Jeremiah 3 BFC 2018
Jeremiah 3:19-4:3
October 14, 2018
(Blast of the shofar) In
Jewish tradition, the dissonant blast of the shofar is meant to wake you up, to
take notice of where you are and where you have been, and to ask, “Is this road
or this path the one I really want to walk?”
I began this Jeremiah sermon series by talking about the great
unraveling. In Judeo-Christian
mythology, in one of our creation stories, the universe begins in chaos and
creating begins when Creator begins to put necessary boundaries and limits and
rhythms in place, an order, that then leads to rest and Sabbath. Built into that rest and Sabbath are
boundaries and limits and rhythms to provide grace and protect the most
vulnerable. But if those boundaries and limits and rhythms
are broken, not regularly practiced, and limits not observed, creation begins
to unravel. Creation is founded upon
pillars of justice where I know where I begin and end and my responsible
boundaries and limits allow others to flourish and grow.
The blast of the shofar begins the High Holy Days in Jewish faith
and practice. Those High Holy Days have
just completed within the Jewish tradition, referred to as the Days of Awe or
the Days of Repentance. These are ten days
when the primary Jewish value of responsibility is hammered home, a movement
from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. Rosh
Hashanah begins with taking responsibility for the little things in your life,
the little mistakes. It begins with the
soul taking account as an individual.
The Holy Days continue with an ever-larger responsibility--an accounting
to the soul of our families. That
responsibility expands an accounting to the soul of the Jewish people on Yom
Kippur, and then, finally, an accounting of the soul of the whole world. It is the understanding that when we begin we
are not ready to take on the whole world, but over the ten days the Jewish
people build their spiritual muscle and the soul arrives on fire by Yom Kippur.[1] “The sage of the Talmud, the
12th-century philosopher Maimonides, interpreted the call of the shofar at Rosh
Hashanah in this way: ‘Awake, you sleepers, from your slumber. Examine your
deeds. Return in repentance and remember your Creator.’”[2]
The Ten Days of Awe and Repentance are marked by a sense of the
fragility of life. Tomorrow each and
every one of us could die. So it is important to get right in our
relationships, to get right with creation, to get right with Creator. The Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, has this sense of being able
to stop right now, get on the right path, to literally turn or re-turn, to heal
the breach. We have free will in
rebuilding all of creation in partner with Creator. We begin again. The Jewish liturgy has within it, “Hayom harat olam" — "Today is
the birthday of the world."[3]
As one of my spiritual mentors, Rabbi Sharon Brous says, “[T]his
is intensely countercultural, because all of our impulse and all of the norms
of society push us to deny and reject responsibility for the things that we're
doing wrong.”[4]
Within Jewish faith and practice, this was historically tied to
the earth--and the land in particular.
Creator not only created humankind out of the land but also deftly sewed
in rhythms and practices of grace with the land so that the people might remain
free. And the land might, in turn, share gifts in
abundance. As every seventh day,
humankind and animals were to be given rest, every seventh year the land was to
be given rest and remain fallow. The
land was not to be viewed as a commodity where it could be bought and sold in perpetuity. Family members were to be able to buy the
land back, to redeem it, as an inheritance so that the poor would not be
exploited and debt leveraged to create obscene wealth and dire poverty. And at the end of 50 years, a year of jubilee
was to be declared where the land returned to the ancestral family and all
debts were to be forgiven. These Sabbath
provisions not only provide us with limits; they practice the grace of God with
our communities in relationship with the land.
