[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:08] Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
[00:00:15] This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast.
[00:00:31] So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:38] Hey, guys. Good morning.
[00:00:42] You guys all right?
[00:00:45] No, you're not.
[00:00:48] I can tell you're not. Okay, first of all, you're very, very quiet. Secondly, you're all sitting like four rows farther back than you usually do.
[00:00:57] I like how one of the. Not to call out anybody but one of the Sioux girls. Did you notice that up here was like, mimicking what happens behind this little thing here? Did you see that? She was like, is that what I do?
[00:01:21] Felt harsh.
[00:01:25] Anyway, it's good that we can laugh. For those of you who don't know, my name is Jason. I'm one of the co lead ministers here. Thank you for being here today. Welcome to the Oceanside Sanctuary. This is our adult teaching time and we are working through a series called Unseen Witnesses. We're visiting some of the stories of sort of lesser known or sort of easily marginalized characters in scripture. We'll be doing this through the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament. Today. I want to share a story with you from Jeremiah, chapter 38, and I'm going to read to you verses 7 through 13. If you don't have your Bible, we'll put the passage up there as usual. It says this verse 7. Abed Malek the Ethiopian, a eunuch in the king's house, heard that they had put Jeremiah into the cistern.
[00:02:23] I love it when stories begin, like right in the middle of the plot.
[00:02:27] I'll fill you in in a minute. But that they had put Jeremiah into the cistern. The king happened to be sitting at the Benjamin gate. So bed Malek left the king's house and spoke to the king. My lord king, these men have acted wickedly in all that they did to the prophet Jeremiah by throwing him into the cistern to die there of hunger, for there's no bread left in the city.
[00:02:53] And then the king commanded Abed Malek the Ethiopian, take three men with you from here and pull the prophet Jeremiah up from the cistern before he dies. So Abed Malek took the men with him and went to the house of the king, to a wardrobe of the storehouse and took from their old rags and worn out clothes which he left down or which he let down to Jeremiah in the cistern by ropes. And then Abed Malek, the Ethiopian, said to Jeremiah, just put the rags and clothes between your armpits and the ropes. And Jeremiah did so. And then they drew Jeremiah up by the ropes and pulled him out of the cistern. And Jeremiah remained in the court of the guard.
[00:03:41] Pray with me.
[00:03:42] God, we thank you so much for today, for this time in this space, this opportunity for us to come together, to settle our bodies, to be in a space where we are welcomed and loved and accepted.
[00:04:01] A space where we have agreed to.
[00:04:04] To be stretched by words from these very old stories, to be inspired by a sense of your spirit as we raise our voices in prayer and in song and to draw us together to encourage each other. We ask that you would do all that work here today, that we would cultivate in us a sense of your presence in our midst.
[00:04:33] And from that we would gain courage and hope and all the things we need to follow you. We pray this in Jesus name, Amen.
[00:04:45] Okay, so here's what's hard for me about doing what I do for a living is it's getting harder and harder these days for me to stand up here and express any authentic hope.
[00:05:06] I'm just being honest.
[00:05:09] It feels a little like that when I show up in spaces like this. I don't think it's just me, but when I open my news feed on my little portable supercomputer that I carry around with me in my pocket and I spend way too much time looking at when I open my newsfeed, I see two things.
[00:05:34] I see more evidence that tremendous violence is being done in our communities in the name of Jesus.
[00:05:48] And I'm finding it very difficult to then see the other things that I tend to see in my feed, like the latest Apple product that has just been announced as if everything is normal.
[00:06:04] And so, you know, things are bad if my interest in new Apple products is waning because, you know, I'm like that stereotypical guy, right?
[00:06:16] But it is becoming, I think, a very difficult time, especially in spaces like this, where we have said that to be a woman does not diminish your worth or value in the eyes of God or your ability to lead in the church or in the world for that matter. Where we have said to be gay or queer or trans does not diminish your worth or value in the eyes of. Of God or disqualify you from any good work in the world. It's becoming harder and harder to be that kind of preacher in that kind of space when my newsfeed tells me that the current administration is seeking to label trans persons as radical, violent activists.
[00:07:06] And that is so absurd.
[00:07:12] Here's how you know you don't know a trans person because you think that they are radical, violent activists.
[00:07:22] And so I'm really, honestly grateful for this passage.
[00:07:28] But this passage also is really sort of stretching me and challenging me to find a sense of hope.
[00:07:41] So I could use your help with that.
[00:07:45] I could use your help finding a real sense of hope.
[00:07:50] So I'm going to do my best to preach a little sermon to myself today, and if you find it useful, then all the better.
