Well Past Schadenfreude (Jeremiah 31:27-34)

By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” (Psalm 137.1-3)

The opening verses of Psalm 137 bear witness to the immense trauma exiles from Judah faced in Babylon.

They were a conquered and defeated people–mocked and abused.

Disoriented and displaced, their memories of better days offered little comfort as bitter tears overwhelmed their spirits.

A passage from Richard Friedman’s book, Who Wrote the Bible?, summarizes well the exiles’ plight.

Friedman writes,

In short, the Babylonian destruction of Judah had brought horrors and tremendous challenges and crises to this nation. They were forced to reformulate their picture of themselves and of their relationship with their God. They had to find a way to worship [God] without a Temple. They had to find leadership without a king. They had to learn to live as a minority ethnic group in great empires. They had to determine what their relationship was to their homeland. And they had to live with their defeat. (p. 155)

Their old world was shattered leaving the exiles from Judah with the unenviable task of rethinking and reevaluating everything that they once believed and treasured.

They had to ask themselves big existential questions about who they were and who they were going to be.

“What is the point of all this?”

“How do we understand who we are, who God is, and what difference does it make, anyway?”

“What legacy will we leave behind for our children and our children’s children?”

If we continued reading Psalm 137, we would find out that one of the possible answers to the big questions they were asking themselves was to become an embittered and violent people who gave their hearts over to seeking revenge on their enemies for the wrongs that had been done to them.

You see, that chapter of scripture that begins with a riverside lament ends with one of the most jarring expressions of a desire for vengeance and bloodshed found anywhere in the Bible.

Raging against the Babylonians and calling out Judah’s neighbors in the kingdom of Edom who cheered as Jerusalem fell, the psalm concludes with these graphic and disturbing lines.

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!”

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! (Psalm 137:7-9)

It’s really a shocking passage that puts us in touch with the savagery of the moment.

If it’s true that an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, then some of the exiles were at least wondering if there was anything worthwhile left to see.

While the Church has a bad habit of ignoring difficult passages like this, I think there’s an important connection between Psalm 137 and the ministry of Jeremiah that we’ve been following for several weeks.

But first, it needs to be said that while the psalm is an honest expression of the exiles’ rage and anger, it doesn’t indicate that God blesses the people’s bloodlust.

No holy spirit is whispering in any one’s ear saying, “Do it! Go get your revenge!”

And that absence of a divine mandate for violence is significant for us as readers of the scripture because it shifts the focus from interrogating the nature of God to raising questions about our human condition.

Psalm 137 doesn’t beg the question “Why is God so violent in the Old Testament?” but it should get us thinking about the way those ancient fires still burn within us.

It invites us to see the ways that rage, revenge, and violence impact our communities and infect our lives.

It shows us how important it is to be honest about the anger that we carry.

So let’s be honest.

There’s some horrible, unfair, gross, and detestable things that happen in this world, and—even though we worship a loving God, even though we follow the Prince of Peace–you bet we’re angry about them.

How can it be that the rich continue to sow division and heap scorn upon the poor, just like they did in Jeremiah’s age?

Why is it that those who abuse and denigrate their neighbors appear to be shamelessly creative, while the well intentioned seem hopelessly hamstrung and flat footed?

Why racism?

Why war?

Why, in the name of all that is Holy, are we living in a timeline when people are trying to increase their influence and further their careers by praising the likes of Hitler and the Nazis?

I’m not saying we’re Psalm 137 angry, but we’re well past schadenfreude.

Also, to be fair, while we might like to believe that we only get angry when our sense of justice is offended or because of our righteous indignation, sometimes our egos get bruised, our patience grows thin, and we just get pissed off like everybody else.

That’s why hearing the exiles’ honest expression of their anger is so important.

In Psalm 137 the exiles’ honesty becomes an invitation to God to hear them out and to sit with them in their rage.

That encounter, then, becomes the point of contact where God’s Word is heard and healing and transformation can begin.

“Rage belongs before God,” notes theologian Miroslav Volf, because “by placing unattended rage before God we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self face to face with a God who loves and does justice.” (Miroslav Volf on Psalm 137)

Volf continues,

Hidden in the dark chambers of our hearts and nourished by the system of darkness, hate grows and seeks to infest everything with its hellish will to exclusion. In the light of the justice and love of God, however, hate recedes and the seed is planted for the miracle of forgiveness.

Volf gives us some beautiful theology and biblical interpretation here that resonates with the vision Jeremiah shares with us this morning.

Confronted by a broken world filled with broken people, pressed between the cruelty of the powerful and the promises of God’s mercy, aware of the same violent sentiments expressed in Psalm 137, if not feeling that way, too, Jeremiah preached about a new thing that God would do, a new way of being with God and one another that transcended dislocation, rage, and violence.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

Sitting with Jeremiah’s words, I’m struck by how the actions that he describes God taking in days that “are surely coming,” came to pass and, even to this day, define what we would call genuine religious devotion, or at least what our Wesleyan / Methodist tradition calls genuine religious devotion.

A covenant written upon the heart–this speaks to an inward change and inner disposition toward God that we recognize as essential.

This is also why it’s vitally important to note that from Jeremiah’s perspective, in the Hebrew idioms and metaphors that he understood, the heart wasn’t just an individual’s emotional center. The heart was also the intellectual center, the personality, and the center of intuition and motivation.

It’s not all that far removed from what we would describe as one’s true self.

And that’s where God wants to get to work on us, not around the fringes of our identity, not with what’s leftover after we’ve spent ourselves chasing lesser and fading things, not with the pious corners of our lives that we’ve convinced ourselves aren’t really that bad.

God wants it all and has gone to the greatest lengths in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ to give us new life from the inside out.

