacks and other non-white citizens, our acquisitiveness, our avarice, our individualistic self-centeredness, and so on.
But those are not the primary subjects that shall be addressed in this Jeremiah-ish declaration. It is the precarious state of our partisan politics that is the concern of this sermon. The USA is potentially close to a total political and moral collapse. We are probably as near to disastrous disintegration as Judah was when Jeremiah was making life supremely alarming for anyone who was willing to listen to him.
Jeremiah said God told him something in the opening verses of our scripture passage that I am sure God did not say, but Jeremiah was convinced God said it. “Do not pray for the welfare of this people” (14:11), Jeremiah said God said. I can’t imagine that God ever gives up on anybody, no matter how bad their behavior is, but Jeremiah insisted God does wash His hands of recalcitrant humans. Nonetheless, Jeremiah supposedly quoted God, “I will consume (the Jewish people) by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence” (11:12). Those things happened in the year 587 BCE, but not because God caused it. They brought it upon themselves. And just so you know where this sermon is going, the American people may well be bringing disaster upon themselves if we continue on the path that too many of us are following.
Lies and half-truths have long been utilized by many politicians in both of our major political parties. But never until now have lies become the apparent major political policy of one of these two parties. What I am now going to say will be something that would make blood boil, but I trust not in anyone who has attended services in The Chapel Without Walls for at least a few months or more, unless you agree with what I shall say, but think a minister should never verbalize any such thing publicly. To that I respond by stating that I believe it is incumbent upon the clergy to preach what they perceive to be God’s truth in all areas of life, and not only in what is deemed to be “religious” or “ecclesiastical.” Nothing could be more dull than to have to listen only to the short list of topics that are acceptable to many Christians.
So what am I going to say? This is a statement the likes of which even I have never made, but here it is: A very large majority of Members of Congress in the Republican Party and a somewhat smaller majority of Republican voters in the last election have become prophets of lies. With no shame or hesitation, they are purveyors of falsehood about many matters of vital political interest.
There can be no serious questioning of that fact. The primary lie is the one which has been repeated ad nauseum by former president Donald Trump ever since Nov. 3, 2020, the day on which he lost the election. But you also may recall that before the election of 2016 he was claiming that if he lost that election, it would have been stolen from him. He was lying before November of 2016, he was lying before and after the election of 2020, and he continues to lie, including the bizarre statement that he shall be back in the presidency on August 25. Why the 25th? Where on earth did that date come from?
The standard bearer of the Republican Party for the past five years has been the Prince of Lies. Nonetheless, a large majority of elected Republicans around the country as well as others who voted for him in 2020 staunchly maintain that the election was stolen, which has been proven not to be true. Fox News echoed that false claim frequently, although they have finally succumbed to the truth. No reputable election officials in any state ever said that the election was rigged. Pundits and television hosts relentlessly ask why the Big Lie continues to maintain traction. It does because the GOP has concluded it is politically more effective to tell lies than to speak truth.
God has always been so committed to truth that one of the Ten Commandments specifically forbids the telling of falsehoods. “You shall not bear false witness” may refer first to judicial trials, but secondarily it requires truth-telling by everyone in general. However, the Republican Party has wed itself to a man who made prevarication his primary political modus operandi.
The most egregious affirmation of that seemingly-incomprehensible practice is the near-universal rejection of the proposed commission by Republican Members of Congress to investigate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol Building. This is nothing less than a cynical attempt to avert the truth. Seldom if ever could millions of Americans watch a visible riot unfold in real time and in living color such as the one we saw last January 6. Many Senators and Representatives also watched the televised attack in their locked offices, and some visually in the House of Representatives. It is perverse for anyone to deny that January 6 was an insurrection, but most Republicans in Congress have refused to establish a commission to investigate the matter, and to make recommendations on how to prevent it from happening again.
Senator Mitch McConnell, for years the leader of “the Party of ‘No’”, has decreed that he will do everything in his power to stymie every bill President Biden wants passed. He also did that with President Obama, and was largely successful. No one in the federal government knows more about how Congress works than Joe Biden, who has served in Washington for half a century. He said he wants to promote bipartisan action on his recommended programs. Trying to do that with Mitch McConnell as Senate Minority leader is like trying to be reasonable with a Mafia don or with Kim Jong Un. Honorable people are usually ineffective against corrupt people in open negotiations. They are eaten alive. The only way to overcome a corrupt minority in the Senate is to change the rules by which the Senate governs itself. The filibuster must be abolished, or there will always be a perpetual Tyranny of the Minority, whoever constitutes the minority. The Senate has long claimed that it is the world’s greatest debating society. Now it almost never debates. It pontificates, it fulminates, but it does not debate.
