This summer, we have spent a significant amount of time with the Hebrew prophets. This is, of course, mostly my fault. I believe our faith must be more than spiritual anesthesia, and I’m not enamored of the passive orthodoxy that says “You’re going to heaven, and you’re going to heaven, and you’re going to heaven,” like some deified Oprah.
I do not have the attention span to focus on an eternal paradise when I can see hell right here on earth, nor do I have the discipline necessary to tune out the cries of the sick, the poor, the frightened, for it takes tremendous discipline or true sociopathy to ignore suffering, and I just don’t have it in me. I’d never make it in a church that wants to hear “gee, aren’t you just swell” every single week, and indeed, that type of church has chewed me up and spit me out.
Which is all to say that if you know anything about the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, you should not be even slightly surprised that I selected this text from the several that were available in the lectionary today, for Jeremiah lived in troubled times, just as we do, and he was not willing to “stay in his lane” so to speak.
No, most Christians would like religion to just focus on going to church, on micro-managing other people’s sex lives, and on controlling women’s bodies, and being a prophet, Jeremiah wasn’t having it. He wanted to talk about more than just patriarchy, personal piety, and purity. Among other things, he talked about foreign policy and military strategy.
He did so in the final years of the southern Kingdom of Judah, when Assyria was declining, and Judah found itself caught between Egypt and Babylon, with the Babylonians eventually destroying Jerusalem itself, its Temple of Solomon and its walls. While many would be carted off to Babylon for the decades we know as the Exile, Jeremiah and his scribe, Baruch, would instead flee to Egypt, where tradition has it he wrote the Book of Lamentations.
And for all of that, I am not going to deliver a sermon about doing justice, as I do frequently, or about idolatry, another frequent subject. I’m not even going to preach about false prophets, though God knows there are enough of them about, from televangelists to bishops in the Roman tradition. Though we must certainly pray about the consequences of false prophets on this week that has seen attacks by their followers.
I’m not even going to point out that sinful behavior ultimately leads to societal ruin, that we don’t need God to crush us, because greed and cruelty simply aren’t sustainable in the long-term, for the planet, for our species.
Let’s focus, instead, on the opening of the reading:
The Lord declares, Am I a God
who is only nearby and not far off?
Can people hide themselves in secret places
so I might not see them?
Don’t I fill heaven and earth?
Now, Jeremiah is focusing on punishment, but he is on to more than he realizes. For God is not only nearby, as the Hebrews would discover when the four-century-old Temple of Solomon, God’s location in their theology, was a burning pile of rubble.
God could be with them when they prayed in Babylon, could speak to Ezekiel there, could be present with the diaspora community. They’d have to re-discover this when the Second Temple, reconstructed after the Exile and existing for centuries, was again destroyed another five centuries on, in 70 C.E., as a mad street preacher from Galilee had predicted four decades earlier.
They’d learn that they could gather as a synagogue, and God would be as present and as real as when they slaughtered bulls on the Temple Mount, maybe more so.
Yes, Jeremiah, God does indeed fill heaven and earth. And if God fills heaven and earth, how can God ever be the God of only one tribe, one race, one nation? Indeed, how can God ever be the God of one species?
Fine, we sentient erect primates conceive of God as being like us, for we are our only frame of reference, the stick against which we measure all things. Though scientists are beginning to imagine other ways that animals and plants and systems might think, they paradoxically can only think about that thinking from within our thinking, the same thing we have done with God since we first conceived of the mysterious has holy, as having will and agency, since we chose to think that the holy might think, just like us.
Humility requires that we be honest with ourselves. Our every utterance about the holy is a dart thrown into an ocean, never hitting the target, sinking ever further into the depths, beyond our view and imagination.
We do best to understand that God as the mysterious X in every equation, the equation of being instead of non-being, of the Big Bang and unfathomable life and natural selection, of love and art and longing, of joy and even of grief.
We are only bound by the idea that God chose one species, one tribe, one nation, whether the ancient Hebrew states or, through some twisted heresy, the United States, if we choose to do so. Or we can choose to see God in all things, name what is alive and creative and amazing in all things, and help to peel off the layers of hurt and frustration we have piled onto the divine.
Jesus, thoroughly Hebrew, calls for a reformation of the Hebrew faith of his time, a reformation of love for God, for others, for self. We are called by the prophets to love and justice, God’s justice which is a justice of reconciliation and resurrection, to walk in humility with our God, which is easy to do if we confess that God is God and we are not, and that God is, as Jeremiah reminds us, everywhere.
To declare that we know God, know the will of God, is either the greatest of sins or a mark of insanity.
Jeremiah wanted the ancient Hebrews to see God who saw them wherever they went, wanted that to be a cause of fear, a reason for humans to conduct themselves in a way that would suit God. But that is not God. That is cranky Jeremiah imagining God. For God is everywhere, in everything, spinning galaxies and the smell of fresh bread and the laughter of that giggling grandbaby.
God does chase us down, everywhere we go, every moment of this mysterious being on this green and blue rock orbiting around a nuclear fusion reactor, and God does see what we do, but not to punish us. Humans punish. Humans kills. God loves. God creates. God speaks us into being, Her song becoming light becoming things becoming us, one note followed by another. You are the song of God, the breath of God, and you are loved.
And so our charge is clear. Dance. Sing. Love. Create. See God in all things, even those hate-filled sinners who need our love in order to find their own. And gosh, is that ever hard.
May your heart be filled, with joy, with sorrow, with courage. Amen.