The
prophet Jeremiah lived and preached in some very dark days for the Jewish
people – just before Israel and Judah were conquered by the Babylonians,
who took Israel, the northern kingdom, in 597 BCE and Judah, the southern
kingdom, about ten years later. Jeremiah was called by God to deliver a
difficult message to the people of Israel--to tell them because they had been
disobedient and unfaithful to the Lord their God, they were going to be
punished. An enemy from the north was going to conquer them. In today’s
passage, Jeremiah’s prophecies are coming true. The armies of Babylon are
closing in, the city is under siege, and the enemy is literally at the gates.
The situation is desperate. The people have lost all hope, and they don’t
know what to do.
The people of Israel struggled with the
question of whether God had abandoned his people? Or was God punishing them because they had
done something wrong? Why didn’t God
hear and respond to their cries? “Where
is God in the midst of suffering? Isn’t
the Lord with us?
We can all relate to how the people of
Israel felt because we’ve been there. We watched in horror as the two towers at
the World Trade Center fell twelve years ago. We saw the devastation of the
tsunamis that hit Indonesia and Japan, and the hurricanes that struck the east
coast. We witnessed the mass shootings in schools and movie theaters. We’ve
seen the power of tornados to destroy a town in mere minutes, and watched fires
swallow up acres and acres of timber, homes, people, and anything else that
dares get in the path. Where is God now,
when so many things seem out of control?
What makes the book of Jeremiah so
meaningful, so moving, is that we can relate to it. We respond to the feelings
of all people who have ever suffered or felt abandoned by God in their time of
need. It seems natural to feel that way. At this moment of greatest desperation
and hopelessness, Scripture tells us that the prophet Jeremiah buys a piece of
land outside of Jerusalem, which which has already been CONQUERED by the
Babylonians and is thus no longer held by Judah. Why in the world Jeremiah
would do such a crazy thing?
We could say it’s because that’s what God
told him to do. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? He did it because,
even under these dire circumstances, God wanted him to give the people some
hope. He did it because he believed that even as bad as the situation was,
SOMEDAY, things would get better. His
willingness to purchase this land, to invest in an unknown future, is a clear
and tangible sign of his faith that God would one day redeem Israel.
It’s like the rainbow that God put in
the sky to remind Noah of the promise never again to destroy the people of the
earth in a flood. It’s a sign of hope. What do we cling to when life begins to
spin out of control and we feel like we are hanging on by a thread? To
whom do we turn? Where can we go to look for a sign of God’s promise that
one day things will get better? Where can we find some hope?
We all faces times when we don’t know how we’re
going to make it through the day. What do we do? How do we go on?
Where can we look for a sign of God’s promise that one day things will be
better?
Maybe when things go wrong in our lives,
we’re like the people of Israel and think that somehow God doesn’t hear our
cries, that God has abandoned us, or that God is punishing us because we’ve
done something wrong. But maybe the
problem isn’t that God doesn’t answer.
Maybe the problem is that we are not always able to see how God is at
work in so many ways in this world. Maybe the problem is that we’re not
asking the right question, that we’re not asking, What are we to do? Rather
than expecting God to bind up our
wounds, ease our sorrows and our suffering, and make the wounded whole, maybe
we should be listening for how God wants us to join in his actions to relieve
the suffering of this world.
The irony is that it was during these dark
days, that the prophets developed the sacred dream of the peaceable kingdom. We
first glimpse this vision of the world as God wants it to be with the image of
the promised land – a land flowing with milk and honey. What a powerful image
that must have been for freed slaves traveling though the Sinai desert. Or,
later, during the exile, for nostalgic refugees dreaming of home.
The nation of Israel flourishes only very briefly
during the reigns of King Saul, David and Solomon less than 100 years, from
1020-930 BCE). But then the nation was torn by civil war, sickened by
corruption, threatened by a succession of powerful enemies and eventually
conquered. It’s brightest and best were carried away as exiles to Babylon. And
then the great irony. It was as refugees in a foreign land, that the Jewish religion
matured and flourished. During the
exile, the dream of a peaceable kingdom changes from a dream of a promised land
to a promised day or time, the Day of the Lord, when oppressors will be
overthrown, when corruption and unfaithfulness will be replaced by virtue and
integrity, and when the blessing, justice, and peace of God will flow like a
river and fill the earth as waters fill the oceans.
Swords into
plowshares.
Today that would mean dreaming about tanks being melted down into playground
jungle gyms and machine guns being recast as swing sets. Wolves living with lambs. Today that would mean Christians and Jews
and Muslims throwing a picnic together or Left- and Right-wingers forming a
band and singing in harmony, or nuclear weapons engineers being redeployed to
develop green energy. Children playing
with snakes, centenarians seeming to be in the prime of life. Today those
wouldn’t suggest snake handling in heaven or the need for bigger retirement
funds, but rather a time of deep safety for vulnerable people, without gaps in
the health-care system, so all can live a full life from childhood to senior
citizenship. Everyone with a vine and fig
tree. That wouldn’t necessarily mean a return to an agricultural economy
for everyone, but it would suggest full employment for all families everywhere,
all having some secure place in a healthy, sustainable, regenerative economy. Men and women prophesying, the knowledge of
the LORD covering the
earth like water covers the ocean basin. That would mean a deep kind of
universal and egalitarian spirituality. There are foretastes of the dream
coming true, of course, even though the dream itself always beckons and is
never fully grasped.
Are these passages just images of heaven
or of a post-apocalyptic future? Maybe there’s
a different way to read them. If we are people who live in the Genesis story of
creation and covenant and the Exodus story of liberation and formation into
God’s people, what if we were to hear
these images as a vision of the kind of future toward which God is inviting us
in history? What if we saw them less as an eternal destination beyond
history and more as a guiding star within it, less as a description and
prediction and more as a promise and hope, as an unquenchable dream that
inspires us to unceasing efforts to make the dream a reality?
The Bible says that God created the
universe and that as part of that God created us, each one as an individual
with a unique personality and character traits. We are all different from one
another. We possess free wills. The
Bible says that God, too, is a person. In fact, God is in three persons in the trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God
is not just a force or an energy or a set of impersonal laws or scientific
principals. God is personal, like a mother or a father.
In the Old Testament, God frequently is
viewed from the perspective of a growing child. First, from the standpoint of a
toddler, God seems like a giant and sometimes terrifying father figure who
rants and raves and doles out punishment mysteriously with his mighty arm.
Then, as the prophets of Israel grow in their understanding of God, and as
Israel herself develops into a teenager, so to speak, God is seen as a father
who says to the erring child, “I’ve had it! You are grounded!” Isn’t this,
after all, just exactly what God is saying to the nation of Israel when,
through the prophet Jeremiah. “Isn’t God saying, “Now come on, child of mine Israel! I’ve told you and told you not to do that. Now I am
making plans against you and getting ready to punish you for your continued
evil ways. Stop living sinful lives! Change what you are doing right now
because you are on the verge of being grounded!”
According to the Bible, God is always
intensely personal because God wants us to grow up to become people who are
responsible. The future is waiting to be
created; it is not fatalistically predetermined. God hasn’t already
prerecorded history so that it waits like digital information on a disk,
already “made” but only being “played” in real time. Life is “live.” History
isn’t a “show”—not even a “reality show.” History is unscripted, unrehearsed
reality, happening now—really happening.
The story of the peace-making kingdom provides
our faith with a sacred vision of the future, a vision of hope, a vision of
love. It represents a new creation, and a new exodus—a new promised land that
isn’t one patch of ground held by a chosen people, but that encompasses the whole
earth. It acknowledges that whatever we have become or ruined, there is hope
for a better tomorrow; whatever we have achieved or destroyed, new
possibilities await us; no matter how far we have come or backslidden, there
are new and more glorious adventures ahead. And, the prophets insist, this is
not just a human pipe dream, wishful thinking, whistling in the dark; this hope is the very word of the Lord, the
firm promise of the living God. The
liberating, hope-inspiring God whose image emerges in the prophets’ sacred
stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment