An Eager and Reluctant Pilgrimage

 

An Eager and Reluctant Pilgrimage

Men's Journeys
Jeremiah 20:7-13
June 21, 2020

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopal
Morristown, NJ

Just why I can't really say, but unlike many of my progressive peers, I lean toward the Hebrew Bible. Maybe because it was Jesus' Bible and, as the old Sunday School song says, "If it's good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me."

Maybe because, when I took Hebrew, I was assigned a study of the uses of the Hebrew word gô'êl, a word that is usually translated as "redeemer" or "avenger," but which is best understood as "the one who does what a next-of-kin should do." Often it refers to a human next-of-kin who should make sure that their relative lives in peaceful sufficiency. Sometimes it refers to the requirement to exact vengeance in the case of a wrongful death. This was ancient Israel's rough and ready criminal justice system and, before we comment on its barbarity, may I just remind us all that our own criminal justice system can hardly claim any moral high ground.

When I realized that one of God's consistent claims in the Hebrew Bible is that God acts as gô’êl, as next-of-kin, to anyone who does not have a next-of-kin to act for them. In particular this is true for the widows, the orphans, and the undocumented workers. Mess with these classes of people and you will find yourself facing, not an angry parent, spouse, or sibling, but Yahweh, the covenant God of the Israelites. Something in me thrilled to discover this. Social justice is not some add-on to the biblical message. It is part and parcel of who God has decided to be toward this world and its people. This is comes as both comfort and warning.

So I am a Hebrew Bible fan. More than that, I am a fan of the prophets. To them falls the task of speaking for the God-who-is-next-of-kin. When a society fails to protect those who have no other protector, when a nation fails to safeguard those with no safety net, when a people decide that the rich and the powerful are the God-blessed, then prophets announce the bad news: by setting themselves against the moral arc of the universe they will bring, not prosperity and security, but anxiety and scarcity on themselves.

If this is the well from which Jesus drinks, then one of those who dug must deeply would have to be the prophet Jeremiah. I'm a Jeremiah fan. Jeremiah's people claim to be the people of God and were convinced that it gave them unqualified immunity and unlimited protection. Jeremiah is clearest among the prophets about the fate of a people who forget who God is and what it is that God seeks for this world.

Jeremiah is my favorite, too, because he never hides how he feels about his job. Unlike Isaiah who was all "Ooh, ooh, pick me!" Jeremiah's response was in essence, "I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number." When God would not be dissuaded, Jeremiah discovered quickly that the job of prophet has absolutely no perks. He is God's "essential worker:" abused, endangered, and woefully underpaid.

In our text today he does not hold back. “You fooled me, YHWH, and I let myself be fooled. You were too strong for me, and you triumphed.” The Hebrew root, repeated in the words, "fooled" and "let myself be fooled," has the basic meaning of being open, but not in a good way. It means being open to deception or enticement, being simple, foolish, or silly, in other words. So as Jeremiah is using the word, it accuses God of having deceived, or enticed, or even seduced Jeremiah into becoming a prophet. Add to that notion the mention of God's being too strong or having overpowered Jeremiah in that act and Jeremiah is close to invoking a dark metaphor. "Enticement by force" could be a way of avoiding a very ugly accusation, but it amounts to the same thing. Jeremiah is saying, in typical prophetic overstatement, that he is experiencing his calling as at very least some sort of bait-and-switch scam or even an assault with sexual overtones. The fact that either could be meant lets Jeremiah leave the accusation hanging in the air.

God should know better and Jeremiah is not shy about telling his own story. If being a prophet means speaking truth to power, telling God his own truth is as prophetic as you can get. Jeremiah demands God's promised justice, even when it is God of whom he demands it.

Anyway, this is supposed to be about men's journeys, but you've probably already guessed. I see features of my own story in Jeremiah's. Of course no disciple is greater than their master, so I'm claiming no equivalence. I'm not even claiming to be a particularly apt disciple. If Marx was right that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, in the place of Jeremiah's gutsy bleat, mine is more like the men's prayer from The Red Green Show.

