Elie Wiesel,
who as a teenager survived the Hitler death
camps, many years later won the Nobel Prize for peace. Referring
to world events during his lifetime, he said, "If I want to talk
about today, I talk about Jeremiah, that sombre beauty."
In Jeremiah’s time revered institutions were crumbling.
The monarchy had become weak and on the way to irrelevance. The
faith of Israel, centred for centuries on the One who had
redeemed the Hebrew slaves from Egypt and led them to the
promised land, had lost its persuasive force. The commandments
of God seemed no longer binding. The strong exploited the weak
and grew rich. The false religions of the surrounding nations
were spreading their seductive allure.
Over the past six Sundays the Lectionary has excerpted for us
passages from the great prophets who went before Jeremiah--Amos,
Hosea, Isaiah. They were extraordinarily far seeing. Another
Nobel laureate, the writer Czeslaw Milosz, died last Saturday.
Like Elie Wiesel he lived through a time of great change in
Eastern Europe. He might have been describing the great prophets
of Israel when he wrote,
There is a new organ, which we
may
call the telescopic eye,
that perceives simultaneously not only different points of the
globe but also different moments of time; the motion picture
created it in all my contemporaries. And I, more often than my
contemporaries, had to make use of it, tossed as I was by
circumstances from one civilisation into another, from
high-pressure areas into low, and vice versa.
Their words of the old prophets still ring true because they,
too
possessed the “telescopic eye.” They documented the
history of a community falling away from faith, failing the tests
of ethical integrity, and heading for disaster. In the case of
Jeremiah’s community, it was to be war, invasion,
destruction, and exile of the survivors in Babylon.
One must not draw parallels too explicitly. I know of
right-wing Christians in America who slate the 9/11 disaster as
God’s punishment for sexual immorality. And there are
left-wing Christians who see it as God’s punishment for
nationalistic pride and capitalist greed. It is easy to use
Scripture to reinforce one’s own prejudices.
Nevertheless the world is in danger. During the Cold War the
combatants had between them stores of arms enough to destroy life
itself eleven times over. The prospect was called "the death of
death,” because there would be no living things left to
die.
This beautiful planet, this fragile ball of life over which God
had laboured so long and so lovingly in creation, and at such
great cost in redemption, was in deadly danger. It still is, and
the danger comes from the proliferation of terrible weapons into
nervous hands.
II
Jeremiah, too, lived under the shadow of approaching
destruction. He talked about things that others found
unthinkable. It was largely through his legacy that faith was
able to understand itself afresh for the difficult centuries yet
to come.
He said that Jerusalem, whose inhabitants had fallen from faith,
was about to be destroyed. The armies of Babylon were already
marching. Like the contents of "a boiling pot facing away from
the north" (Jer 1:13) they would soon pour over the land. Did
this mean that the God of Israel had failed? No, said Jeremiah.
It was evidence of God's power. The armies were coming, all
unwittingly, as agents of divine judgement.
His opponents in Jerusalem continued to believe that theirs was a holy
city, inviolable. God would hold it secure forever.
Jeremiah protested:
They
have healed the wound of my people
lightly,
saying, "Peace, peace," when there is no
peace.
If God saved Jerusalem from the Assyrians in a previous century,
he argued, that was no guarantee of safety from the Babylonians
in the present.
III
Jeremiah prepared the way for Ezra and Nehemiah, who after the
exile came to a diminished and disheartened people of God.
Ezra’s task was to keep the Judeans firm in their faith,
while Nehemiah’s was to build a wall of security to keep
out foreign marauders.
If, knowing the situation in the Israel and Palestine of today,
you think nothing much has changed, remember that one thing has
changed. Christians believe that the Messiah of Israel has come.
We believe that Jesus has broken down the wall of separation
between the ancient people of God and outsiders.
Consider this television image from a recent local war. Two
lovers lie dead in no-man's land. One was Christian when living,
and the other Moslem. Fleeing for safety, they failed to dodge
the bullets. They have now lain for days, their bodies bloating.
The lenses of the world's media eye them relentlessly, but from a
safe distance. Nobody comes to take them away, for snipers have
the scene within range.
Why is this image so troubling? It symbolises the evil of war, to
be sure. There is something else. This Christian Romeo and Moslem
Juliet shared a love that transcended religious and ethnic
distinctions. Their love, willing to risk everything, continues
to speak, even in death.
