Oct. 27 – Thoughts on Jer. 12-14 & 2 Tim. 1

You are always righteous, when I bring a case before you.  Yet I would speak with you about your justice:
Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?
You have planted them, and they have taken root; they grow and bear fruit.
You are always on their lips but far from their hearts.
Yet you know me, you see me and test my thoughts about you.
Drag them off like sheep to be butchered!  Set them apart for the day of slaughter!

I just love how polite Jeremiah is when he is questioning the Lord’s justice.  He uses what I have heard is called a “compliment sandwich”; begin with a compliment, then give your complaint, and finish with another compliment.  This is used in leadership and business circles.  But Jeremiah uses it in his prayers.

Still, as polite as he is, he is also deeply honest.  And in that honesty we see our own unasked questions.  You see, there has been an assumption that we cannot be THIS honest with God.  I have been asked countless times whether it’s ok to share our anger, doubt, and fear with God.  My answer is always the same, “not only is it ok, it is a requirement of our relationship with God.”  God won’t deal with fictional characters, only with real people.  So when we approach Him with lies, masks, and hidden truth, He simply won’t deal with us.  God wants the real us, however ugly that life may be.  Because God doesn’t see the ugliness of our lives.  He sees the righteousness of His Son who exchanged our sinfulness for his own perfection.

And besides, do we really think God doesn’t know when we’re angry, or when we doubt, or when we are afraid?

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Oct. 26 – Thoughts on Jer. 9-11 & 1 Tim. 6

From “Big Girls Don’t Cry” to “There’s no crying in baseball!”, crying has been a sign of weakness for generations.  Bullies have sought to make younger kids cry forever, and “taking it like a man” has meant with an utter lack of tears.  Funerals often got a pass and became one of the only places men could cry openly, but even then it was a slight trickle rather than an outright sob.  Crying has been socially forbidden in many world cultures.

This has always seemed to me to be yet another cultural abnormality, a means of showing our power by withholding from something truly wonderful.  For tears are the means of healing in so many ways.  I have heard them called “the only true cleanse of the soul” and “liquid anger released”.  No one who has felt the pains this world can bring and has wept for real can deny that they feel significantly better having done it.  And the harder the cry, the better we feel.  Jesus wept in sorrow and fear, as did the prophets before Him, so it seems very odd to refrain from it.

Jeremiah is known as “the weeping prophet”, and we begin to see shades of it in today’s reading.  Chapter 9 is filled with calls to weep, wail, and cry for God’s lost – meaning here “sinful” – people.  That people who have been promised so much and wooed into as powerful a relationship as God’s would walk away from it and follow worthless idols is cause for much weeping.  While this may not heal the world’s ills or bring the lost back to the Lord, it does cleanse us, release some of our anger toward them, and move us to a place of being healers ourselves.

So look at our world, from our political leadership to the divisiveness and xenophobia that has this entire globe in its grip, and weep, wail, and cry.  God is.

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Oct. 25 – Thoughts on Jer. 6-8 & 1 Tim. 5

Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father.  Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity…  Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Our family is pretty tight.  When I do pre-marital counseling with couples, one exercise examines the “closeness” and “flexibility” of their family structures.  Our family would probably score pretty high on the “closeness” vector.  We have dinner together at the table every night but Wed. when we are at church and have for our 22 years of marriage.  As the kids have aged, they often have to miss a meal, but never when they are available.  At that meal, we share our days and thoughts together.  Vacations have been family-only, rather than bringing friends along, and while we fight like every family, we have never stayed mad for long.

When a family member is in need, be it financially, emotionally, or physically, we are there for each other.  And according to this passage, that’s the way it should be.  In fact, this isn’t a new teaching but is a modernization of the Fifth Commandment, “Honor your father and your mother…”  While we continually teach that this means being respectful and kind to our parents, it is far more about caring for them in old age, since there were no other alternatives in OT Jewish culture.  But this passage goes beyond that.

