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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