A Reflection and Poem for XIV Pentecost All Saints’ Church, Southern
Shores, NC
August 21, 2016 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Unbending
Walking Upright
This Sunday and for the next 10 weeks we have as our
Hebrew Testament lesson selections from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. Depending on how you read the three verses
before this lesson for today, Jeremiah is either born or begins his ministry in
627 BC in the southern kingdom of Judah. He is born in a priestly city a couple
miles north of Jerusalem. Priestly cities were places set aside for Levites
where the lands were used to support and house families of Cohens, the Hebrew
word for Priests. Priests were not called; they were born into the job. They
were raised to be attendants at the Altars in Jerusalem, to be moral guides for
the people, to accept sacrifices and interpret the entrails of the sacrificed
animals for portents from God. Most of the time, Prophets and Priests would be
on opposite sides as the prophets acted as critics of the priestly clique who
tended to be supporters of, and apologists for, the status quo. Jeremiah, the
son of a Priest, receives a call from God to be a Prophet, so he was not all
that popular with his Cohen cousins. It would be like the butchers son’s one
day declaring that he was now going to be a vegan. In this lesson, Jeremiah
says that he was given the call before he was born, so he could have been a guy
who just did not fit in from before Day One. His mother probably cried a lot
and his father probably was frustrated with him. When Jesus says Prophets are
honored everywhere except in their hometown, their family and household, he was
speaking from his own experience and from centuries of historical witness.
When Jeremiah is born, or receives his call, in 627
BC, the Northern Kingdom had been wiped out and carried into exile by the
Assyrian Empire about a hundred years before. In 626, the Assyrian Empire,
whose capital was Nineveh, the ruins of which are across the Tigris River in
the modern Northern Iraqi city of Mosul, had reached the point of decline from
their own mismanagement and civil strife that it was ripped apart by rival
claimants for regional power. The greatest threat to Judah is now Babylon on
the Euphrates River about 300 miles south of Nineveh, about 50 miles south of
modern day Bagdad. Jerimiah becomes extremely unpopular when he suggests that
the Babylonians may be the instruments of divine justice to punish Jerusalem
for its rampant corruption and its exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. The
Babylonians will conquer Judah in 597 BC and destroy Jerusalem in 587 BC.
Because Jeremiah has been a critic, he is kidnapped before the fall and taken
into Egypt where he disappears from history.
Being a prophet is not a job that Jeremiah wants,
but with great sorrow he remains faithful to the call he was given to “pluck up
and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” He knows
the truth that one cannot plant without plucking up and pulling down, one
cannot build without destroying and overthrowing the old order. What keeps him
going is a sense of hope of how all things will be redeemed in God’s time. It
is the vision of God’s love building the new that gives him energy each new
day. Jeremiah knows that love in his life and has known it from before he was
born. It is when you know that you are loved that you are able to find the
strength to speak the truth to power, putting up with the negative opinions
from others and finding hope for the future.
When I was in high school English, our teacher,
assistant football coach, and Drama Club advisor, Mr. Miller, made us memorize
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 about finding hope:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee—and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love
rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn
to change my state with kings.
That kind of loving hope in the midst of turmoil is
what the Book of Hebrews is suggesting when the writer says that “ indeed our
God is a consuming fire”, a fire that burns with love and hope..
In the Gospel lesson, Jesus sees a woman all bent
over; she has spent her entire life in this posture and the healing comes when
she is straightened. The old way of
being in the world is changed, and healing comes as the old posture is
destroyed. The religious folk are upset because Jesus is a threat to business
as usual where law breeds shame, but Jesus responds that there is a new way of
looking at the world, that God is tearing apart the old shackles of law and
shame for a different way of walking in the world.
Most of us don’t like to change; we would prefer
that other people change. We see this in families and communities all the time.
Yes, they know that the way they do things is broken, but they want someone
else to do the changing - somebody else’s ox to be gored, somebody else to make
the sacrifice, someone else to pay the bill for healing. However, the old
saying is true: “No change equals no change.” Change is possible when someone
speaks loving, hopeful truth to power, and supportive, loving, hopeful truth to
those who feel that they have no power.
Unbending Walking
Upright (poem)
I hate the way things
are; is lousy
but I’m used to it, part
of my life.
What’d it be like
without a knife
twisting shame
walking drowsy
all bent over
seeing only ground
afraid they'll
see beyond my guise
and make some
sort of pity sound?
However notion
to me remembers
that there was
once a womb voice
declaiming love
could be a choice
as that
consuming fire fans embers
to walk upright and truth speaking
and of no other's approval seeking.
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