Wednesday, July 24, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Prophets
Most of us who think we’re prophets aren’t. Jeremiah seems to have been one, though.
The Lord extended his hand and touched my mouth, saying, “See, I place my words in your mouth!
I wrote a letter to Lincoln’s hometown newspaper in September 1968, feeling prophetic. After personally watching the police riot at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention, I wanted to speak up for American freedom and the Constitution.
The letter went on too long, although even now I appreciate my complete sentences:
We were in Chicago insisting that we be allowed to march, because we are Americans and that thus it must be allowed. I am protesting a complacency that seems to have settled like a pall over America. But this country cannot be allowed to deteriorate. The animal nature of man which desires power over others cannot be allowed to corrupt. Yet all these things ARE being allowed, while highways everywhere are full of cars containing people rushing to get away from it all.
Dad told me I was too young and impulsive to be political. I agreed, sort of. But God told Jeremiah:
The Lord answered me. Do not say” I am too young!” To whomever I send you, you shall go, whatever I command you, you shall speak. I am with you to deliver you.
By this time, at age 19, I had read at least the first chapter of Jeremiah, and oh how easy it was to put myself in his place, imagine the power of God behind my words. Politics and religion bring out the “with God on our side” songs. Being right matters more than it should. Either-or thinking (dualistic thinking) prevents much understanding or compromise. We turn toward some of us, and against the rest of us.
Of course this is happening now in America, and most other countries of the earth. Political peace is always frail, and religious peace even more … Jesus said as he confronted the Pharisees, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” This is not the non-violent Jesus adored by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is the Jesus who knows what his Father has said is true and so will not depart from it.
How do I know when to stand up for something? I am, like Jeremiah, fearful and shy in a crowd. I want to also be like Jeremiah in my honesty and forthrightness – with the Lord, with Yahweh, with Jesus, with the Father, filled with the Holy Spirit. It’s easy to get caught up in the religious names we’ve adopted for God, our Source and Destination, the unnamed king of the universe.
You seduced me, Lord, and I was seduced. – Jeremiah 20:7
I think Jeremiah get very sick of words. Maybe not God’s but certainly all the others that attached themselves to him, or attacked him. God said nearly nothing, but when he spoke Jeremiah listened and passed it on. How could he have known as a young boy that this gift of listening would require speaking into darkness, a “gift” that often nearly killed him and almost always made him miserable.
Listening to silence is a gift of the monastery. Into Great Silence, 2005 documentary filmed at the Grand Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps, offers us a taste of that gift. “This film dissolves the border between screen and audience with a total immersion into the hush of monastic life. More meditation than documentary, it’s a rare, transformative theatrical experience.”
The seed is the word of God, and Christ is the sower. All who come to him will live forever.
I’ve always loved words, the sound and feel of them, but silence is often referred to as “God’s language.” Words serve to point us toward the silence, into much deeper truth than we can find in either religion or politics. Into truth like … God’s mercy
“Mercy is a cloak that will wrap around you and protect you…. It can help you rest and breathe again for the time being. Which is all we ever have.” – Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway.
(Jeremiah 1, Psalm 71, Matthew 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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