And There Was No One At All? - Reflections on Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28, Pentecost 14, Year C

by John C. Holbert on Tuesday, June 10, 2025

         I have an especially personal, deeply memorable and explosively chilling experience with this particular text from Jeremiah. I had been asked to preach sometime in the summer of 2001 at a church in the Dallas area on Sept.16, 2001. The pastor of that church had had some throat surgery, and had been demanded by his doctor to take many months off to recover fully. Of course, we all will remember what happened on Sept.11, 2001, the Tuesday prior to my preaching invitation, when four hijackers commandeered four commercial airliners, and flew three of them into three significant buildings, while the fourth was forced to crash land in a Pennsylvania field, though it was surely headed for a fourth important structure as well. The nation went into shock, emotions and fear ran high, while all air traffic was grounded, and most US Americans did not know what to think. Were more attacks coming? With the deaths of nearly 3000 people, and massive cleanups underway, especially in lower Manhattan, the country was completely on edge.

         I was certain that the pastor would want to preach to his reeling congregation after this catastrophic series of events, but the doctor forbade him from doing so. I had to keep my appointment to bring the message, and I of course was willing and anxious to do so. Explanations for the attacks were already flying through the airwaves: hatred of the West and its loose morals had led a few fanatics to take their massive revenge; certain Muslim fundamentalists had had their fill of US American arrogance in its relationships with the rest of the world and had decided to punish that arrogance. Those were two of the explanations I recall, but there were many more. I early on in my thinking about a sermon determined that explanations were not yet needed and wanted; people needed support, a measure of the beginning of healing, and whatever comfort and hope the gospel of God could provide.

         I arrived at the church that morning, and noted immediately that every person who had a uniform of one kind or another was wearing one, from military to cub scout. The air fairly crackled with ideas of “getting even,” of any kind of revenge, of a seething fury against the perpetrators, whoever they might have been. I had based my sermon on this Jeremiah text, and when I read it in preparation, I was stunned by its words. “I looked at the earth, and see! It was a blasted waste (tohu wabohu in Hebrew, the only other time the construction is used after Gen.1, a description of the world before God begins the act of creation); and at the skies that had no light” (Jer.4:23). “I looked, and see! There was no one, and all the birds of the sky had disappeared. I looked, and see! The fruitful land was wilderness, all its cities annihilated before YHWH, before YHWH’s rage” (Jer.4:25-26). Of course, Jeremiah is speaking of his land of Judah, a Judah he has regularly judged to be a nation of sinners, a nation that has angered God by turning to false gods and by refusing to live by God’s demands for justice and righteousness for the poor and marginalized.

         Yet, as I just said, it was in my mind not time yet to blame our evil, or even the evil acts of those who flew the planes, to explain the events of 9/11. But in Jer.4 there is hardly a glimmer of hope for Judah’s future, except the tiny note appended to the end of vs. 27: “For thus says YHWH, ‘The entire land will be desolate, yet I will not make a full end.” That small phrase has long been thought to be an editorial addition to Jeremiah’s originally thoroughly dark announcement of YHWH’s implacable fury against Judah, written by a more hopeful scribe, who simply could not imagine the unrelenting anger of YHWH played out against the chosen people. 

         I readily admit that in that sermon so long ago, I did not focus on that small phrase, but turned instead to the New Testament passages of the day, 1 Timothy 1:12-17 and Luke 15:1-10. The former offers assurance of God’s mercy to every sinner, especially to the self-proclaimed sinner, Timothy, while the latter passage from Luke gives us the prelude stories to the most famous narrative tale in scripture, that unforgettable portrait of the wayward brother and the expectant father. I wanted this congregation that day to hear the announcement of mercy for all through Jesus, and I tried to include those furious flyers of those planes become missiles. That message hardly was well received by the congregation, who had vengeance in mind and not mercy, and especially not mercy for those killers in the planes. In fact, between the two morning services, someone moved the US flag from its place in the corner of the sanctuary up to within a few feet of the pulpit; I preached the second service with the American flag literally flying in my face.

         If I had it to do again, and I of course hope for nothing like a repeat of the experience, I think I would focus on that tiny Jer. 4:23 statement that “YHWH will not make a full end.” It is a claim made again and again in our Bible, that no matter how angry God becomes in the face of our recalcitrance, or refusal to heed the call of God, our unwillingness to follow the ways of justice and righteousness, in short the way of Jesus, God always offers the people a fresh start. God’s promise to Noah remains valid: “As long as the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Gen.8:22). There is a divine claim on which we can build our lives, no matter the horrors we see around us.