Uncreating
Midweek
Worship, Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Ah, there’s that prophetic wrath we hear so much about. There’s your fire-and-brimstone preaching.
The prophet Jeremiah, son of a priest, had the lamentable honor of presiding over the destruction of his world. For centuries, the Kingdom of Judah had stood as the fulfilment of all God’s promises to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, and to David. Here the Hebrew people honored their covenant with God through the tripartite institutions of monarchy, temple, and school: that is, the kings, the priests, and the prophets. Land, cult, and crown proved the fidelity of the Lord unto His people.
And Jeremiah knew that it was all going to fall. If only someone would believe him.
Judah was trapped, balanced on a knife’s edge, betwixt two great empires: the Assyrians north and east, and the Egyptians south and west. The Assyrians had already wiped out their sister kingdom of Israel in the north. It seemed only a matter of time until they did the same to Judah in the south. But wouldn’t you know it? There’s always a bigger fish. And soon Egypt and Assyria, with Judah in between, would be swallowed up by the ascendant Chaldeans of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
How does one make sense of this? How does one come to terms with the end of the world as we know it? If indeed the temple and the priesthood and the prophets and the king were all tangible signs of God’s faithfulness and favor, what then did it mean that they were all swept away in one fell swoop? Without the land of Judah, without the kings of Judah, exiled instead to a strange and foreign land, could the people even call themselves Judeans anymore—or were they well and truly dead in the eyes of Judah’s God?
It’s our own fault, Jeremiah is saying. God didn’t do this; we did it to ourselves. We betrayed God by ignoring the sacred covenant, not only its ritual and religious laws but the moral commandments as well. We did not love God with our whole heart; we did not love our neighbors as ourselves. And the result of that is the loss of the entire created order. Without the moral and spiritual life of faith cementing us together, the center cannot hold.
And so Jeremiah’s prophecies paint for us a picture of the undoing of Creation. A hot wind from the east scorches the crops in the field, so that the earth cannot be fruitful. The heavens have no light; the earth is formless and void. There are no people on the land, no birds within the air. The fertile soil is desert; the cities lie in ruins. It is Genesis unraveled. Yet even then, the Lord insists, it shall not be a full end. I shall make of this the sort of death that leads to resurrection.
If one is familiar with the greater arc of the Hebrew Bible, then one already knows that the Judean faith indeed finds new life and birth in Exile: when the people of God become people of the book; when the Lord is understood not simply to be the local deity of one people, but the Creator of everything and everyone. So all the sturm und drang of Jeremiah comes to pass, yet life forever rises after death. We may break the covenant with God, but He never breaks His faithfulness to us.
One of the things I find compelling about this passage is its assumption of interconnectedness, the implicitly wholistic nature of the prophet’s worldview. Creation here is a living web whereby our neglect of morality, of spirituality, harms the whole. Sin is not some isolated incident because all is tied together. Our spurning of the poor, our avarice and greed, negates religion and convulses Creation.
I think we can relate to that, here in the twenty-first century. The divorce between humanity and nature finalized in the Industrial Revolution has wrought havoc on our world. Our lack of compassion for our fellow creatures, for our environment, and for generations yet to be, has borne a wicked, poisoned fruit. We’ve known about pollution for generations now, and the effects of global climate change are ever in the news: droughts, floods, fires, heatwaves. The Danube and the Yangtze have both dried up this year. That’s apocalyptic stuff.
It’s not that God in His wrath is punishing us for failing to steward Creation, but that this is the natural and perhaps inevitable result of relinquishing responsibility for our religion, our morality, and our spirituality. We treat people and animals as things. We need to recapture a religious understanding of the cosmos and of our place within it. We need a reënchantment of our world, recognizing it as a living thing, and affirming our responsibilities toward it as divine imperatives.
A spiritual revolution is what we truly need, a recapturing of meaning and of purpose and of value beyond cost. Science shows us how but we also need a why. Why pass on anything? Why worry about anyone other than ourselves? The answer should be obvious in any faith tradition: because the divisions between me and you, past and present, nature and humanity, even Creator and Creation are illusory, are lies. We are all one Body in Jesus Christ our Lord.
What I do to you, I do to me, and also unto God. Greed and dissension and violence affect not simply local communities but the whole species, the whole planet. That’s the sense of sin that the Bible has in spades: not of individual moral failing alone but as the collapsing of Creation, rejecting God in favor of nothing. “Yet I will not make a full end,” says the Lord, for our hope is set on Christ. Wherever there is Christ, there’s a new Creation. As within, so without.
The way we treat a homeless man, the way we treat the planet, the way we treat each other—all of it is sacred. All of it is of a piece, for all of it is Jesus.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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