The image illustrates a dominant evil of our time. Of all time, I
suppose. The word is "ethnocentrism." It means regarding
one’s own ethnic group, culture, religion, system of
government, and way of life, as the best possible. Everything
else is of lesser account. It is easy to see that Islamic
extremists think this way. But so do we, much of the time.
Behind ethnocentrism is a failure of faith. "God" shrinks to fit
the ethnic group. There is a word for that too --
"ethnolatry."
Ethnolatry--making an idol of one’s own culture-- leads to
nasty wars and nasty acts of terrorism fuelled by ethnic hatred.
The outcome for the world could be terrible.
IV
Is there a word from God to save us?
As Elie Wiesel said, it is useful, in talking about today, to
talk about Jeremiah. Let us listen to the account of
Jeremiah’s call:
Now
the word of the Lord came to me saying,
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and
before you were born I consecrated you;
I
appointed you a prophet to the nations."
Listen to that. It speaks of your unique destiny. God has singled
each of you out for a special purpose. God knew each of you and
loved you before you were born. As a tiny embryo you were already
a focus of infinite hope.
Your destiny was not always evident. God's call came to Jeremiah
when he was "only a boy." At an unspecified time in their lives
God's call came to those rough fishermen from Capernaum -- Peter
and Andrew, James and John.
They didn’t dream that God had chosen them until a
word came from a visiting rabbi. They were going about their
business. Two were fishing and two were mending their nets.
"Follow me," he said, "and I will make you fish for people."
Each call is unique. God crafts each call differently. God called
Peter to be none other than Peter, and Andrew to be Andrew. You
and I have not been called to be Mother Theresa or Albert
Schweitzer. We are called to be ourselves.
God called Jeremiah to be a prophet to the nations. There
is a hint of that in every call. We are to be bearers of the word
God has spoken to the earth in order to save it.
The late Marius Geursen, an old friend who served nearby parishes
with distinction, was an enthusiastic disciple of the theologian
Karl Barth. "The day Barth left Germany for Switzerland," he
said, "when Hitler had expelled him, the students gathered at the
station to say farewell. 'Do you have a final word for us,' they
asked, 'to sustain us during these terrible times?' The professor
puffed slowly on his pipe, then said, 'Bible study, Bible study,
Bible study.'"
The advice is relevant not only to future preachers. We are all
“the people of the book.” Most of all, we must keep
going back to “the word made flesh,” Jesus of
Nazareth. Have no doubt that "God's word makes its way through
the tragedies of history." (Ernst Fuchs)
V
The account of Jeremiah's call continues:
Then I said, "Ah, Lord God!
Truly I
do not know how to speak,
for I am only a boy."
That is our trouble, too. We don’t know how to speak. How
can we speak a saving word to the earth so that the earth
responds?
We make our excuses. What does God say to Jeremiah's weak
excuses?
Do
not say 'I am only a boy';
for
you shall go to all to whom I send you,
and
you shall speak whatever I command you.
Do
not be afraid of them,
for
I am with you to deliver you, says the
Lord.
It is an awesome thing to be called to speak for God. But how do
we do it?
With words, our own stumbling words. Don’t despise words.
The Bible uses words, and the words of the Bible have endured.
Yet there is also , as 1 Corinthians 13 says, a more excellent
way.
If I speak in the tongues of
mortals
and of angels, but have
not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
It is the lived word of love that is powerful. A piece
of
advice given to Aboriginal women is:
“Be the change you want to see
in
the
world.”
How are we to be changed ourselves? Jeremiah claimed that he
had
stood, spiritually, in the very council chambers of heaven. That
is where we have to go, alone before God, stripped of
pretence.
We have to wrestle continually with God in prayer, as Jacob
wrestled with the angel, and went away limping. We have to
respect the insights of others, whether they are Christian or
not. God chooses unexpected people in unexpected places as
sources of truth. We have to practise the presence of God
constantly through a listening heart. God gives us what we need,
whether lived words or spoken words, but we must ask in fear and
trembling.
We have come a long way since Jeremiah. Jesus Christ
has
come. The cross is God's promise that doom need not have the last
say. Civilisations rise and pass away. Everything passes. The
grass withers and the flower fades, but Jesus Christ, the lived
word of our God, will stand forever. Let us join him in love.