[00:07:59] Here's what's going on in this story. By the way. It is an odd little story, the story of Abed Malek. What's happening in Jeremiah chap. 38 is that Jerusalem is under siege by the Babylonian army.
[00:08:13] And this is an event that has been foretold in Hebrew scripture at this point. The the prophets that came before Jeremiah said over and over and over again, because you don't treat foreigners and outsiders and outcasts and widows and orphans with kindness and goodness and mercy and justice, your power, your kingdom is going to fall.
[00:08:35] Right. That's an interesting little tidbit that we could preach about all day long, but we'll just set that aside, you know, like the idea that empires that don't treat the poor and the marginalized and the outcast, well, will eventually fall. And that is what has happened in Jeremiah 38. The Babylonians have shown up at the gates of Jerusalem and they have laid siege to Jerusalem. And as a result of this, there is famine and chaos throughout that land. And as a result of that sort of external threat, the famine and the chaos, the hunger, the poverty, the suffering inside of the walls of Jerusalem. As a result of that, there is now political turmoil inside of Jerusalem as well.
[00:09:20] People who are supposed to be there for each other are now against each other. And this we saw in the few passages before the one we read today in Jeremiah 38. 1:6. Very briefly, what happens is that the princes of Jerusalem, the sons and the grandsons of the king Zedekiah, are frustrated and upset because there's this wandering prophet named Jeremiah who is running around Jerusalem saying to everybody, hey, we're screwed.
[00:09:56] Have you looked outside the gates? Have you noticed what's happening? We are going to be conquered. God has been telling us this for generations.
[00:10:05] This is that moment. We're going to be conquered. The very best thing that we could all do is surrender. And if we surrender to God's judgment, you will at least have your life.
[00:10:19] It's spoken really interestingly in the passage in verses 1 through 7, Jeremiah says, you'll have your life as a prize of war.
[00:10:28] It's really interesting phrase because typically the prizes of war are those won by the victors, right? It's the plunder. It's the loot that you get when you are on the side of the conquering army. Jeremiah says, hey, you want a prize from this war?
[00:10:45] You want some loot from this war? I have good news and bad news. The bad news is you're going to lose. The good news is you can still have your life.
[00:10:52] So surrender.
[00:10:54] Well, this makes the princes of the king Zedekiah very angry because Jeremiah is, in their view, like, demoralizing the troops, demoralizing the community, telling them to give up, to surrender. So they go to the king in that first portion of chapter 38, and they say, hey, Jeremiah is a problem. We need to get rid of him.
[00:11:17] We need to execute him.
[00:11:19] He's. He's causing problems. Zedekiah, being a fairly, like, unprincipled leader and easily swayed, says, do whatever you like. He's. He's yours to do with whatever you choose.
[00:11:35] So the princes grab Jeremiah. They take him to a cistern, which is, of course, a, you know, large container that gathers water so that you can store up water when it rains and you have drinking water and cooking water and all that good stuff. The cistern is fairly dry, but not completely dry. They throw Jeremiah into the cistern. It's full of mud. He sinks in the mud. They leave him there to die, to starve to death.
[00:11:59] And that is where we pick up verse seven.
[00:12:03] In verse seven, Abed Malek, the Ethiopian, a eunuch in the king's house, hears what happens, and he goes to the king, Zedekiah. He finds him hanging out by one of the external gates of the city.
[00:12:17] And he pleads with the king for Jeremiah's life.
[00:12:23] And again, the king, being unprincipled and having no apparent sort of moral compass of his own, is persuaded by Bed Malek. He says, okay, fine. Go save Jeremiah. Take some men with you. This is another one of those fascinating little tidbits in the story. He's the king, but he can't just give the order. He says to this official, this Ethiopian eunuch in his court, take some soldiers with you so that you can do it right? There's. That's evidence of that, like internal division in the kingdom.
[00:12:59] So then Abed Malek goes. He Rescues Jeremiah. And there's this really interesting little bit where he stops at a wardrobe and gets some old rags, right, and some worn out clothes, and he throws them down into the cistern along with the rope and tells Jeremiah to put them under his arms so that he can pull him out of the mud.
[00:13:18] This, to me, is a fascinating story about a really unusual hero in the faith.
[00:13:27] Abed Malek, in case you hadn't noticed, is an outsider in at least two ways. The text sort of obsessively refers to him as an Ethiopian.
[00:13:38] Over and over again. Abed Malek is called out for being an Ethiopian, by which, of course, it means, you know, an African, black man, an Ethiopian.
[00:13:51] This is the nrsv, which is a more modern translation, and it sort of very carefully translates the original word there into Ethiopian. But the word actually is better translated as kushite, because people in Africa who had darker skin were seen as the sons or the. The descendants of Kush, who was one of the sons of Moses. So what's interesting about that is the text also enforces a kind of connection.
