top of page

[Sermon] Speak in the Daylight

Pastor Hector Garfias-Toledo



The prophet Jeremiah didn't hold back with God. He accused, complained, and declared himself cheated, and God was big enough to hold all of it. In this sermon, Pastor Hector draws on Jeremiah's raw honesty to reframe what it means to be prophetic: not the cave-dwelling mystic or the street-corner shouter, but the truth-teller who speaks from a place of deep covenant relationship. The prophetic call, he argues, is not about confrontation for its own sake; it is about faithfulness to a God whose authority is not military power or political control, but righteousness and steadfast love. That kind of faithfulness demands that we go deeper than our feelings and name what is actually wrong in our world. And when the fire is in your belly, don't suppress it. Go public.


Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.


Grace to you and peace from God, Abba, Father, Mother, Creator, the One who sees through us everything, and the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord who sees us as his family. And we say amen.

 

Well, I was thinking that it's an irony for me to preach today, because we are going to talk about Father's Day and then the gospel says, "I'm coming to put enmity between you and your father." So I don't know what to say now. So you're going to preach with me.

 

It is hard. And I don't know how you deal with this, and how you see the prophetic role of every Christian in the life of the church. Last Friday, Jade and I went for a walk. We knew it was going to be a little bit chaotic, but we said, "It's not too bad. Let's drive all the way to Elliott Bay to walk along the water in the new park they opened in Seattle." We knew there was going to be a game. It was the US against someone else. I don't remember. But I was not too concerned because Mexico already won two games, so who cares?

 

So we went. And as we were there, we got close to the new area. I don't remember what they call it. But it's this thing where you can go up and see the Sound, and it was packed with people. Why are those people standing there? There were two screens. They were watching the game.

 

So Jade and I got to that place. And then, when we were about to come back, the game started. And we got to a place where there were probably six or seven people experiencing homelessness: sleeping, some of them sitting, some of them just there. And as we were standing there, four Apache helicopters went over the stadium, close enough that we could see the pilots.

 

And inside me there was this prophetic voice. Some people started to clap. But inside me there was this prophetic voice that didn't allow me to even think more, because I am looking at the dichotomy of our reality in this world: where we know that millions and millions of dollars are spent on the military, while I'm standing next to a person who hasn't had a home, a meal, or maybe someone to be with him.

 

Those are the moments when the prophetic aspect of our identity as Christians is difficult, because we are confronted with the realities. And maybe we are confronted with the call that you and I have: that we are not just called to bring a message, but that we are called to be the message of the grace, the love, the power, and the disruption of the Holy Spirit in the community where we live, in the society that we are part of.

 

Fortunately and unfortunately, we have gotten to this idea that prophets are these people who are foretellers, or these kinds of mystics who live in a cave and do their thing because they are prophets, just kind of crazy people wearing strange clothes, saying the wrong things at the wrong time to the wrong people. Or we go to the other side: we believe that prophets are protesters just yelling and sending everybody to hell for everything wrong that they are doing. Unfortunately, we go to the extremes, with very wrong images of what the prophetic role of every Christian is.

 

And we see this in the passages we read today, where Jeremiah brings this raw cry of how he was feeling when he encounters people who are mocking him, laughing at him, making his life miserable. And then, on the other side, in the gospel, we have the Lord Jesus Christ with this unsettling sword logic: being the one who is not bringing peace but bringing the sword to separate families, to break relationships, to basically pit people against each other. How do we understand all of this in the world we are living in right now?

 

The prophetic role, I think, is the art of holding insoluble tension: the intimate covenant of love and the structural confrontation, the personal anguish and the public proclamation, the feeling of being utterly cheated and possessing a fire that we cannot extinguish.

 

The words of the prophet Jeremiah have always fascinated me since I was a kid. And I can tell you that I have gotten into trouble since I was a kid, with the president of the Mexican Lutheran Church, for speaking things and for sharing things that I saw were not helping us to work in the unfolding reign of God.

 

I was in trouble when I was serving at the churchwide, because I was pointing to things I believed we were not paying attention to, things that were actually turning us more inwardly than looking forward to how God and the Spirit are leading us to be a denomination, a church in this country.