In the evening of January 6, Senator McConnell on the Senate floor condemned the Capitol attack in the strongest of terms. A week later, on January 13, he laid the blame for the assault on the Capitol squarely on the shoulders of Donald Trump, as you can see on the cover of the bulletin. Apparently he then thought the party was with him in that observation. By Jan. 25, when the senator was asked if the former president were the Republican candidate in 2024, would he support him, he quickly answered, “Absolutely.” What a difference a few days make! And all this from the man who later put the kibosh on the commission to look into the Capitol insurrection.
Many of the Old Testament prophets were incensed by what they called “false prophets.” In the eighth century BCE Isaiah, Micah, Amos, and Hosea were, and in the sixth century BCE Jeremiah was. Of such prophets Jeremiah groused, “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush” (Jer. 6:14-15).
For years many Republicans have loudly denied the idea of climate change. In Tuesday’s paper there were two stories, one saying that Lake Mead, which the Hoover Dam created, is down 140 feet from its normal level. One-hundred-forty feet; half a football field ! Another story said the level of carbon dioxide in the air is the highest it has been in the last four million years. Even now, with reams of mounting evidence to the contrary, many Republicans still insist the climate is not rapidly changing throughout the world, and that these changes are not caused by humans.
Too many in the Grand Old Party have lost their feeling of shame, and feel no remorse for their litany of lies. Calling liberals socialists is a deliberate lie. Perhaps the worst of it all is that they have been encouraged in their dissembling by numerous evangelical Christian preachers. If you truly believe that God is on your side when you lie, is it even possible to recognize truth at all? White evangelicals are the most fervent of all the Trump political supporters. Is there a connection between their skin color and their kind of Christianity?
The percentage of white evangelical preachers who support Trump is far higher than the percentage of Black preachers who do. Is there something about their “Caucasian-ness” that makes white evangelicals more likely to become false prophets than Black evangelicals? Donald J. Trump seems clearly to have answered that question in the affirmative for his own benefit!
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus also addressed the matter of religious officials flying under false colors. “Beware of false prophets,” said Jesus, “who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” They sound so holy and so innocent, the salesmen of the Big Lie! Later Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Mt. 7:15,21).
How can anyone be loyal to liars? The answers to that question are complicated to find in 2021, but the short answer is that they think it will get Republicans elected in 2022 and other Republicans and their presidential candidate elected in 2024. Thus besides being prophets of lies, they also are profiteers of lies. They think it pays to lie, which is why they lie so often.
Does it matter that many of them believe their lies? Whether or not they think they are lies, it matters greatly. QAnon and Fox News have become the Bible for them, and you can’t demolish holy writ if you are convinced it is really holy! But the world cannot operate efficiently or effectively if falsehood is one of its primary operating principles.
Mr. Trump’s unceasing allegation that the 2020 election was a fraud is itself the most egregious of his many frauds, because it is a cunning attempt to overthrow democracy. Democracy is founded on the will of the people, and if it is claimed that the people’s will was thwarted, when the claim is clearly a lie, it weakens the very foundation of our system of government, especially when so many people believe his lie. The whole strategy is monstrously diabolical.
It may sound like this is a bald-faced promotion of the purity of the Democratic Party. It definitely is not. FDR, HST, JFK, LBJ, and Bill Clinton (who was never identified by initials) all had at least several skeletons in their closets. But if there was one Democrat who had reason to claim that a presidential election was stolen, it was Al Gore, with the hundreds of hanging chads of Palm Beach County, and the unseemly Supreme Court haste to bring the matter to a Supreme-ly decisive end. But in any case, Democrats have not made wholesale lies the centerpiece of their political strategy - - - at least not yet.
You may wonder what you personally can do about any of this. You can try to convince Republican friends or relatives you know that their adherence to the Big Lie or the multitude of little lies which accompany it is a grievous danger to American democracy. I admit that is a very difficult assignment, especially with relatives. But it must be done. Don’t do it in anger or by attacking the intelligence or sensibility of Republicans, and don’t use pejorative words against them. Just do your best to persuade them that the former president and his associates have used lies as the primary weapons in their battle for Mr. Trump to re-gain the presidency, and that it is ungodly, indecent, and un-biblical. Truly it is. The politics of lies is the road to disaster.
Here are the most important things that will be said in this sermon. If Donald Trump is allowed by his followers to continue his assault on truth, and if he is re-nominated and re-elected as the Republican candidate for president in 2024, which alarmingly is a distinct possibility, the United States of America will be confronted by the greatest threat to its viability since the beginning of the Civil War. Were Donald Trump to be re-elected, the USA will become a national cult of personality, a one-party state, and the rule of law will cease to exist. We will be a much larger carbon copy of the nation with whose autocrat Donald Trump “fell in love” in Singapore.
The prophets of lies must be combatted by people of truth. God is requiring that of everyone who is committed to honesty and trustworthiness, rather than to falsehood and duplicity. God’s will is always for goodness, but God puts the future is in our hands. He does not determine it. As Bishop Arthur Cleveland Coxe wrote in 1840, six years before the outbreak of the Mexican War, the real War of Northern Aggression, “We are living, we are dwelling in a grand and awful time.”