“Do not be conformed to this age,” wrote Saint Paul, “but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

“The true, living, Christian faith…is not only an assent, an act of the understanding,” preached John Wesley, “but a disposition, which God hath wrought in [the Christian’s] heart; "a sure trust and confidence in God, that, through the merits of Christ, [their] sins are forgiven, and [they are] reconciled to the favour of God." (The Marks of the New Birth)

This is, I believe, consistent with what Jeremiah envisioned and prophesied—an experience of God, a relationship with God, a covenant with God in which there was nothing superficial, nothing artificial, just a deep, earnest, honest, transforming communion–something strong enough to endure heartbreaks and rages, steadfast enough to hold on when hearts wander and stupidity wins the day, powerful enough to let go of privilege and to choose mercy, forgiveness, and love.

“I will put my law within them,” says the Lord, “and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

Confronted by a broken world filled with broken people, pressed between the cruelty of the powerful and the promises of God’s mercy, aware of the same violent sentiments expressed in Psalm 137, if not feeling that way, too, you and I have been entrusted by God with Good News that transcends dislocation, rage, and violence.

Through Jesus Christ, God came into our lives, holding nothing against us, to write upon our hearts a transformational story of love, forgiveness, and new life.

May all that we have and all that we are–our words and our actions, our joys and our lamentations–bear witness to this story.

And may we always give thanks to God for it. Amen.

Image Attribution: De Morgan, Evelyn, 1855-1919. By the Waters of Babylon, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57161

Beyond Power and Privilege (Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7)

A story told by Will Willimon about an event from his adolescence sets the stage for our encounter with God’s Word this morning.

Confessing that “it may sound trivial,” Willimon is tempted to believe that a world changing seismic shift happened in his town one Sunday evening in 1963.

He writes,

Then, in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us–regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church–made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox. (Resident Aliens, p. 15)

Some of you may be familiar with the kind of blue-law Sunday restrictions Willimon describes, but you can be forgiven if you’re not. Apart from Chick-fil-a’s closed on Sunday policy and some restrictions in some places on when you can buy alcohol, they’ve largely disappeared from the culture. It’s worth noting, though, that even until the not so distant past, businesses and all manner of cultural and civic groups treated Sunday differently, or were required to treat Sunday differently, by imposing sometimes draconian limits on what people could do on the first day of the week.

Here are some classic examples.

In colonial Boston, Captain John Kemble was arrested and put in stocks for two hours for kissing his wife on the Sunday that he returned home from three years at sea.

In 1789, President George Washington was on his way from Connecticut to attend church in New York when he was charged with a blue law violation for unnecessarily walking or riding on Sunday.

[And in 1917, after the “New York Giants and Cincinnati Reds played the first Sunday major league baseball game at the Polo Grounds, [the managers of both teams were arrested for violating the blue laws.] (Gotham Gazette)

A little closer to home, I grew up playing youth baseball in southern Indiana when it was inconceivable that any game would ever start before noon on Sunday, and, while I don’t remember legal restrictions being in place in my hometown, I do remember the astonishing moment when my grandmother decided that it was ok to stop by the grocery after church and pick up something for the family’s Sunday dinner, breaking her own, long-standing practice of not buying anything or doing any business on the Lord’s Day.

Now of course there’s a big difference between an individual or even a private business choosing to forgo certain activities on Sundays and having those same limitations imposed on them under penalty of law.

The Bible calls for the faithful to “honor the sabbath and keep it holy,” but bringing the coercive force of the law and fear of punishment into the situation really does change the relationship, doesn’t it?

For a very long time, many religious leaders and institutions in this country understood themselves as benefitting from this set up. Simply stated, it was thought that creating an environment in which there was nothing else for people to do on Sunday morning was good for the Church. But the reason I started with Willimon’s story this morning is his willingness to point out what might’ve been good for attendance was ultimately bad for discipleship.

Far from pining for the return of aggressively regressive blue laws, Willimon describes these pressures as something like a crutch whose removal after years–even centuries–of depending upon for support, left the Church with atrophied muscles and a halting gait.

Again, he writes,

On that night, Greenville, South Carolina…served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church. There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free rides. (p. 15-16)

In other words, with its crutches and props removed, the Church would have to learn to stand and walk on its own.

Unfortunately, old habits die hard and the legacy of the Church’s once privileged position still shapes so much of what does and doesn’t happen in our congregations and denominations.

Evangelism strategies that once filled church pews, are no longer intelligible, much less effective.

The notion that we can count on people to learn the basic Bible stories almost by osmosis just by existing in this culture is folly.

The assumption that births, and deaths, and weddings will bring families back to “their church” for an opportunity to renew connections as the community grieves or celebrates together is quickly fading away, if not already gone.

This is how Brad Brisco, a church mission strategist, describes the contemporary situation,

At the same time, the church is less and less effective at reaching a changing world, many in the church continue to believe the church maintains a central role in the life of culture. So instead of leaning toward the missionary vision of the church…we default to church as a “place where certain things happen,” and we wrongly assume that those outside the church will be interested. But…that simply isn’t the case.

We need to admit that it’s been really hard and kind of scary for the Church to get used to walking, or marching, or even getting on our knees and praying without our old crutch.

That’s the reality into which the prophet Jeremiah speaks a word of truth to us this morning.

We’ve reached the point in Jeremiah’s ministry when even the Kingdom of Judah’s most optimistic–even sycophantic–supporters had to admit defeat. The armies of Babylon had swept over the land and carried thousands of Judeans away.

Any hopes that they were in control of their own destiny, that they were owed a privileged place in society, that a military, or economic, or even a miraculous crutch would appear to save their limping kingdom had been dashed.

They were on their own, exiles–strangers in a strange land.

These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent [to them]...Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

I’m struck by the simplicity of this word to the exiles.

It’s like God is telling them to take baby steps or giving them their first set of exercises post-surgery.

