A Hopeful Farce (9th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 32:1-2, 6-15; July 17, 2016)

A Hopeful Farce

9^th Sunday after Pentecost

Jeremiah 32:1-2, 6-15

July 17, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

Eventually in Jerusalem Jeremiah’s warnings became fact: an enemy did indeed come from the North, the armies of Babylon. They had been there before, but Judah had promised to pay tribute money, so the armies left. When Zedekiah suspended the tribute payments, Babylon’s armies returned, surrounded Jerusalem, and laid siege to it. But Zedekiah was optimistic.

There is a difference between optimism and hope. Let me take a stab at stating it. The pessimist sees the glass as half empty. The optimist sees the glass as half full. The person with hope knows where the well is. No, that’s not quite it. I’m not sure I can put it simply, but I know it when I see it. I see it in our text.

Zedekiah was an optimist. He walked along the city walls and he felt how firm they were beneath his feet. Jerusalem had never fallen to an enemy if there were men to defend its walls. He had an army at his command. It wasn’t anything like the armies of King Nebuchadrezzar who had besieged the city. There was no army in the world that was like the armies of Nebuchadrezzar, at least not in Zedekiah’s world. But the walls were strong.

All Zedekiah had to do was to outlast Nebuchadrezzar. He had water, plenty of it. He had food which, admittedly, was in short supply. But for now there was enough.

Besides, he had friends. Powerful friends. The Pharaoh of Egypt was his friend. He had said so, many times. Many times Pharaoh had promised that, if Zedekiah broke his treaty with Babylon and refused to pay Nebuchdrezzar the tribute money he demanded, Egypt would come to Judah’s aid. Zedekiah had sent his messengers to Egypt. Pharaoh would come. Zedekiah had only to wait. Zedekiah was an optimist.

Jeremiah was not. Jeremiah was a prophet. Jeremiah’s calling was to look into the heart of the events of his day and into the heart of God and to announce the path that God was calling the people to walk. There are times when this calling is a delight. The winter of 587 was not one of those times.

Jeremiah looked out from the same walls as Zedekiah. He looked toward the northeast, toward Anathoth, the town of his birth, the town where his ancestors had settled, the town where his family had lived, at least until the armies of Nebuchdrezzar had come. It was just three and a half miles away. Jeremiah could see it clearly.

But he could also see that the armies of Nebuchadrezzar swarmed over the landscape between Jerusalem and Anathoth and, indeed, in every direction, like ants whose hill has been disturbed. Nebuchadrezzar was not going to go away. Pharaoh was not coming. As far as Jeremiah could see, there was in the heart of God no hint of rescue and no promise of a miracle. No, the path that God was calling Jeremiah’s people to walk was the path of exile and the sooner they surrendered to that path, the better for them.

Prophets don’t just see the truth of a situation; they announce it. That’s what Jeremiah did. In a besieged city Jeremiah went about calling on the people to surrender. Jeremiah was not good for morale. Jeremiah was a problem for Zedekiah the king.

So Zedekiah had Jeremiah arrested and kept imprisoned in the courtyard of his own guards where at least he wouldn’t have access to public spaces and the frightened people who had taken shelter in the city.

Among those frightened people was a cousin of Jeremiah’s named Hanamel. Like hundreds of people, Hanamel had fled to Jerusalem at the first news of Nebuchdrezzar’s invasion. He grabbed whatever he could carry and sought refuge behind the strong walls of the city.

Hanamel, like the other refugees, had a problem: he was hungry. The price of bread kept rising and Hanamel’s purse kept getting lighter and lighter. Like the other refugees, Hanamel was looking to liquidate some of his other assets so that he could continue to eat.

Hanamel owned a field at Anathoth. The field was pretty much useless to him, what with the Babylonian army using it for a parking lot and all. He could sell that field and have money for food. If he could sell the field. If he could find a buyer willing to pay anything at all. As any realtor will tell you, though, the three most important things about real estate are...location, location, and location. Located as it was under the chariot wheels of the Babylonian army, this field was not going to be worth much. Who would be crazy enough to buy Hanamel’s field at Anathoth?

As soon as Hanamel asked the question, he had his answer: Of course! Cousin Jeremiah! Jeremiah might buy the field. After all Jeremiah was Hanamel’s cousin. Remember, land in those days was not quite the commodity that it is now. You couldn’t just sell your land to the highest bidder. Land was supposed to stay within extended families. Family members were morally obligated to buy the land, if they were able to do that, to keep the land from being alienated from the family. Jeremiah was not only Hanamel’s cousin, and obliged for that reason to buy the land if he could, he was also nuts. Buying useless land was just the sort of gesture that Jeremiah did all the time!

So Hanamel went to crazy Jeremiah who was confined in courtyard of the royal guard. He offered him the field at Anathoth. Even though Hanamel had thought all this through, I still think he was surprised when Jeremiah said yes. He not only said yes, but gave him a fair price for it: seventeen shekels, a fair price under normal circumstances and circumstances were far from normal.

But you couldn’t have figured that out by watching Jeremiah. Jeremiah observed all the niceties of a real estate transaction: Jeremiah got his secretary Baruch son of Neriah and grandson of Mahseiah—a very formal way of referring to Baruch—to make out the deeds setting out the terms and conditions of the sale. There were two copies: one deed was left unsealed so that it could be consulted and the other deed was sealed so that it could not be tampered with and could be available as a comparison in case there were ever a doubt about the open deed. Jeremiah weighed out the seventeen shekels in front of witnesses—bored, off-duty guards I suppose.

Everyone was waiting for what came next. Jeremiah had a way of turning the most normal of acts into an Event. Jeremiah was always bringing God into things. He did not disappoint. Jeremiah gave his secretary instructions: “Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. For this is what Yahweh of the Armies, the God of Israel, says: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

There is the difference between optimism and hope. Jeremiah is no optimist. Jeremiah does not look on the bright side of things. Jeremiah does not work to keep his own or anyone else’s spirits up. Jeremiah knows nothing of that optimism that seems to be a part of the American character. Jeremiah never faces disappointment with Scarlet O’Hara’s famous line: “Tomorrow is another day!”

What Jeremiah does instead is to stake himself on God’s future even as he lives in the midst of a present that is broken or even disastrous. He places himself in the gap between the world as it is and the world as God longs for it to be and entrusts himself to the world as God longs for it to be. This is what it means to hope.

This shouldn’t be too hard to understand. We do the same thing every time we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us. Jesus, too, was a prophet and he taught us a prophet’s prayer. In the midst of a reality that does little to render God’s name holy, we pray for God’s name to be hallowed. In the midst of self-serving empires we pray for God’s reign instead. In the midst of egos competing for scarce resources, we pray for God’s will to be done. In a world of hunger we pray for daily bread for all of us. In a world that keeps score and holds grudges we forgive and ask forgiveness. In a world of hard testing we pray not to be tested to destruction. In a world where evil seems to run rampant, we pray that no one would become evil’s victim.

