SatAug282010
Jeremiah 2:4-13
Sometimes I wonder why I pick certain scriptures to focus on for a particular Sunday. This is one of those weeks. Most of us go to church, I imagine, because we’re looking for something uplifting, something to improve our lives, something that makes us feel better. You want words of comfort and reassurance. So if you’re like me, you hear those words from Jeremiah and you just feel battered. This is God railing at the people: You “took up with Sir Windbag,” says God, “and turned into windbags [yourselves]. . . . Because of all this, I’m bringing charges against you. . . . Look around. . . . [M]y people have traded my Glory for empty god-dreams and silly god-schemes” (Jeremiah 2:5,9,10,11, The Message). Not especially what I wanted to hear today. Not, I’m guessing, what you wanted to hear, either.
Maybe you’re even thinking, “This is way too much like what I hear at home. It sounds like my mother or father, my child, my spouse or partner. Always yelling, always complaining, always finding fault.” Maybe, God forbid, you even hear yourself in this speech: too easily harping, blistering, blaming.
It’s not easy to defend this speech. It’s not especially appealing to suppose that this is the way God is—demanding, insistent, and hypercritical. Just like you, I want a God who wraps me in warm arms and reassures me. I want a God who affirms everything I do right, and excuses everything I do wrong. I even want a God who thinks I’m da bomb, while being entirely willing to excoriate everybody who isn’t as nice or accomplished as I am!
So when we hear this speech of God’s lambasting the people, lambasting us, it can be extremely jarring. It can even seem dead wrong: no God worth worshiping would talk or act that way. The question is: is there a way into this speech, or is it just a mistaken take on God?
I imagine that maybe God is scared. Scared that this prized creation is losing direction and heading astray. Scared that what was once a really close relationship has dissolved. Scared that a misguided people has become cruel and self-destructive. You know how easy it can be to lash out in anger when you’re scared. One of our friends says that when she was a little girl, she was very late for dinner one night. She hadn’t told her family where she was, and when she got home, her father slapped her across the face—the only time he ever did that. And of course it was a rebuke for something she had done wrong: she should have said she was going to be late. But the slap was rooted much more in fear than in anger. He didn’t know where his little girl was, and he was petrified something had happened to her. Slap!
Maybe that’s what we’re seeing in Jeremiah’s prophecy today: a God whose fear comes out as fury. In any case, like the little girl who’s late for dinner, it’s not as though the speech is without cause. Whatever the merits of God’s jeremiad—a word that derives from the name of the prophet Jeremiah, and means a long, sad tale of complaint or woe—whatever the merits of the speech, it’s still true that Israel has somehow not done the right thing. God’s standards have not been met. Israel has, in some sense, failed.
And hard as it may be to hear, my sense is that at least occasionally, and perhaps regularly, we’re in the same boat as those ancient Israelites. We, too, have “dug cisterns—cisterns that leak, cisterns that are no better than sieves” (2:13). Not in every way, of course. It’s not that we never do anything right. It’s more that, time and again, we wander away from the center, express our fear and worry as anger, think of ourselves as the center of the world, and get lost in minutiae.
We do have a choice, though. We have the opportunity, at every moment, to take the healing road, to do the right thing, to turn to God. And we turn to God because that’s where the light is. The real reason “forsaking God” (2:13) is such a problem is not that it represents a moral failing. It’s not that ignoring God makes us evil or bad people. It’s more that everything else is just such a meager substitute. Think about the alternatives to the one true God, the lesser things we so often find ourselves worshiping. If our god is success, for example, then what do we do when we fail? If our god is health and fitness, then what happens when the cancer strikes or old age rolls in? If our god is a fat investment portfolio, then what becomes of us when the market keeps “failing to thrive”? It’s not that success or fitness or profits are wrong. It’s just that they’re not enough.
The call is to return to the one place that can sustain us in the midst of the vagaries of life: God. Brett Ratliff is a backup for the Cleveland Browns, and there’s some likelihood that he’ll be cut before the season starts. This is how he deals with it: “If I get cut from here,” he says, “I really feel I’ll be somewhere else. If not, I’ll see what God has for me and get into coaching. . . . [It’s a matter of] continuing to trust in God and what [God] has planned for me.
“Ratliff said his relationship with God has enabled him to handle the ups and downs of his job.
“‘Joy doesn’t come from football, it comes from God,’ he said. ‘. . . I [used to be happy], up and down, based on football. Now my attitude doesn’t swing with football. It’s about God’” (The Plain Dealer, Aug. 27, 2010, p. D3).