It’s a total reset of life and faith, almost like learning to walk again.

Build houses, and gardens, and families, the prophet writes. In essence, start putting your life and your community back together. Tend to the relationships that matter. Do the things that help you get stronger, more stable, more secure, and remember that it’s ok to find happiness, to be glad that you’re alive.

“Multiply there, and do not decrease.” This is no time to give up, says Jeremiah. It’s time to be reborn.

And then–and this is such an important message to a people who had forsaken justice, who had come to see relationships as self-serving transactions, as opportunities to grift—“seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

This new beginning is going to require a new way of doing things, so set aside the pride and greed that made you believe that it was all about you, that the world should cater to you, that your neighbors, especially the poor, were there to serve you.

Get rid of that and start finding yourself in the ways of service, of elevating a common good rather than personal privilege, of learning to pray for people that you don’t even like.

That was Jeremiah’s message to the exiles, and, when we stop to think about it, it’s not all that different from what Jesus would one day tell his disciples as they struggled to learn how to rebuild their lives in the space beyond power and privilege.

“Whoever wishes to be great among you,” said Jesus, “must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave, just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Mt 20:25-28)

I like to think of Jeremiah as a preacher of rock bottom grace because he understood that when you’ve fallen as far as you can fall, your only real choice is to plant your feet, kick up, and start your way back to the surface.

Or, to return to Willimon’s image, maybe it’s time to set aside your crutches and learn to walk again.

That was the substance of Jeremiah’s message to Judah’s exiles, but it still resonates with those who have had their hearts broken, their lives turned upside down, or who hear the news each day and ask, “what is this strange place and how did I get here?”

It’s also a message for limping churches.

This is no time to give up. It’s time to be reborn.

Through the prophet, God told the people to take baby steps and gave them their first set of exercises post-surgery.

It was a total reset of life and faith, like learning to walk again, only this time, they would walk on a path that leads beyond power and privilege.

They would walk on the path God was building to their true selves, to their neighbors, to one another, to a future with hope.

May it be the path to always travel. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Things that Never Were (Lamentations 1:1-6)

Have you ever heard of the Mandela Effect? It’s a term used to describe the phenomenon of a large group of people misremembering a detail about an event or item in popular culture.

For example, do you remember the iconic scene in Stars Wars: The Empire Strikes Back when Darth Vader said, “Luke, I am your father.”

No, you don’t remember that, because that’s not what he said. The actual line is “No, I am your father.”

What about “Life is like a box of chocolates,” the famous line from Forrest Gump.

Nope. Momma always said, “life was like a box of chocolates.”

Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw had a lot of sex in the city, but her show is called “Sex and the City.”

Jiffy peanut butter doesn’t exist. Skippy peanut butter does, though, and so does Jif.

And what about that classic cartoon starring Fred, Wilma, Barney, and Betty–is that the Flinstones or Flintstones? It’s Flintstones, with two ts.

Now of course unless you’re really into copyright law or are passionate about intellectual property, none of these are matters of great significance. I mean, maybe they can score your team a few points at your next trivia night, but that’s about it.

And for heaven’s sake, don’t be the guy who corrects the little kid in the Darth Vader costume on Halloween.

Ultimately, the Mandela Effect just places a label on something that we all do and that we’ve all experienced. Capable of taking in an incredible amount of information, our brains also sort that information, assess it, file it away, and from time to time, fill in missing gaps. As a consequence, we sometimes get a detail wrong, or we forget it, or we conflate it with something else, or maybe we just kinda make it up.

It’s a bit like an optical illusion, a trick of the mind.

A misremembered movie line or a forgotten detail about a cartoon character from your childhood is usually the stuff of light-hearted fun. It’s not a big deal.

However, individually and collectively, we’re also capable of weaving misremembered facts and details about our lives into a story that can, indeed, become very important.

Sometimes the way we sort, assess, file away, and fill in information says more about our hearts and souls than our attention to detail and memory recall.

What I mean specifically is that we’re all capable of creating a story or even a myth about ourselves that can become an impediment to personal growth and faithful discipleship.

Perhaps we misremember the truth about ourselves and who God created us to be and come to believe instead that we can do no wrong, or that we can never be right.

Instead of finding purpose and meaning in the Good News that we are made in God’s Image, created for community, and, by God’s grace, forgiven, loved, and free, we become convinced that we’ve wandered too far away from God to ever be welcomed home again, that we’ll always be unlovable, or that grace is for losers and we’re doing just fine on our own, thank you very much.

It’s like the Mandela Effect, except all information is filtered through either a self-serving or self-sabotaging lens, and we fill in the gaps accordingly.

There’s the person who was born on third base and thinks they hit a triple, the one who believes that the circumstances of their birth sets them apart from others as being morally superior, destined to lead, a master of the universe.

There’s somebody else who hears so many degrading things said about them and is surrounded by so much negativity that they take it for granted that they’ll always be second class, inferior, a nobody.

“The mind is a wonderful thing,” writes Leo Babauta at the website Zen Habits. “It’s also a complete liar that constantly tries to convince us not to take actions we know are good for us, and stops many great changes in our lives.”

And when more and more people believe the same lie, the lie spreads and gains power.

White supremacy and its progeny are the most obvious and impactful of these mass misremembering in our nation’s history, but there are others. Misogyny, homophobia, Christian hegemony, the notion that might-makes-right, that wealth imbues one with wisdom or virtue, the list goes on.

Any combination of arrogance and power that stifles dissenting voices and refuses to admit, much less, repent of and correct its wrongs–these are the destructive stories, myths, and lies that faithful hearts must leave behind.

The ministry of Jeremiah the prophet helped God’s people leave behind what they could no longer carry.

His was a clear-eyed reality check that invited the people to grieve their losses and, when they began to see the light again, to walk into a new day as a changed people.

