The Prophet’s Reward: Hope Against Complacency -- Sermon at St. Francis Episcopal Church 6-28-26

Have you ever noticed that ChatGPT is a big suck up? It’s true – AI systems like Claude and ChatGPT are prone to sycophancy. More often than not, they just tell us what we want to hear. 

This is not a bug. It’s a feature. It turns out that people like being affirmed, validated, and reassured. We like it when we are told that our instincts are good, our opinions are sound, and our frustrations are justified.

Most of the time, AI’s tendency to affirm and encourage is relatively innocuous, as far as it goes; sometimes, it can even be helpful. But it can also be dangerous – there are growing reports of AI systems deepening users’ delusions, intensifying emotional dependency, validating destructive impulses, and, in some tragic instances, contributing to self-harm and even suicide.

Of course, this is not specifically an AI problem. Artificial intelligence may be a new and especially vivid example, but in a lot of ways it’s a tale as old as time. Most of us do not especially enjoy being challenged. We don’t typically seek out voices that tell us we are wrong, or that we need to change. We are naturally drawn to voices that reassure us and confirm what we already think. 

The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah didn’t seem to have this problem. He didn’t seem to care much about what his contemporaries thought of him, and he had little patience for sycophancy or empty affirmations. Our reading this morning is a great case in point. Let me set the scene: In 597 BCE, Babylon began its conquest of the kingdom of Judah. They ransacked the Temple and carried off some of its sacred vessels. They sent Judah’s king, Jehoiachin into exile, along with many of Jerusalem’s elites, and installed a puppet king in his place. The people are living through defeat, destruction, humiliation, exile. They desperately wanted things back the way they were.

Our friendly neighborhood prophet Jeremiah had a characteristically warm and fuzzy message for his fellow Judeans. Want to know how he lifted their spirits?

He took a big wooden yoke – like the oxen kind, not the egg kind – put it on his neck, and walked up and down the streets of Judah, proclaiming the message behind the not-so-subtle symbolism: submit to Babylon. 

Woof. Talk about refusing to simply tell people what they wanted to hear! I think of Jeremiah as a Jewish optimist – which is someone who hears, “Things can’t possibly get any worse,” and replies, “Oh yes they can!”

Now, in Jeremiah’s defense, his message was not about liking Babylon; it wasn’t indifference to the suffering of his people, or a lack of national pride. Quite the contrary, it was because he cared for the people that he dared to preach such an unpopular message. He believed that the restoration the people sought was possible – but only if his countrymen reckoned with the moral and spiritual failures that had gotten them where they were; there was no quick fix, and no inevitable happy ending. The way through would require introspection, repentance, and transformation.

But Jeremiah wasn’t the only prophet in town. He had a contemporary named Hananiah, and his message was strikingly different from Jeremiah’s. Hananiah announces that within two years, God will break the yoke of Babylon. The Temple vessels will be returned, and the exiles will come home. In other words: this crisis is almost over. Do not worry. Do not reckon too seriously with what has happened; don’t draw too many sweeping conclusions that will force you to change course. You’re fine. Everything is fine. And everything will soon be back to normal. Stand down and stand by, and witness the deliverance of the Lord!

Even with just the little bit we know about Jeremiah, his response to Hananiah is striking. He says, “Amen! May the Infinite do so.” In other words, Jeremiah is saying, I hope you are right. I hope the exiles come home. I hope the Temple vessels will be restored. I hope this long national nightmare will end speedily and in our days! 

But then Jeremiah adds a somewhat cryptic postscript. He says, “The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many lands and great kingdoms. But for the prophet who prophesies peace, it is only when the word of that prophet comes true that it will be known that the Infinite has truly sent the prophet.” 

It may not sound like it, but this is a not-so-subtle rebuke of Hananiah’s optimism. Jeremiah is admitting that Hananiah’s message is unquestionably appealing – and at the same time, he’s warning that an appealing prophecy has to be tested with special care – precisely because it is appealing. A warning can awaken people. It can call them to repentance, responsibility, and change. But an optimistic message too readily becomes an excuse for inaction. Jeremiah’s point is not that peace is somehow less desirable than Judah’s current predicament; nor is he saying that bad news is always true and good news is always false. It’s that while Hananiah’s prediction of a just and peaceful future may indeed be true, it’s impossible to know for sure whether he is right unless and until it comes to pass. If I believe the prophecy will come true, then all I would need to do is sit back, relax, and wait for the good times to roll. But what if, regardless of how much I may want to believe in the prophet’s positivity, he turns out to be wrong? What if peace never comes to pass? What if all that time I sit around waiting for the positive promise to eventually be fulfilled that I miss the opportunity to make things better right now? What if passively waiting actually makes matters worse? Hananiah’s affirming message is doubtlessly appealing. But the seductiveness of his sycophancy is precisely why it’s so dangerous. As the book of Proverbs warns: “the tranquility of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of dullards will destroy them” (Prov 1:30–32).

