The Lively Lectionary Old Testament is a blog that reflects on the Old Testament text from the Revised Common Lectionary each week.
Though we can never know who wrote these poems, they were obviously composed in the shadow of supreme destruction, forged in the fires of tragedy and despair; Lamentations 1 makes that context clear enough. But even that horror was not able to extinguish the hope that one may always find in God and God’s never-failing love and mercy.
Our last look for this year at the prophet Jeremiah includes the astonishing, and at the same time ludicrous, land deal that YHWH proposes to the prophet while he languishes in a Jerusalemite prison.
Jeremiah, in the face of the terror suffered by his recalcitrant people, those same people that he has called into question again and again, can no longer merely attack them; he must also suffer with them, must empathize with them. No true prophet can only bring doom and destruction; she must identify, and stand in the place of those to whom she speaks.
Sometimes, sermons are whispered in a hurricane, and that was one of those days.
For we are clay in the hands of our God, and as such can only hope that we are fully worthy of the artistry that God has bestowed on us. May we become vessels of justice and righteousness for the world God has given us.
Paul Tillich’s famous formulation for what God must be for us, namely our “ultimate concern,” or “the ground of our being,” well delineates what Jeremiah is saying to his own people. A rejection of YHWH leads to the acceptance of other things as ultimate concern, as ground of being, and such an exchange leads to a desire for self-sufficiency, a will to go it alone, a conviction that we have no need for God or God’s call for justice and righteousness among all of God’s people.
Today’s text focuses on YHWH’s call, and a memorable one it is. “Before I shaped you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I consecrated you—I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (Jer.1:5).
I suggest that the short poem of Isaiah 5:1-7 is one of the strangest love songs ever composed. The prophecy of Isaiah is little less than a mirror of God’s anger against the chosen people, along with God’s unbreakable hope for them at the same time.
Babel’s pain has been turned to surprising joy, as the division of tongues had been overcome by the Holy Spirit.
This Lenten season, the call for justice is sounded loud and clear as we are reminded that Lent is both a time for self-examination and a time for allowing that examination to lead to engagement with our human siblings in a search for righteousness and justice.
This Lent I wished to focus on issues of justice and righteousness in the community, rather than in individual spirituality or getting closer to God on our own. What this odd chapter adds to that emphasis is the significance of a God who simply cannot be penned in or defined in ways that allow that God to be approached by traditional means of religious activity.
In Isaiah we find a brilliant representation of that most basic and uncanny statement of God’s hallowed promise to us all: there is, in the end, no death, no exile, no pain, no hopelessness, in which God may not find life in it.
© SMU Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence
