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The Third Sunday In Lent
Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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The Third Sunday In Lent
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A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
✛
Jeremiah on Truth and Hope
The world of the prophet Jeremiah was a world of disaster. Our first reading today was from the book of Jeremiah, about the prophet who lived in the traumatic sixth century BC. Specifically, he lived in that time period that saw the Babylonians crush Jerusalem not once or twice, but three times, in fifteen years, and haul her citizens off into exile. At a time when the Israelites trusted in their institutions, their institutions were destroyed; when they trusted in their own election, God didn’t protect them.
This disaster wasn’t just something unfortunate that happened to the Judean people. It was an event of total collapse in which the faithful lost the resources—emotional as well as physical—to be able to carry on with the basic business of living. They saw their culture ruined, their loved ones killed, others taken far off to a foreign land. The comfortable routines of everyday life disappeared, and wouldn’t return. The ancient covenant that had anchored Israel to their God seemed to vanish into thin air, and they found themselves unmoored from any life that they could recognize, the very foundations of their world shattered. Military defeat was followed by something far worse: a total spiritual defeat. As the Hebrew scholar Walter Brueggemann describes it, the book of Jeremiah is a “meditation upon the abyss.”
What do you do when your world ends? That’s the question that Jeremiah faced; it was the question that his whole community was facing. It’s not a question entirely foreign to our own day, and looking at how that faithful prophet Jeremiah lived in the midst of such devastation may be helpful to us as we live out our own lives of faith. Jeremiah gives us two guidelines for addressing these situations.
The first is this: Jeremiah called on his community to tell the truth, to be honest about what was happening and why. The cause of Israel’s destruction, Jeremiah said, was nothing else but Israel’s evil. At the beginning of the book, the Babylonian attack was imminent, and yet they continue in their ways, ignoring the poor among them, the widow, the orphan. They have been called to greatness as God’s chosen people but, as Jeremiah says, corruption infects every strata of society. He writes, “from the least of them even unto the greatest of them every one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely.”
That’s right, the priests and prophets too. Because there were plenty of false prophets around, Jeremiah reports, who sought to reassure the people that their ways of life, turning away from the God who had chosen them, was suitable. They cried, Peace, peace, when there was no peace. Jeremiah, on the other hand, insists that the community pauses there, on the brink of its imminent destruction, to face its reality. In other sections of the book, writing then after the return of the exiles, Jeremiah is a voice in the conversation about what this portends about Israel’s relationship with God. He writes about how they could possibly move on. Here, too, Jeremiah calls for truth, not dissembling or evasion. It made him unpopular—the person Jeremiah lost everything—but he emphasized the need for the community’s honest self-examination. The real problems Israel had were rooted in their hearts, not in the armies of Babylonia.
And yet Jeremiah contains another kind of word, too, for a different kind of guideline. When God called Jeremiah to the office of prophecy, he said, “I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down.” But not only this. To pull down and destroy, God says, but Jeremiah is also being sent “to build, and to plant.” The book of Jeremiah, then, isn’t only about destruction; it’s also about hope. The foundation of that hope is trust in God. It is a trust, however tenuous, that there is life after disaster, because God has pledged that it will be so. Jeremiah is called the “weeping prophet” because he spends a lot of time mourning the fate of his people, but he is also sometimes called the prophet of hope. The House of David has been, it seems, destroyed, but God affirms, again, the his promise will be kept. Somehow, some way, the destruction and exile, and the sin and judgment will not thwart God’s purposes. Just as God has promised, the remnant that is left will be gathered together, and David’s throne will once more be held by a new and righteous king.
But still here Jeremiah’s insistence on truth-telling remains. Unlike other prophets, such as Hananiah, who proclaimed that everything can just go back to normal, Jeremiah maintains that the destruction and exile mark a turning point in the relationship of God and Israel. The old ways are, indeed, over. In a real way, there is no going back. There is, however, something ahead for them, something new, and holy, and true. Jeremiah charts a path out of the wreckage they have made into new life. What he describes is a “new covenant.” Theirs will be a hope that is rooted in their experiences of suffering; their hope doesn’t ignore their pain, but gathers it up so that it, too, can fall under God’s providential care.
This “new life” that the Israelites would take on would be one of significantly increased intimacy between God and the community, and God and the individual. Indeed, in this new covenant, the law of God will be written on the very hearts of the faithful, and every one of them—“from the least to the greatest” Jeremiah says—will know God, and be known by God, intimately. This new covenant won’t stand or fall on the good works of the people, who are temperamental and unreliable. Instead, the new covenant is an everlasting covenant, guaranteed by grace—God’s grace—and founded on forgiveness. This is what the people can put their trust in, when everything else has failed them.
The book of Jeremiah is read daily throughout Lent this year, right into Holy Week, according to the calendar set by the Church. This is, partly, because he describes the destructive wages of sin, the effects of human faithlessness—an important reminder in a penitential season. But it’s also read because Jeremiah is telling the Easter story: when humanity’s faithlessness is met by God’s faithfulness. There is life after destruction because, in Christ, God entered the world of disaster, and in the midst of its disaster—at the hands of its wickedness—he saved it nonetheless. Even there, life is possible, because God has pledged, through his son, that it will be so.