When we pray as Jesus taught us, we pray a prophet’s prayer. But when we move from simply saying the words, to living this prayer that Jesus taught us, something profound happens. We, with Jeremiah and Jesus, place ourselves between the world as it is and the world that God longs for. With Jeremiah and Jesus we stake ourselves on the world that God longs for even as we live in the world as it is.

This is the beauty and the tension of a life lived in covenant with the God of Jeremiah and Jesus. And this is the life offered to the people who are called the church:

We are the people who commit ourselves to peace even in the face of war.

We are the people who commit ourselves to generosity even in the face of scarcity.

We are the people who commit ourselves to justice even in the face of privilege.

We are the people who commit ourselves to resurrection even in the face of death.

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No Balm in Gilead (8th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 8:20-9:7; July 10, 2016)

No Balm in Gilead

8th Sunday after Pentecost  Jeremiah 8:20-9:7  July 10, 2016

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

Two of my favorite grownup magazines when I was a boy were Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. The first was a sort of do-it-yourself guide for making really cool stuff. The second was a glimpse into an imagined future in which we would all have the best and coolest toys: jetpacks and gyrocopters that could take off from a football field and could fold up and fit in a garage.

I loved to read about science, not only for its descriptions of the way the universe works, but also for the doors it opened into a future filled with possibilities: nuclear energy so cheap it would be given away without even measuring how much was being used, household robots that did all the chores and could even make my bed, two hundred mile an hour trains, and medicines so effective that disease would be virtually unknown. I leafed through Popular Mechanics and Popular Science and read science fiction and I dreamed of the world that I would inherit when I was a grownup.

It didn't work out quite the way I dreamed. Diseases have become more resistant even as our cures become more and more advanced. It's an arms race to see whether the diseases can out-evolve our cures. The super fast trains are in Japan, not the United States. Roomba can clean floors--with some important reservations--but it cannot make our beds. Nuclear energy turned out to be recklessly dangerous and, while renewable energy sources like wind and solar power have come a long way since I was ten, fossil fuels still provide for most of our energy needs. And I never got my jetpack.

My future did not turn out as I had imagined and expected that it would. The place where I had made my imaginative home was not a place where I could actually live. And the place where I live is not what I had called home. Of course now I can look back at this micro-exile and smile at my younger self indulgently. How naive I was, how credulous! What I am styling as exile is really just a matter of growing up, of becoming a grownup, of learning to recognize the difference between a daydream--even one sanctioned by my Dad's magazines--and reality.

But I have experienced exilic disillusionment of a more serious kind. I suspect that some of you have, too.

When I was ten, and indeed, all through my public school days, our school day began with the Pledge of Allegiance. It had been written in its first form in 1892 for the opening of the Chicago World's Fair by the Christian socialist Francis Bellamy. It's been tinkered with since then, most famously and rancorously by inserting the words "under God" in 1954. But the Pledge of Allegiance has always had the words "with liberty and justice for all." Bellamy had originally wanted "liberty, fraternity, and equality," but knew that vast numbers of Americans would never stand for equality if African Americans or women were to be included in that notion, so he settled for the form that we know. "With liberty and justice for all."

No matter who you were, not matter where you'd come from, here under our flag were two things you could count on: liberty and justice. Red or yellow, black or white, here under this flag you were free. Man or woman, rich or poor, here under our flag you could count on justice. That was the republic I grew up in. That was the flag to which I pledged my allegiance. Every morning in public school, Two thousand, three hundred forty times, I stood with my classmates, put my hand over my heart and said the words. "With liberty and justice for all."

I believed those words. I believed that the America to which I pledged my allegiance was the American that really existed in the real world.

Now, when I was ten it was 1962 and African Americans were no longer willing to publicly pretend that "liberty and justice for all" described the reality that they lived. My daily pledge had, like the Declaration of Independence, become a defaulted promissory note. "Instead of honoring this sacred obligation," Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds'."

Slowly, I began to understand that "liberty and justice for all" were words that described our aspirations, rather than our reality. And let’s just say that there is nothing wrong with aspiring to more than we are. This, then, became the meaning of my daily recitation. "Liberty and justice for all" is our goal. It may take a long time to get there, but we are going to get there. Bit by bit, with changed laws and slowly changing attitudes those words would become our reality.

Now, I have to confess, I am not so sure. There is not much that suggests that we are moving as a people toward liberty and justice for all. There is not even much that suggests that this remains our shared aspiration and dream.

I'm not sure what all has fed into this new pessimism of mine.Maybe it's the resurgent racism that I see. Some of it is the double standard applied along racial lines by too many police departments and too many officers. This week one black man, Philando Castile, was shot to death in the Twin Cities suburb of Falcon Heights while explaining to the officer who had pulled him over because of a broken taillight that he had a permit to carry the weapon that he had on him. His girlfriend filmed the whole encounter and her four-year-old daughter can be heard beside her on the back seat of the squad car saying, "It's OK, Mommy. It's OK, I'm right here with you."

On the same day in Raleigh, North Carolina, a 62-year-old white man, William Bruce Ray, was standing near a road and pointing his shotgun at the drivers of passing cars. A deputy was sent to the scene and succeeded in wrestling the shotgun from Ray's hands. Then Ray drew a handgun and fired it. The deputy then took the handgun from him and arrested him.

The actor Jesse Williams's speech at the Black Entertainment Television awards sparked heated, we'll call it "conversation", on the interwebs last week. As part of an amazing acceptance speech for BET's Humanitarian Award he said, "What we’ve been doing is looking at the data. And we know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm and not kill white people every day."

"Liberty and justice for all."

We suffer the effects of the deep racism that infects our society. The same racism that justified the theft of a continent and the kidnapping of millions, is now used to oppress black (and other) communities all over the country. The only way I see past our crisis is to face it head-on. It will take hard work, especially on our part, since black folk have always been more willing to talk than we white folk have been to listen. It will take hard work and time and lowering white defensiveness and growing our ability and endurance for engaging in meaningful conversation across racial lines.

It's a long shot, but I think it's the only way forward toward "liberty and justice for all."

It's been made even less likely, though, by the blatant racism that has erupted into the open in this country in the last eight years. It is racism that is being nurtured and stoked for the political advantage of a few who seek to harness the justified anger and disillusionment caused by our economy's transformation into a system for enriching the rich and to focus that anger in the form of hate for African Americans, Muslims, Latinos, and LGBTQ folks.

So I was already discouraged when the news of the shooting in Dallas broke. Five officers killed, other officers and civilians wounded in the space of a couple of minutes. There is a great deal that we still don't know. We do know that the officers on the scene were there to protect the right of people to express their justifiable anger at how things stand and to petition the government by means of public protest for a redress of grievances. This was First Amendment speech, protected speech. The police were doing the protecting. And then shots rang out, terrifying the marchers and felling one office after another.

Among the first to condemn this shooting were the organizers of the march. Contrary to what some critics claim, #BlackLivesMatter is not short for "only black lives matter more" but for "black lives matter, too." But even knowing this, I fear that, in addition to the lives lost, in addition to the grief of their families and friends, in addition to the shock and dismay felt in every squad room in the country, these deaths will serve only to embolden those who foster racism for their own ends.