Paul widens the family pool by first telling us to treat older men as fathers, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters.  Within the family of God, everyone is family, and so we have a duty to care for everyone within the family of God.  Is there a “family member” in your church who needs your help?  How might you show your love for God by honoring them with the help they need?

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Oct. 24 – Thoughts on Jer. 3-5 & 1 Tim. 4

‘Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the ‘I will frown on you no longer, for I am faithful,’ declares the Lord.

My wife Heather and I met in Russia.  Well, not really but it makes a much better beginning to a story than the reality.  We were in the North Park Choir together for years, but being a choir of nearly 100 singers, we knew OF each other but didn’t KNOW each other.  Until 1993 when the choir toured Sweden, Estonia, and Russia.  Our friends were hanging out together, and we were hanging out with them, so we were, by the transitive property (look it up!), hanging out together.

Heather noticed the attraction first.  For me, it wasn’t until we got home and she sent me a postcard from Alaska where she was living at the time that I noticed it.  When she returned to school for her Junior year, I was beginning my first year of seminary and we began to hang out for the first time outside of Russia.  For the next year we talked and walked and our friendship grew.  By the following summer, we were walking for hours together and continued to grow closer.  Eventually we were engaged, just before I left for a year’s internship in Mankato, MN while she taught in the Chicago inner city.  We were married the next year.

Being human, we love each other because we find the other lovable.  We were attracted to each other for various reasons, and that attraction led us to determine that the other was worthy of the commitment of marriage.

I am eternally grateful that this is not how God loves, not how God’s faithfulness to us works.  You see, if God loved us only because He deemed us lovable, then He wouldn’t love any of us at all.  We are a deeply unlovable species, inherently selfish, drawn to darkness, and greedy.  The very best of us is utterly unlovable when compared to the perfection that is God.  But God, being God, doesn’t love us because we are worthy of love.  He isn’t faithful because we have earned His faithfulness.  God loves us because He is love; He is faithful to us because of His faithfulness, not our worth.  This means that there is nothing we can do to lose God’s love or cause Him to be unfaithful, because we can never change who God is.  Ponder that!

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Oct. 23 – Thoughts on Jer. 1-2 & 1 Tim. 3

“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

When Jesus spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, He had to be thinking of this passage from Jeremiah.  Jesus proclaimed Himself to be the source of “springs of living water”, a direct quote from this passage.  And so we have to look at the implications of this verse, because we know that John’s readers would.

There are in fact no less than four implications in this simple sentence given to Jeremiah.  The first is that God’s people have forsaken Him.  This is the primary message of this entire chapter, book, and Jeremiah’s life work.  By following false Gods, Jeremiah’s contemporaries have turned away from God.

The second is that God is the spring of living water.  Springs are never-ending, eternal supplies of water, one of the most valuable and necessary things in all human life.  But more than water, this spring brings “living water”, which is the water of cleansing and healing.  Water that is “living” is water that is flowing and moving.  Washing dirt or sickness in still water, a pool or well, keeps the dirt or sickness in the water – it does not take it away but instead dirties the water.  Washing instead in Living Water, in moving, running water, takes the dirt or sickness away.  This is why the Law required people to be washed or cleansed in living water.  And God is the source of a spring of it.

The third is that God’s people have turned away from this free gift of living water and have attempted to dig wells of their own.  They are seeking the healing, cleansing power in sources other than God.

And finally, the idols and false deities to which God’s people turn for salvation and healing can never heal since they aren’t alive.  They are “broken cisterns” offering nothing at all.

Jeremiah proclaimed these truths, and Jesus proclaimed them again when He referenced it.  I believe we could proclaim it yet again today.  We are turning from God to our human leaders, whether political or intellectual or social, and to our own accumulation.  We are seeking salvation, safety, and healing from these “broken cisterns”, empty wells that cannot give us what we truly seek.  Like Jeremiah’s audience, and Jesus’, we need to heed this warning and turn back to God, to our only source of the living water we truly need.

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