Jeremiah,
chapter 9, verse 1, God speaks, “Would 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 my poor people!”
As
with last week, when Jesus uses metaphors for God that might surprise us or
push us to grow in imagining the activity of God in the world, so also the
prophet Jeremiah uses imagery that might have us understanding how God acts in
the world differently.
Meditating
on the two Scripture verses myself, I realized that I grew up with an image of
God as enthroned, in full power, demanding my purity and meting out judgment
from on high.
Jeremiah
is referred to as the weeping prophet. But
the Scripture verses telling of his weeping, like the ones read for us today,
are intentionally vague. Is it Jeremiah
weeping? Or is it God who is weeping,
distraught that the people suffer, that the poor are oppressed, that the Way has
been forgotten? The Way or the path was really the meaning of the Jewish
Torah. In keeping with this Jewish
understanding, in the Acts of the Apostles, the author of Luke defines
Christians as people of the Way.
I
think that is an important thing to remember as people of faith. Faith is not believing in the miracles or the
impossible things. Faith is a communal living
of a path that seeks to follow the Heart of God, Christian faith to walk
the way Christ walked, to imitate the life of Christ. The main goal of many early Christian
spiritual practices was to imitate Christ, to “one” ourselves to the Heart of
God—prayer, fasting, lectio divina, and examen all sought this as
an end. How do we, together, walk as Jesus
walked, imitate Christ?
I
want to remember that definition of faith—in Hebrew Scripture, living out the
values discerned to be the Heart of God; in Christian Scripture and tradition,
imitating Christ. To me, that definition of faith seems self-evident.
But
I remember growing up alongside a Christianity that defined faith as believing
the impossible things—Virgin Birth, miracles, and resurrection. As I grew older, I became aware of a
Christianity defined by wealth and material success. As I became an adult, I learned of a Christianity that was about
consolidating political power to push cultural narratives and reinforce
mean-spirited rhetoric to justify hatred and violence.
I
became very aware of how real this Christianity is when one of my friends, one
of the kindest, sweetest people you will ever meet, when I shared my mourning
over the 600,000 people killed in Gaza said to me, “Yes, Mike, but Israel is
the favored nation of God,” as if this favored-nation status, these magic
words, exempted Israel from any wrongdoing, Biblical prophecies more important
than thousands of lives, of children, doctors, and journalists, all justified.
In
speaking to his own people, his own nation, the prophet Jeremiah or God
speaking through the prophet Jeremiah says, “Would 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 my poor people!”
Is
it imitating Christ, the Heart of God, to establish our particular faith to
dictate to others how education, the arts, entertainment, and the government
shall be? Christ and Jeremiah certainly
engaged and confronted power, to the detriment of their own well-being, but did
they do so to win or to dictate?
Jeremiah,
in fact, confronts the rulers of Judah, the religious aristocracy of his own
time to bring bad news. To Judah’s
royalty, bad news was unacceptable.
Don’t tell the truth. All the
royal prophets told the king to ignore Jeremiah’s dire predictions and told the
king whatever he wanted to hear.
Now
things did not go well for Jeremiah as the bearer of bad news. He was thrown
down a well, detained in prison for not being patriotic, the royal priests and
prophets sought the death penalty for him, all for critiquing his own
government. Jeremiah regularly agitated
against those leaders who sought private profit and gain over and against
public well-being. Greed had become the
regular practice. Wealth had become
consolidated. National leaders were so
shameful that they could not even be embarrassed by their own behavior.
Jeremiah
is probably responsible for recording much of the Jewish tradition we have in
Hebrew Scripture. He started young, his people's tradition came under threat,
he had a reason to get oral traditions collected and down in print. So he
probably was responsible for the finished product of the first creation story
in Genesis . . . chaos to order to rest.
Jeremiah
regularly preached that because of the people's injustice, particularly the way
they treated the economically poor, the inequity between rich and poor, that
first creation story in Genesis, the one he may have written, was being undone.
For Jeremiah, that inequity, the gap between rich and poor, was causing all of
creation’s fastening, mooring, and boundaries to come loose. God's intent for
rest in the first creation story was being forced back into chaos. Jeremiah
effectively says that God's good earth is the canary in the coal mine.