[00:14:19] We saw this in last week's message, too. There is an outsider, somebody who's from a foreign land, somebody whose skin is different, and yet even though they're an outsider, even though they're a foreigner, there is a kind of deep familial connection to them.
[00:14:35] Same thing with the bed. Malek.
[00:14:38] What's ironic about the story is that when Jeremiah the prophet, the servant of the king, is grabbed and thrown into the cistern to die, it's not one of Jeremiah's compatriots that saves him. It's not one of Jeremiah's own people. It's not a Judah, it's not a person from Jerusalem. It's not a Hebrew.
[00:14:59] It is a black man from Africa.
[00:15:04] It's an outsider. It's a foreigner who speaks up to save Jeremiah's life.
[00:15:10] But Abed Malek is an outsider, a kind of marginalized person in more ways than one. Not only is he from Africa, not only is he a foreigner, this sort of like, marginalized person in the court, but he's also a eunuch.
[00:15:26] A eunuch meaning somebody whose body has been altered, right? Whose body has been changed, specifically, who has been castrated.
[00:15:36] So Abed Malek is not just a foreigner. Abed Malek is also a queer person, a person whose body has been surgically altered in order to change his apparent sex.
[00:15:52] This is something that was done in the ancient world commonly, especially for people who were placed into positions that required for Them to be trusted.
[00:16:03] Right. And so they were sort of disarmed, especially around, like, harems.
[00:16:10] But it wasn't just that. It was also common to castrate men who were going to serve in other official capacities, perhaps to work with money or to work as diplomats with other foreign nations. This is why it was common at that time for foreigners to serve as eunuchs, because they served as kind of diplomats in the court of the king or the rulers.
[00:16:33] And so as a eunuch, he's sort of conveniently disempowered.
[00:16:40] It's both, like, literal and symbolic.
[00:16:45] This, by the way, is explicitly marginalized by the law of Moses. Deuteronomy, chapter 23, verse 1, excludes anybody whose genitals have been castrated or crushed in any way from entering into the religious assembly.
[00:17:05] And so this person, Abed Malek, really occupies sort of two intersecting, marginalized identities.
[00:17:14] He's not only a foreigner. He also is what we might today consider to be a person who doesn't fit in typical sexual or gender categories.
[00:17:26] This is why eunuchs in scripture are often latched onto by the queer community as examples of how God lifts up people who have alternative genders and alternative sexualities and yet are still used by God, because that is, of course, exactly what we see happening here.
[00:17:47] A person who exists entirely outside of the law of God, entirely outside of the realm of God, according to Hebrew law, is the one through whom God works.
[00:18:02] Interestingly enough, Abed Malek in Hebrew literally means servant of the king.
[00:18:11] What's especially interesting about that is that Abed malek, in spite of the political division, in spite of the danger, in spite of the very real threat that exists outside the walls, in spite of serving a king who has no discernment of his own, Abed Malek seems committed to serving the true king.
[00:18:32] Abed Malek seems to be able to understand what is genuinely good, right, and true, even though all of his identities are outside of what is considered for this community, good and right and true.
[00:18:52] And that, I think, is where there's hope in this passage.
[00:19:02] Whatever your difficulties, whatever your identities, whatever threats are coming against you, God works in the most surprising and unexpected ways, generally through the most surprising and unexpected people.
[00:19:28] This shouldn't be a surprise to us.
[00:19:32] Hope always works, I think, this way.
[00:19:36] Hope works its way into us. Despite our frustration with whatever the current situation might be, despite whatever the threats might be, despite whatever, you know, political intrigue might be going on, God finds a way to work hope in our midst, usually through the most unexpected people and I think that sort of pressure, that discomfort that is created is itself a kind of indicator of the possibility of hope, or at least I hope so, pun intended.
[00:20:21] Here's what I mean by that.
[00:20:23] I shared last week with you a quote from this book, holy Disruption, which is this month's book club selection at the Oceanside Sanctuary. If you're reading it, I hope that you will participate in our book club event, which is coming up at the beginning of October, where we'll be having a live conversation with Reverend Amy Butler, who's one of the co authors of this book. But here in a later chapter when Amy Butler and Dawn Darwin Weeks, who are the co authors of this, where they're talking about hope and specifically about a theology of the hope of hope, they quote the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann.
[00:21:02] For those of you who don't know Jurgen Moltmann, one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century, and one of the things that makes him particularly interesting as a theologian is, you know, I don't know if you're aware, but some interesting things happened in the 20th century in Germany.
