THE TRUTH ABOUT JEREMIAH'S UNDERWEAR

June 29, 2008
by Pastor Laura Gentry

(During the summer months, the sermon's are based upon non-lectionary texts)

Today, we examine a story from the Book of Jeremiah. This prophetic book of the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, which is a complicated and poetic language. The time period it covers is around 587 BC—right about the time in which the Southern Kingdom of Judah falls to Babylonia and the temple in Jerusalem is destroyed.

Jeremiah was a son of a priest from the land of Benjamin. According to the book, for a quarter century prior to the destruction, Jeremiah repeatedly issued prophecies predicting God's forthcoming judgment. He was always caring on, telling the people of God that they must put down their idols and repent in order to avoid judgment. Even though Jeremiah dedicates his life to this important preaching, his fellow Jews refuse to heed the warnings: they do not repent, their land is overtaken by foreign invaders from Babylon and many are sent off to live in exile for 70 years, exactly as Jeremiah predicted.

Needless to say, Jeremiah’s got a rough job. He didn’t sign up for it. He didn’t answer a divine want ad or send in his resume. God simply picked him and called him into service at a very young age. Even before he was born, God knew him and wanted him for the job. Mind you, Jeremiah is by no means perfect. In fact, he seems to complain more than most. He is known as the “Weeping Prophet” because he was always lamenting what would happen to Jerusalem and then lamenting that it did happen to Jerusalem. Jeremiah struggles with the responsibility that God has placed upon him. Still, he presses on with vigor. He engages in dramatic performances to get through to the people. He walks around the streets with a yoke about his neck. He is taunted and put into jail. At one point he is thrown into a pit to die. He is often angry and frustrated by the sinfulness of God’s people.

It was common for prophets to teach with signs. In this passage from Jeremiah, God picks out the sign and basically has Jeremiah act out this object lesson to make a point. Now, we read from the 13th Chapter, verses 1-11.

Thus said the Lord to me, “Go and buy yourself a linen loincloth, and put it on your loins, but do not dip it in water.” So I bought a loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it on my loins. And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, “Take the loincloth that you bought and are wearing, and go now to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock.” So I went, and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. And after many days the Lord said to me, “Go now to the Euphrates, and take from there the loincloth that I commanded you to hide there.” 7hen I went to the Euphrates, and dug, and I took the loincloth from the place where I had hidden it. But now the loincloth was ruined; it was good for nothing. Then the word of the Lord came to me: Thus says the Lord: Just so I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. This evil people, who refuse to hear my words, who stubbornly follow their own will and have gone after other gods to serve them and worship them, shall be like this loincloth, which is good for nothing. For as the loincloth clings to one’s loins, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the Lord, in order that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory. But they would not listen.

God tells Jeremiah to go get himself some underwear—that’s what a linen loincloth was, after all. What a strange object lesson this is! Underwear? Hardly something we talk about in public and here it is in the Bible! But it is certainly an object we can all relate to and perhaps it even makes us snicker a bit to hear it preached about.

It reminds me of a famous poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti entitled Underwear. The poem begins in this way.

I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
Underwear is something
we all have to deal with
Everyone wears some kind of underwear
Even Indians wear underwear
Even Cubans
wear underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana
wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot
Underwear can really get you in a bind...

Well, in this story, Jeremiah’s underwear teaches us about the bind that God’s people have gotten themselves into. God tells Jeremiah to put on his new underwear but not to dip them into water. In other words, he can’t wash them. Now I don’t much like doing laundry and I can really procrastinate doing it when I am busy but there comes a time that dirty laundry simply MUST get washed. This passage doesn’t tell us just how long Jeremiah has to wear his linen loincloth without washing it but it was probably quite a while. Poor Jeremiah had to keep on wearing that stinky underwear! No wonder he became the weeping prophet. I imagine he might have looked like the Peanuts character of Pigpen—who had a cloud of dust that followed him wherever he went.

But just having unwashed underwear is not enough to prove the point. Now the word of God comes to Jeremiah a second time and tells him to go to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock. Jeremiah was probably quite delighted to do so. Burying them in the rocks by the river probably seemed like the most appropriate thing to do with those smelly underwear he’d been wearing around without washing. “Good riddance!” he must have thought.

That’s not where the story ends, though. After many days, God instructs him again. Jeremiah is told to go back to the spot and retrieve those hidden underwear that have been rotting there for who knows how long. This is where the story gets gross. In fact, it is listed in the Lutheran Handbook as one of the grossest Bible stories. Junior high boys find it absolutely intriguing when we learn about it in confirmation.

The underwear, it says, are ruined. They are good for nothing. Other words might come to our minds to describe the underwear: rancid, moldy, just downright nasty. They really don’t paint a very pretty picture in our mind’s eye, do they?

There is more than just gross-out in this story. It does have a point. You see, the people of Israel had been to God as this loincloth. Underwear in Biblical times also served as a belt to hold the whole outfit together. It really clung tightly to the body. Metaphorically, God was holding the chosen people tightly to himself—wearing them like a loincloth. He had made them, blessed them and held them.

Yet they had not been faithful as God has been faithful. They were told specifically to avoid idolatries and yet they walked right into them. They buried themselves in foreign earth, mingled among the nations, and were so corrupted that they were good for nothing. Their proud, faithless behavior became abominable to God. Their sin was as nasty to God as old, molded underwear that had been hiding out in the rocks of the Euphrates river.

God declares that he cannot tolerate wearing them as a belt any longer. He will cast them off. They weren’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to be God’s glory, a royal diadem in God’s hand, according to the prophet Isaiah. Now instead of shining with the love and glory of God, they have gone their own way. They have acted horribly. They are disobedient and ungrateful. So God threatens that he will cast them away into exile in the land of Babylon by the Euphrates river.

So what does this strange underwear story mean for us today? Notice that the loincloth in this story is made of linen. This fabric was made of natural fibers and this signifies the truth of a person’s inner nature. The chosen people had pride and disobedience as their inner truth. They no longer put their trust in God and walked in God’s ways as they once had. Their hearts were far from God and their sinfulness became so much that God needed to judge them in order to get them to repent. They certainly had ample chance to repent—what with all of Jeremiah’s dramatic preaching—and yet they would not turn back to God until God cast them off.

What we need to ask ourselves is: what is our inner truth. For we know that God looks upon our hearts and knows them even better than we know them ourselves. In our inmost selves, do we love God? Do we cling to God with all our heart and mind and soul? Do we look around at the circumstances of our world and still hold fast to God with confidence? Or have we strayed away and look to other things to give us security?

God’s judgment seems too harsh in Old Testament stories like this one. It is no wonder Jeremiah wasn’t popular with the crowds. But this object lesson helps us see just how deplorable our sin really is to God. In the same way we couldn’t be expected to put on half-rotten underwear, we cannot expect God to join himself to us when we have joined ourselves to sin.

The big problem with God’s people was that they did not listen to God. They did not cling to the Word of God. Ultimately, that Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God was so crazy about us, that he sent his son to be the with us as the Word. He came to be our Savior on a very personal level and to redeem us for all eternity. Do we listen to him? Do we allow him to be our Savior? Do we turn back to him in obedience? Or would we rather go on being stinky underwear?

We DO have a choice. We have an amazing opportunity to receive forgiveness for all our sins and to enter into a loving relationship with God through Christ. My friends, God does not see the foulness of our sin (and it is foul). God sees only the blood of Christ when he looks at you and me. We are redeemed. What an amazing gift! Today, let us cling to him anew that we may be made clean. Amen.


© 2008 Laura E. Gentry