 

To the point that one day, talking with a classmate I had when I was studying at Lewis University in the Chicago area, a classmate who is politically speaking on the complete other side of the spectrum, a Swedish Catholic to my Mexican Lutheran. We always make fun of that, because how can these things happen in the world? Anyway, he said that he was experiencing similar situations, being pushed away, accused, pointed at for speaking truth. And one day we said, "Well, what was wrong with us?" And he said, "Hector, I think I am like the prophet Jeremiah and you are more like the prophet Hosea." And then I went to check what the prophet Hosea does. And I thought, "Oh yes. I'm like that."

 

Jeremiah's complaint to God is: "You lied to me about how this was going to work. I warned you I was tired of the mockery of the people around me, and you force me to say things that get me into trouble. I want you, God, to be silent in my life and let me go on with my own life, deciding what's good and what's bad for me."

 

Jeremiah felt that the covenant God had signed with him when he called him in his childhood had been violated, that this covenant was shattered to the core.

 

And now you can understand how Jeremiah may have felt. Because I believe you know this. Who is the person who can hurt you the most?

 

Who in your life is the person who can hurt you the deepest? The one you love the most.

 

Because in a relationship of love, we make ourselves vulnerable. We open ourselves up to the other. And when something goes differently than the expectations of that relationship, we get hurt. And it hurts bad. It goes deep.

 

So what does it mean to be prophetic in today's world and society?

 

I think the short answer is this, and I offer it as food for thought for the week. To be prophetic in today's world is to be truth-tellers in residence. Not confronting situations for the sake of it, but taking the time to reflect on how you and I are responding to God's covenant with us, a covenant of loyalty, the chesed, which in Hebrew means steadfast love. Confrontation is not something we do just because it makes us feel like we are fulfilling a role, but because when we confront, we are speaking truth, with reflection, with discernment, for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of well-being, for the sake of shalom.

 

Maybe what it means to be prophetic in our world today means seeing the wicked in systemic terms, not as individuals we simply don't like. Let me say this because I think it's important as we live in this world, in this situation, in our country. In many of the protests that I have been following, when people go to protest about the current president, they have asked the protesters: "Can you tell me what you are protesting about?" And very few people are able to articulate the reasons, the policies, the aspects that are concrete or tangible. Everything basically reduces to, "I don't like this person."

 

And this is not about feelings. This is about the call to prophetic presence. It's about looking for the deepest roots that are causing the problems. Because to be honest, I believe that my wife doesn't like me at times. As you may not like someone you love at times. As a professor in one of the seminaries I attended said when teaching his children: "I tell you I love you, but I just don't like what you are doing right now, and the way you are acting right now."

 

To be prophetic is to go deeper, my siblings in Christ, than the superficial feelings that pull us like the wind from one side to the other.

 

To be prophetic, based on chapter 20 of the book of Jeremiah, means to reject apathy, even when our social justice efforts fail, or when we see the system rigging the lives of all people.

 

It means to remember that God is big enough to handle our accusations, our deceptions, our complaints, our anger, even when we feel that God has been unfaithful to us. To be prophetic is, with Jeremiah, to be able to speak our hearts to God, and to know that our God is so great that God's grace is greater than our anger and our disappointment.

 

Because this liberates us to relate to others, to listen to others, and to know that the others are in the same situation, probably and most likely the same as I am.

 

We cannot fall into the trap of saying: "What is happening to me, even though I am very angry at God, is just because God is testing me." We cannot fall into that trap. We need to be in touch with our own emotions to be able to understand our siblings around us, because they may be going through the same situation. So we need to be radically honest about our relationship with God and with others.

 

As Rose Berger, a Catholic activist, said: "The prophetic action is one which creates a disruptive crisis of truth in the present by bringing forward the wisdom from the past in order to triangulate on the hope for the future." God persisted, ultimately leading Jeremiah to praise and declare God's deliverance.

 

So the message for us, my siblings, and I offer this as a reflection for you to think about, to challenge me, or to teach me, is that what we are called to be is not just a proposition to articulate our best intellectual understanding of God. It is to live in the tension that we embody: refusing to let go of God's righteousness, even while holding God's apparent silence in one hand and the grip of the wicked in the other. It is to live in the tension that you and I embody.

 

So today, as we leave this place, as the fire in your belly and in your bones is there, perhaps trying to suppress your desire to share what God has been for you in your life, I invite you to not hesitate to go public today, and to speak in the daylight. And that, per se, is the good news of the call that you and I have as prophetic presence in the body of Christ.

 

Amen.

bottom of page