To say that I am discouraged is a vast understatement. The events of our recent history have wrenched me not only from the country in which "liberty and justice for all" is a fact realized in our shared life, but also from the country in which "liberty and justice for all" is an aspiration toward which we strive. I am a refugee from that country looking for shelter. If it persists long enough, I will have to call myself an exile.

I find that I resonate with the prophet Jeremiah even more now.

"The harvest is past, the summer has ended, yet we aren't saved." I used to quote those words as a joke, a description of the life of a Cubs fan in October. But it isn't funny any more.

Where is the healing ointment for our sickness? Where is the doctor who can treat our disease? Whatever healing there is, whatever balm there is in Gilead, whatever physician, it has not been and is not enough.

"If only my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, I would weep day and night for the wounds of my people." I get it. Man, do I get it. If I do not weep constantly it is not because there is a lack of things to weep about. Eventually I run out of tears.

I see the wounds more clearly than I would like. I see the racism. I see the homophobia. I see the rapist culture. I see how the mentally ill rank in our hierarchy of concern. I get it.

Jeremiah sees the wounds of his own people, too. He wishes that he could simply go his own way and leave them behind:

"If only I could flee for shelter in the desert, to leave my people and forget them..."

and he begins to catalog his people's failings: they are adulterers, crooks, liars, and he finishes with:

"They go from bad to worse. They don't know me! declares the Lord."

Wait! What?

It turns out that we have not been listening to Jeremiah's pain and anguish, but to God's. It is God who despairs:

"Because my people are crushed, I am crushed; darkness and despair overwhelm me."

It is God who suffers from a lack of tears:

"If only my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, I would weep day and night for the wounds of my people."

I confess that I would like God to hover above the world untouched by it and able to fix things with a word or the flick of a finger.I would like God to eliminate racism. I would like God to wipe out homophobia. I would like God to salve our wounds and heal our dis-ease. I wait, but there seems to be no balm in Gilead and no physician there, either, not even God. Instead, we find God crushed because we are, overwhelmed with darkness at the darkness that overwhelms us, weeping over our wounds.

In the darkness of exile perhaps we will yet find healing as we are washed, not with our own, but with God's tears and we hear God speaking with the voice of a four-year-old who says, "It's OK. It's OK, I'm right here with you." We aren’t saved, not yet anyway, but we aren’t alone either.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

The Centre Cannot Hold (Pentecost 7; Jeremiah 7:1-7, 22-23; July 3, 2016)

The Centre Cannot Hold

Pentecost 7
Jeremiah 7:1-7, 22-23
July 3, 2016

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

For many of the congregations of the Iowa Annual Conference and for many of my pastor colleagues, today is an important event: it's the first Sunday of a new pastoral appointment, the first time that the whole congregation will be present to check out the new preacher, the first time the new preacher will get a feel for what their new congregation is like, emotionally. This is a fraught event. The first sermon is an occasion.

Walter Brueggemann says that the sermon is a triangulated event. The most important relationship is between the congregation and the Scriptures. In a sermon the congregation and the Scriptures come face to face. The first question the preacher must ask, says Brueggemann, is On which side of the confrontation will she stand? Will she stand with the congregation as it hears the words from a strange text and struggles to respond? Or will she stand with the Scriptural text as it struggles to make itself understood?

My advice to preachers in new appointments? Stand with the congregation. The Bible is strange, even the parts that we have managed to tame and domesticate. The Bible makes outlandish demands that push us to the limit and beyond. The congregation has not been studying the text all week. The congregation has been trying to get through life and some of the folks on a preacher's first Sunday haven't been in church for weeks, months, or even years. They were hurt somehow. It wasn't necessarily anyone's fault; no did it on purpose. But they went away wounded and now they want to know if there is a possibility of healing for them. So, stand with the congregation. That doesn't mean you have to take sides, that you have to embrace everything the congregation thinks and reject what the Scriptures say. It just means that the congregation shouldn't feel ganged up on by both you and the Bible.

I say this for two reasons. First, I pay too little attention to my own advice. I know how it goes. I study a text during the week. When it comes to writing the sermon, I've come pretty far from the experience of first confronting it. If it angered or made me uncomfortable, I've had time to make up with the text and recover my composure. I come to see things from the text's point of view and so I easily step into the pulpit as the text's spokesperson, "Thus says the text," I begin in good prophetic form. And make clear whose side I'm on. I should take my own advice more seriously.

The second reason is that Jeremiah is a preacher preaching his first sermon and clearly ignoring my advice. The results are predictable.

Of course it's not the same thing as the dozens of duly-appointed, first-Sunday United Methodist preachers stepping into the pulpit this morning across Iowa and many other conferences in the United States. For one thing, Jeremiah isn't duly-appointed, at least not by the bishop. He is the great-great-great, etc. grandson of the priest Abiathar whom Solomon sent packing back home to Anathoth many centuries before for having backed a rival. Jeremiah has come back to Jerusalem from Anathoth at God's appointment. (The most dangerous people are always the ones who claim to have been sent by God.)

I don't even know whether the Temple had a pulpit, but Jeremiah doesn't preach from it. Jeremiah doesn't even preach in the Temple. He preaches outside the Temple near its gate, to the people going in and out.

This doesn't appear to have been a special day of any kind, not a festival, not even a Sabbath day. It was an ordinary day when people we going into the Temple to pray or to have a sacrifice made. A man who had been sick was giving thanks for his recovery. A woman who had just had her first-born son was bringing him for circumcision. You get the picture. They were ordinary people who got the strength they needed to face the things that life threw at them from the God of Judah. They found it helpful to come to the place that people called Yahweh's House. They were poor people mostly, because most people were poor. There were a few pilgrims, but mostly they were the city poor rather than country poor. The people in the countryside had their own ritual habits that gave them comfort and, besides, traveling to Jerusalem was a hardship when it meant leaving trade and field work behind.

No one had told them that it was Jeremiah's first sermon. They had thought it was an ordinary day. And what should they encounter but the lunatic Jeremiah holding forth at the gate. It would be as if I, on my first day here, had chosen to preach on the sidewalk to people out walking their dog, or to Pam Ransom on her way into the office to see to some UMW business with Rhonda. "Who in the world is that?" "Our new pastor."“Oh!”

Whatever brought them to the Temple, my guess is that they went home from their visit and talked about the lunatic preacher at the Temple gate and the awful things he said to them:

"Improve your conduct and your actions, and I will dwell with you in this place. Don’t trust in lies: “This is the Lord’s temple! The Lord’s temple! The Lord’s temple!” No, if you truly reform your ways and your actions; if you treat each other justly; if you stop taking advantage of the immigrant, orphan, or widow; if you don’t shed the blood of the innocent in this place, or go after other gods to your own ruin, only then will I dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave long ago to your ancestors for all time. 

"And yet you trust in lies that will only hurt you. Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, sacrifice to Baal and go after other gods that you don’t know, and then come and stand before me in this temple that bears my name, and say, “We are safe,” only to keep on doing all these detestable things?"