We’ve read several passages from the Book of Jeremiah recently, that despite being twenty-five hundred years old, are as contemporary as our most recent text messages. These are passages filled with worry, grief, and disillusionment.

Jeremiah lamented personal losses, losses in his community, losses that fundamentally challenged everything he thought he knew.

Homes, dreams, freedoms, loved ones, even God’s own Temple–all gone.

But today, a reading from Lamentations, the Book of Jeremiah’s companion volume, shows us how Jeremiah also helped the people to let go of what never was, to leave behind the misremembered stories they believed about themselves that could block their path to a future with God.

In fact, one section from our passage speaks directly to this challenge.

How lonely sits the city

that once was full of people!

How like a widow she has become,

she that was great among the nations!

She that was a princess among the provinces

has become subject to forced labor.

Now here’s the line that caught my attention.

She weeps bitterly in the night,

with tears on her cheeks;

among all her lovers,

she has no one to comfort her;

all her friends have dealt treacherously with her;

they have become her enemies.

From Jeremiah’s perspective, the abandoned lover was the Kingdom of Judah who, despite compromising its covenant with God and sacrificing its understanding of justice in order to pursue alliances with other nations, still found itself all alone when hard times came.

Again, according to the prophet, this was the fallout of a people who changed who they were and what they valued in order to gain the affections and protections of neighbors who were happy to take what they wanted, but couldn’t be counted on to give anything of substance to the relationship.

Jeremiah wanted the people to know that trying to secure a future by compromising themselves and casting aside their God-given distinctiveness would always be a fool’s errand. It was an empty promise, a lie, a myth, and now they needed to consciously walk away from it.

Only acknowledge your guilt,

that you have rebelled against the Lord your God

and scattered your favors among strangers under every green tree

and have not obeyed my voice,

says the Lord.

Return, O faithless children…(Jeremiah 3)

Today God’s Word invites us to an essential task–to commit ourselves to recognizing and leaving behind the lies about ourselves and others that we’ve accepted as true–lies that hold us back, or puff us up, lies that convince us we’re unlovable, or that we’re just so great why would be need anything like grace or mercy anyway?

God invites us to leave behind all of this, the things that never were, and to come home.

After all, we’re all capable of creating a story or even a myth that can become an impediment to personal growth and faithful discipleship, but God says come back to what is true, come back to the Good News that you are made in God’s Image, created for community, and, by God’s grace, you are forgiven, loved, and free.

Thanks be to God for this Good News. Amen.

Cries of the Heart (Jeremiah 8:18-9:1)

“My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick.”

The first verse of the passage we read this morning from the Book of Jeremiah reminds us that while the failures of Judah’s kings and the violence of Babylon’s invading army drives the book’s plotline, the prophet’s story is ultimately one of human loss and grief.

After all, Jeremiah was a spiritual leader to a people who were witnessing the destruction of everything they held dear.

Homes were destroyed, freedoms stolen, lives lost, and even though Jeremiah saw God at work in those events, he still gave voice to the hurt and pain he and his neighbors were experiencing.

O that my head were a spring of water

and my eyes a fountain of tears,

so that I might weep day and night

for the slain of the daughter of my people!

Sentiments like these are about as far removed from weak sauce optimism as one can imagine. This is, instead, a lament born of the love for, solidarity with, and the shared experience of a people in pain.

Jeremiah is one of the Bible’s most prolific authors of lament–he literally wrote the book on the subject, Lamentations–and lament is one of the Bible’s most prolific forms of prayer.

A lament is a prayer characterized by anger, grief, or sadness, that often includes questions of God, often stinging questions, questions like; “Why hasn’t the health of my people been restored?”, “How long will you hide your face from me, O Lord?”, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Above all, lament is honest. It’s prayer that doesn’t pull any punches, but lays it all out there for God to hear, usually as a variation on this theme–“I’ve heard it said and have come to believe that you are a loving and powerful God, but if that’s true, then why does what we’re going through hurt so much?”

Laments are cries of the heart and they are the backbone of our Faith. Without them, there’s no covenant, communion, or relationship with God, only fate and fatalism.

A community without lament, loses its sense of right and wrong and grows deaf to the call to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.”

As Walter Brueggeman notes, “when lament…is censured, justice questions cannot be asked and eventually become invisible and illegitimate.” (p. 107)

Weak-willed and insecure tyrants only want to hear praise, but the Almighty God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ invites real and honest catharsis.

“Pour out your hearts to God,” instructed the Psalmist because God welcomes our laments.

As common as prayers like these are in the Bible–as many as 65 of the 150 Psalms are laments–a lot of faithful people really are not good with the idea of giving honest expression to their struggles or with being around people who are. It makes them uncomfortable and elicits a misplaced or even idolatrous effort to fix everything.

I remember with gratitude the number of friends and family members who were just “there for me” when my wife Laura died, who didn’t try to say too much, who created a loving space where I could just do the work of grieving. That support meant everything to me.

Less meaningful were platitudes that, even if well-intentioned, came across to me as “Your grief is making me uncomfortable so please don’t do it anymore.”

“God just needed another angel.” I only remember hearing that one time and thinking to myself, “What kind of S.O.B. god would take my son’s mom just to add one more to an infinite multitude of angels?”

That, I would argue, is an example of the weak sauce optimism that Jeremiah wants us to avoid.

I read an essay by a woman named Krys Burnette this week about the death of her mother. Her words resonated with me, especially what she took away from a discussion with her mom’s pastor.

Krys explained how the pastor asked her and her brother if there would be any children at the funeral. “Since when are kids a deal breaker at funerals,” she wondered, but after talking to him about the way children grieve, Krys realized that rather than keeping them out, the pastor wanted the children in the family to attend.