Hananiah’s prophecy may prove to be true. But then again, it may not. It counsels complacency – but perhaps the moment calls for disquiet. So Jeremiah is saying, in effect: I hope you are right, Hananiah. But until your promise proves true, we cannot trust in it simply because it comforts us. Or, to put it in the words of a more contemporary visionary Bruce Springsteen says, “You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come. Well, don't waste your time waiting.”

Of course, part of the issue here is a definitional one. What is a prophet, and what is prophecy? Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of England and one of the most important Jewish public theologians of the last generation, put it beautifully: “A true prophet does not foretell. He warns.” A prophet is not an oracle peering into a fixed and predetermined future – the future is not determined. Human beings are free. People can change. And God forgives, The purpose of prophecy is not to predict. The purpose of prophecy is to awaken. As Rabbi Sacks puts it, “a true prophet is an agent of hope.”

What is hope? It is not the insistence that everything happens for a reason, or that history automatically bends toward justice, or that if we just stay positive long enough things will somehow work out. That’s optimism. Hope is different. Hope is not the belief that a better future is inevitable. Rather, it’s about looking honestly at reality, seeing the brokenness clearly, and still refusing to accept that the status quo is inevitable or incontrovertible.. It’s the insistence that a better future is possible – but whether such a future comes to pass depends, at least in part, upon what we do to bring it about. 

Jeremiah doesn’t offer polyannish promises of peace. But he also doesn’t predict inevitable doom. Instead, his message is that the people’s future can change – but only if they change. As he proclaims just a couple chapters before our reading this morning, “Amend your ways and your doings, and obey the voice of the Infinite,” and then the disaster pronounced against the people may be averted (Jer 26:13). The future is not something you merely await. The future is something you shape through repentance, responsibility, and repair. 

Over the past few years, I have found myself increasingly drawn to a neologism that I know sounds a little ridiculous, but that I continue to find useful: hope-timism. Hope-timism is the discipline of refusing both despair and complacency. It’s the practice of telling the truth about what is broken while also refusing to believe that brokenness is destiny. It’s recognizing that the world is not as it should be; and that the path to repairing it may be long, hard, and uncertain; but failure is not foreordained, redemption is still possible, and what seems impossible today may simply be something that has not happened yet.

That is why I think Jeremiah speaks with particular urgency to us. We, too, inhabit a world filled with voices that function like Hananiah’s. I like how Conan O’Brien put this in his recent commencement speech at his alma mater, Harvard. He pointed out: “We are living through a period of extreme narcissism. Our current leadership in Washington believes that empathy is a weakness, and that our nation stands supreme and alone. Add to that, everyone here today has a phone in their pocket that is algorithmically programmed to celebrate you and you alone by making you the protein-maxing hero of your own special journey.” Whether politicians or celebrities or Instagram influencers or tech CEOs or ChatGPT, the proliferation of these voices tell us, over and over, that all is well with us – or perhaps that all will be well, that the best is yet to come; or at least that things are about as well as they’re ever going to be. So sit back, relax, and enjoy.

Jeremiah counsels us to be skeptical of the voices that seek to settle us with self-justification, and instead seek out those that summon us to service; to resist the voices that merely affirm where we are, and instead embrace those that call us to climb higher; to heed the voices that call us to repair, and reject those that give us permission to remain unchanged?

This, I believe, is what Jesus means in the passage we read this morning from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.” 

Now, since I’m not a scholar of Christian scripture, I asked a few trusted Christian colleagues what exactly Matthew means by “a prophet’s reward.” And the basic answer was: spiritual blessings, probably? Turns out no one really knows. But I think Jeremiah gives us one way of thinking about it:

The prophet’s reward cannot be popularity, because the prophets were rarely popular. It cannot be comfort, because the prophets often lived uncomfortable lives. It cannot even be vindication, because being proven right is a pretty poor reward if what you were right about was destruction. Jeremiah was right about many things, and yet he spent much of his life grieving what his people refused to hear.

The prophet’s reward, I think, is making a meaningful difference in people’s lives, and in the world. It is seeing warning inspire repentance, and repentance becoming repair. It is seeing people turn. It is about helping the future that God desires, and calls us to bring about, begin to break through into the world. It is not the satisfaction of saying, “I told you so.” It is the joy of no longer needing to say it.

And if that is the prophet’s reward, then to “welcome a prophet,” as Jesus puts it, is not merely to admire a courageous speaker or applaud an inspiring sermon. It is to allow the prophetic word to make a claim on us. It is to hear a truth we may not want to hear and nevertheless let it call us to climb higher. It is to refuse both the pessimism that says nothing can be done and the optimism that says nothing needs to be done. It is to look at what is broken in our lives, in our country, and in our world, and say: this can be repaired, this must be repaired, and with God’s help we will have some part in repairing it.

May we have the courage to welcome prophets in our lives – those who may make us uncomfortable even as they help us become more faithful; those agents of hope who, though they may not offer ready reassurance, help us resist both despair and complacency, and call us toward redemption.

And may we merit, speedily and in our days, to receive the prophet’s reward: the joy of seeing warning become wisdom, repentance become repair, and God’s hope for the world become, through us, ever closer to our reality. 

So may it be God’s will. Amen.