An Elegy for the Cubs

Proper 20C
Jeremiah 8:18—9:1
September 19, 2010

An Elegy for the Cubs

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The regular season record for the Chicago Cubs stands at 66 wins, 88 losses for a percentage of .449. It is cold consolation that the Pittsburgh Pirates who are bringing up the rear in the National League Central Division—and indeed in all of major league baseball—have a .333 winning percentage. The Cubs have quite simply stunk all season long. It is a measure of their misery that they do better on the road than at home. A depressing fog is generated by the gathering of large numbers of Cubs fans. On the road, the mental and emotional air is cleaner and the Cubbies only have to deal with outright hostility.

Cubs fans live perpetually and painfully in the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is. As fundamentalist Christians long for the Second Coming of Christ, so we Cubs fans long for the day when all the children of Abraham will gather from the east and from west, from the north and from the south, to sit together in the centerfield bleachers of Wrigley field to watch the Cubs win game seven of the world series, preferably against the White Sox. But it is not to be, not this year. Next year is the year, we say, just as Jews gather at Passover meals and vow, Next year in Jerusalem, the only difference being, that they can go to Jerusalem while the world in which the Cubs win the series remains closed to us, a world of imagination and longing only, not one that we can enter into fully.

My favorite living Christian scholar is Walter Brueggemann, now retired from Columbia Theological Seminary where he taught Old Testament. He is my favorite even though he is an ardent Cardinals fan. He has said that there is a biblical text for Cubs fans and that text is found in today’s reading: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

Of course, we might say that the text is about exile, not baseball. The whole of the book of Jeremiah was written under the shadow of a looming and then present disaster. The Babylonian Empire that had emerged explosively from within the old regional super-power Assyria in the early 6^th century. In the opening years of that century the Babylonians would push past the boundaries of Assyrian Empire. The king of Babylon would demand tribute payment from Judah for the privilege of maintaining its independence. Kings of Judah would be tempted by promises from Egypt into denying these tribute payments.

Under King Nebuchadrezzar the armies of Babylon would lay siege to Jerusalem in the summer of 587 before Christ; starving it out in 586, looting its temple and treasury, burning the temple, and destroying the city gates, and leading away its leading citizens in chains to Babylon itself. Jeremiah’s work as a prophet, as God’s spokesperson in Jerusalem, took place in this time. He saw the disaster coming. He argued for surrender as the only way to soften the disaster only to be branded as a traitor. When the catastrophe finally fell he urged the Judean captives to make a life for themselves as exiles, strangers in a strange land, and to remain God’s people, and to become a people of hope.

This exile, which lasted some forty-eight years, was one of the most important things that ever happened to the people of Judah, known ever after that as Jews. In a sense they became Jews during the exile. Most of the writings of what we call the Old Testament took their final form during or just after the exile. During the exile Jews developed ways of worshiping and of being God’s people that did not involve the Temple or its sacrificial system. The exile became the lens through which the Jews understood everything that they had experienced up until then and through which they experienced the world from then on.

The exile in Babylon became Exile with a capital E. For today and for the next four weeks we will explore life as God’s people in Exile with a capital E. I have two reasons for choosing these texts from among the lectionary texts in the up-coming weeks. The first is that, no matter how well our lives are going right now, no matter how at-home we feel, all of us will experience Exile in one form or another at some time, and many of us living in Exile right now. The second reason is that I am convinced, and have been for some time, that we in the United Methodist Church and mainline churches in general will best understand our situation by seeing ourselves as God’s people in exile.

Looking closely at these texts from Jeremiah and Lamentations can help us live faithfully as God’s people and as individuals when our life’s journey leads away from home and into exile. For we live in exile anytime we are forced to live in a place we cannot call home.

It can happen geographically. There are real exiles in the world, refugees who have been forced away from their homes by famine, war or political strife and who live as sojourners in places that are strange to them. But people can also be dislocated even as they continue to live in the places they were born. Southeastern Michigan is filled with exiled factory workers who have lost their identities along with their livelihoods and their homes because of the collapse of the domestic automotive industry. Countless neighborhoods are places of exile for the people who called them home just three years ago.

Exile can happen as a neighborhood or even a country change around us and leave us no longer at home in our own homes. Some of the people of Postville at least have welcomed wave after wave of newcomers in the past thirty years only to find themselves feeling like strangers in their own town.

Some of us have experienced a kind of technological exile as forms of communication have changed and we have struggled to keep up. Now our kids are more at home with texting than we are with email and, even if we could master the technology, we are faced with a foreign language: l-o-l, o-m-g, r-o-t-f-l, and others too fierce to mention. We might as well be immigrants!

A wife and mother finds herself living as an exile in her own home when her husband announces that he is through, no longer willing to invest any effort in the marriage that she had thought was having its troubles but was well worth the work it would take to make it good. The routines are the same, the pieces of furniture are all where had been, but their bed is an empty place and so is her heart.

And when we are sitting across from the oncologist after telling our family doctor about the nagging symptom that wouldn’t go away hurled us into a whirlwind of hospital admissions, tests, biopsies and consultations and the oncologist tells us that, yes, it’s cancer, we find ourselves living as exiles in our own bodies.