This Canadian comic series features the misadventures of a group of men who are trying without a great deal of success to figure how to be happy. They have gotten no further than to figure out that their happiness must somehow involve the happiness of the women in their lives but they can never seem to shake loose the allure of guyness. At least once per episode they gather for a meeting of the Possum Lodge and open the meeting with the Men's Prayer that goes like this: "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

My upraising yielded a version of manhood that was deeply conflicted. I was supposed to be a "man," someone who was not only in charge,but deserved to be. And, as a man who was also straight, white, middle class, and college-educated, I was at or near the top of every hierarchy I could see.

In part I felt uneasy with that privileged height. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I saw just a little of what it cost my mother to live in a world that valued men more than women. Maybe it's because I experienced some of what it cost me and my sisters to be born into a world that valued adults more than children. Maybe it's because manhood defined that way remained a precarious achievement.

Mostly I was okay with privilege, okay with the power I had. My wishes, my hopes, my wants were important just because of who I was.

But there were times when that unease would ooze out. Carol had aspirations to become a nurse and then, a psychiatric nurse. I could hardly claim that that was less important than my goals. And, in the event, she has had, I suspect, a greater impact on the world than I have, for all my plans. Even she does not know how many lives she has saved and how many more are better because of her work. How could I have stood in the way of that? I didn't find it easy, and I was much less easily successful at it than I could have wished, but I was glad to be able to aid this remarkable woman in ways that my father would never have done. He once told me that I would make someone a wonderful wife some day. "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

In seminary during the theological development of second-wave feminism, even at a backwater institution like the University of Dubuque, my notions of the role of men in the Christian movement were challenged on a weekly basis. One good friend especially, Karen Dearsch, took me on as a special project. I'm not sure why. Maybe I showed promise. More likely she just couldn't refuse a challenge. And I certainly was that. We would come out of a class in which I had made some foolish statement or other and she would turn to me and say, "Now, John..." She made the implications of my positions clear and with that clarity I came recognize how benighted they were. "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

Jody kept working on me, too, as you might imagine. She has reminded me of how little air there is in the rarified heights I often inhabit. She will meet a long abstract rant of mine with the giant-slayer question: "What about the sheep?" This is a shorthand reference to the work of Fernand Braudel who persuasively demonstrated that you cannot understand the history of the Mediterranean world until you are very clear about the fact that sheep change their grazing grounds with the seasons. "What about the sheep?" demands that I be grounded, and not to some abstract ground, either, but to the ground that yields the grasses that sheep eat in their summer and winter grazing lands.

Someone responded to my first sermon here by saying, "I can see where [Jody] gets it." That is at least half backwards. But for Jody's apparently indefatigable patience (which I know to be more apparent than real) much of my thought would stagnate and start to smell, however much I would be willing stay settled where I am. "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

I could say more. I would love to talk at great length about a community of folks in Potrerillos, a village in the mountainous northeast of El Salvador, and how they stood my notions of wealth and poverty on their heads. They tolerated my stupid questions. They didn't answer me with words; instead, they showed me. For them I have learned Spanish, or relearned it. For them I have learned more about political economy than I ever wanted to know. I'm still not sure how that story is going to go from here. None of it has been particularly easy, for in the process I discovered that hard and painful truth that my country had betrayed me. Maybe a different version of the Men's Prayer goes: "I'm an American. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

I could say something about how my most deeply held beliefs have been constantly challenged: beliefs about race and racism, about sexuality and gender, about capitalism and colonialism. Every axis against which I am measured and found privileged is also an axis about which my world is spinning. I have no idea how it will all come out except for this:

I know my journey isn't just about me, nor is it undertaken just for my benefit. One thing has emerged with greater and greater clarity (although that is no guarantee of its truth). There is something at work--fashioning or perhaps birthing but in any event--bringing into being a world that we have hardly begun to glimpse. Jesus called it the basileia tou theou, that I like to translate as "God's dream." King called it the Beloved Community. It is the possibility of human community within a broader global community of all living beings and the world that sustains them. The whole world is on a journey toward it.

My own pilgrimage, however reluctantly I undertake it, is intended--and not always by me--to inch the world toward God's dream. Perhaps I am being dragged toward God's dream. I'll accept that if the alternative is being left in self-satisfied stasis.

Yes, "I am a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

Amen.