Jeremiah 2 World Communion BFC 2018
Jeremiah 2:1-15, 33-35
October 7, 2018
We live in a time where the teeming
underbelly of our nation’s history has a chance to transform. Racism, patriarchy, imperialism, and
obsession with wealth and fame have been a huge part of the unspoken American
Dream lying beneath the veneer of democracy, freedom, equality, and justice for
all. As people of progressive faith, we
yearn and long for the veneer to become real in one way or another. But we must also admit that many of us are vested
in that underbelly as white, male or connected to males, middle- to
upper-class, citizens of the number one superpower on the planet. At one time we may have proclaimed our
innocence because we could not see the pain and grief hiding in plain view.
A great revealing or uncovering is taking
place. What we should have known before
is being unmasked in ways that we cannot deny.
Body cams or dash cams show people of color walking away without weapons
being gunned down. Children are stripped
from their parents and the records lost.
Stories of rampant sexual harassment, abuse, and violence are ignored so
that a “good, white family man” may go forward.
Our country is supplying the military wherewithal to fuel the greatest
humanitarian crisis on the planet. And
we are easing restrictions, rolling back standards, and continuing practices
that send us barreling towards climate change.
Once again, we are preparing the way for an economic collapse that will
certainly devastate the poorest of the poor and drive many of us to the brink
with the loss of savings, health care, and retirement. And what we already knew is that the leader
of our nation was not the self-made lie but earned his money, as Jesus implied
with the rich, young ruler, through inheritance and fraud. These are not new truths. These were long
known but now they are beginning to emerge from assumed institutional health as
deformities, cracked cisterns, wicked cruelty and evil. They were all hiding in plain sight.
Too many of us have just been vested in that teeming
underbelly. We may want change but we
have resisted transformation. We hoped
the cancer-ridden body could largely stay the same while addressing the acne on
the skin. Some of us are losing hope and
showing our privilege by talking about removing ourselves from the struggle
when there are those who can never, ever pretend that they are part of the
American dream of materialism, militarism, patriarchy, and racism. Even when they lose hope, their lives depend
on continuing. They cannot opt out. The possibility for transformation looms, the
violence of centuries is being revealed, and the teeming underbelly is digging
in, fearful that its death is imminent.
The suffering of God is uncovered in a hope against hope that the new
thing Creator is fashioning might finally come forward.
The true prophet identifies with and represents the people of
God before God sometimes in the unseen suffering and pain experienced by the
most vulnerable, sometimes in expectation of the suffering and pain yet to
come. But the prophet, as truth teller, also
identifies with and represents God before the people of God, God languishing in
pain and torment as the people of God abandon the loyalty and fidelity God has
for them. Called the “weeping prophet”,
this defines the laments of the priest and prophet Jeremiah. In Jeremiah’s many laments, it is often
impossible to tell when Jeremiah speaks for himself and when he gives voice to
the suffering and pain of the economically poor or when he gives voice to the torture
and anguish of God.[1]
Classical theology, not wanting to
understand the Almighty as a god who was bent and moved to and fro in fits of
rage or found cavorting in passion with individual humans, pictured God as
immutable, or unchangeable, and impassable, not experiencing emotion or suffering. For Jeremiah , what was immutable or
unchangeable was God’s integrity and fidelity.
What was impassable, or not swayed, was God’s eye on and compassion for
the most vulnerable. God would not be
bought. God was not
passive-aggressive. God would not waver
in search for favor or power.
Roman Catholic theologian, Dr.
Elizabeth Johnson, challenges the idea of God separated from human
suffering. God is acting in
relationship, in solidarity with humanity in history.[2] She writes:
. . . if God’s compassionate love struggles against destructive forces, then
being in alliance with God calls for a similar praxis…. Especially in situations of massive suffering
due to injustice, such a symbol makes clear that God is to be found on the side
of those who are oppressed, as a challenge to oppressors be they individuals or
structures. The close correlation
between divine pathos and prophetic act in the Bible indicates that responsible
action for resistance, correction, and healing are among the truest expressions
of living faith.[3]
As
one of the leaders in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and former
Dutch Reformed clergy, Dr. Allan Aubrey Boesak writes about the Khoi people of
the Eastern Cape. The Khoi speak of
their supreme being as Tusi-Goab, the Giver, Protector, and Sustainer of all
creation.[4] Tusi-Goab struggles on behalf of creation and
helpless people and not to attain power and glory for Tusi-Goab. In Tusi-Goab’s struggle with evil, though
victorious, the Khoi God was wounded in the knee. That is what Tusi-Goab literally means,
“wounded knee.” Tusi-Goab was in the
first place not a God of power and might, but of woundedness and empathetic
solidarity, a God who fought on behalf of God’s creation and children, and who
was willing to be wounded for their sake.
Because Tusi-Goab is wounded, the ancients go on to say, God understands
the woundedness and woundability of God’s creation, of God’s children.[5] It is with this theological insight of the
Khoi people with which Boesak argues that we can speak of hope “only if we speak
of woundedness.”[6] Because of the profound evil, systemic
suffering and social injustice that Boesak lived through under Apartheid, he
concludes, “hope is fragile, for it is the hope of the vulnerable, of those at
the bottom of the well.”[7]
In the bitter winter of 1890,
well-armed American soldiers slaughtered freezing, almost defenseless Native
people, many of them women and children, at Wounded Knee. It was the culmination of a great genocide,
an intended destruction and dissembling of a people. The great Sioux holy man, Black Elk, was
still a child when he saw the dead bodies of his people strewn throughout this
area. As an old man, he reflected on what he had seen: “I did not know then how
much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can
still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along
the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can
see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard.
A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. For the nation’s hoop is
broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is
dead.”[8]
Where is God in the midst of such tragedies? Such unmitigated hatred, fear, cruelty, and
violence? Why would we think God would
ordain this? That hoop, broken and
scattered, is not only the hoop of the great Sioux people or Native people in
general. It is a hoop that has long been
broken for our whole nation. Some of
our nation, finding community only in fear, hatred, violence, and cruelty, want
that hoop to remain broken and scattered.
On this World Communion Sunday, we must be the people of Tusi-Goab,
Wounded Knee, and begin putting the sacred hoop back together.
Hebrew Scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann has said
that the prophet Jeremiah watched as the nation of Judah went through its
equivalent of 9/11. Babylonian armies
leveled the city of Jerusalem, the holy city, killed or carted off the national
leaders in chains, God’s representatives on earth, razed the Temple to the
ground, the place of God’s special abiding, and salted the land-- the
particularity of God’s promise. If these
were the signs of God’s presence in the world, leaders, Temple, land, then where
had God gone? Why had God abandoned
them?
Truth-tellers, prophets like Jeremiah, had seen this
coming. He knew the center could not
hold. The violence visited on the
vulnerable would return as a reckoning visited upon the nation. While many
Christian leaders of our age may suggest that God is concerned with our
personal morality, prophets like Jeremiah made it clear that God was and is
concerned with our wider systems and structures. “How do the systems and structures of our
community and nation provide for life and health and growth?” In our Scripture for today, Jeremiah believes
that the people had forgotten the stories of their deliverance from slavery in
Egypt, how God had walked with the people in the wilderness—in a land of
deserts and pits, droughts and deep darkness.
No people are to pass through such wastelands, no people come out alive
on the other side of such barren places.
And yet, this God was with you, to sustain and support you, to provide
you bread from heaven, water from a rock, quail in your nets. This God set before you values and ways of
life that would keep you free, and whole, connected, and at peace. This God brought you to a good and plentiful
land, so that you might eat the fruit of a good and safe place, a place flowing
with milk and honey. This God delivered
and saved you. All that this God asked
of you in return was a relationship sealed by how you treated neighbor
differently than how Egypt and its pharaoh treated you.
Like a jilted marriage partner who recognizes that
the devotion of the other partner is gone from the marriage, like a partner who
has caught their spouse in the bed of another, a parent who has seen the
children betray the values so long taught, a lioness who cannot believe anyone
would disturb the den to slay her cubs, God roars in pain. The Living God has been abandoned by the
nation, city, and people who were to be a light to all other nations. “Why, oh why,” God asks, “would you pursue
worthless and empty things that do not benefit you?”[9] The abandoned heart of God is broken.
The suffering prophet and God are
so interconnected that it is difficult to sort out who is speaking in many
texts. Nor should one try to make too sharp a distinction. As if with one
voice, prophet and God express their anguish over the suffering of the
people…These texts should be interpreted in terms of the prophet’s embodiment
of God’s mourning…At least, Jeremiah’s mourning is an embodiment of the anguish
of God, showing the people the genuine pain God feels over the hurt that [the] people
are experiencing.[10]
Your prophets speak the language of the god, Ba’al,
the language Walter Brueggemann refers to as the consumer ideology and the
language of commoditization.[11] Ba’al was the god who legitimated regular
economic exploitative practice.[12] That did not benefit you. “Why, oh why,” the Living God asks through
the prophet Jeremiah, “would you pursue worthless and empty things that do not
benefit you?”
Bob Pierce, founder of the Christian mission
organization, World Vision, wrote in his Bible, after traveling the world and
seeing so much suffering, “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the
heart of God.”[13] But who really wants that? Who has a hunger for that kind of
relationship with God?
Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, writes
that the prophet Jeremiah enters in to the pathos or the pain and suffering of
God.[14] We have the ability to be such prophets,
Heschel believed, to live with the voice of God in us. Heschel wrote:
The pathos of God is upon [the
prophet]. It moves [the prophet]. It breaks out in [the prophet] like a storm
in the soul, overwhelming the inner life, the thoughts, feelings, wishes, and
hopes. It takes possession of [the prophet’s] heart and mind, giving [the
prophet] the courage to act against the world.[15]
Heschel believes that we all can be prophets. There is great freedom in knowing that no
great wisdom, no great wealth, no great connections are needed. It is a hunger to have our hearts broken by
the things that break the heart of God.
Jeremiah also makes clear from this passage that
prophets are the people who regularly ask the question, “Where is the Living
God?” so that the prophet might move to that place and encourage the people of
God to move to that place. In
trepidation then, we find out how much faith matters to us. These are not apostolic missions which
require great wisdom, wealth, or power.
These are apostolic missions which require great courage.
God asked Jeremiah to proclaim, within earshot of
Jerusalem, that those who went after worthless things became worthless
themselves. They did not ask themselves,
“Where is this Living God now—this God who delivered us from Egypt, walked with
us through the wilderness, and gave us a good and plentiful land?” For this is a God on the move. We cannot expect God to carve out a place,
call it the holy city, whether it be Billings or Jerusalem, and expect God to
stay there. We cannot build a church or
Temple and expect God to be contained by its four walls. We cannot say our land is holy, watch our
leaders murder, lie, and break the backs of the poor, and expect God’s will to
be done through them. God will not be
bought off with worthless things. God is
on the move, seeking a habitation and relationship with a people who will keep
covenant, remain faithful, and honor commitments.
When the people in power object and proclaim their
innocence, Jeremiah points to the blood of the innocent poor on their
clothes. Jeremiah knows their
hedge. He knows they will try to blame
it on the innocent poor. “But they,”
Jeremiah proclaims did not try to break into your home, “and yet, their blood
is on your skirts. By the Mosaic
covenant, these were the people you were to protect and, instead, you have
destroyed them.”
God challenges us through the prophet Jeremiah to be
a people who remember our deepest values so that those values are not abandoned
at times of prosperity. For if we
abandon our values at times of prosperity, we shall certainly not hold those
values when we are confronted by crisis.
Where is the Living God? If God
is on the move, where can the presence of God be found? These are the challenges put to us by the
prophet Jeremiah, asking us to be prophets, and declare our willingness to have
our hearts broken by the things that break the heart of God, to put the sacred
hoop back together. For we are the people of Tusi-Goab, the
truth-tellers, representing the people of God before God and representing
Wounded Knee to our nation. On this
World Communion Sunday, may we choose to be in solidarity with the suffering of
God so that the day may quicken when Creator’s newness will transform us and we
will repair the sacred hoop. Amen.
[1] Bill Muehlenberg, “Jeremiah
and the Suffering of God,” CultureWatch: Bill Muehlenberg’s Commentary on the issues
of the day, February 14, 2018. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2018/02/14/jeremiah-suffering-god/.
[2] Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is:
They Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (The Crossroad
Publishing Company, 1992).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Allan Aubrey Boesak, Dare
We Speak of Hope? Searching for a Language of Life in Faith and Politics (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), p. 34.
[5] Ibid, pp. 37-38.
[6] Ibid, pp. 24-42.
[7] Ibid, p. 42; quoting the
phrase by Derrick Bell, Faces at the
Bottom of the Well: the Permanence of
Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992)
[8] Rabbi Marc Angel, “Eulogy
at Wounded Knee,” Ideals: Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, https://www.jewishideas.org/article/eulogy-wounded-knee.
[9] The words “worthless” and
“empty” are translations of the Hebrew word “hebel.” The word can also mean “vanity” or “a puff of
breath” (connoting transitory life or inspiration with no long-lasting
value). See the book of Ecclesiastes
with the word being used again and again translated as “vanity” or “puff of
breath.” “Hebel” also means “idol.” So to pursue idols or to do idol worship is
to pursue some kind of value or benefit which is “worthless” or “empty.”
[10] Terence E. Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 160-161.
[11] “Interview with Walter
Brueggeman: The power of ordinary acts
in extraordinary times,” Real Change News,
http://www.realchangenews.org/index.php/site/archives/4021/
; March 31, 2010.
[12] Walter Brueggeman, Like Fire in the Bones (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 202.
[13] Richard Stearns, The Hole in Our Gospel: What Does God Expect of Us? The Answer that Changed My Life and Just
Might Changed the World (Nashville, TN:
Thomas Nelson, Inc, 2009), p. 9.
[15] Abraham Joshua Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press,
1997), p. 125.
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