A Community of Hard Truth-Tellers--June 29, 2026
The prophet Jeremiah spoke to the prophet Hananiah in the presence of the priests and all the people who were standing in the house of the Lord, and the prophet Jeremiah said, “Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord fulfill the words that you have prophesied and bring back to this place from Babylon the vessels of the house of the Lord and all the exiles. But listen now to this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people. The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.” (Jeremiah 28:5-9)
To be a part of God's people will require that we do the hard work of telling the truth to each other, and hearing it from each other, even when it is uncomfortable.
That is true today, and as this passage from Jeremiah which many of us heard this past Sunday reminds us, it has always been true. Sometimes we might wish for the ability to ignore disagreements, or we might tell ourselves that the "godly" thing is to sweep all of our sources of conflict under some convenient religious rug, but it turns out that those strategies are like letting a wound fester rather than cleaning it. Just because you are afraid of touching the tender spot, or that it will be painful to disinfect, it is still unwise to ignore the injury and just hope it goes away untreated. Like James Baldwin put it so aptly, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is face." If we are going to be the authentic people of God in this found-family we call "church," we will need at least that much courage--the same way the prophet Jeremiah dared to face difficult truths and to tell them, even when there was plenty of peer pressure to just nod his head along with the voices who said everything was fine.
This passage from Jeremiah 28 picks up as the people of Judah were staring down the reality of exile. The Babylonians were not just at the gates: they had already plundered the Temple in Jerusalem, deposed the previous king and taken him captive to Babylon as their trophy, and begun to destroy the whole kingdom. Jeremiah had warned the people that there was no chance to avert this disaster: their repeated turning away from God's ways of justice and mercy, and their perpetual trust in military might and political gamesmanship, rather than in God's provision, had pushed the situation to the brink. And now, there was no way to prevent or avoid exile. The Babylonians would not be stopped; their pagan empire would be allowed to run roughshod over the nation of Judah, including its government, its temple, and its capital city. Now, as you can imagine, that was not a very popular message to tell people (especially the remaining leadership in Jerusalem), and they did not like Jeremiah insisting on speaking it. The accusations would have been obvious: "Jeremiah is unpatriotic! He doesn't love his country if he's announcing that they cannot win a war against Babylon! He hates God because he doesn't want God's holy vessels from the Temple returned, or at least he doesn't think we'll ever get them back!" If you're the one burdened with announcing bad news, people will assume you are reveling in it and rooting for the destruction, even if you are actually saying it with tears in your eyes.
Over against Jeremiah and his bad news, there was another prophet--well, someone who had deputized himself to be a prophet at any rate--named Hananiah. Hananiah didn't like all that gloomy talk of destruction, and he couldn't imagine that God was really going to allow the nation to go into exile. Hananiah seemed to think that God was only around to prop up the status quo, and that because his nation saw itself as "God's people," it therefore couldn't be defeated or destroyed. So he announced a message that was the opposite of Jeremiah's: basically, "Everything's fine. It will all blow over. And pretty soon everything will go back to the way it was before, easy-peasy." This, of course, was a lot more popular, and people really liked what Hananiah had to say... because they wanted it to be true. In a way, Hananiah is the prototype for every TV evangelist promising health, wealth, and prosperity from God, along with every Christian nationalist preacher who says that "We will always succeed because we have God on our side!" As popular as such messages may be (and sometimes they are VERY popular), the true prophets like Jeremiah insisted that they just aren't true.
So here in this passage, we finally get Jeremiah's response to all of Hananiah's comforting (but wrong) malarkey. Jeremiah says, essentially, "Look, I would love it if you were right and everything was going to fine. I would love it if we didn't have to go through exile, and if the Babylonians just brought back everything and everyone they have taken into captivity already. But here's the thing--we don't judge prophets authentic or not based on whether they said what we wanted to hear. We judged the prophets based on whether their messages actually came true or not." In other words, "Hananiah's message sounds great, but it also seems like wishful thinking. And I think God is calling us to face the harder truth that we are going to have to endure exile rather than wishing it away." That took courage--both for Jeremiah to say it, and for anybody else in the room to hear it and truly listen.
It's always going to be tempting to be the Hananiah of the moment--to say the things that everyone wants to hear and wishes were true. Complicating things further is that nobody wants to admit that they actually are the Hananiah du jour; we all want to picture ourselves as the true and right prophet Jeremiah, and we never want to admit the possibility that we are wrong. It is always going to be more alluring to tell ourselves that we won't have to face the difficult stuff, or that there will be some deus ex machina fix to prevent us from having to deal with suffering. But Jeremiah reminds us that we belong to a community of people learning to be brave enough to tell and hear difficult truths. God will keep raising up people to face what we would rather ignore; the question is whether we will be courageous enough to listen... or to be those truth-tellers when we are the ones God is raising up.
I can only imagine how hard it would have been to be Jeremiah: being branded an unpatriotic traitor for saying that his nation did not have God on a leash and that their Babylonian opponents would defeat them would surely have been unpleasant. Ultimately, though, Jeremiah--like all authentic prophets--trusted that the God who gave him that difficult message would also give him the strength to speak it. Jeremiah's witness dares us, too, to speak difficult truths even when they are unpopular, and to face even hearing those truths when someone else is speaking them. It's hard to be the boy declaring that the emperor is wearing no clothes, and it's hard to be one of the townspeople listening to his message when it would mean admitting you'd been swept up in the Big Lie that the emperor was truly wearing a magnificent robe. It was hard to be the voice like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, speaking up against the Reich's fascism in his day, when there were so many other Christian voices saying that everything was fine. It was hard to be the voice like Dr. King's, calling out Jim Crow as the sin that it was, especially when there were so many White preachers looking the other way or declaring that it was "too political" to speak against segregation.
It continues to be daunting today to know where and when to speak up, and where and when we need to listen to those with whom we disagree. After all, if everybody imagines themselves to be the "true prophet" like Jeremiah then we will never admit even the possibility that we might be the self-appointed counterfeit like Hananiah. It takes courage, both to be the one to speak the difficult truth that you don't want to have to say, and it to be the one to hear such a truth from someone else. Being open to both possibilities is important--even essential--for us as the people of God. When we allow our faith simply to become a support for wishful thinking, we are headed down the path of Hananiah; when we are convinced that we are being led to speak up even when it is inconvenient or difficult, it is more likely we are at least in the ballpark of Jeremiah. But a good rule of thumb is to ask, "Is this message on my heart something I just wish were true, or something I am convinced needs to be said because it is true?" Even asking that question requires us to be brave.
So today, Jeremiah's example reminds us of the importance of honest listening, bravery in speaking, and the courage to face things so that they can be addressed, even when they are unpleasant. May we be given such bravery today from the same One who has raised up prophets throughout the past so that we might face this present moment and whatever it brings.
Lord God, give us the gift of courage, both to speak where you would have us speak, to listen to those you have raised up to tell us the truth.
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