Prophets of a future not our own

In the liturgy for the ordination of a deacon, the first of two suggested options for the Old Testament reading is the call of the prophet Jeremiah. Over the years, it has been my good fortune to preach at several ordinations and I love preaching on this text. Even if you have never been to an ordination service for a deacon before, the words may be familiar. The Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you…

That call is met with resistance from Jeremiah. Because when called to do the work God gives them to do, God’s people resist. Moses reminded God that he had a stutter. Isaiah said he had unclean lips. Mary didn’t so much resist as simply ask the obvious question: “how can this be, since I am a virgin?” God's response is always the same: "no worries, I’ll be with you."

So Jeremiah says, “but I’m only a boy.” To which God says, “Do not say I am only a boy. Do not be afraid, I’ll be with you…”

The reading abruptly ends at verse nine, however, and then everyone sings "Here I am, Lord." That is unfortunate, however. Because it is in verse ten that we get a job description of what exactly God wants Jeremiah to do, and that matters. The God of the Bible isn’t very interested in happy generalities. The God of the Bible is into particularity: specific people doing specific things at specific times and in specific places. So Moses has to go tell old Pharaoh to let God’s people go; not just declare in vague generalities that God cares about the oppressed. Mary carries that child, Jesus, in her belly for nine months. In the case of Jeremiah, his ministry can be nicely summed up with just six verbs. The work God gives him to do is to pluck up and pull down, destroy and overthrow, build and plant.

Notice that two thirds of those verbs are about the hard work of deconstructing the old order. It’s like going into a new construction project to open up the kitchen area but before that vision can be implemented some walls need to be knocked down. Isaiah and Micah and Amos and Hosea all tried to warn God’s people to do justice and love mercy by caring for the widow and the orphan. They got clear in the course of their respective ministries, however, that denial is not just a river in Egypt, as their words fell on deaf ears.

So as Walter Brueggemann puts it, it falls to Jeremiah “to speak Israel into exile.” That's not a fun job! There is no room left for denial once the Babylonian army marches in and reduces the Temple to a pile of rubble and carts off the leaders to Babylon. Now there is grief and despair as they lay up their harps and weep: for how could they sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

I remember, in the aftermath of 9/11, hearing words from the eighth chapter of Jeremiah read aloud that Sunday in the congregation that I was serving at the time and for the first time in my lifetime, those words made total sense, not just to me but to everyone in the congregation. You could have heard a pin drop. 

My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land:" Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?"…Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? 

It’s only centuries later that the old spiritual will dare to claim that there actually is a balm in Gilead. For Jeremiah and the exiles, in the midst of all that plucking up, tearing down, destroying and overthrowing, it is simply left as a haunting rhetorical question. And for a time it must have seemed as if the clear answer was “no.” No balm in Gilead. No cure for the sin-sick soul. No hope; it's all dried up.

It had become almost cliché for theologians and Biblical scholars as they look around at the how the church has been changing in the past few decades to borrow this metaphor of Exile to speak of the challenges of trying to be a Christian in North America at the dawn of the twenty-first century. We are not unacquainted with grief and loss. But this pandemic has accelerated that process. Do we really believe that the Church is a building or a people?  We know how the song goes, and we also know the buildings mean a lot to us. 

But if we are to take seriously the metaphor of exile, then we do well to remember that after all that difficult work of plucking up and tearing down, of destroying and overthrowing, the story isn’t over. God isn’t finished. There is a time and a season for everything under the sun and after all that work of deconstructing, it is a time for building and a time for planting. Eventually the exiles come back home and when they do, they begin again. That is the story of faith and of life itself: how endings give way to new beginnings. 

This brings us to the Old Testament reading appointed for the fifth Sunday in Lent, which comes from Chapter 31 of the Book of Jeremiah, the second half of what the Biblical scholars call "the Book of Comfort."  In the face of death, Israel has to learn anew that God really will and can work new life. The days are surely coming, Jeremiah says. 

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and [I will] remember their sin no more.

We rehearse this same kind of language when we recite the Paschal mystery and we do it more slowly and intentionally in Holy Week. What does it mean to remember not only that Christ has died, but is risen, and will come again? What would it look like for us to begin to live it not just as words on our lips, but in our lives by truly becoming an Easter people? The days are surely coming, Jeremiah insists. Do we believe that, as we approach Easter 2021?  

The days are surely coming when the covenant is written on hearts, not just on page 350 of The Book of Common Prayer. The days are surely coming when love of God and love of neighbor define God’s people and the Lord is made known not because of our buildings but because through us we show the world that God’s love knows no boundaries. The season ahead will be a time for planting and building. 

Thirty-one years ago, on March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was martyred while presiding at the Holy Eucharist in El Salvador. His witness, and that of the people of El Salvador reminds us that in all seasons of the Church’s life we are called to faithfulness, even if not always to success.

There is a prayer that I believed for years was written by him, which it turns out was not. The best I can find out, the prayer was composed by the late Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw. Even so (and perhaps in a similar way as the prayer attributed to St. Francis)  I can't think about Oscar Romero without thinking also of this prayer, which it seems does resonate with his life and witness even if he didn't actually write the words.  I think Jeremiah could also have written it after all that deconstructing: 

This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything,
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders;
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future that is not our own.

We are indeed prophets of a future that is not our own.  May we find ways, in the time that is given to us after so much loss, to build and plant. To plant seeds that hold future promise and to build foundations that will need further development. May we do what we can, in hope.