Present Tense: October 13, 2019

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, 11

Video at : https://vimeo.com/366618954

There has been a running joke of many years that I am just about the least “gay” gay man ever. Now, I take issue with this fake news. It is true that some question my fashion judgment, that I prefer a beer to a Cosmo, that I watch sports, and by that I don’t mean figure skating… and that I go to bed early. But are we really going to traffic in base stereotype? Besides, I always thought it was a one question application, and that question was not about brunch entrees or Judy Garland.

At least I get one thing right. I do like musical theater and opera, no doubt the result of a childhood where Camelot, Fiddler on the Roof, and Mario Lanza played on the giant console record player in the living room. I especially like it when musical theater crashes into other musical genres, because I love nothing more than a good mash-up. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I love Hamilton, where history and hip-hop collide with musical theater, because I like history and hip-hop too. In the years B.H., that is before Hamilton, there were other beautiful collisions, notably Jonathan Larson’s smash hit Rent, which opened on Broadway in 1996 and ran for twelve years, grossing over $280 million.

Rent is a modern reimagining of “La Boheme,” Puccini’s classic opera, which premiered exactly a century earlier, conducted by a young Arturo Toscanini. In Rent, the Latin Quarter becomes lower Manhattan, the scourge of tuberculosis becomes AIDS, but the issues are still the same: art on the precipice, love among the wreckage, exploitative economics, and the constant specter of death. The protagonists do not know what comes next, so time and the moment are major themes. The second act begins with one of the show’s enduring anthems, “Seasons of Love,” which reminds us that a common year is “Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes.” Another is the refrain, included in the finale, that tells us:

There’s only us, there’s only this
Forget regret, or life is your’s to miss
No other path, no other way
No day but today

The people in Jeremiah’s time knew a thing about anxiety too. The prophet’s attention was primarily drawn to the macro, to matters religious and political, rather than to the domestic, but people certainly still loved and grieved, suffered disease and hunger and the sort of constant anxiety that comes from one piece of wretched news after another.

They had constructed for themselves this identity as a chosen people, and by people we mean a nation state under a divinely sanctioned king. But that nation state became divided, with factions and immoral rulers, and most of it had been lost completely, the Ten Tribes scattered to the wind and ground into the dust. Now, the last little sliver of the faithful, Jerusalem and the surrounding towns, were led by a man under the control of a foreign power. The most skilled had been carted off to that distant land, to Babylon. And the prophet, the working theologian back in Jerusalem living in the ruins, targeted by those bullying and corrupt leaders, wrote to those in captivity.

Jeremiah’s instructions, God’s instructions, were simple. Do not cower, bury yourselves, whimper in the dark. Today, you are where you are. Plant a garden. Get on with life today. You may be in Babylon where they worship strange gods, where the rulers cannot be trusted to have your best interests at heart, but you are where you are, so get on with it, with love and babies. Try to make Babylon a better place.

How easily we skip to the last line of the reading, about hope for the future, immediately forgetting what came first, about the command for the present.

Live where you are. There are things to be done where you are.

Slowly over the centuries, we have reduced the gospel to a sort of death insurance, aimed entirely at some future life. It was the carrot at the end of a stick, held in front of the poor and powerless while another stick beat them into submission. No wonder Marx would call religion the opiate of the masses, for Jeremiah’s instructions were lost, as were Micah’s. The simple urgency of Jesus was converted into some complex Christological formula, wrapped up in their need to explain away how Jesus could be omniscient and omnipotent and fully God and yet the Day of the Lord was still not arriving. For the message of Jesus was urgent and we can see in the text, written decades after his execution, that he did believe that the Kingdom of God was breaking into the world right then, and they couldn’t reconcile the man and the message so they added scaffolding and facade to cover what they did not understand.

The instructions of Jesus were right now. Give now, go now, serve now, heal now. Even the disappointment and confusion of the decades that followed could not erase the nowness of Jesus, the nowness of Micah, the nowness of Jeremiah.

Do justice today. Go and sin no more today. Get up and walk today. Feed the hungry and visit the imprisoned and welcome the immigrant and set the captives free, all today. Nothing about this was about tomorrow.

There is nothing wrong with a little planning, with gathering some acorns and squirreling them away. This is not a YOLO message, that youthful mantra of “you only live once” that could be an invitation to adventure but is all to often a cover for stupidity.

But a Christianity that is about checking boxes for some imagined future life seems pretty lifeless and is definitely not compelling.