Awful things! And they wanted to do was to pray for Uncle Fred!

Clearly, in this encounter between the Word of God and the People of God, Jeremiah stood with the Word of God against the People of God. I understand this. Jeremiah had been living with the Word of God for a long time and it was not fun for him.

The Word that came to him--you remember--was about digging up and pulling down, about destroying and demolishing, and only then about building and planting. I'm sure he had his own reactions to all this. Jeremiah was human, after all. But he had time to get used to the message.

Jeremiah had this terrible news to deliver to people who had never heard it and had never had time to get used to it and wrap their minds around it. Jeremiah delivered the news, but I'm not sure anyone heard it.

That doesn't make Jeremiah wrong about what is coming. There was another prophet, Hananiah, who was active during Jeremiah's life, who claimed that God would continue to protect Judah and Jerusalem for the sake of the Temple that was there. But the people of Judah forgot Hananiah and remembered Jeremiah, because events proved Jeremiah right.Jeremiah knew, as W.B. Yeats wrote just after WWI:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Jeremiah understood what was happening; his audience hadn't given it a thought. Jeremiah and the people were so far apart that, at this point at least, the people simply could not hear what Jeremiah had to say.We're not strangers to this. I was visiting Jim, a parishioner, in University Hospital in Iowa City who was receiving his third round of treatments for prostate cancer. He knew that treatments would be futile. He could sense it in his body somehow. He knew that at most the chemotherapy would give him a few more weeks and he also knew that those weeks would mostly be spent recovering from the chemo. He was ready to let nature take its course. He was ready to die. Why are you getting the treatments, then? Sandy [is wife] isn't ready to let go. I'm giving her some more time. You must love her very much to give this gift. His eyes welled with tears and he nodded.

At some point in the journey toward death, for many people a time comes when things fall apart, a time when the center cannot and does not hold. Before then we may live in a mental universe in which people who pray hard enough for health are restored, a universe in which people who live right, who see their doctor regularly, and who are diagnosed early don't die of cancer. But after that, after the prayers and the third round of chemo, and they can feel in their bones that the fight to stay alive is lost, the prayers and the treatments no longer hold the same meaning. While God is still there and the nurses and doctors, too, there is no longer the same expectation.

Jim knew where he stood and was ready to let go of life, but for Sandy the center still held. She still hoped that the third round would be the charm that magically restored their lives. The two of them were in far different places--this happens a lot--and communication across the distance was very difficult. At least he didn't shout it at her by the front gate. Instead, he gave her gift of time, time for her to catch up with him, time for them to share the last steps of his journey.

Soon enough Sandy would find herself an alien in her own life, exiled by loss into the twilight of grief. The gift that Jim gave her could not prevent that. But it did give her a little light to make her way through the valley of the shadow of death to the life on its far side.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Narcotic Religion (6th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 5:1-5, 10-13, 30-31; June 26, 2016)

Narcotic Religion

6th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 5:1-5, 10-13, 30-31
June 26, 2016

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

Compared to the New Testament, the Old Testament has a bad reputation. The Old Testament is assumed to be filled with violence, judgment, and condemnation, but the New Testament with love, mercy, and grace. This has even led some to say that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New are of entirely different character, even that they are different gods. The truth, though, as anyone who has actually read the whole Bible carefully knows, is that both Testaments have their full share of violence and love, judgment and mercy, and condemnation and grace.

We don't like the harsh themes wherever they are found and we try as best we can to read around them. Especially we are not fond of judgment and condemnation. When television preachers claim that the Orlando massacre happened as God's judgment because same-sex marriage is legal or that abortion is such an heinous sin that our toleration of it will cause God to bring the downfall of the United States, we find their claims reprehensible.

We are sure that God doesn't work like that, although we're not quite sure why we're sure. We sense that these so-called prophets are a little too gleeful about the destruction they announce. We sense that they are not so much speaking God's heart as they are pretending that God is speaking theirs. When they cry doom we sense we are getting a glimpse into the abyss of their hearts where the resentment they have nursed toward the world has festered and become a deadly poison.Judgment has a bad name among mainline Christians.

So offensive do we find the notion that God would stand in judgment of us and of what we do that we imagine instead a God who indulges every moral failure. We suppose that this sort of God is more loving than a God who judges us. But a God who overlooks every injustice, who refuses to choose between oppressor and oppressed, who indulges every whim of the powerful is a God who is not so much loving as indifferent.

There is a tension between God's love and God's judgment, but it isn't so hard to understand, at least in general. Any parent who has waited for a child out past their curfew and not answering their cellphone knows this tension all too well. Love and anger are perfectly compatible when a teen does dangerous stuff. But every honest parent also knows that the anger is also just a little bit about the ego of the parent whose rules have been broken.

In Jeremiah, God is very much a loving, angry parent who has been pushed to edge of sanity by the dangerous way that Judah and especially its capital city Jerusalem have been behaving. God is a parent who has run out of ideas for turning a delinquent child around.

Our reading does not spell out clearly just what Jerusalem has done that is so offensive. They have broken the covenant with God, that much is clear--"They...have broken their yoke and shattered the chains"--but that isn't much to go on. In the surrounding verses we find two things: First, they call on other gods besides Yahweh the God of Israel. "They do not say in their hearts, 'Let us fear the Lord our God, who gives the rain in its season...'" [5:24a] They worship fertility gods who claim to be able to give abundant harvests and to make the herds of sheep and cattle increase. These are the Ba'als, gods of production and profit who promise prosperity and ease.

We know that the God of Judah is prone to jealousy. Perhaps this has to do with God's ego, the ego of the offended parent whose rules have been broken. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has written that the Israel's testimony about its God is that God can be characterized by two things. The first is a passionate commitment to justice. The second is a massive self-regard. God's famous jealousy would be an example.

But this isn't simply a matter of God's demand for exclusive worship. Maybe people imagined that they ought to worship someone, though it didn't matter too much just who they worshiped. But God sees it differently. The worship of a god is not simply a matter of a few ceremonies and a couple of festivals. We become like what we worship. The Ba'als are interested in production and profit and if we worship them we will be interested in production and profit. Yahweh, on the other hand, is committed to justice, and those who worship Yahweh make justice their commitment, too. Which brings us to the second of God's concerns with Jerusalem's behavior.

Jerusalem has given itself to a love of profit and production and to the easy life that these make possible. Easy for them at least, not so easy for those who must produce the profits. "Scoundrels are found among my people; they take over the goods of others. Like fowlers they set a trap; they catch human beings...They know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy."

These are the reasons for God's anger and disappointment. They raise the specter of God's judgment.We are right to reject the televangelists' notion of judgment. They see some catastrophe or misfortune and assume that there must be some wrong-doing close at hand for which these things must be punishment. But the world clearly doesn't work that way. There is no easy, one-to-one relationship between wrong-doing and disaster, either for individuals or for nations. When something awful happens to us, we might ask, What have I done to deserve this? And the answer, more often that not, is that we haven't done anything at all. Otherwise, only the wicked would suffer cancer, only those who deserved it would be poor. We know better than to believe that. The psalmist says, "I have never seen the children of the righteous begging bread." To which I say, "You must not get out much, because I have seen the children of the righteous going hungry."