If we put our trust in God, we stop being so dependent for our contentment on the circumstances of our lives. Our moods don’t rise and fall so precipitously, depending on what LeBron does or how the stock market performs or what our business fortunes are. It’s a matter of trust: who or what is going to sustain us when the chips are down? Choose wisely, Jeremiah and God seem to say.
What Jeremiah is getting at is that a life centered on God is rich and full. A life centered on God is one that doesn’t leak water from broken cisterns. It’s one that holds living water and fills us and those around us.
Part of what’s difficult about a life focused on God is that it involves a kind of inner dimension that isn’t encouraged in this culture. I finally read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love this summer, and I was so struck by how much time she gives to prayer and meditation—hours every day. I have never spent that kind of time in prayer in my whole life, and I’m professional clergy! When are we encouraged to take the time to reflect on our lives, to bring all its dimensions into focus, and to cultivate habits of attentiveness and growth and grace? Only if we’re intentional about it does it happen.
And what I’ve noticed in the course of my ministry is how difficult this is for men in particular. We men have been so programmed to accomplish and succeed and not express emotion that we often shun any suggestion that we be still and quiet, that we open ourselves to the rivers of holiness that course just under the surface and that we can tap into if we but choose to.
I’m sure there are various reasons why women outnumber men so thoroughly in churches, sometimes by as much as two to one. But at least some of the reason is that the culture leans so distinctly in the direction of production and accomplishment and success that this place in which quiet and grace and attentiveness are stressed seems utterly foreign, a world speaking an alien tongue.
One of the things I hear regularly from people who first come to church—and it happened to me when I returned to church years ago—is that week after week they find themselves in tears as they come to worship. Maybe that sort of reaction is difficult for everybody, but I know it’s particularly difficult for us men who have been groomed since birth to stifle that rawness.
Just this week, as I was out for my morning walk, I passed a man I know slightly just as the school bus came to take his child to kindergarten on her second day. A few minutes later, as he went by me, he stopped his car, rolled down the window, and said, “I can’t believe how emotional I was yesterday. My daughter got on the bus, and I couldn’t stop crying. I kept wondering”—and this was so telling—“what was wrong with me?” So I said to him, “There’s nothing wrong with you. That’s the natural reaction to this major step in your daughter’s life. A lot of the process of parenting is watching your children move away from you—taking their first steps, going to kindergarten, heading off to college, moving to their first home. And as wonderful and right as all those steps are, there’s also a sadness about them.” He said, “I don’t know whether that makes me feel better or worse!” and we both laughed.
What was striking, though, was his discomfort with his own tears, as though they were a sign of his weakness. They’re not. They’re a sign of his health and vitality. It’s just that the habits of our culture have devalued those feelings.
Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, says that men have largely lost touch with the inner life that feeds and restores us. “Take a typical woman, educated or uneducated, of most any race or ethnicity, and give her this agenda: ‘You are not to have any close friends or confidants; you are to avoid any show of need, weakness, or tender human intimacy; you may not touch other women without very good reason; you may not cry; you are not encouraged to trust your inner guidance, but only outer authorities and “big” people; and you are to judge yourself by your roles, titles, car, house, money, and successes. . . .’ Then tell her, ‘This is what it feels like to be a male, most of the time.” Feminism points out accurately that women’s external options in the world are more limited than men’s. But it’s equally true that men’s interior options are vastly more limited than are women’s. “Men have more outer options, women have more inner; that is the norm.”
Rohr points out the amount of male anger he sees around him, and says, provocatively, that “much male anger is actually male sadness.” (Sojourners, July 2010, pp. 18-21). Men have oceans of sadness in them that seldom get released. A healthy church, and a healthy culture, will allow both women and men to feel and to grieve. And perhaps celebrating the sacrament of baptism is as good a time as any to remind us of our need to engage God and our inner selves in ways that bring light to our eyes and a bounce to our step. That inner horizon is so often where the riches of God come to life. This is what Molly Caldwell-Kepner and Milo Quintin [baptized today] need to know.
To close off the inner life, to build a fortress against unpleasant feelings, to stay unfailingly busy, to anesthetize ourselves with a constant swirl of activities that seem mostly to keep us from facing the truth—all this is to dig “cisterns that leak, cisterns that are no better than sieves.” Jeremiah reminds us that there is another way, and that it’s a holy way. This is the way of prayer and openness, of vulnerability, of deep friendships, of trust in a God who loves us despite all our shortcomings. It’s the way of shared meals and honest dialogue; it’s the way of restful down time and confessed faults; it’s the way of life lived with God at the center. Because here’s the bottom line: as sad or angry as God may sometimes get, the heart of God is one of boundless care and endless delight—in you and me and all of us. This is the God in whom we put our trust.