His question was ultimately a question for self reflection — what are we protecting children from? Are we protecting them or are we, the adults, avoiding the difficult conversations about death? Are we the ones afraid to speak about our feelings, to show emotions, or become vulnerable in front of the children in our lives?

She continued,

The Bible and Christianity teaches us about the life and death of Jesus and that death, no matter how someone dies, is the most natural, and most certain part of life for all living things. Like anything in life, he said, the younger we learn these lessons, the further we can carry them through our journey in life. The more compassion we can have for each other, the more understanding we can have for each other as we grow.

Krys summarized this experience with the wit woven throughout her work.

Sure [the pastor] was talking about a child’s experience of death and mourning, but I mean, come on. Let’s copy/paste and put that right into our manual for “adulting” am I right?

Of course, she was right, and not just about “adulting” and grieving, but about a bedrock principle of Chirstian community.

“Weep with those who weep,” wrote Saint Paul, because when we silence the cries of hurting people, when we try so hard to protect those we love from life’s sorrows that we impede their ability to truly live and grow, when we allow propriety, or discomfort, or emotional fragility to short circuit the grieving process, we cause harm and fall short of the abundant relationships God’s grace makes possible.

I often repeat something my ethics professors in seminary once said, “Whenever I hear an old married couple say that they haven’t had an argument in years, it tells me that somebody gave up a long time ago.”

The same, I think, can be said about lament and prayer.

Whenever a Church makes no room for honest expressions of lament, or anger, or heartache, whenever a wounded soul is told “your grief is making me uncomfortable so please don’t do it anymore,” it’s evidence that that Church gave up on prayer a long time ago.

But if we’re willing to enter into lament’s crucible, if we’re willing to be honest about the brokenness within us and to bear witness to the brokenness we’ve observed, if we will “pour out our hearts” to God, then gracious mercy can flow through this covenant, this communion, this relationship between Creature and Creator.

“Where the cry is not voiced, heaven is not moved and history is not initiated,” wrote Brueggemann, but “where the cry is voiced, heaven may answer and earth may have a new chance.”(p. 111)

The promise of the Gospel is that, through Jesus, who wept with his friends Mary and Martha when their brother Lazarus died, God enters into and heals the human experience, all of it, even death.

There’s a reason we sing “Where, O death, is now thy sting?” on Easter Sunday.

You see, the breadth of that promise is greater than the notion that, as believers, you and I get to go to heaven when we die.

Rather, the promise of the Gospel anchors us in God’s steadfast and abiding presence and invites us to be our honest and authentic selves–to be a people who will lift our hearts in praise, who will bow our heads in prayer, who will open our hands in service, and who will bawl our eyes out in sorrow and anguish for this hurting world and its hurting people.

When we silence the cries of hurting people, when we try so hard to protect those we love from life’s sorrows that we impede their ability to truly live and grow, when we allow propriety, or discomfort, or emotional fragility to short circuit the grieving process, we cause harm and fall short of the abundant relationships God’s grace makes possible.

But when we confess our need to lament and choose to “pour out our hearts” to God, mercy may flow, heaven might move, and a new creation will be born within us.

Let it so be with us today.

Thanks be to God for this Good News. Amen.

Do the Work and Sing the Songs (Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15)

The prophet Jeremiah ministered during a season of war and rebellion that ended with the kingdom of Judah in ruins and many of its people in exile, so it’s not surprising that the Bible’s books that focus on Judah’s story have a lot to say about his timeline.

Here are some of the important highlights from that history.

King Josiah was the first of five kings to rule Judah during Jeremiah’s ministry, and the last good one. After a time of relative peace in the surrounding region, Josiah’s reign came to an end when Egypt’s army marched against his kingdom and he was killed.

The next king was Josiah’s second oldest son, a man Jehoahaz, who reigned for just a few months until Egypt carried him away and his older brother Judah’s ruler.

Egypt wanted Jeremiah’s third king, Jehoiakim, to be their stooge, but he was so bad he proved why it might’ve been a good idea to give his younger brother first dibs on the throne.

Jehoiakim was a horrible human being and a godless tyrant.

When Babylon superseded Egypt as the regional superpower, he switched his allegiance to them, but then tried to switch back again, and ended up dead for his troubles.

His son ruled for three months and then Babylon hauled him away and made Zedekiah Judah’s last king.

This is how Second Kings introduces him;

Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he began to reign; he reigned for eleven years in Jerusalem…. He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, just as Jehoiakim had done. Indeed, Jerusalem and Judah so angered the Lord that he expelled them from his presence.

Quite an endorsement, right? Zedekiah did such a poor job as king that God threw him and everyone that followed him out of the room.

Zedekiah was also Jeremiah’s nemesis, stooping so low as to order Jeremiah to only say nice things about him.

Can you imagine? What kind of thin-skinned leader would do something like that?

Jeremiah, of course, refused and ended up beaten and imprisoned more than once, telling the king, in one stinging rebuke, “You’re so bad at this that even if Babylon only sent their wounded soldiers into the fight, they’d still beat you, and God would help them do it.”

That’s the kind of leadership and politics that shaped Jeremiah’s ministry–a ministry often associated with things like judgement, weeping, and doom.

And then today, we encounter this strange evidence of the prophet’s hope.

With Babylon’s conquest of the land imminent, Jeremiah bought a piece of land in his hometown.

The biblical account of this transaction is incredibly detailed. “I”s were dotted, “T”s were crossed, witnesses were gathered, and all the proper paperwork was completed, in duplicate, the Bible tells us.

It all seems so absurd. With all Hell breaking loose all around him, Jeremiah not only bought a plot of land at ground zero, but he also made sure that everything about the purchase was done strictly by the book.

“Seriously, Jeremiah,” a friend must’ve asked him, “aren’t there more important things to worry about than getting this signed right now?”

But the prophet explained,

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: 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 thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.

Defeated, the people of Judah were a mess. They were going through some things, and would continue to go through some things, but all wasn’t lost.

Buying the field was a way for Jeremiah to demonstrate his hope in the God whose steadfast love endures forever even as it adapts and evolves to reach, hold, and heal listless and wayward hearts.

Buying the field was Jeremiah’s declaration of faith that God would bring the people back to this place, but buying the field was also about Jeremiah’s hope and investment in his people. It was his way of saying that people and families who have lived through this would have a chance to lead good and peaceful lives again.

That’s why it was so important to him that he did his paperwork correctly.

After almost an entire career of watching God’s people lurch after empty alliances, and watching them forsake God and one another, and seeing them disrespect holy traditions and dishonor the poor, Jeremiah still believed that a hopeful future was possible, one in which the violent whims of kings no longer had the power to trump truth and where the honest ways of righteous people would bring order to their lives again.

After years of living under siege, of being under attack, of being tempted to believe that might-made-right and that invading armies possessed the only power that really mattered, Jeremiah imagined a scenario in which some future dispute might be peacefully settled by a bureaucrat or magistrate opening that sealed deed and declaring, “Whadda know? Jeremiah really does own that field. He bought it fair and square, so you can’t just take it from him–no matter how much money you have or how big a fuss you want to make”

That’s why the details of Jeremiah’s transaction are so important. They point to a time, beyond war and exile, when people commit themselves to, and blessed by, the ways that make for a peaceful society.

Like the prophet Isaiah who famously saw a future in which swords would be turned to plowshares and pruning hooks, Jeremiah saw a future where contracts and the testimony of witnesses were honored.

In other words, the prophetic hope was that a people who had only known and were still being shaped by violent surroundings would come to know, and embrace, and reap the benefits of real, and just, and transformational peace.

Take a look at the image on the cover of your bulletin. That’s Dreseden, Germany at the end of World War II, a city in ruin.

Now if that picture can be our stand in for Jeremiah’s Jerusalem for a moment, we can clearly see what an audacious thing it would be to preach hope in that setting and to say that those piles of rubble will be built into a thriving city again.

Jeremiah preached that message, but he also said that the people who lived through war and who had their lives impacted so deeply, would know what it’s like to live in peace again.

Buildings would be rebuilt, but so, too, would hearts and spirits.

And that’s still an important message for us, because we are a people and a nation that continues to be shaped by divisive and destructive forces that run counter to God’s desires for us.

We know violence and hate.

We know racism and arrogance.

We know self-righteousness and elitism.

We’re experienced with being sinned against and sinning, but God is calling us to reap the benefits of a life centered on and committed to sharing God’s mercy and love in all that we do.

God calls us to be the kind of people who care that Jeremiah had his paperwork in order because that’s a people who are willing to invest in each other’s wellbeing, trusting that God hasn’t given up on any of us.

Let me close with another example that I think illustrates the kind of hope for people that Jeremiah had.

This is a story told by Scott Alarik about Pete Seeger, the folk music legend and famed protest singer.

Seeger was invited to sing in Barcelona, Spain in 1971. Francisco Franco's fascist government, the last of the dictatorships that started World War II, was still in power but declining. A pro-democracy movement was gaining strength and to prove it, they invited America's best-known freedom singer to Spain. More than a hundred thousand people were in the stadium, where rock bands had played all day. But the crowd had come for Seeger. As Pete prepared to go on, government officials handed him a list of songs he was not allowed to sing. Pete studied it mournfully, saying it looked an awful lot like his set list. But they insisted: he must not sing any of these songs.

Pete took the government's list of banned songs and strolled on stage. He held up the paper and said, “I've been told that I'm not allowed to sing these songs.” He grinned at the crowd and said, “So I'll just play the chords; maybe you know the words. They didn't say anything about *you* singing them.”

He strummed his banjo to one song after another, and they all sang. A hundred thousand defiant freedom singers breaking the law with Pete Seeger, filling the stadium with words their government did not want them to hear, words they all knew and had sung together, in secret circles, for years.

Pete Seeger believed that even people who had known 35 years of fascist repression could sing freedom songs again.

Wounded hearts could be made whole again.

“Chords that were broken would vibrate once more.”

Buying a field was Jeremiah’s declaration of faith that God would bring Jeremiah’s people back home again to not only rebuild their houses, but their hearts, their minds, and their lives, too.

That’s why it was so important to Jeremiah to do his paperwork correctly.

It was his way of testifying that God had not given up on the people.

Jeremiah and Pete Seeger show us we shouldn’t give up on each other either.

May we, then, do the work and sing the songs that lead to peace.

Amen.

Too Great a Burden (Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28)

On Friday morning, at a news conference announcing an arrest in the murder of Charlie Kirk, Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, made an impassioned plea for people across this country to take ownership of their actions at this time.

Cox said, “We can return violence with violence. We can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — is it metastasizes. Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”

“History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country,” Mr. Cox continued, “but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.”

The governor is, of course, right about this. Left to their own devices, cycles of violence rarely starve, but can rage for years, generations even, and breaking them requires people to say, “No, I’m not going to feed this monster anymore. I’m going to choose a better way.”

A quote from Martin Luther King Jr. shared at our Bible study Monday night is on point, “I have decided to stick with love,” King remarked, “[because] hate is too great a burden to bear.”

A lot of what we heard, and saw, and felt this week is evidence of hearts and minds that are shaking, at times even crumbling, under the weight of that burden.

What you and I must be about when we gather here in Christ’s name is helping each other to put that burden down and “to stick with love.”

In order to help us get started with that important work this morning, I want to share with you a passage from a devotional book written almost twenty years ago by Bishop Rueben Job.

The passage comes from the book’s opening section in which Job explains the problem that he intends to help his readers solve. This is where he makes his diagnosis, so to speak, before writing his prescription.