But having rejected this mechanical notion of judgment and even more an idea that God sits up in heaven looking to zap anyone who gets out of line, there is still another notion of judgment that is at work in the world. Martin Luther King, Jr., was fond of saying that "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." There is a deep structure to the world that we live in that embodies God's dream for us. If we live against that arc, against that dream, against that wisdom, we diminish our chance for lives that are fully human. Founding a city on injustice and exploitation is not a sustainable policy. Sooner or later it will collapse. No zapping necessary.

I think that deep down, the people of Jerusalem understood this. And they tried to ease their own guilty consciences. We humans are pretty good at this. We have all sorts of ways. The way that Jerusalemites salved their own guilt was to build a religion around Jerusalem exceptionalism. Jerusalem is Yahweh's city. Yahweh's Temple is there. They exploited the orphan, the widow, and the needy. And then they said to each other, "God will do nothing! Disaster won't come upon us; we won't see war or famine." They have a "get out of jail free" card. Their religion tells them they can go on living against God's justice and have nothing to fear from God. It has come to this in the city where God's name supposedly dwells: "An awful, a terrible thing has happened in the land: The prophets prophesy falsely, the priests rule at their sides, and my people love it this way!"

The world situation for the world of ancient Jerusalem--and for our world as well--is this: A disaster is coming. They and we might imagine that God will spare us. But God's love, as deep as it is, cannot save our world from the consequences of a prosperity built on injustice. That is Jeremiah's message.

Jeremiah does not leave us much hope, but that is not quite the same as no hope at all. Jerusalem had sought prosperity by appealing to the Ba'als, when Yahweh would have given them all that they needed. So the grapes that grew in its vineyards had not come from Yahweh, but from the Ba'als. Therefore, says God, "climb through her vineyards and ravage them, although not completely." Did you catch the little bit of hope there? The disaster is coming. The vineyards will be ravaged. But not completely. Not completely. Something will remain. Something will survive the disaster.

That doesn't sound like much good news now, but there will come a time for Jerusalem when that will be very good news indeed.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

God's Torn Heart: A New Story (5th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 3:12-18; June 19, 2016)

God's Torn Heart: A New Story

5th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 3:12-18
June 19, 2016

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

Human beings are meaning-makers. We arrange things, put them in order, find patterns. We impose patterns if we need to. We see pictures in the clouds on a summer day. We see constellations in the night sky. We investigate events and look for cause and effect. We invent conspiracies to explain events that seem to have no explanation. We tell stories. More than anything, we tell stories.

We tell stories that explain why things are the way they are. Why is it difficult and painful for women to give birth, especially since animals seem to do it more easily? Why is farming such hard work when animals seem to find their food without toil? The second and third chapters of Genesis tell a story that gives an explanation for the cost of culture.

With our stories we create a map of the world that, if it isn't perfect (and what map is?), will at least help us get where we want to go and recognize it when we get there.

When something horrible happens, whether it's an automobile accident that kills parents and spares their young children or the exile of a nation from its holy ground, until we are able to fit it into a story, we will worry at it like a chipped tooth. When a man shoots his way into an LGBTQ club, fires a thousand rounds of ammunition, kills fifty celebrants, and seriously injures another fifty-three, it makes no sense. It's not just that we are angry and sad and afraid. We are also confused and lost. It's as if our map of the world has been shot apart. We have to navigate a world that is not making sense.

In the face of the unspeakable we begin to speak. We say we are looking for answers, explanations, but that's not quite true. What we're looking for is a story, a story that will hold this event in some meaningful relationship with other events in a pattern that makes sense to us. The easiest way to do this is to reach for a story that we already know.

As soon as the shooter's name was known, some reached for a familiar story, a story that has shaped our national priorities and policies for the last fifteen years. The shootings in Orlando early last Sunday morning fit into the story of "radical Islamic terrorism," as one presidential candidate has it. This was, then, proof of the threat posed to our way of life by outsiders, outsiders with skin several shades darker than mine, outsiders with an unfamiliar religion, outsiders who are wrapped up in images of violence and fanaticism, of decadence and backwardness. Both presumptive presidential candidates called for renewed attacks on ISIS. Get that: the proper response to an attack on a nightclub in Florida is to call for increased bombing in Iraq and Syria. If that sounded reasonable to them, if it sounds reasonable to us, it is because of the story that we invoked as the way to make sense of the Pulse massacre.

There were problems with this story pretty quickly. Although the gunman (whose name I have not and will not utter) pledged allegiance to ISIS during a call to 911 and although ISIS claimed the credit for the shooting, the shooter seems not to have been a radical anything, not really an ISIS franchisee, only a woman-hating, homophobic, wannabe cop with a violent temper.

Although this version of the story might advance a political agenda, secure the profits of the arms industry, and put money in the pockets of the terrorism experts called in by the news agencies to blather on authoritatively and fill the time by extrapolating from guesses, it failed to provide for much of a narrative frame for this event.

For one thing, it erases both the fact that this was an attack on a club that offered itself to the LGBTQ community and that the attack was carried out on Latin Night, when most of the patrons were latinos and latinas, the majority of whom were puertoriqueños. They were, in other words, not only gay but gay persons of color. This is of a piece with the often-repeated assertion that this was the largest mass shooting in American history, when it was only the largest mass shooting in American history carried out by a single shooter. The Sand Creek Massacre of November 29, 1864 ended with the slaughter of over 150, most of them women and children.1  Between 250 and 300 died in the Massacre of Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890.2  Why is it that when straight, white culture tells the story it gets white-washed and straight-washed, that is, persons of color and LGBTQ persons simply vanish, unless, of course, they are the perpetrators.?

Telling the Orlando massacre as part of the story of global Islamic terrorism is so useful, though, that the inconvenient details can be forgotten. This version of the story has legs, as they say. But that isn't the only way to tell the story.

Other atrocities have become stories about mental illness. This is harder to do in this case because we usually reserve this story for events with a white perpetrator. When the perpetrator is Muslim, African American, or Latino, we have their roles prepared in advance: they are terrorists, thugs, or drug dealers. But we never try to understand an atrocity by assuming that there is something wrong with white culture, something that a white gunman would embody or represent. A white gunman has to be represented as a one-off, a mistake, or an anomaly. So when we account for an atrocity, it becomes a story of a deviant white man, a white man who went off the rails, and so a white man who has nothing to do with other white people. But, as I say, that story line wasn't really available, with a shooter who was even sort-of Muslim.

Another frame story, and one that never appears in major news media, is the story of the violence inherent in patriarchy. How many of the mass murders committed in the last twenty years or so have been committed by women? None. A massacre is something that men do. This story could be told as part of the story of toxic masculinity, of maleness gone amok. The signs in this case are there: a first marriage that ended because of domestic violence, the shooter's fascination with power, and his co-workers' reports of tirades. I think this story is neglected for the obvious reason that most of the reporters are men, their bosses are men, and their bosses' bosses are men. Toxic masculinity? Masculinity as a public health hazard? That might make a really useful story, but it's not going to sell AR-15s.

Speaking of which, one story that is being told to make meaning out of this event is the story of America's on-going love/hate relationship with guns. The Pulse massacre was not America's largest mass shooting, but we should remember that the Sand Creek Massacre of over 150 was conducted by 700 Colorado militia men over the space of a couple of hours. In Orlando a single gunman with one rifle killed 50 people in a few minutes. Clearly the weapons available today are of a different order entirely from the Civil War firearms of Colonel Chivington's troops. So this event has been taken up into the story of our attempts to find a way of living with these deadly objects, a way that doesn't end with so much death. We have an opportunity to protect the rights of the users of firearms for sport and self-protection that doesn't involve easy civilian access to military-grade weapons that were designed to allow one person to kill many people quickly. Recent history tells us that we don't have much time if it's going to be done. The NRA already has its campaign ready to roll out. However this story turns out, it is not a story that can answer the question, "Why?" only a story that move toward answering, "How?"

One other story arc has gained some ground on the others. This wasn't just an attack on a random gathering of Americans. It was an attack on the LGBTQ community and, in particular, the Latinx LGBTQ community. Let me explain my use of the term "Latinx." As you may know, the terms Latino and Latina are more common, but they divide the world into grammatical masculine and feminine. As members of the LGBTQ community remind us or teach us, the world is not that neat. There those who are both and those who are neither and so it is easier for some to invent a term than to use what the straight world has given them. And that is the point of Pulse. The club, like many LGBTQ clubs, functions as a safe haven, a place where people who everywhere else are forced to define themselves or hide themselves in the often hostile gaze of straight culture. Pulse is to the Latinx LGBTQ community of Orlando as Mother Emmanuel AME Church is to African American Christians in Charleston: a place where people can be who they are, accepted for who they are, without fear for their safety or lives. This is what makes an attack on an African American church or an LGBTQ club so devastating, quite apart from the immediate injuries and deaths. The unscathed survive only to find themselves without that place of safety, that refuge, that sanctuary. Through no fault of their own they find themselves homeless in their own community, exiles in effect.

Both as an attack on people of color and an attack on LGBTQ persons, the Pulse massacre is one more of a long line of acts of violence against those outside of the racial and orientation/gender mainstreams. Violence against non-white, non-straight people has been a feature of our history from the very beginning.

We are learning, not without a struggle, not without resistance, not without discomfort, to own our history. If the Battle of Concord Bridge is a part of our history and we are rightly proud of our long-ago struggles for freedom, then Sandy Creek and Pulse and other atrocities are, unfortunately, part of our history, too. We have to live them down. The best way to do that is to bring them to an end.

During the last week I have been sad, outraged, angry, cynical, depressed, confused. Friends and colleagues of mine are suffering and I do not know what to do. I have been in touch with several of them to say, what? That I know? I don't. That I'm sorry? That seems pretty cheap. That I will stand with them? But how can I when their credentials are in jeopardy and mine are perfectly safe for as long as I want them to be?

One of the things that we must do, I'm convinced, is to recognize that our rhetoric has real consequences. The debate in our denomination--and in our nation--that presents itself as being about "homosexuality" is in fact about whether people who do not fit into the two gender boxes straight culture demands that everyone fit into and people who love differently than straight people love are to be considered fully human, as bearing the image of God. By declaring that the being and the loving of LGBTQ persons is "incompatible with Christian teachings," we have helped in some little and not-so-little ways to pave the path that led a shooter who had seen two men exchanging a gesture of love to conclude that he had a right or even an obligation to respond to his discomfort by killing fifty human beings and seriously wounding as many as that again.

Our Methodist tradition's way of organizing its life has been life-giving for many of us and world-transforming in places that we can point to with justifiable pride. Before we began the Imagine No Malaria campaign, a child died from malaria in Africa every two minutes. Now that rate is every eight minutes. That's life in the real world for so many children and life without the grief of losing children for their parents.

But our denomination stands at one end of a spectrum the other end of which is occupied by the Orlando shooter, by the California preacher who celebrated the deaths and prayed for more, and by the Westboro Baptist Church. Of course The United Methodist Church does not advocate the death of LGBTQ folks. In fact, as the Social Principles say,

We affirm that all persons are individuals of sacred worth, created in the image of God. All persons need the ministry of the Church in their struggles for human fulfillment, as well as the spiritual and emotional care of a fellowship that enables reconciling relationships with God, with others, and with self. 

and,

We implore families and churches not to reject or condemn lesbian and gay members and friends.  

But at the same time,

The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching.

We refuse to marry same-sex couples and we refuse to ordain "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals."

We say this as if heterosexuality and homosexuality were practices that we could either do or not do rather than aspects of our identity and therefore something we are all the time. We say that it is the behavior we are concerned with, but our message nonetheless is that LGBTQ persons are flawed in their being as well as in their loving. But none of that is supposed to add up to a rejection or condemnation of LGBTQ folks.

We want LGBTQ people in the pews. We want them on this side [baptizand's side] of the baptismal font. We want them on this side [congregation's side] of the table. But we don't want them on this side [officiant's] of the font, nor this side [officiant's] of the table, and, if it's a wedding, we want them there [in pews] but not here [in front of Table]. Friends, that just won't wash. We can't have it both ways. We can't pretend that our denomination is not part of the problem. We can't keep adding heat to a pan of water and expect it not to boil. The United Methodist Church helped in its own little, unintentional and well-meaning way to create the Orlando massacre.

Perhaps there are other stories that could be told and are being told as you and I struggle to understand, to repair our maps of the world, to make meaning out of an event that jars us and leaves us in sorrow and anger.But there is one more story that must be told and that is the story of God's dream of who we might and could become. At our baptism, you and I became a part of that story. We came to the font. A few of us walked, most of us were carried, but none of us came on our own. We came in the company of others. And we were drawn by the grace of God, the love of God that refuses no one and welcomes all. Water was poured and prayed over. Questions were asked and answered. Among them was the question that has guided me and kept me keeping on when nothing and no one else could do it:

Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?

It is a part of the life of Jesus' followers to find ourselves in a world where evil, injustice, and oppression are real and, moreover, they are not always easy to spot. They present themselves in "forms." Sometimes they come to us as the stories we tell as when we tell our story in such a way as to cover up a crime and excuse ourselves. Our stories then become part of the crime. Our stories themselves become oppressive, unjust, even evil.

When we tell the story of the Pulse massacre for our own benefit, to advance the agenda of increasing our own power, it becomes an oppressive story. When we tell it to erase the evidence of the racism and Islamophobia that led to this crime, it becomes an unjust story. When we tell it to incite violence against Muslims or the LGBTQ community, it becomes an evil story.

But we don't have to do any of that. We have the freedom and the power to see that there are ways of telling the story that are a form of evil, injustice, and oppression. We have the freedom and power to resist those ways of telling the story. We can use those stories to help us discern the precise shape of the evil that we are confronting in the Orlando massacre.