It is as Crazy Horse said, “Treat the earth well: it was not given to
you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit
the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.[5]
One does not sell the earth upon which people walk.[6]
We are the land.”[7]
In a poem titled, “The Monster Who Was Sorry,” a little boy reacts
to when his dad yells at him. In his anger, the little boy imagines
throwing his sister down the stairs, wrecking his room, and then destroying an
entire town. He ends the poem, saying, “Then I sit in my messy house and
say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’”
Religious writer, Kathleen Norris, reflects on the boy’s poem in
her book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith,
'My messy house' says it all; with more
honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for
himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If
that boy had been a novice in a fourth century monastic desert, his elders
might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a
monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said,
why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to
dwell.[8]
If the house is messy, why not clean it up, why not make it into a
place where God might wish to dwell? In faith’s vocabulary, that is such
a simple and elegant definition of repentance. Who wouldn’t want to make
their heart and soul into a place where God might wish to dwell? And yet,
we so often find it difficult to practice the necessary repentance to bring
about needed change and transformation. We hedge. We do enough to bring things back to “normal”
and stay on the road which brings death and destruction while resisting necessary
change and transformation.
Part of the Judeo-Christian tradition is about our spiritual
freedom to change and transform who we are and the world’s systems and
structures through repentance, to turn on a dime.
Today we baptized Liam Alexander McLean Pollock, Red Feather. We declared him a Child of God, created in
God’s image, having innate dignity and worth.
As Marci and Angie will soon find out, Liam also has free will and
therefore the capacity, soon even the obligation to create and recreate
himself. “Rabbi Shai Held teaches [that]
the greatest heresy in Judaism is to believe that the world must be as the
world is.”[9]
We grow Liam in this congregation to say to him, there will be tough
times, difficult times, but we want you to know that if you are headed down the
wrong road, you can turn on a dime. If
the world is headed in the wrong direction, Liam has the freedom to practice
justice and righteousness to partner with God to re-create the world. The world does not have to be as it is. As people of covenant, we are to be certain
that neither our lives nor the world is static.
In our Scripture passage from Jeremiah today, God speaks through
the prophet to ask the nation to repent. The Hebrew word used over and
over again throughout the book of Jeremiah is a derivative of teshuvah, shuv, and is translated as “turn” or “return.”
The word is used sixteen times in the particular poem Lisa read from for today.[10] Turn or return to the Living God and
the covenant with the Living God.
For some time, the prophet Jeremiah had been demanding that the
leaders of his nation return, through concrete action, to the covenant given to
Moses and Miriam and the Hebrew people. Jeremiah challenges the rulers of
Judah. Jeremiah asks if they will be
known as kings by their trappings. Do their expansive homes, made with
the most expensive woods, show their values, show them to be righteous and
just? Jeremiah presses, confronts:
how have they shown themselves to be righteous and just by sewing the
grace God intended into systems and structures for the poor and needy?
Are their eyes only on dishonest gain, acquired by violence, oppression, making
the innocent poor slaves, and shedding their blood?[11] Do they remember the poor
and vulnerable as God remembered their whole people as slaves in Egypt?
The effecting of justice for the poor and needy had long been a
staple of the covenant given to Moses, Miriam, and the Hebrew people. The
Jewish people differentiated themselves from other peoples and nations with
their willingness to sew a society together with enough Sabbath and grace to
remember the poor. Throughout the book of Jeremiah, the prophet reminds
the people of their humble beginnings. On their journey from Egypt and
away from slavery, the Hebrew people entered
the land of the Canaanites. The Canaanites
worshiped the god, Ba’al. The Hebrew people were to not be like the
Canaanites and not to be assimilated by the Canaanite religion.
Canaanite, literally translated, means “people who practice sharp and
exploitive economic practices.” Ba’al was the god who legitimized such
practices. Meanwhile, the God of the Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews,
Yahweh, or the Living God, legitimized practices of freedom, grace, release,
and justice.[12]
So many years later, when Jeremiah sees Judah’s rulers and wealthy
leveraging debt to entrap and enslave their own people, he sees sharp and exploitive
economic practices. Jeremiah does not see economic practices which bring
about freedom, grace, release, and justice. Jeremiah therefore invokes
the name of the Canaanite god, Ba’al, to ask the wealthy and the rulers to turn
and return to the covenant made with the Living God long ago.
The last King of Judah, Zedekiah, hears Jeremiah and, in a last
ditch effort to saves his kingdom, tries to appease the Living God as the
Babylonian armies descend upon the nation of Judah and the city of Jerusalem.