I’ve actually had this passage in my notes for some time and watching this week’s events unfold, I was struck by how timely the Bishop’s assessment of our predicament remains.

Job writes,

We live in such a fast-paced, frenzied, and complex world that it is easy to believe we are all trapped into being someone we do not wish to be and living a life we do not desire to live. We long for some way to cut through the complexities and turbulence of everyday life. We search for a way to overcome the divisiveness that separates, disparages, disrespects, diminishes, and leaves us wounded and incomplete. We know deep within that the path we are on is not healthy or morally right and that it cannot lead to a positive ending. We fear that there is no way out. (p 7-8)

I think it’s fair to say that the pace at which we are living has become faster, more frenzied, and more complex since these words were written, our divisions more profound, and we have all been diminished by the disrespect and disparagements we have hurled and by which we have been hit.

The path we are on isn’t good, and we have to find an off-ramp before it gets too late.

In another time and another place, the Prophet Jeremiah preached to a people who had come to that point.

We’re working our way through Jeremiah’s book this season so I covered a bit of the book’s background and context last week. You can watch that sermon online if you need a refresher, but it’s sufficient for our purposes today to say that after an era in which corruption, waywardness, and injustice dominated the hearts and lives of God’s people in Judah, Jeremiah ministered as the consequences of those actions became apparent.

Being a prophet in ancient Judah, Jeremiah described those consequences with characteristically dramatic flair,

[And the LORD said,] “At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem: A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward the daughter of my people, not to winnow or cleanse, a wind too strong for that. Now it is I who speak in judgment against them.

“For my people are foolish; they do not know me; they are stupid children; they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil but do not know how to do good.”

As we heard in this morning’s reading, Jeremiah goes on to describe a desolate scene in which the kingdom is stripped of all things good and life-affirming.

“I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.”

When we’re learning to read the Bible, it’s vivid images of desolation like this that grab our attention. Hot winds, earthquakes, eclipses–these are some of the prophet’s pyrotechnics, but in the art of prophetic stagecraft, such things are always used to illuminate or point us back to the spiritual or moral point.

In this case, it’s not a hot wind that should make us sweat, it’s our capacity to so completely lose the plot that we end up working against our own best interests and doing that which we never wanted to do.

In Jeremiah’s words, we become “skilled in doing evil but do not know how to do good.”

Or as Saint Paul described a similar conundrum, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

Or as Martin Gore of Depeche Mode translated this abiding truth into a song lyric,

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time

For the wrong reason and the wrong rhyme.

On the wrong day of the wrong week

I used the wrong method with the wrong technique.

Seeing our personal struggles in oracles like these, we must admit that our best efforts at doing the right thing often miss the mark and that by what we have done and left undone we’ve helped to create an environment and propped up systems that are actually capable of working against God and God’s desire for Creation.

We’ve done wrong.

Clearly stated, we are sinners, yet confronted by sin’s consequences, we proclaim Jesus as the way to forgiveness, healing, and holiness.

Years ago I had the opportunity to meet with a church group that was visiting New York to attend a seminar on global hunger and related issues of mission and social justice. The seminar’s organizers invited me to speak to the group about the way in which our Methodist tradition informs and enlightens our approach to such matters, an opportunity I took to share something about John Wesley’s method for encouraging people to live holy lives.

You see, John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, isn’t one of the figures in history who argued that the Church was teaching the wrong things. No, Wesley, for the most part, was okay with what the Church had to say about Jesus, but he was terribly disappointed with the way Christians of his day were following him.

Listless, joyless, indifferent to their neighbors’ struggles, filled with vice and void of virtue—Welsey saw these in parishes and pews everywhere he went, working against God’s desires not only for Christians, but for all people–that we would be free, and whole, and loved, and loving.

We can think of Wesley, then, as something like a sign flashing along the roadside telling us, “Take this exit. Get off here. Go another way. Follow Jesus where he leads you. ”

I told that group how Wesley wanted Methodists to discover in Jesus a model for how to love, and to think, and then to love better. And I told them how, in order to facilitate that kind of spiritual growth and discipleship, Wesley gave us three simple rules to hold ever before our hearts and minds–Do No Harm, Do Good, and Stay in Love with God.

Three Simple Rules–that is, in fact, the title of Bishop Job’s book that I quoted earlier. Three rules to help us break destructive cycles, heal sick thought patterns, starve hungry monsters, and center us in God’s love and grace–Do No Harm, Do Good, Stay in Love with God.

This week it felt like finding a faithful way forward in our “fast-paced, frenzied, and complex” world became even more challenging. We have every reason to believe that some of the loudest voices in our country will only get louder as they continue to monetize rage, foment divisions, and diminish the suffering of those they label as “them,” or “the other side,” or “not like us.”

As Jeremiah said, we are “skilled in doing evil but do not know how to do good.”

With God’s help, however, we can learn and I pray that we will as we heed the wisdom of Scripture and our Faith in this moment and choose the better way.

We can starve the monsters that would destroy us and, by following Jesus, we can be agents of forgiveness, mercy, and reconciliation. In fact, we must center qualities like these as the hallmark of our witness and our life with God.

We must “stick with love, because hate is too great a burden to bear.”

Amen.

The Potter's Touch (Jeremiah 18:1-11)

Jesus often described living a life with God in ways that radically upended commonly accepted notions of what was fitting, right, and proper for good God-fearing people.

For example, he once left a learned man named Nicodemus scratching his head when he told him that “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.”

Likewise, in a passage passed on by Saint Luke that we’ve read today, Jesus spoke of hating one’s family as a basic ante for following in his steps, a teaching that must’ve made his own mother do a double take, not to mention the two pairs of brothers he counted among his twelve closest disciples.

And then there’s what probably sounded like the most ludicrous thing he ever said.

“Take up your cross and follow me.”

A cross? The ultimate symbol of the Roman Empire’s violence and oppression? A tool of state sponsored execution? This was Jesus’ invitation to would-be disciples?

When Saint Paul wrote that the cross was “foolishness to the Greeks” it was an incredible understatement.

Jesus repeatedly described discipleship in ways like this, ways that assumed great tension existed between his teachings and what his audience would’ve understood as common sense and practical wisdom.

And, of course, he was right.

While it’s important to acknowledge that Jesus did use hyperbole and exaggerated figures of speech in order to make his points, he obviously understood that God expected a higher level of righteous behavior and holiness of heart from his followers than that which came easily or without intention, formation, or revelation.

Remember how Jesus once told a parable about the dangers of putting new wine in old wineskins which was basically his way of telling the people that trying to fit him and what he had to say into a neat and tidy box of religious things just wouldn’t work.

In this way, Jesus stands as the fulfillment and source of the Bible’s prophetic witness, the crucible in which God’s Word and human experience intersect and react with one another.

Over the next several weeks we’re going to explore that same prophetic witness by taking a closer look at the ministry of one of ancient Judah’s greatest prophets, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah was a priest-turned-prophet who ministered among God’s people about 600 hundred years before Jesus was born during an era defined by the ferocious threat and ultimate defeat Judah faced at the hands of the Babylonian Empire.

Jeremiah and his neighbors witnessed the horrors of war and famine. They saw Jerusalem conquered, King Solomon’s magnificent temple destroyed, and thousands of their own forcibly deported.

A team of archeologists recently excavated a site from Jeremiah’s era that shines a light on the terror Judeans faced. Working within ancient Jerusalem’s city limits, the team found in the remains of a Judean house layers of ash, Babylonian arrowheads, and, quite tellingly, a piece of gold and silver jewelry.

The dig’s co-director, Shimon Gibson, noted, “the combination of an ashy layer full of artifacts, mixed with arrowheads, and a very special ornament indicates some kind of devastation and destruction. Nobody abandons golden jewelry and nobody has arrowheads in their [household trash].” Imagine for a moment the circumstances that could lead you to lose your most precious and valuable possessions in the pile of ashes and weapons that used to be your home, and you get a sense of what Jeremiah’s community went through.

This is the context and background for the scriptures we’ll read this season.

And we begin with a scene that brings us back to that same principle that Jesus so often articulated–the principle that faithful discipleship often requires us to reject, or to hold ourselves at a distance from, or to radically change our perspective about what once seemed like good advice and wise counsel.

We start in Jeremiah, chapter 18.

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.

Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

God led Jeremiah to the potter’s house where the shaping and remolding of a vessel on the wheel held a promise of good news for Jeremiah. God’s people were still a work in progress. Change and transformation were still possible. The way things were was not the way things needed to stay.

However, the bad news for Jeremiah was that the way things were wasn’t good at all. Not only were the people up against it with the Babylonians, but, even more important to the prophet were the choices and behaviors that lined the path leading to the people’s present troubles.

Faithfulness to God’s covenant, keeping God’s law, honoring the poor, working for justice–these pillars of the Faith had fallen to the wayside long before Jerusalem’s defenses.

It seems as though the people had given their hearts over to all manner of beliefs and practices based only on their ability to generate profits and material gain.

As a consequence, what counted as wisdom to the people was, in fact, foolish.

Jeremiah explained this in chapter 8.

How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us’, when, in fact, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie? The wise shall be put to shame, they shall be dismayed and taken; since they have rejected the word of the Lord, what wisdom is in them…because from the least to the greatest everyone is greedy for unjust gain”?

Like a spoiled vessel in the potter’s hand, the people needed to be shaped anew and reformed.

Now, therefore, [Jeremiah,] say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you, from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.

The thought of God “shaping evil” against anyone is a challenging concept, like so many things that Jesus said, but I think what’s translated “evil” here in English, brings to mind something like a broken relationship or perhaps even an intervention.

It’s as if God was telling the people, “You need to own the fact that you’ve caused some harm here and the time to make amends is now.”

Because, as God said, even though they had messed up terribly, the substance of their hearts was still malleable, able to be refashioned, like clay.

We can learn a lot from Jeremiah’s visit to the potter’s house.

You and I, the Church, and our country, like the people of Judah, are works in progress.

Some things have definitely gone wrong with us and we need to get them fixed even if that might feel a whole lot like starting over.

Like the prophet’s people, we, too, may look at the circumstances in which we find ourselves today and wonder, how did we get here? How are we going to get through this?

Are lockdown drills in our schools and masked federal agents on our streets really the best we can do?

Have we lost the ability to see any issue–from polio and measles to the legacy of January 6 and the ongoing killing of civilians in Gaza–through anything other than our own partisan looking glass lenses?

Are we not willing to acknowledge that while this nation and the Church in this nation was travelling down the path to where we are, we accepted as wise the foolishness that values profits over virtue, tribe over truth, and shortcuts and quick fixes over disciplined and often difficult work?

With cruelty in the ascendency and a threadbare social fabric, someone might say we need to be born again or that we need to take up our cross and follow Jesus.

As people of Faith, we must confess that God expects a higher level of righteous behavior and holiness of heart from us than that which comes easily or without intention, formation, or revelation.

When the whole world seemed to be spinning out of control, God took Jeremiah to the potter’s house.

The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.

It was a bit of good news for Jeremiah and his neighbors, good news that God’s people were still a work in progress. Change and transformation were still possible. The way things were was not the way things needed to stay.

And that’s still good news for you and me today.

“Can I not do with you just as this potter has done?” says the Lord. “Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand,” so let’s open our hearts and our lives, our church and our world, to the potter’s touch.

Thanks be to God. Amen.