[00:21:22] As a consequence, some interesting things happened in the 20th century across the world because of what was happening in Germany.
[00:21:30] Jurgen Moltmann was a young man in Germany in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s and ended up conscripted into the German army in World War II. Fought for the German army in World War II, you could say somewhat against his will.
[00:21:50] This is certainly true for many of the Germans who fought on behalf of Hitler in World War II.
[00:21:58] Many people didn't have much choice in the matter, but also didn't really understand the bigger picture of what was going on. Later in his life, Moltmann famously sort of repented of his participation in that and grieved it and went on to write incredibly influential theology as a consequence of what he experienced.
[00:22:22] And in this book they quote, I think one of the things that he writes in his book, A Theology of Hope, and here's what it says, as theologian Jurgen Moltmann wrote, quote, those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is.
[00:22:48] Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is.
[00:23:00] Peace with God means conflict with this world world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled presence.
[00:23:20] I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is what Abed Malek was experiencing, like the goad of the hope of the future. Stabbing inexorably into his own presence.
[00:23:37] That thing that we feel, that, like, profound discomfort, that turns into frustration, that turns into anger, that turns into rage, that maybe eventually becomes hopelessness or grief. But whatever it is that you're experiencing, that sense that what's happening now isn't right, it's not the way it's supposed to be, because it's somehow rooted in some sense the future, some sense of how things ought to be, some sense of, like, this is not the way that we should be moving. This is not the direction in which we should be going. We ought not to be moving in a direction that blames the problems of our society on every foreigner, on every queer person, on every person of color. That is not the right way to go.
[00:24:29] That's the discomfort that I feel.
[00:24:33] That's the anger and the rage that I feel.
[00:24:38] And Abed Malek, I think, is recognizing that things aren't right, not just with Jeremiah, but certainly starting with Jeremiah, that the man who was willing to tell the truth and being punished for it, being executed for it, perhaps could be rescued.
[00:25:03] Perhaps the truth could be rescued.
[00:25:07] And so I think because Abed Malek somehow, someway, still has hope that things can be better, he acts.
[00:25:18] And this is what I think I can learn from Abed Malek.
[00:25:24] The number one thing of which I've already mentioned, which is perhaps very obvious, is that God works through those who are excluded and marginalized.
[00:25:37] I don't just mean like that God sometimes, occasionally works through those who are excluded and marginalized. What I mean is that God works through those who are excluded and marginalized.
[00:25:54] Those who are considered by society, by their community, by their religion, those who are considered nothing more than old rags or worn out clothes often become the very means by which we are saved.
[00:26:14] That's the first thing that I take from this story.
[00:26:19] This is, of course, true over and over again in Scripture. Every prophet fits this description. Every woman in scripture that we read about fits this description.
[00:26:30] Every foreigner in scripture seems to fit this description over and over and over again.
[00:26:38] Jesus himself fits the this description.
[00:26:45] Can anything good come from Nazareth was a phrase that was uttered about Jesus because he seemed to come from, you know, some backwater rural town that nobody could imagine could produce somebody of significance.
[00:27:02] But again and again, God works through those who are excluded, marginalized.
[00:27:10] I think the other thing that I am learning from this passage is who my enemies are.
[00:27:23] It's really common for people in my position who get paid to do what I do, who teach from scripture, to say, I don't have any Enemies.
[00:27:38] But that's not true.
[00:27:42] Jesus told me to love my enemies.
[00:27:46] An exhortation that makes no sense whatsoever unless I have some.
[00:27:58] So I do.
[00:28:03] Well, what I learned from this is my enemies are not foreigners.
[00:28:11] My enemies are not the people who come to my community from some other community, some from some other ethnicity, from some other nationality, from some other culture.
[00:28:22] They are not my enemies by virtue of coming from some other place. I don't care what the law says.
[00:28:33] I don't care what a political party says. I don't care what the President of the United States says. I don't care what some hate filled talking head on Fox News says. If you come from some other place, you are not my enemy.
[00:28:52] My enemies are also not queer or trans people.
[00:29:02] Just because somebody's sexuality is different than mine, somebody's body is different than mine, somebody's gender is different than mine, does not make them my enemy.
[00:29:14] People from other religions are not my enemy.
[00:29:21] People who have a different way of making meaning of their world, who have a different sacred scripture, who attend worship in different kinds of buildings, who read from different traditions, are not my enemy.
[00:29:35] What Abed Malek teaches me is that my enemy are the lies and the misinformation and the propaganda that are used to make me serve the wrong king.
[00:29:53] Abed Malek didn't believe the lies and the misinformation about Jeremiah. Abed Malek valued the truth that Jeremiah spoke.
