What the word does (Jeremiah 1.4-10)
What the word does (Jeremiah 1.4-10)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, 4th Sunday after Epiphany (February 3, 2019)
Tom James
Jeremiah has been called “the weeping prophet.” The description is apt—not only is the book of Jeremiah filled with lamentations for a broken and scattered people: its follow-up in the Bible is actually called “Lamentations.”
But what was Jeremiah lamenting? And, maybe much more important for us, does his grief in any way connect with our own experience? Maybe we should ask, first, do we have anything to grieve, like Jeremiah? Can we relate to “the weeping prophet?” Is there any cause for lamentation among us today?
A little background. Jeremiah was a prophet during the reigns of the last kings of Judah, just as their kingdom was falling apart and about to be overrun by the growing empire of Babylon. It was actually a long decline that Jeremiah tracked over many years. Our passage for this morning recalls his call to be a prophet, somewhere around 625 B.C., and the fall of Jerusalem, which he witnessed, does not actually occur until 586 or so. In between, there were some thirty-nine years of painful drama and degeneration, as the vision of Judah as a faithful and independent people deteriorated.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that what was happening during those years was the full flowering of what he calls “royal consciousness.” Now, let me explain what that phrase means. Royal consciousness was a combination of three things. It was, first of all, an economics of affluence in which a few people grew very wealthy while most of the population remained poor—this happened mainly by gobbling up land (the main source of wealth in ancient times) either by conquest or by means of exacting interest on debts and then seizing the land when the debts couldn’t be repaid. And, secondly, royal consciousness involved a politics of oppression that seeks to keep poor people from having any kind of redress by centralizing authority in a monarchy and enlisting the help of a standing army to reinforce differences in power. Finally, royal consciousness involved a religion that was focused on the regularities of the created order. It was the role of the king and his priests to maintain that regularity. The God of such a religion was predictable, controllable, and accessible—not to the people, but to the ruling hierarchy. The nation of Israel had originally been a project inspired by Moses the liberator, and it involved the most passionate rejection of royal consciousness in favor of a whole new kind of faith. Israel was to have an economy of shared abundance rather than hoarded affluence, a politics of emancipation, governed by decentralized tribal councils rather than a centralized monarchy, rather than a politics of oppression, and a religion that believed in a God that was not controllable and not predictable and not accessible in the same way. This last item was especially important because a God who is always predictable can be depended upon to reinforce inequities of power and wealth—such inequities are seen as if they reflect God’s own intentions, as what is natural and inevitable. But a God whose ways are, as Isaiah was to say, “not our ways,” and whose thoughts are “not our thoughts,” could not be relied upon to support a stable order, but instead challenged it and called it to be different.
And so, when the prophets of Israel and Judah cry out against “foreign gods,” it’s not just a matter of religious preference that they are getting so heated up about. What is happening during the time of the kings is that the liberating project of Moses is being slowly but surely replaced by the same kind of oppressive, centralized monarchy to which others in the region had long since succumbed. The land of Canaan had been ruled by urban monarchies, city-states who grew rich by siphoning off the wealth of the land, where rural peasants worked hard just to survive. Israel was supposed to be different, but, as time went on, it wasn’t. And that made people like Jeremiah sad.
So, what was Jeremiah lamenting? It was, first of all, a failure of his people to live up to their calling. It was a failure to grasp the freedom that God had offered them. It was that they had become just like the other nations, characterized increasingly by vast inequalities, by a lack of compassion and justice, by a religion that did not respect the freedom of God but expected God to be at the beck and call of Israel’s most powerful.
We read in our passage that, when God calls Jeremiah to his role as prophet, he tells him that he will be appointed “over nations and kingdoms, to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and overthrow.” Now, how could these words be anything but scary? How was young Jeremiah (he called himself just a “boy” at this point), how was this young Jeremiah going to be somehow “over nations and kingdoms,” and how would those actually sitting on those thrones take to him “plucking up, pulling down, destroying and overthrowing?”
We know from the story that Jeremiah didn’t actually get appointed king in the kings’ places—that’s not what God meant. What God meant was that, somehow, Jeremiah’s words would have this powerfully destructive role. More than that, God’s own words would be given to Jeremiah so that Moses’ project of freedom would have a voice in the midst of Israel’s corruption and decay. And it wasn’t that God’s voice in itself was a voice of destruction, but that the kings and their nobles and their priests—indeed, all those who were purveyors and beneficiaries of royal consciousness—would hear those words as words of destruction. Because God didn’t want to destroy the people, but to create the people again, to renew the project of Moses, to once again liberate the people from their bondage to a way of life that would consume them and destroy them so that they might finally live into the promise of Israel. It was a rescue operation; it was a mission of redemption.
But Jeremiah wept. Why did he weep? First of all, he wept because the nation would not listen. The word rang out with its dreadful overtones of impending judgment and doom as Jeremiah preached and preached, but the power brokers held on and the people did not challenge them and things went on as they had before for so long. Meanwhile, the empire of Babylon sharpened its swords and gathered its troops.
But there’s a second reason why Jeremiah wept. He also wept because he grieved for himself. The message that he had to deliver did not make him happy, because he, too, was in some ways taken in by royal consciousness. After all, it had grown so familiar, like an old house that you don’t want to leave, or like an old pair of shoes you don’t want to give up. The strange fact about human nature is that we all tend to love what is familiar even when it is killing us. Drug and alcohol addictions aren’t the only examples. We can cling to a relationship that is destroying us, or to a job or even a whole way of life that is actually making us miserable. In this case, Jeremiah, too, must have felt the attractions of centralized power and a static religion and a predictable god. Indeed, losing such a god, coming to believe in a God who isn’t constrained by human expectations, a God who may intervene in our lives at any time and ask us to do things differently, who shakes our complacency and calls us to step forward into new territory rather than around and around in comfortable circles of familiarity, can’t help but be felt in some ways as a loss.
How can you and I relate to Jeremiah? I believe that, just like Judah, we are all too easily beguiled today by what Brueggemann calls “royal consciousness.” Of course, we don’t have kings in this country. But we do have a tendency to accept and adopt structures of power that reproduce human pain and suffering, even when they hurt us, too, just because we believe that that is the way things must be. We do have a tendency to fail in our imaginations and in our awareness of our moral resources to change things for the better. And we do, don’t we, have a tendency to shape our religious beliefs and practices, our rituals and habits, in such a way that they guarantee stability and reliability, shielding ourselves from the way the God of Moses may be calling us to leave Egypt behind.
But the words of Jeremiah pluck up that royal consciousness—they tear down that stale religion that tries desperately to keep things always the same—because they point to a way of life, a way of faith, that is always with us and always open to us when we say “yes” to it. The way is the way of Moses, which is also the way of Jesus. It is a way of openness to the Spirit, of speaking words of truth that challenge the power of kings and support and uphold those who are most vulnerable in their struggles for freedom and dignity.
We may or may not be ready for it, but I believe God puts those kinds of words in our mouths today. We are invested with the spirit and call of Jeremiah for our time. When we hear the voice of the spirit, we are empowered to proclaim the reality of a God who calls us to change our hearts, and our lives, and our systems of power as communities and nations.
We are also empowered to grieve. That may sound like a strange kind of power; but it is what prophets must do, in every time and place. Because we see it, too. In word and deed, we Christians preach and preach the love of Jesus that reaches everyone and that heals and forgives and tears down walls of division, and yet the power brokers hold on, and the people don’t challenge them, and everything goes on as it has for so long. Grieving is what those who hear the voice of God, and witness the stubbornness of the nations, must do.
But that’s not the end of the story. Even Jeremiah could look beyond his sorrow and see glimpses of hope for a new beginning from time to time. For him, he imagined a time when the word he was working so hard to preach would be implanted in the hearts of the people so that no one would have to preach. For us, perhaps we can imagine such a world only on a small scale. We get to see, and hopefully be a part of, new beginnings here and there. Maybe there’s a new group or a new community or a new family or a new ministry or a new plan. We Christians started out a small sect, facing down a huge empire. We are accustomed to starting small, against long odds, but not giving up, not calling it quits, not allowing our imagination to fall back into the trap of royal consciousness, but trusting that the work of the spirit goes on. We need to draw on the spirit of Jeremiah for our own time. Because it is time, once more, to tear down, and to build; to destroy, and to plant. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
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