Monday, August 3, 2020                   (today’s lectionary)
I run in the path of your commands
Green bushes pour over the fence from our neighbor’s hardy, wild yard. Leaves, branches, insects, and remnants of yesterday’s falling rain live and breathe this morning as I sit quietly, primly almost, in my silence. Over my head those plants are shouting and singing with joy.
By the rivers of Babylon, draped with huge green trees, the captors rest in the shade and command their captives to sing. But how can they sing in this strange land?
Jeremiah didn’t think it was so strange. For years he knew Nebuchadnezzar would cast his iron net around Israel and drag the people to Babylon. Jeremiah put wooden yokes on anyone who allowed it, and one on himself, to symbolize this coming slavery. Other prophets, including Hananiah, disagreed. In a true community process, first Hananiah broke the yoke off Jeremiah’s neck and spoke out with what he had heard from the Lord, or thought he heard from the Lord.
Within two years our God will break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar
From off the neck of all the nations.
Jeremiah was taken aback. He left the gathering and went to pray alone.
Returning later, Jeremiah spoke what he heard from the Lord.
By breaking a wooden yoke, you forge an iron yoke.
You shall all serve Nebuchadnezzer, even unto the beasts of the field.
Hananiah, you have raised false confidence in this people.
And this very year you will die.
Hananiah did die, in the seventh month.
Jeremiah encourages the people of Israel to submit to Nebuchadnezzar as if to the Lord, but many disagree. Shouldn’t we resist? A guy named Theopolus at Fuller Seminary says, “The problem of determining the true from the false is not more radically presented in Scripture, except in the case of Jesus’ condemnation and execution.”
When I preached a guest sermon at Monticello Christian Church thirty or so years ago, I gathered up the courage to sing my text rather than recite it. I sorted out some chords and made this song from Psalm 119:30-32:
I have chosen the way of truth, I have set my heart on your laws.
I hold fast to your statutes, O my Lord, do not let me be put to shame.
I run in the path of your commands
I run in the path of your commands
I run in the path of your commands
For you have set my heart free, you have set my heart free!
Thomas Merton said simply, “You can’t have faith without doubt.” Jeremiah was no different from me. He heard Hananiah and in that moment he did not know what to believe. In my less political, less public moments of doubt, I too do not know. Sometimes when I sing my song, I transcend this doubt with the famous “leap” of faith, and my emotions often rebound as well.
Emotional as he was, Peter too longed for consistent, straight-up faith in his leader, in his savior, in the Great Fisherman, who once again was off on his own praying. The storm that blew up in his absence should have been no surprise. What did surprise Peter was seeing a ghost walking on the water.
Lord if that is you, command me to come to you on the water.
Come, Peter.
And Peter did.
But he faltered on the angry surface of the sea in storm, and Peter began to sink.
Yahweh did not leave Jeremiah to stew, nor did Jesus leave his friend to drown. And he does not leave me, either, or you, in the messes of our own making.
At Genneserat, the people brought all those who were sick.
Can we just touch the tassel on your cloak, and we will be healed?
And they did. And they were.
And we do. And we are.
           (Jeremiah 28, Psalm 119, John 1, Matthew 14)
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