Most
representations picture Jeremiah as an old man. I think he probably looked like
an activist in the Sunrise
Movement, fasting outside the nation's capital, begging for her
nation to make a u-turn, to follow a path, a way that brings all of humankind
back into harmony with creation.
Indeed. Today is a huge day in the climate
movement. Throughout our country
different parties and activities and teach-ins are breaking out to celebrate
what is being referenced as Sun Day. If it weren’t for worship services and a
potluck today you would find me at a party on Pere Marquette Beach (a beach
party!) in Muskegon or at a solar festival in Chicago, or a multi-faith blowout
in Ann Arbor. All of it is to celebrate
the advance of solar and wind power as they are making a way we had at one time
thought impossible. Just this past
summer, wind and solar power supplied Europe provided over 60% of Europe’s
energy—an incredible landmark.
It
is Sun Day. And people from all over our
country are celebrating!
Climate
activist Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Third Act, regularly reminds
people these days that for a long time we thought of solar and wind power as
Whole Foods—nice ideas, maybe affordable to the elite liberal few, but not
really practical.
Actually,
McKibben says, wind and solar are more like Costco, available to all of us and
available in large quantities. In
McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun, he details how countries like Germany and Pakistan
have started to use balcony solar. They
hook up a singular solar panel on their balcony and power their household. McKibben believes wind and solar offer the
possibility that energy of the future will not be hoarded by the select few,
like fossil fuels, but can be shared by us all.
As a Christian and United Methodist Sunday School teacher, Bill McKibben
believes this is the way, what God intends to uplift our whole community, to
further the cause of democracy.
I
am going to lead out a virtual study of McKibben’s book later this fall and I
hope you will join me to think and discern how we might follow in the footsteps
of Jesus, imitate Christ, how we might know the Heart of God.
We
have to move fast, McKibben contends.
Before seeing the incredible movement happening around solar and wind,
McKibben believed that humankind had strapped its fate to those positive
prophets who didn’t dare say a negative word about the direction we were headed
focused on fossil fuels. And with AI
centers and developing China, demand for energy grows ever-greater. McKibben admitted that this state of the
world was what kept him up at 3:00 a.m., weeping for what we were intentionally
doing to God’s good earth.
In
our country, our struggle to hold onto democracy becomes ever more dire. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich details
how wealth has become consolidated in the hands of the very few.
Airlines merged from 12 major carriers in 1980 to 4 today. Four giants control 80% of meat processing. A handful of companies control the pharmaceutical industry. In 1983, 80 companies controlled 90% of the U.S. media market. That number is now down to 5.[1]
This
inequity, this concentration of voice, and wealth, and power, with
corresponding statistics that show how deep the divide is growing in our
country threatens to undo all of creation.
Greed becomes the regular spiritual practice. And God weeps.
On
the front cover of your bulletin is one of the most power images I have ever
experienced. Tracy’s dad used to live
near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in Shawnee.
So one day we decided to go to the Oklahoma City Memorial. I remember going through the memorial and
being powerfully moved at the two gates, the reflecting pool, the empty
chairs. But then I found myself on the
other side of the memorial thinking I had seen it all when I looked up and saw
a figure with his back turned to the memorial proper. I came around to see the rendering of
"Jesus wept,” a remembrance when Jesus mourned the death of his friend,
Lazarus.
The
very people who killed all those children at that day care, destroyed the lives
of all those federal employees . . . they are now prominent in our country to
say their Christianity must now hold sway, must be instituted in every
university and classroom, must put women in their proper place, must purify the
nation as they hoard wealth and resources.
Some of these same people have
been deputized to our streets.
And
I have to ask . . . is this the Heart of God, the imitation of Christ, the way,
the path in all humility that is put before us as people of Christian
faith? When did Jeremiah or Christ
suggest that the path was seeking after power over others rather than sharing
it, hoarding wealth and position rather than distributing it, destroying the
lives of people not like us rather than dining with them?
Jesus
has left the building and is weeping in the streets. Weeping publicly, openly.
Be a damn mess. Now is the time. The
ancestors are with you. Jeremiah and Christ still lament, weep, and plead. God
still laments, weeps, and pleads for those slain, for those detained, for this
good earth. We are not alone. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment