Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 14, 2022
           (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Just do it, like Jeremiah
Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us.
I, Jeremiah, feel very vulnerable today. But that’s nothing new. Everything around me is dangerous.
The princes took Jeremiah and threw him into the cistern of Prince Malchiah, letting him down with ropes. There was no water in the cistern, only mud, and Jeremiah sank into the mud.
The mud clung to my sandals, and then as the rope went slack, my feet and legs slipped further into the slime. No water here. No food here. I can’t move my legs back and forth more than an inch. No movement here. I am caught in the cistern, trapped by my enemies. No light here. Oh Lord, what are you thinking?
The country has been sacked and there’s no food for anyone. We are going to be carried off to Babylon, exiled from our country. You say it will be for 70 years, and I tell everyone what you said, but no one wants to believe it. The king was curious, at least.
But he could have stopped this kidnapping.
None of my enemies even seem to notice how this is also what happened to Joseph long before, when we were all saved when God’s avenging angel passed over the houses in Egypt, the houses with lamb’s blood on the lintel. We look back into the past for our traditions. Why can’t we look into the future with our hope? God’s vision extends from alpha to omega. Mankind moves through suffering into acceptance into peace. We don’t have to hold so tight to our own skins. We are as natural as the wheat, which must die to live again.
Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. I have come to set the earth on fire!
I will not complain to you, O Lord, or wish I had been born in a more peaceful age. I will follow you into every inferno. You seduced me, and I was seduced. My life is yours.
A court official spoke to King Hezekiah. These men have been at fault. Jeremiah will die of famine in the cistern, for there is no more food in the city. And the king ordered that four men draw the prophet Jeremiah out of the cistern before he should die.
Later in the second millenia (or third?) Richard Rohr wrote, of those living then and those living now.
When primal knowing is wounded or missing, an immense doubt is often created about our own and God’s foundational goodness. Many people live with this doubt, and religious experience only comes to them with great difficulty. Most people don’t know how to surrender to God. How can we surrender unless we believe there is Someone trustworthy out there to surrender to?
Often we don’t learn this trust completely enough from our parents.
When we inevitably begin to see ourselves through eyes that compare, judge, and dismiss, then we need spirituality to help heal the brokenness of our identity and our world.
Jeremiah knew his business. His relationship with Yahweh held him high in every moment, out of the mud, out of the terror, out of the whirlwind. His “spirituality” taught him the safety of surrender to God, and although his complaints rang loud and his circumstances rarely comfortable, his obedience carried him through.
(Jeremiah 38, Psalm 40, Hebrews 12, John 10, Luke 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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