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Mattins: Jeremiah 18:1-18, John 18:33-38a “The virgin Israel has done a most horrible thing. Does the snow of Lebanon leave the crags.....? But my people” says the Lord “have forgotten me; they burn offerings to a delusion; they have stumbled in their ways, in the ancient roads, and gone into by-paths, not the highway...” (Jeremiah 18:11-13) One of our sons was travelling in Northern Uganda while my wife and I were at the Lambeth Conference in 1998. He was going to a town in the area oppressed – as it is still terribly oppressed today – by the LRA. I asked its Ugandan bishop, whose own wife had been killed by a land-mine in the previous year, how our son would find things there. “He will find it”, he said, “very pathetic”. Bishop Ochola was using the word in its older sense, which the OED notes first: “pathetic: producing an effect on the emotions, affecting, moving, distressing”. Some
of you know that I spent most mornings for six weeks of my Study Leave in the
autumn reading through the book of Jeremiah in its original Hebrew. For me
this was, in Bishop Ochola’s sense, a “pathetic” experience –
affecting, telling, alarming, convicting. I’m going to try, this morning, to share the heart of this with you. I
first need to tell you a very little about the man, his times and the book
that bears his name. Jeremiah
was active in And
the Book that bears his name, all 52 chapters of its poetry and prose - how
much is from “the historical Jeremiah”, and how much from others through
perhaps the next 250 years? Of course the experts differ, and there is no way
of being sure; but I think two things can be said.
There are passages of vivid, pathetic, immediacy, full of rare
words, striking turns of phrase and observation, and marked by a fearful
struggle to express not only the agonising and horror of a person at what he
sees around him, but that too of God; I think that you can discern what I
should call “the passion of Jeremiah”. And those who came after, and
arranged and developed and commented on those sharp-edged jewels – and
sometimes blunted them! – they did so because the basic message seemed to
them to speak to their times too......as it seems to me, to my alarm, to speak
to ours.... All
that is there to be seen in what I chose for us to hear this morning from
Jeremiah 18; and for me it both illustrates, and is illustrated by, that
equally contemporary exchange at the climax of St John’s telling of the
Passion of Jesus: ““.....I came to testify to the truth...”Pilate
asked him, “What is truth?”” (John 18:37-38a). And
please have it in your minds that we do not read Jeremiah, or John’s Gospel,
as Christians out of historical or literary interest, rewarding though each is
on both of these counts. We read Jeremiah, John and the rest as Scripture;
that is to say, as among the collection of writings given to the Church by God
so that with his aid we in turn can hear God’s word, discern what God is
doing, catch his urgent call, often his “wake-up call”, to us in our times
and circumstances. So
the chilling image that begins this morning’s excerpt. The potter is at work
(and the word for his trade is that used of God’s forming of man at the
start of Genesis 2): “and the vessel he was making of
clay was spoiled in the potter’s (you could almost say “the
creator’s”) hand; and the potter re-worked it into another vessel, as
it seemed good to the potter to do”. (Jer. 18:4). God’s
precious creation, God’s precious people whom he has singled out as witness
to him and whom he loves, is not guaranteed its safety, even its continuing;
“Can I not do with you as this potter has done?”, says the Lord”. Jeremiah
sees his own people suffering disaster if - as - they fail to “listen” to
God but instead “follow our own plans”. And although Jeremiah sees
Babylon as God’s servant, God’s representative, and suffers as a
fifth-columnist for doing so, the book climaxes with two long and terrifying
chapters about the destruction, too, of
Babylon – the hyper-power of the day........ Specifically,
through reading Jeremiah I have glimpsed more immediately than ever God’s
horror and distress at the treatment by the rich of the poor, within our own
country and between North and South, between “first world” and
“two-thirds world”; God’s horror and distress at the effects over
generations of our pillaging behaviour as colonial and military powers upon
Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and upon the whole created environment; God’s
horror and distress at the range of sexual activities that our culture has
come to accept as normal, and which we have exported across the world; God’s
horror and distress at the “burning incense to false gods” that is more
and more explicitly and proudly the ground and root of our society; God’s
horror and distress at our failure over centuries, and still today, clearly to
engage as Christians with the range and depth of this – of our - sinfulness.
Through
reading Jeremiah I have been pressed to recognise dreadful realities of our
times, terrible in their effects, as the results of our sinfulness in a world
whose creator God is sovereign, as signs of His appalled, sorrowing judgement
– 9/11, for instance, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and global warming; and so
I have been pressed to ask what today it can mean for us to hear, and to give
voice to, Jeremiah’s repeated, almost but not quite despairing, call to his
own contemporaries: “Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and
amend your ways and your doings” (18:11). For
Jeremiah does not in the end despair, “lose hope”. He sees “a future and
a hope”, in spite of everything, and through the demolition of even the most
overwhelming of super-powers, because he is sure that the righteous God wills
and longs for the Shalom, the well-being of his creation and of humankind. But
God’s way to it, for individuals and families, nations and churches, lies
through “turning” back to God, through repentance and a new obedience,
through remembering and not forgetting God, through what he calls “the
circumcised heart” devoted to knowing and
praising God. |