Jeremiah 31:27-34
Sermon: Listening
Last week’s ceasefire and exchange of hostages and prisoners in Gaza and Israel has been characterized by some as a “peace deal.” It is no such thing.
The war criminals of Hamas, the Netanyahu government, and the Israeli Defense Force do not stand in the dock to be tried for their crimes against humanity, and all three parties are guilty. We have all been witness to those crimes, broadcast by what little is left of our free press.
There has been no change in the position of the Israeli and American governments on the West Bank, where ethnic cleansing continues unabated.
No one has offered a solution to the problem that multiple ethnic groups with violent hatred for one another claim the exact same land, that some Jews do not trust their safety to others or multi-ethnic states for legitimate reasons, that even the most progressive-minded peace advocates offer only solutions that leave two competing ethno-states in place, a moral outrage in the Twenty-First Century. Any ethno-state, defined by race or religion, is repugnant in a scientific age that understands human migration, genetics, and the absolute meaninglessness of our claims of “us versus them.”
Rather than peace, we have a suspension of the most visible violence for some unknown period of time. But make no mistake, there is still violence, systemic and direct.
Many of us have been thinking about the Nuremberg Trials recently, not just when it comes to the Gaza War, but also as we consider the complicity of so many corporations in the crimes of our own current government, for a handful of German industrialists were tried after the Second World War as an example to others, in the dock beside the political and military leaders of the Third Reich.
What is most certainly worthy of our consideration today is the war crime of collective punishment. It is codified in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and while Israel claims the massive death toll in Gaza is simply “acceptable” collateral damage, there is little question in the eyes of the world that this is a genocide, the collective punishment of all Gazans for the horrific crimes of Hamas.
I am sure I am not the only one in this Sanctuary who was infuriated by collective punishment as a teenager, the age when many of us were beginning to solidify our framework for justice. A few bad actors, and boom… the class ski trip is cancelled, or the prom.
In my personal pantheon of high school evil, the moral outrage of youth, collective punishment is right up there with group projects, which says something about my suburban privilege and age. I came of age before active shooters were a thing, before kids were watching the world burn, literally, around them.
Justice can feel like a problem in scripture too, where God is often a jerk. Someone reaches out a hand to steady the Ark of the Covenant, and boom, struck dead. Divine blessing can flow from generation to generation, but so does divine sanction. The child pays for the sins of the father.
A nation that does not sufficiently appease this tyrannical god faces destruction at the hands of enemies, Neo-Assyria or Babylon. And though some prophetic texts and psalms suggest that God’s fury will die down, that eventually Yahweh will change modes from despot to patriarch, a spouse in many texts, a parent in the teachings of Jesus, in most cases the damage is done before the holy temper tantrum ends. The Book of the Prophet Jonah is exception not rule, where repentance results in the cancellation of violence and destruction.
Today’s passage in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah is, then, a critical pivot in the theology of pre-Rabbinic Judaism.
“In those days they shall no longer say: ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.,’ But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of the one who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.”
“All shall die for their own sins”
So many people have been raised with what I think of as a dead god, which is to say, one that never changes. Every living thing, including me, including you, is a process, is change. Honestly, even the dead change.
These folks think the unchanging god in the sky plopped down religion like a pot roast on the dinner table and that was that. They want clear and certain answers. What God actually gives us is questions, the questions that fuel human creativity.
It is humans who construct religion. At our most faithful, we do so because we start to hear a pattern in the mysterious music of creation, rumble and swell or melodic air, and we respond.
Jeremiah is listening to the holy, is constructing a new theology, a better theology, one even that pissed off teenager who did all of the work for the group project and still got the same grade as everyone else can understand. That she especially can understand.
Jeremiah tell us that we are going to be graded on our own work.
Whew! That’s a relief. I didn’t murder anybody today! I didn’t steal today!
That’s the good news.
But I did, if I am being honest. I did murder. I did steal. For while we do not have collective punishment, all except the most powerless have collective responsibility. That’s the formula, the price we pay for social, economic, and political freedom. The more agency you have, the more responsibility you have.
We live in a complex entangled society, still nominally a democracy. While the number of folks who identify as “nones,” meaning they are not affiliated with an organized religion, grows every year, every single person has some sort of framework for their experience of the world, some sense of right and wrong, for chaos is lethal to both our physical and mental health. Some of us call this system for understanding and acting religion, others do not. As Shakespeare wrote, a rose by any other name is still a rose.
The Honorable Reverend Doctor Raphael Warnock, Senator from Georgia, famously said that “a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children.”
Voting is a religious act. Not voting is a religious act.
Purchasing is a religious act. Choosing not to purchase is a religious act.
Good news: You’re not responsible for what someone else did. Bad news: You are responsible for what you did. Even if it was indirectly. Best news: Grace abounds.
We can’t all drop everything in acts of radical simplicity and spiritual madness. Somebody has to bake the loaves of bread that Jesus multiplies to feed the thousands. If everyone was Saint Francis disrobing in the town square, society would collapse.
I have to compromise every day. Absolutism is insanity. Sometimes we take the best imperfect path. Sometimes we take the least awful path. What matters is that we do so mindfully, lovingly.
And people do still sometimes pay for the sins of their parents, stunted by poverty, or just as bad, growing up to be sociopaths, the children of criminal oligarchs. We work to liberate them, and while our focus has historically been on the chains of deprivation, let me just assure you that plenty of us these days are focused on the chains of wealth, on an anchor that is sinking the whole ship.
Judged for your own actions. For when I was hungry, you made food accessible. When I was being disappeared by ICE, you filmed my arrest and told my story. When my child’s clinical trial was cancelled, you sat with me, and you wept too.
There is no peace in Gaza or Chicago. Will you eat the sour grapes? Or will you tend God’s good vineyard?
Holy music, bread in the oven, justice rolling down like a river, and a mysterious God who loves you, who calls you to move, to act, to live, this day and always. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Black Elk called you Wakan-Tanka,
our ancestors called you Holy Spirit,
we name you Love in Action,
opening us to Holy Mystery,
and compelling us to act,
aligning ourselves with creativity,
compassion, resilience,
freedom and beauty,
but also embracing
our fragility and finitude,
the renewal, reuse, and recycling
of star stuff.
We pray for all creatures
victimized
by fear and hate and greed,
lives cut short
by poachers and bombers
and active shooters
and private equity firms,
by preventable disease
and by human caused disasters.
We pray for protesters in frog suits,
for preachers and poets
and classroom teachers,
for folks who just offer a ride
or to cover the check,
who change how much and where they spend
so to avoid complicity in evil.
Scripture tells us the Spirit descended
as Jesus stood in the Jordan,
so filled with spirit,
we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father…