King Zedekiah returns to the covenant by using a term commonly used for the
Hebrew slaves. Zedekiah remembers the
liberation story for the people and proclaims that all the Jewish slaves are to
be liberated and freed. Nobody is to hold another Jew in slavery.
And the Scripture says that all of the people obeyed and set their slaves
free. But when the immediate crisis appeared to be averted, the
Babylonian armies recede, the people turned right around and took their slaves back
into subjection. To do so, Jeremiah the prophet railed, was to profane
the name of the Living God.[13] God created the pillars of
the world in justice. To encourage and
practice injustice was to see the whole house coming down.
The long-ago Exodus from Egypt and the covenant with the Living
God to make the Hebrew people free was over, and the nation of Judah would be
no more. The violence, economic injustice, and ecological devastation
their government had visited upon others and the most vulnerable within their
own country would now be visited on them. God’s hope for the nation of
Judah’s repentance was over. There are
consequences.
As Rabbi Sharon Brous related to her Jewish congregation on their
liturgical days of awe and repentance, all of us suspect our lives and our
world are not everything they are meant to be. There is truly
something that eludes us. We would like to be better inside ourselves,
better in our marriages and families, more engaged in our schools, communities,
our church, and in our political system. But as Rabbi Brous has said, “ .
. . in order for that to work we need to have the courage to look at our lives
with brutal honesty. We need to be prepared to ask the questions of
ourselves that we are terrified to ask. We need to think freely and
concretely about what needs change. And we need to consider what we are
willing to do about it.”[14]
We live in a time when living honestly and taking responsibility
for our actions is truly a countercultural act.
It is a messy house. And we must
teach Liam, with our lives, that the world as it is, is not how it has to
be.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl argues that part of a healthy
spiritual life is recognizing the disequilibrium created in our life between
the chasm of who we are as a person and people and who God intended us to
be. As long as that disequilibrium has us working toward the persons and
people to which God has us aspiring to be, recognizing that we are never
finished or complete, we are living life in a healthy spiritual repentance.[15]
As people of the covenant given to Moses, Miriam, and the Hebrew
people, spoken prophetically by Jeremiah, and carried on by Christ, we are to
be people of “sacred discontent”, “eternal unease”[16], and “spiritual freedom.” May
our repentance create and recreate a space within ourselves that is in keeping
with who God intended us to be. And as
we build our spiritual muscle, may we come together as a church, join hand in
hand with God, and create and recreate a space within our community and world. Children of God. Turn. Return. Repent. Amen.
[1] Rabbi Sharon Brous, “Days
of Awe: Interview with Rabbi Sharon
Brous,” OnBeing, September 2, 2010. https://onbeing.org/programs/sharon-brous-days-of-awe/
[2] Krista Tippet, “Days of
Awe: Interview with Rabbi Sharon Brous,”
OnBeing, September 2, 2010. https://onbeing.org/programs/sharon-brous-days-of-awe/
[3] Brous, “Days of Awe.”
[4] Ibid.
[5] Crazy Horse, Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/392966.Crazy_Horse.
[6]Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (London: Picador, 1970), Chapter 12, quoting Crazy
Horse.
[7] John Trudell, “We Hear
What You Say,” Bone Days
[8] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York:
Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 70.
[9] Rabbi Sharon Brous, “Rosh
Hashanah 5768: Teshuva—Unsticking Ourselves.” http://www.ikar-la.org/documents/RoshHashannahDay1_5768RabbiBrousSermon.pdf.
[10] “shuv,” The Harper Collins Study
Bible, New Revised Standard Version (San Franciso:
HarperCollins, 1993), p. 1118.
[11] Jeremiah 22:11ff.
[12] Walter Brueggemann, Like
Fire in the Bones (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2006), p. 202.
[13] Jeremiah 34:6ff.
[14] Rabbi Sharon Brous, “Rosh Hashanah 5768.”
[15]Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
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