[00:30:06] Our lies, then, also are the politics of corruption, exploitation and oppression that result from the power that is created by those lies and our enemies. My enemies are those who are willing to do violence and service to those things.
[00:30:24] Those are my enemies.
[00:30:28] Ephesians, chapter 6, verse 12, famously says, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities and evil and wickedness in high places. And Paul, I promise you, believe me or not, but I promise you Paul is not talking about ghosts and demons and spirits.
[00:30:45] When Paul says, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against power and principalities and evil and wickedness in high places, he's talking about systems and structures of power.
[00:30:56] He's talking about administrations and policies that mean to do harm, usually against foreigners, queer people and people of other faiths.
[00:31:13] And if all of that is true, then like Abed Malek, I think that our weapons against those enemies are the discernment to know what's true.
[00:31:27] And there might not be a more valuable commodity in the world right now than the ability to know what's true.
[00:31:39] It wouldn't be difficult to make a deep fake AI Video of me saying exactly the opposite of these things.
[00:31:47] Nobody would, because nobody cares what I say.
[00:31:51] But it wouldn't be hard.
[00:31:55] It wouldn't be hard to leverage the technology that exists in the world on behalf of lies and misinformation that helps people to gain power that they can use to exploit and oppress people.
[00:32:08] And so our first weapon is discernment, to know what's true. Our second is faith.
[00:32:17] Faith in a gospel that says God is with the marginalized, the exploited, and the oppressed.
[00:32:27] Do we believe that?
[00:32:32] And then our third weapon, I think, is the same courage that Abem Malek expressed when he spoke up when needed, and when he acted in order to do what was right.
[00:32:47] I think that if the ability to discern the truth is maybe the most valuable commodity right now, a close second is the courage to speak up against the lies and the misinformation and the courage to act in order to do what is right.
[00:33:09] We're not yet at the place where most of our lives would be on the line if we spoke up and acted with courage.
[00:33:16] But if we don't do it now, we will soon be at that place.
[00:33:23] I don't think I'm overstating when I say that.
[00:33:31] Listen, I know somebody. I won't say who. Somebody close to me who is from Turkey.
[00:33:41] Shh.
[00:33:45] Some of you know what she's talking about.
[00:33:49] Somebody very close to me is from Turkey. He came here several years ago in order to get away from a violent, oppressive political regime.
[00:34:00] And what he has said over and over again over the past couple of months is, I never would have imagined that the United States would be where it is right now as quickly as it has.
[00:34:14] He said it took years, years for Erdogan to accomplish this level of control and oppression in Turkey. It's only taken months in the United States.
[00:34:30] And so I do think Abed Malek teaches us how to discern the truth, how to have faith in what's true, and how.
[00:34:40] How to have the courage to speak up, if you want to know how to do that.
[00:34:46] I think you look to those who are marginalized and excluded and oppressed because they have been through it.
[00:34:57] That's why communities, hopefully, like this exists, so that you can know people who have learned the hard lessons about how to resist.
[00:35:12] And you or me, somebody like me who largely doesn't know what it's like to be marginalized or excluded or oppressed can learn from those of you who unfortunately have.
[00:35:25] I think we all have to teach each other those lessons.
[00:35:29] I think we have to be willing to learn those lessons from each other.
[00:35:33] And then I think we have to be willing to speak up and act.
[00:35:38] And I'll do my best to have the hope and the courage to do that.
[00:35:43] And I hope that you will too. Amen.
[00:35:46] Would you pray with me?
[00:35:48] God, we thank you for today and for these good but difficult texts.
[00:36:05] We acknowledge that all across the country there are churches who look a lot like us and sound a lot like us and maybe most days act a lot like us, who are saying exactly the opposite, who are saying that the cause of our problems are people who come from other borders, who are people who live queer lives, that our problems are caused by people who don't look or act according to whatever we define as normal and as Christians, God, as followers of Jesus, we are grieved by that.
[00:37:00] But we ask that you would give us first and foremost the courage not to vilify and demonize other humans.
[00:37:16] That with Paul, that we could say that we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with the ideas and the systems and the structures of power that cause harm.
[00:37:28] And even though those slogans and words come out of the mouths of other images of God, we pray that you would give us the courage to speak and act from a place of truth and yet still embrace those who speak them.
[00:37:46] To resist the temptation to speak and act violently, but instead to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us and find our hope in all the little ways that you are bringing salvation in the most surprising ways and through the most unexpected people.
[00:38:12] We pray that you would make that true for us. In Jesus name, amen.
[00:38:21] Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
[00:38:27] To learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit
[email protected] We hope to see you again soon, Sam.
