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.

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