Christians have been so busy trying to shore up the tottering edifice of this Christ they have created, of this false god that they have manufactured, that they have forgotten the God we actually have, the Christ that actually speaks to us from the pages of scripture, that conducted his ministry of teaching and healing, that solidified what the prophets had been telling us, that God is love and creation and goodness, not some nasty and capricious supernatural egotist, but the constant victory of life, creativity, transcendence.

We have our eyes on heaven, and today only matters in that it gets us to heaven, and even that has been watered down, so that hell is erased and the radical message of Jesus about how we are to live our lives, the message of agape, of selflessness and sacrifice and beauty, has been reduced to a generic command to “be nice.”

Jesus didn’t say anything about being nice. I am pretty sure that the gospel calls for more than just being nice. It calls for changing our lives now. It calls for changing the world now. And while we’re at it, we might notice that God is at work right now. Not some future re-ordering. God is happening all around us.

The message to be, you know, sorta nice, is not compelling. I am by no means a fan of the hellfire and damnation preaching of my childhood, and certainly not a fan of the most pernicious of Calvinist teachings, the idea that a good God would predestine some sentient beings to eternal torment. I don’t actually know what comes next, if there even is a next, though I am inclined to believe there is, faith in both our constantly amazing God and the weirdness of the quantum. But it doesn’t matter, because…

This is the day that the Lord has made. Do justice. Get up and walk. Babylon sucks, so roll up your sleeves and make it a better place.

It was a terrible time. Jeremiah ends up thrown down a well. Jerusalem is destroyed. The tallest building in the city, the great Temple that Solomon built, was a broken smoldering ruin. Neighbor was turning on neighbor. People were going back to the worst ways of the ancient past. Scripture even suggests that they were sacrificing their children. Those in Babylon were angry and grieving captives. Everything they believed about who they were, about their God, was in question.

Plant a garden. Let your daughters get married and have kids. Try to make the place you are a better place. Don’t worry about the future. I’ve got that.

Five centuries later, a new tall building on the height, the Second Temple. Those in charge of Jerusalem, of the faith and the city, were more interested in themselves, their own power, their own wealth, than they were of their Jewish sisters and brothers, and they were all under the control of a foreign power that did not share their core values.

There were bandits in the countryside, a general lawlessness. Famine was common. Roman taxes were brutal, their legions even more so. People were losing their ancestral land. We look at Jesus and think “A carpenter. That’s a good trade.” But it probably meant that the family land, the birthright we read about in so many early stories in the Hebrew scriptures, was lost, for in a time of instability the rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer. At least if you owned land you might be able to grow some food, eek out subsistence.

This is the time in which Jesus lived. This is the time when he called fishermen from their boats and a tax collector from his table. Not “I’ll stop by next week,” but “let’s go. Let’s change the world. Starting now.” This is the time when he said get up and walk. This is the time when he sent them out two by two into a world that was dangerous and that wasn’t always willing to hear a call to action, a call to righteousness. The kingdom of God is like a treasure found in a field. The kingdom of God is here, right here, right now, and it is worth everything you have. Even your life. “I trust that there are many rooms in my Father’s mansion. There is one for you too. But you’re going to have to live fully, courageously. You are going to have to face the danger of love, for one another, for these people, for this world.

I don’t know anything about pearly gates and whether Grandpa and Sparky are there, nor do I know where we draw the line on sentient beings and the preservation of energy, information, and matter. I don’t know. But I do know this. God is. The Kingdom of God is here.

Eleanor Roosevelt famously said that yesterday is history, tomorrow mystery, but today is a gift. Today is a gift.

People were scared, confused, displaced. The foundations of their nation, of their identity, collapsed. They could have sat around dwelling on the past, but that isn’t what Jeremiah told them to do, so they invented new ways of being the people of God in an all new context. They could have chosen to live as a people under siege, all of their energy and thought aimed to some maybe future, but that isn’t what Jeremiah told them to do, so they did what he said and they engaged the world where they were and when they were. So deeply would they enmesh themselves in their context that one of the great texts of Rabbinic Judaism is the Babylonian Talmud!

As I sat in my office in Lower Manhattan on a morning when thousands died along with their someday plans, I said to myself “No day but today.”

Things feel a little scary? The prophet didn’t say wait for God to fix it. Jesus didn’t wait for God to feed the hungry or heal the sick.

As my favorite rock band tells me, “It makes much more sense… to live… in the present tense…”

Amen.