In our text for today begins with a cry: “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.” A catastrophe threatens Judah or perhaps it has already arrived. The prophet can see it, hear it, feel it, and taste it. The prophet is overwhelmed with grief and anger?

If it has not already arrived, it must be close enough that even the people of Jerusalem can see. Or does the prophet anticipate what the people will say when the armies of Babylon loom over the horizon: “Is Yahweh not in Zion? Is not her King in her?...The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” But these outcries seem formulaic, stilted, rote. Does Judah hope to stave off the disaster with formulas? Does it hope that religion-as-usual will return it to business-as-usual?

Don’t we always try to make some kind of bargain in the face of unbearable loss? Like ants dashing this way and that seeking escape from a flood that will overwhelm them momentarily, like politicians facing a recession—Democrats calling for more spending and Republicans for lowering taxes when neither of them has a clue, we hope to fix everything without changing anything. “We want our country back,” some are crying. But it’s too late. Time moves in only one direction and it is inexorable, relentless and unpitying.

The only things that can be done are to face the magnitude of what has happened, to cry out our anguish, and to grieve: “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.”

If we ask, “What is the picture of the church that emerges in this text?” as I have promised that we will often do, then the answer must be something like this: The church is a community of people who give voice to the pain experienced both by its members and by the wider community in which it lives its life. We do not shrink from discomfort. We do not sit by in silence while we or others suffer. We name our anguish in the presence of God. We grieve. We lament. We do this for each other. As Paul says, we weep with those who weep, just as we laugh with those who laugh. We give voice to our own suffering, but we also give voice to the suffering of the voiceless. We do not rejoice in the growth of the economy if the poor remain in their poverty. We do not fail to count their dead among our own when we go to war. When we weep with the shrimpers and the oilmen of the Gulf of Mexico in their loss of livelihood we do not fail to give voice to the sea turtles, the pelicans, the tuna and the marsh grasses that die without a sound.

We, too, cry, “O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!”

But whose cry is this? The text isn’t clear. This lack of clarity has prompted the scholars to go to work. A commonly recognized solution is to see these verses as a conversation or drama with various actors speaking various lines, the cast of characters including Yahweh (Judah’s God), Jeremiah the prophet, and the people of Jerusalem. But they can’t seem to agree on who is speaking when.

I suspect that this confusion of voices is a result of the situation and the overwhelming anguish that comes with it. A catastrophe threatens Judah or perhaps it is already here. The prophet can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it—or is it Yahweh who sees, hears, feels and tastes? Is it the prophet who is overwhelmed with grief and anger or is it Yahweh? Or are Jeremiah’s grief and Yahweh’s grief finally two separate things at all?

If Jeremiah is God’s prophet, then Jeremiah is not just speaking for God when he announces judgment. Maybe it is true, as Jeremiah says on God’s behalf, that the people have brought this disaster upon themselves. Maybe they have failed to recognize that their nationhood is distinct from the nationhood of the nations around them, maybe they have decided to forsake their distinctness so that they could play the same games being played by their neighbors and so, having lost at these games, they will suffer the consequences.

Maybe we do bring a lot of troubles on ourselves. We spend our time in front of televisions and computer screens and wonder why our children are obese. We work more and more so that we no longer have the time for meal preparation that would avoid using high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar processed foods that agri-business shoves in our direction and then we wonder why our health care costs keep going up. Perhaps Jeremiah’s accusations are on target; perhaps Yahweh is justified in bringing judgment against the people.

But Jeremiah announces more than judgment. Can we clearly distinguish Jeremiah’s anguish from Yahweh’s? Can we distinguish Jeremiah’s grief from Judah’s? I don’t see it. And here is the strange good news that lies within this morning’s cries of woe. Yahweh suffers in Judah’s suffering. Yahweh mourns in Judah’s grief. Jeremiah’s prayer that his eyes could become a fountain of tears so that he would have enough to shed on Judah’s behalf is God’s prayer as well.

No matter what the judgment being brought against them, to God Judah is still “my poor people,” literally, “my daughter-people.” They are family. Nothing can break that. Nothing can change that. If Judah suffers, God suffers. If Judah weeps, God weeps. If Judah cries in anguish, God cries in anguish. If Judah goes into exile, it does not go alone; God goes into exile with them.

So our hope lies in this, not that we are better people than our neighbors, nor that we believe the right things, nor even that we have had the right religious experiences. Our hope goes further than what we heard last week: “It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter how lost you are. God will hunt you down. God will never give up on you.”

Our hope goes further than that: It does not matter where we go. It does not matter what we do. It does not matter how lost we may become. God will go with us. When we suffer, God will suffer along with us. No matter where we have to go, we will not go alone. God will go with us into suffering, into exile, into death itself if need be. Even in our God-forsakenness, God will be God-forsaken, too, right alongside us. We are not alone. We will never be alone. God will be us always.

This is something we can learn only in exile, so in some strange way this cry of grief is good news, and even if it can never be home, exile is a place of blessing. Blessing or not, of course, I’d still like to see the Cubs win a series.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.