Jeremiah 20:7-13
Terence Blanchard is an American jazz trumpeter and composer, with five Grammy Awards, as well as two Oscar nominations for his collaborations with filmmaker Spike Lee.
Blanchard’s 2013 opera “Champion” told the tragic story of welterweight boxer Emile Griffith, who died just weeks after the premiere. Griffith was a closeted bisexual man who beat an opponent into a fatal coma on national television in 1962, after being called a gay slur. He would himself be beaten almost to death in 1992 when leaving a gay bar in Manhattan.
Blanchard’s next opera broke a long and shameful record. Though it premiered in Saint Louis in 2019, it opened the first post-pandemic season at the Metropolitan Opera in 2021, becoming the first opera by a Black composer performed by the company since it was founded in 1883. The “opera in jazz” was “Fire Shut Up in my Bones,” based on the memoir of the same title by the journalist Charles M. Blow. It wrestled with the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse. In the third and final act, a line from the first act returns: “Sometimes you just gotta leave it in the road.”
As you may have noted, both Blow’s memoir and Blanchard’s opera take their title from today’s reading in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. For Charles, the burning fire in the bones, the word to speak, is to name the abuse he suffered at the hands of his cousin, to confront the evil. But it is not just words he carries at twenty when he prepares to face his abuser.
Jeremiah has a fire in his bones, the word of the Lord in the prophetic tradition of the Jewish Scripture. He was the last of the prophets of the Temple of Solomon period, when the culture was marked by king, priest, and prophet.
Jeremiah was trying to interpret the unfolding catastrophe, the invasion by Babylonian forces, through the lens of God’s covenant with the Israelite people, trying to call the people back to fidelity, back to God.
The text contains constructive theology for a future people and invective against idiocy in foreign affairs. The latter would so infuriate the king that he had Jeremiah cast down a well, hoping that this public nuisance might die in the muck without the need for royal violence.
It may well be this line about “fire in the bones” that the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had in mind when he stated “Of course I am a man on fire! I have icebergs to melt.”
These days, if someone claims to have a message from God, we back away… slowly. And yet, we have got plenty of folks who speak on God’s behalf every day, and I’m not just talking about an infallible Pope or the top Mormon.
Maybe my favorite from this past week comes from a screenshot re-posted on Unvirtuous Abbey, a tongue-in-cheek Facebook page for religious geeks like me. It comes from Tony Delgado, not to be confused with our Lieutenant Governor. This Delgado describes himself as an entrepreneur, founder of Latino Wall Street, and leader of Latinos for Trump.
He posted “Socialism is theft: Even Jesus said, give a man a fish he eats for a day teach a man to fish he eats for life… no handouts… no welfare… just hard work and building your skills”
Now, if you’re wondering where that is in the Bible, you should. Or as one person responded on social media, “Do you even read the Bible, bro?”
People take scripture out of context all the time, but you’d be surprised at how many things “in the Bible” are not actually in the Bible. And for the record, Mr. Delgado, let’s talk about loaves and fishes…
It is hard to know when to speak up these days. It can be dangerous. There are an unfortunate number of dumb and violent people out there, the result of efforts to destroy public education and sell opioids and guns, both the real version and the cyber-version of too many boys, mostly boys, plugged into “Call of Duty.”
We might try on the standard of speech attributed to the Sufi tradition, an ecstatic and mystical branch of Islam. Known as the Three Gates, it consists of three questions.
“Is it true?” That seems pretty simple, an iteration of the commandment among the ten against “bearing false witness,” which is to say, lying. And there are lots of simple truths.
The poet William Carlos Williams famously wrote:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
It is a lovely and classic little poem. Just the facts. The dog did not eat the plums. The house was not burgled by the Provincetown Plum Plunderer.
But sometimes things can be untrue and not a lie. Humility reminds me that my experience and your experience might not be the same. I don’t really like plums, sweet and cold or not. I’m not talking lies on the scale of “the election was stolen” or “horse de-wormer can treat Covid.” I’m just suggesting a little wiggle room to account for our unique perspectives. Relativity if you will.
The second gate is this: “Is it kind?” And again, the question is both simple and not so simple. You might think it is “kind” to ask “Are you really going out like that?,” but the stony silence of the next thirty-six hours might suggest otherwise. And of course, it is mighty easy to talk about being kind while sitting in the pew on Sunday morning, and less so when the fury is turned up to eleven, the blood pounding in your temples like the bass line at a Beyonce concert. And while I do not always adhere to Michelle Obama’s “we go high” mantra, maybe names like “the Mango Monstrosity” are below me, meant to show off my cleverness, but not really productive speech in any meaningful way.
The third gate is “Is it necessary?” I’m not sure that one is universal. I mean, if we only spoke when it was necessary, we’d mostly be latter-day monks, no small talk, no poetry or song. Or maybe only poetry and song, because once we’ve eliminated the false and unkind and unnecessary, maybe most of what is left is poetry and song, an overflow of “fire shut up in your bones.”
I have, since I began preaching, tried to apply a fourth gate. Well, I’ve tried, though not always succeeded. That fourth gate is “Can they hear it?” Because, if the listeners stop listening, you might as well stop talking. Or preaching. If my speech puts someone on the defensive, if I engage in name-calling, even if I use technical language that my listener cannot understand, it is game over. At that point, I’m only speaking to myself for my own entertainment, and honestly, I’m just not interesting enough to hold my own attention most days.
And for all of that, for all of the mindfulness and discipline we might bring to speech, there is still that simple claim of Jeremiah, of Charles Blow, journalist and memoirist, of Charles the character in the “opera in jazz,” the claim that sometimes the words are a fire shut up in our bones, prophetic and difficult, filled with love: a love of my country strong enough to want it to be what it has always promised to be but has never achieved, a love of my church strong enough to not be satisfied if there is one child hungry in our community, one soul lost in aimlessness and sin, one young man filled with rage, driving through the night with a gun, dangerous like a fire shut up in his bones.
May we engage in what the Buddhists call “right speech,” practice the three or four gates, or if you know a tween, the six-seven gates. If you know, you know…
May we use our gifts, words and hands and simple presence, to make the world a little more just, a little more kind, a little more kin-dom queer, this day and always. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
The poet Lucille Clifton wrote “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed” This morning, we pray in thanks for failure.
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
it is all moving parts,
from subatomic strings
to nuclear submarines,
from this distracted driver
texting LOL
and barely noticing that the light has changed
to the DNA that swaps a letter
and sets off a wildfire of cancer.
We thank you for the tree that did not fall on our cars
as storms blew through our community,
bacteria that did not survive
sterilization or pasteurization
or the microwave,
the tanker car rumbling down the track
that did not quite tip
when the engineer let the speed creep up,
terrified by corporate timetables.
We thank you that we managed
to commit no acts of profound violence
despite phone trees and
packages on the wrong porches
or stolen from the right porches.
We thank you that the moving parts are still moving
despite it all
and even when we are still
the fire of your holy and mysterious creativity
still burns in our bones.
We thank you
that when empire did succeed in killing Jesus,
his followers experienced him as still present,
still real,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father…