And then we have the freedom and power to tell a different story. We are baptized into just such a story, a story of solidarity, justice and liberation. We (and I mean we white people) can see in our own stories and in the stories of the people of color even here in Decorah those points of commonality that can become the beginning of conversation. We (and I mean we straight folks) can see in our own stories and in the stories of the LGBTQ people even here in Decorah those points of commonality that can become the beginning of conversations. Those conversations, if we are careful to listen for the voice of God speaking through each other, if we are careful to let down our guard and honor each other, could lead even as far as reconciliation.

The path toward reconciliation isn't easy. On the way to reconciliation is recognition of the nature of evil, injustice, and oppression, and of our own implication in those things. That isn't easy. On the way to reconciliation is repentance, the inner conversion that doesn't just recognize but resists evil, injustice and oppression. That isn't easy. On the way to reconciliation is restitution that engages us deeply in the work of repairing the damage that has been done. That isn't easy. Those could be the next chapters of God's story for us.

In the prophetic tradition the Orlando massacre gives us a glimpse of the hell that we create for each other in our shared life. The prophetic tradition goes on to announce that there is a space for change. The door of our self-built prison has been left ajar and we can escape if we choose. We can escape and run into God's dream. That is our story, the story that's waiting for us.


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Unbearable Truth (4th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 2:1-13; June 12, 2016)

Unbearable Truth

4th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 2:1-13
June 12, 2016

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

No one wants to go into exile. Merriam-Webster defines exile as “the state or a period of forced [or voluntary] absence from one’s country or home.”1 I’ll put it a little differently: exile happens when we are forced to make our home in a place we cannot call home.

When we have a surgery that requires a several-day stay in the hospital that is not exile. We may miss being at home. Depending on how we’re feeling, we may have a few things from home with us—a favorite book, perhaps. But we don’t have to make our home there. We just wait until we can go home. But when we are admitted to a nursing home because our on-going care is beyond what we or our family can do, this is a kind of exile. It is not that a nursing home is a bad place to be when we need it; it’s just that it is not home, but we are forced nonetheless to make our home there.

Of course in Jeremiah we are dealing with Exile with a capital “E”. In Judah’s exile in 587/6 bce, the elite of Jerusalem were forced at spear point to leave their homes and all but a few possessions and walk the long, dusty miles to Babylon. They never saw their homes again. They became exiles. They began one of the most important chapters of their people’s story and left us a powerful metaphor for living our own lives.

No one wants to go into exile. They are forced into it, sometimes by literal force, and at other times by the lack of any other good choices. People may enter a nursing home recognizing that it’s the best available choice. But no one has ever said to me, “Yippee, I don’t have to live at home anymore!”

[Well, I take that back. There was a woman I knew who broke her hip. After surgery she was sent to a nursing home for rehab. She loved it! There were people to talk to and she didn’t have to do her own cooking or cleaning. But after six weeks they “made” her go home. She was very disappointed.]

I suppose, then, that there were a few in Jerusalem who were glad when the soldiers knocked on their doors, a few who sang to themselves, “Going to Babylon, Babylon, here I come...” But for most people, most of the time, the dislocation of exile is a disaster.

Looking back from the place of exile, the time leading up to it is revealed to be far less secure than it appeared to be at the time. Looking back, a steady decline of vigor and resilience had eventually to make independent living impossible. Looking back to Jerusalem from Babylon, it was clear that something had to give, even if that had escaped most people’s notice.

It escaped most people’s notice, but Jeremiah was not most people. To him fell the thankless job of announcing ruin in Jerusalem, to announce that God’s choice of Judah, Jerusalem, and David’s dynasty was not unconditional and was about to be withdrawn.

Jeremiah knew that Judah had done the unthinkable. Chosen by God, led through the wilderness to a fertile place, sustained even in times of drought and pestilence, Judah turned its back on God. Instead of seeking God’s wisdom, they relied on their own think tanks. Instead of walking the path of Torah, God’s way, they made their own policies in imitation of the nations around them. They gave up covenant life with God in favor of a stable and stale existence they could control and own for themselves. They gave up God in favor of the gods of production and profit. Jeremiah took these accusations, these charges that God was bringing against Judah, and shaped them into compelling poetry that might break through Judah’s complacency and self-satisfaction:

Look to the west as far as the shores of Cyprus
and to the east as far as the land of Kedar.
Ask anyone there:
Has anything this odd ever taken place?
Has a nation switched gods,
though they aren’t really gods at all?
Yet my people have exchanged their glory
for what has no value...
My people have committed two crimes:
They have forsaken me, the spring of living water.
And they have dug wells, broken wells that can’t hold water.

The Book of Jeremiah doesn’t tell us how his hearers reacted to this particular bit. I can imagine it, though: “What do you mean we’ve forsaken God? Look at this Temple that Solomon built. It is one of the wonders of the world! Look at all the priests who serve God in this Temple, keeping before God the smell of sacrifice and incense! We keep all the sacrifices, all the rituals, all the holy days that the Torah requires. And God has promised that David would always have an heir to rule in Jerusalem. This holy mountain, where God’s Name lives and is honored, will never be defiled by gentile feet.”

It isn’t easy for a people to see through their own self-deception. Jerusalemites couldn’t see how they had turned devotion to God into a kind of vending machine: Sacrifice a dozen cattle and gain a victory on the battlefield. Offer the right prayers and God sends the needed harvest. Employ the right people to prophesy in God’s name, to tell the king what he wants to hear, and all his plans will prosper. End every speech with “God bless Judah”, and nothing can go wrong. Make sure Judah’s flag flies in every place of worship, and God will protect Judah. Judah thinks it has a get out of jail free card, that it can compel God to act in their favor.

It was hard for Jeremiah to get through that sort of defensiveness. It’s hard for God to get through our defensiveness. We insist that nothing bad can happen to the United States of America, that whatever we do in the world is the right thing to do simply because we are the ones who are doing it. We insist that if we do what we’re supposed to do, we will prosper and our children will do even better as long as they do what they’re supposed to do. We insist that we can live as we please without any harm to our planet’s ability to support our lives. We insist that our system is color blind and if some people aren’t doing as well as white people, well, it must be because there is something wrong with them.

It will take a lot to get through to us. We don’t want to hear the news if it brings tidings of dislocation and exile. We’ll stop up our ears. We’ll keep reciting our talking points: Science will give us the answers, Technology will give us the power, the Market will show us the way. Everything is just fine.

If we take Jeremiah seriously, we’ll have to admit that there cracks in the facade that we present to ourselves, that the path we are traveling is seriously unsustainable. Can we both continue to damage our home and expect to continue to live in it? Can we ignore our past of mass enslavement and genocide and expect not to pay a price for our blood guilt? Can we celebrate the good life for many in Decorah without noticing the poverty that this requires of others? Can we continue to say that we welcome everyone in God’s name when legally marrying a same-sex couple who want to give their lives to each other and be a blessing to their neighbors could subject me to a church trial, expulsion from the Order of Elders, and loss of support in retirement? Can we gather around the table and eat what God has provided while there are hungry children in our land?

