Grace Presbyterian Church
September 18, 2016, Pentecost 18C
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; 1 Timothy 2:1-7
Weep Together
The reputation of
the prophet Jeremiah has contributed two different turns of phrase to the
English language. The word “jeremiad” refers to a speech, whether written or
extemporaneous, characterized by stern criticism, judgment, or warning of
impending harm. The passage we heard last week, from the fourth chapter of the
book of Jeremiah, would be an example of the kind of speech that inspired that
word.
But the prophet
has also inspired the phrase “weeping Jeremiah.” Such a phrase can describe the
prophet himself or one who engages in a sustained lament, with weeping and
sorrowing made evident both in word and action. That’s the Jeremiah we find in
today’s reading.
Last week’s
reading was remarkable for calling the people “stupid” (4:22) and for depicting a world in which the very act of
creation was undone, blow by blow, due to the people’s unfaithfulness and God’s
judgment. To be sure, there’s a lot of that kind of thing in Jeremiah,
including in the verses of chapter 8 that precede today’s reading, and in the
verses beginning with 9:2 as well. Here, though, for these few moments, the prophet
turns aside from pronouncing God’s denunciation and divine judgment on the
people, and instead weeps for them.
Or possibly weeps
with them.
Or it might be God
doing the weeping.
Or it could be
basically everybody weeping together.
Let’s try to sort this
out.
You’ll notice that
at the very end of verse seventeen, just before today’s reading, the speaker of
that previous section of denunciation was clearly identified as the Lord. The
next time we see such a phrase, is 9:3, by which time
Jeremiah’s lament has clearly passed, and the tone of denunciation and judgment
has clearly returned. That shift of tone seems to start with 9:2, when weeping
for “the slain of my poor people”
(9:1) gives way to denouncing the people as “adulterers” and “traitors”
and the weeping is pretty clearly over.
In short, this
passage of lament sits in the middle of, and interrupts, an extended jeremiad.
But within the lament it’s not always easy to tell who is lamenting.
A few places are
clear; the passage in verse 19 (it might be in parentheses in your Bible) about
provoking to anger with their idols is pretty clearly a sentiment being
expressed by God, with its first-person point of view. The surrounding passages
in verses 19 and 20, which might be in quotation marks, are similarly clear in
being a sentiment being expressed by the people of Judah more specifically.
But verses 18 and
22, as well as verse 1 of chapter 9? That’s harder to tell. One could stretch
it to represent the cries of the people, but the more obvious answer would be
that Jeremiah is here laying aside his prophetic sternness and grieving for the
people and their suffering, however self-inflicted it might be.
This isn’t a
lesson that many modern-day would-be Jeremiahs seem to have learned.
It’s altogether
too easy to find those who are all set to pronounce judgment who are, to put it
delicately, entirely too happy about doing so. And sadly, this particular
condition is pretty widespread among preachers. Politicians can be bad about it
too, but this kind of gleeful reveling in the anticipated suffering of the
judged is pretty endemic among a certain class of preacher.
You know the type.
Good chance they have a “TV ministry,” giving them a nice big platform for
their pronouncements. At minimum they’re preaching to a congregation much
larger than this, if they aren’t set up on a cozy looking set with cushy chairs
and couches. They cherry-pick bits of scripture from hither and yon and stitch
them up into a prediction of dire judgment on the social groups they just
happen to hate, or retroactively pronounce the latest natural disaster as God’s
judgment on the afflicted city or state (except, curiously, when it happens to
be their own). And they couldn’t be happier about it. Gloating, practically, that
some city is underwater or that fifty people were shot dead, or whatever disaster might have befallen us that we haven't heard yet this morning.
Jeremiah would not
understand these people, I think, and he might be prompted to unleash a
jeremiad of his own upon them. The man who writes “my joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick” literally the
sentence after saying “See, I am letting
snakes loose among you, adders that cannot be charmed, and they shall bite you,
says the Lord” is not a person who rejoices in the judgment it is his
calling to proclaim. That judgment is sure, and it is unrelenting as we heard
in last week’s reading, but it is no cause for joy. It is cause for weeping,
for grief, for mourning. It is cause to weep with the ones who suffer, no matter
how much it is true that they might have brought that judgment on themselves.
Jeremiah was
pronouncing judgment right up to the beginning of this lament, and he launched
right back into pronouncing judgment immediately after this lament, but all of
that judgment did not negate his sorrow for his people. That seems a fairly obvious
way of reading this passage, but it may not be the only one.
It is possible, on
the other hand, that the grief being pronounced here is not only Jeremiah’s.
The sorrow, the weeping that Jeremiah is pronouncing may well be that of none
other than God.
It is Jeremiah’s
habit to interject “says the Lord”
every so often, as we heard in verse 17, as if to remind his readers and
hearers that Jeremiah isn’t just blowing off steam or making up these dire
judgments just for kicks. It is a harsh word he is called to proclaim to God’s
covenant people, one that promises pain; one that promises that God’s covenant
people, who have for so long assumed that God would always cover for them no
matter how much wickedness they indulged themselves in, are about to find out how wrong they have been; one that will establish
to them once and for all that God is not a “get out of jail free” card for whatever spiritual crimes they may commit. But there
is no joy for Jeremiah in proclaiming this hard word, and it seems very much
that there is no joy for God in having Jeremiah proclaim it, either.
The people’s
laments recorded here are those of a people who do not understand. Jeremiah’s
laments (and God’s possibly) are on the other hand quite clear on what is going
on. Even the legendary healing balm found in the distant region of Gilead are
of no help to the people to ease the sorrow that is to come. Yes, this is the
scriptural reference that gives us the spiritual we will sing at the end of
this service today, but I’m not sure that Jeremiah would agree with the way the
spiritual answers his question.
What then of us,
in the face of this portrait of weeping?
We modern-day
Christians, or some anyway, have a pretty good knack for imagining ourselves to
be persecuted, to be suffering when those we imagine as “evildoers” prosper.
And it’s not too hard for us to find someone on whom to pin that “evildoers”
label upon. But what happens when the tables turn and our “enemies,” the "bad guys," are the
ones who suffer?
If we take today’s
lament seriously, we weep with them.
We don’t gloat, we
don’t get all triumphalistic and rub it in their faces. We weep with them. We
weep together.
If we want to call ourselves followers of God, we’d better find a
way to mourn with those who mourn, whether they are “our kind” or not. We’d
better be able to weep with those who weep, rather than recoiling from them or
reassuring ourselves that they deserve it. We can be on our knees in prayer, or
flat on our faces in weeping, but the defensive crouch is never an appropriate
position for the child of God.
Come, let us weep
together.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (from Glory to
God: The Presbyterian Hymnal)
#634 To
God Be the Glory
#440 Jesus,
Lover of My Soul
#787 God
Weeps With Us Who Weep and Mourn
#792 There
Is a Balm in Gilead
"Weeping Jeremiah"
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