15 Pentecost, Proper 20
18 Sep 2022
Based on Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Jeremiah uttered his profound words of desolation and lament over 2000 years ago. Yet as we listen to them, the differences of space and time fade to nothingness. We feel his pain, we have experienced his pain and anguish. Perhaps at this very moment we ARE experiencing feelings as desolate and anguished as the prophet himself.
A prophet is not one who predicts the future; that is the role of the fortune teller. I daresay no prediction concerning the exact date that the world will cease to be has ever been right. If it has, I must be living in an alternative reality. A prophet points truth to the faces of power and indeed sees what others cannot because of their blindness. Jeremiah goes beyond the role of the prophet; he becomes the human voice of grief. He leads us to lamentation. He mourns for the loss and the injustice he sees around him.
We mourn when someone we love is stricken with illness or injury or when they die. Our friends and families gather with us and mourn; a funeral is the public lamentation for the profound loss of a life. Even on a platform like Facebook we are allowed to grieve and to share our grief, for the loss of friends and family and even the loss of a non-human companion. It is a space for grief and lamentation on an individual scale. It even gives us space to grieve about injustice: something lost or stolen, a job you didn’t get, property defaced.
Jeremiah weeps for his people and so do I. I am weeping for the people living in border states inundated with immigrants. I weep for the immigrants, many if not most of whom are refugees from extreme poverty and violence. I lament the anger and hatred directed at people trying to figure out how to stay alive or protect their property. I am mourning for those who died, are dying, and will die from gun violence. Like Jeremiah, I see that it could have been, and still could be different. Judah, he saw, had severed its connection with God and with justice to its own people. The people had lost their connection to God and to one another.
It is a familiar story, is it not? We mourn when someone we love dies, yet ultimately death is the end for all of us. What we need to lament is the untimely death. I am mourning the loss of connections, the increasing fragmentation of society. I look around to the people that literally live in my neighborhood, and I have become afraid of them. I see them supporting concepts and ideals that bring fear to my heart and to me as a person. There are signs in yards supporting an amendment to the Iowa constitution that would require legal “strict scrutiny” be applied to any attempt to regulate guns. No longer could violent people be prohibited from obtaining weapons. No restrictions on assault weapons. It will be a legal nightmare. We already have far too many people commit suicide using a gun, mainly young people. Firearms are the number one cause of death in children. The highest suicide rate in the nation is in very rural Wyoming. Firearms are the leading cause.
From Rev Kellan Day:
Jeremiah offers his weeping words for when you don’t have any words yourself, when only a dead silence greets you in the night. They are poems for when your words come so hot and fast that they slip out of you like darts aimed at the closest target – maybe this weeping poem will melt those darts into tears, exposing the sadness that your anger hides. They are words for when you feel as if salvation is a hoax and there is literally no hope rising on the horizon and you are utterly convinced that every day ahead will be barren and empty. They are words for when you wonder if God is going to show up to help with any of the messes we find ourselves in, for when you hurt not only for yourself but for all those who suffer far more than you. They are words for when you see disease sweeping across the land and health seems far from being restored. They are words for when trauma bites and you find yourself reeling from another panic attack. And they are words for when you wish you could cry because at least you’d be able to release some of the sorrow in you, like a pressure valve, whistling out a song of relief.
Jeremiah is the prophet to carry with us in our darkest of times. He knows there are no easy answers or quick fixes, or perhaps there are no fixes at all. But with Jeremiah I have permission to grieve, to lament deeply, and those lamentations, in allowing me to name the pain and the hurts, allow me to move to a place of more compassion for others who are hurting.
When I was a hospital chaplain, the most meaningful thing I did was just to be there, to be present when people needed a presence. Words are usually superfluous, actions even more so. When we lament as a congregation, as a community, as a nation words do become important but nothing exceeds just being present to and with one another in our collective grief. In a way, people all along the political spectrum are the same in that they are mourning and lamenting loss.
It has been said that the words in Jeremiah we heard today were not spoken by the prophet but are the words of God’s own self. God loves us and wants as much as we do for there to be a balm in Gilead. There will be no balm until we turn as a people to lament and mourn together.
It starts with us, with the recognition of our own sin, our own separation from God and the willingness to admit to our own wrongdoing. Open your hearts.