These are the questions that Jeremiah asks us. The only question that counts now is, Can we hear the intolerable questions he asks? Can we bear the unbearable truth he speaks?

There is precious little good news in this text. As we work our way through Jeremiah, we’ll find that precious little good news anywhere. Why read it then? Why subject ourselves to it when there is so little good news in the world? Jeremiah’s words are harsh and offensive. They allow for no defense or plea bargaining. It is clear that Jeremiah’s mission is to announce God’s anger. We will find that there is more to it than that, but that much is certainly true. Where is the good news in God’s anger?

I can’t say for certain that God is like me in this, but I am never angry with people who do not matter to me. If I have a relationship with someone that is dominated by anger, at least it is a relationship. The opposite of love is not anger or even hatred; the opposite of love is indifference. Anger is love that has been hurt and is trying to protect itself. If any of this is true of God as it is of me, then God’s anger here is a sign of God’s love and the depth of that anger is the measure of the depth of that love. In which case God is not through with Judah, whatever the language of the text.

While our passage this morning does not say this, I feel authorized to say that in Jeremiah we will find
that God is committed to this relationship with Judah and this relationship with us and for whatever reason is neither willing nor even able to sever it. There are serious issues here, issues that threaten the core of the covenant. But God is not through with Judah and God is not through with us.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Jeremiah and the Experience of Exile (Summer series): Send Someone Else (2nd Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 1:1-19; May 29, 2016)

Jeremiah and the Experience of Exile (Summer series): Send Someone Else

2^nd Sunday after Pentecost

Jeremiah 1:1-19

May 29, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

The Narrative Lectionary that has supplied our Scripture lessons starts each year with the Creation on Labor Day weekend and sweeps through the narrative arc of the Bible until it reaches the end on Pentecost.

It leaves the summer free. A mixed blessing for the preacher. It imagines that we might use the summer to preach sermon series. It even offers an annual suggestion.

So, what to preach for the next fourteen Sundays? I’ll be gone next week for Annual Conference, two more for the SisterParish delegation to El Salvador, and one for vacation, but that still eaves ten Sundays. So, what to preach?

I’ve been ruminating on this question for several weeks without getting anywhere. Then, two weeks ago, during the Adult Forum conversation, we were talking about our reluctance to talk about death. We observed that in America we really don’t deal with painful feelings very well. Give us happiness, contentment, and being optimistically upbeat and we can handle it just fine. But we are lost when it comes to loss, sorrow, sadness, despair, and anger. We want to avoid these if we possibly can or—if we can’t avoid them—we want to get back to happy, content, and optimistically upbeat as soon as possible. Sooner than possible, even.

My father, for example, was surprised that he was still grieving two weeks after my mother’s death. After all, he had known she was dying for months and figured that all his anticipatory grief would get him out of most of the grief of realized loss.

As difficult as the emotions of loss are to deal with in private, there is hardly any room for them in public. “How is she holding up?” we ask about the widow. “She got through the funeral okay,” is the reply, by which is meant that she shed discrete tears but did not sob or otherwise reveal the depths of the grief she feels at the loss of the man with whom she shared her life for half a century.

The church has not been particularly helpful. For instance, we have taken the Psalms—the prayerbook of the Church—and quietly and with unspoken consent have removed all but a handful. Sorrow, grief, despair, rage—all banished. Most of the psalms are laments, you know, and most them were written for public worship—as witnessed by their use of “we, us, our,and ours” in place of “I, me, my, and mine.” But you would not know this from our common worship.

We allow ourselves and each other a little bit of gratitude, a bit of joy, but we implicitly bid those with broken or burdened hearts to leave them outside, parked at the curbside where we may collect them as we leave. The result is a gathered community of people who do not allow themselves to come “with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind,” if their hearts ache, if their souls are fearful, if their strength is sapped by the weight of grief, or if their minds are whirling anxiously.

If we came with these things, God in the presence of the congregation, could walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death, could begin in us the work of healing. Instead these things come out sideways.

Sorrow, loss, and grief lie behind so much of the irrational anger and even rage that had been skulking in the shadows of our national psyche until this election season when it seems they have become bold enough to come out in broad daylight and even to attend our General Conference.

The tragedy is that we have the resources for our own and our nation’s healing—if healing means being made hale, and whole, and holy—all words that share a single Anglo-Saxon root.

So we being a series today that, except for a few Sundays, will extend through the summer. As sermon texts we will use the Book of Jeremiah, who is sometimes called “the weeping prophet.” We will also serve up generous portions of the neglected psalms and enough silence to allow us to begin to sit with them as companions to our own fear, anger, and grief.

The beginning of Jeremiah’s story is the story of his call to ministry as a prophet. But that story actually begins centuries before during the reign of Solomon, King David’s son.

Solomon became King of Judah and Israel by a less-than-transparent process. Adonijah, Solomon’s older brother, was ahead of him in the line of succession, but Bathsheba, Solomon’s mother, cajoled David on his deathbed into “remembering” his promise to put Solomon on the throne, a promise he seems never to have actually made. This palace coup was successful and Solomon became king. Solomon’s first act as king was to consolidate his power by purging his court of potential enemies. One of these was the priest Abiathar who had backed Adonijah. Solomon banished him on pain of death and sent him home to the village of Anathoth. This would have taken place in about the year 968 bce.

We hear no more about the priests of Anathoth until some three and a half centuries later when Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah, the priest of Anathoth, comes to Jerusalem wearing the mantel of the prophet. His ancestor Abiathar had been banished because he represented the truth of Solomon’s rise to power. Jeremiah comes to tell the truth about the King of Judah and the Jerusalem one percent. He comes to announce God’s truth about Judah’s present and future. It is the return of the repressed.

Jeremiah has been appointed “over nation and empires to dig up and pull down, to destroy and demolish, to build and to plant”—twice as much demolition as construction. No wonder he tries to beg off: “I’m only a child; I don’t know how to speak.”

Prophets are never sent to tell people they’re doing fine and to keep on doing what they’re doing. Sometimes they are sent to tell a people stuck in despair that a change for the better is coming. But most of the time—as in Jeremiah’s case—they are sent to people who think things are fine to tell them that things are not fine.

But Jeremiah has little choice. He can try to keep silent, but that will have consequences. He is Yahweh’s prophet. As clearly as you and I can see our own faces in the mirror, Jeremiah can see the disastrous future that lies within the prosperous present. He knows the infection that festers just below the surface of Judah’s life. He is unable to evade the contradictions at the heart of the life of the covenant people.

He sees all this and, however much it costs him, he will tell what he sees in the most compelling terms possible. He will speak into being a way forward first into the abyss of defeat and exile and then toward the hope for life beyond the abyss that lies in its darkest depths. He will be our teacher and guide through the next few weeks of our shared life. He is not a cheerful sort, but he is a truth-teller and in this election season, we could all use a large dose of truth-telling, if only so we don’t forget what truth sounds like.

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