21 C Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 September 25, 2022
Despair.com is an actual website. They sell posters, decals, hats, T-shirts with quotations to motivate people to new levels of despair. Here’s one: “It’s always darkest before it goes pitch black.”
The prophet Jeremiah would have loved despair.com. He probably had a mug that said, “It’s always darkest before it goes pitch black.” The word jer/e/mi/ad means a “speech expressing a bitter lament or a righteous prophecy of doom, a thunderous denunciation.” Jeremiah is the origin of the word. Jeremiah criticizes everything needing accusations. He denounces the king/ the clergy. He curses the rich for exploiting the poor. At the entrance to the temple, Jeremiah tells the leaders if they think God is impressed by all the mumbo-jumbo that goes on in worship, they should have their heads examined. Jeremiah takes a clay pot and smashes it into smithereens to show what God plans to do as soon as God gets around to it. He tells the people if they are so crazy about circumcision, then get their minds above their navels and try circumcising the foreskins of their hearts (4:4). Jeremiah writes pleasant devotions like, “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick, I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.” Jeremiah tells the king to “take a lowly seat, because your beautiful crown won’t be on your head for long” (13:18).
The prophet has been on a constant tirade, preaching despair for forty years.
Now, the nation of Judah is breathing its last. The Babylonians have returned to punish King Ze/de/ki/ah for his ill-advised rebellion and consequent siege of the city. Within weeks or even days, the siege will result in the total destruction of Jerusalem, the Temple, and the entire nation.
In this dire national crisis, Jeremiah’s message is, “We’re doomed. The Babylonians are going to destroy us, and God is not going to stop it.” Jeremiah not only predicts the invasion, but also tells the people to accept it. He looks them in the eye and tells them they have already lost.//
We are not surprised that no one welcomes Jeremiah’s message. The leaders decide that Jeremiah is a threat to national security. This may sound strange to hear that a preacher is considered unpatriotic because of what he preaches. But we can still remember the government keeping tabs on certain ministers during the civil rights days or the Vietnam War. Even today, churches have been warned of losing their tax-exempt status if political ideas come from the pulpit.// King Ze/de/ki/ah throws Jeremiah in prison so he won’t have to listen to him anymore.///
C.S. Lewis says, “Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins provoking it,”/but it can be difficult not to go there.//
Countless nameless children die daily from hunger and disease. An Episcopal kindergarten teacher jogs down a major street in Memphis in the early morning and is kidnapped and killed. A thirty-year-old architect wakes up without the strength to get out of bed. An accountant receives a call not to come to work because he has been laid off. At. A fourth grader fails a spelling test. He hasn’t studied. His parents have been fighting. A senior drops out of school because his family needs him to get a job. A brokenhearted mother cannot sleep. A Sunday school teacher decides he doesn’t believe in God’s love anymore. A preacher working on her sermons thinks about giving up. A mother dies too soon, and her husband has no idea how to care for their children. Nineteen children and two adults die in a shooting in Uvalde, Texas at Robb Elementary School.//
We do have moments when the light seems to have gone out completely. So Jeremiah’s despair seems reasonable when we look honestly at the brokenness we can’t fix.
The prophet has more than enough reasons to give up, and YET,/ in the middle of the siege,/ God changes Jeremiah’s sermon/1 after forty years and thirty chapters of gloom.
His cousin Han/a/mel, like everyone else in Judah, would love to sell his land and buy a bus ticket out of town. Han/a/mel’s property is now for sale in an extremely depressed real estate market. The land will soon be utterly worthless. So Jeremiah does the most hopeful thing imaginable in the midst of his nation’s destruction. He buys the land and invests in the FUTURE. Someday, the ancestors of Jeremiah will claim his land with the deed he passes on to his family. There will be a new day. “Houses and fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land.” Jeremiah carries out the transaction with meticulous detail. He dots every legal i /and crosses every t, /two copies of the deed, appropriate witnesses, and an earthen jar for a safety deposit box. Jeremiah sees a future rising from the ashes of a crumbling present. With the Babylonian armies camped outside Jerusalem’s walls, he talks about God bringing their world back to life./ With Atlanta about to go up in flames, he buys Tara.
At the very moment that people are finally starting to believe Jeremiah’s message of doom, he preaches about building,/ planting/ and a better life./
Jeremiah always takes the unrealistic position and is always at odds with popular opinion. That’s how it works with God’s prophets, offering challenges to people who think they are on top/ and hope to people who have no hope. Abraham Heschel describes prophets as “singing one octave too high.”
Jeremiah is not accustomed to preaching hope,/ so he makes it clear this is not his idea. His hope is in the faithfulness of God. It is because Jeremiah is honest about the darkness/ that he sees the light. If we look from God’s perspective, we will understand what looks big really isn’t. What seems small and unknown, often forgotten, is a sign of hope. We learn to look for the God moments in our lives that we never realized. The word visionary becomes part of our vocabulary. // At McNair Elementary School in Decatur, Georgia, Antoinette Tuff, the African American school bookkeeper, convinces a man armed with an AK-47 with 500 rounds of ammunition to lay down his gun.
An architect suffering from depression finds the strength to get help. An accountant receives a call from an old friend inviting him to lunch. A cab driver picks up a fare in a wheelchair takes her to the grocery store for no charge.
A preschooler learns to tie his shoes. A ten-year-old gets an A on a history test because her father helps her study. A boy in love points out a bright star in the eastern sky to the girl, who finally agrees to go to the football game with him. A college sophomore falls in love with Flannery O’Connor.
A visitor to the Crystal Bridges Museum looks at “ Kindred Spirits” by Durand and is grateful2. A composer sits at his piano and finds the right note. It is C sharp. A four-year-old hears the story of the Good Shepherd for the first time. A minister preparing her sermon remembers that her mother would never have been allowed to preach. A church has a vestry meeting, and no one gets angry./
An older woman in a nursing home gets a visit from some teenagers. A retired teacher laughs out loud for the first time since his wife’s death. A realtor reads Henri Nouwen and decides to be a Christian.
A gay couple of 25 years is allowed to marry.
And finally, we read from the letters of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,3 another prisoner of the state, who writes before his death about the great hope in this very passage from Jeremiah: “There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as if it were our last,/ and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be a GREAT future. It is not easy to be brave and keep that spirit alive, /but it is imperative.”
1Brett Younger, “Living Towards Hope,” Lectionary Homiletics, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 79-80
2 Depicts the painter Thomas Cole who died in 1848, and his friend, the painter William Cullen Bryant, in the Catskills Mountains.
3Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Enlarged Edition; London: SCM Press, 1971), 14-15