Scripture: Jeremiah 14:1-9
Sometimes as a child begins to think about God and wonder about God she might ask a question like “where is God”, which might be just one way of putting into words much larger, more difficult questions about who God is and what God is like and how we’re supposed to understand this mysterious something that we can’t see. Such an innocent, childlike question may be much more profound than it sounds at first hearing. It comes from a place of childlike wonder, and is an attempt to give words to that wonder.
Likewise the answers we give. The parent or the Sunday school teacher or the minister who is asked such a question, or who is trying to answer it even if it hasn’t been asked out loud, will say things like, “I believe God is everywhere” or “I believe God is in our hearts.” Sometimes it might feel when we hear or when we give such answers that they are more given out of mild desperation, because we don’t know what else to say, than out of real deep conviction, but those answers too may be more profound than they at first sound or seem. All of that, I realized after I chose the sermon title, would be worth reflecting on in a sermon. But it’s not where this sermon comes from.
What I had in mind when I came up with this title was the kind of question grown-ups have been known to ask in the face of tragedy, a natural disaster or some horror of human origin. Thinking about Katrina or a South Asian tsunami or an earthquake in China, where is God in such events? Thinking about the attacks of September 11 or about genocide in Rwanda or Darfur or about Virginia Tech or about Katrina (because that’s a matter of human as well as natural origin), thinking about such things as these, where is God in these events?
Here the question, “where is God?” grows not out of childlike wonder but out of an adult, heavy-hearted wonder about why such things have to happen at all in God’s world. In the face of events like these, it’s not so easy to let statements like “God is everywhere” roll off your tongue. The question is more, “Is God anywhere?” And rather than feeling like God is cozily residing in the human heart, it may feel to many people more like God has abandoned humans altogether and left our hearts to struggle with the world’s Darfurs and our personal traumas as best we can, which sometimes is not so very well.
I don’t know if the question “Where is God?” or “Where was God?” was a question very much on your mind in the aftermath of any of the events I have referred to. I know it was on lots of people’s minds. It made its way not just into sermons and religious writing, where you might expect such questions to be raised. It made its way into newspaper columns and other forums not usually concerned with theology.
I also know that the theological questions born from the Holocaust, what one can say about God or how it is even possible to speak about God, seemed to haunt much of theological discourse for decades after the end of World War II. I was in school during a time when that was particularly true, and the lesson I think I took away from all that talk about God and the Holocaust was that if what you say about God cannot stand up to the reality of the concentration camps, then you should not say it. I still think that’s a valid thought to hold onto. If what you think or have to say about God cannot stand up against any of these kinds of realities I’ve been talking about, then we need to reconsider what we have to say. If what we say about God seems silly or offensive in the light of genocide, terror, or natural disaster, then we need a new theology.
Jeremiah made me think of all this. Jeremiah’s life and times were filled with calamity. I won’t go back over the history I went through last week, just recite the litany of afflictions the people were dealing with. Drought and famine, repeated invasions from foreign powers always ending in defeat, the death of a popular king who seemed to be moving things in the right direction, the installation of kings who were, to put it mildly, much less worthy and their support by foreign governments, the destruction of the temple, symbol of Jewish faith and indeed the Jewish way of life for centuries, the conquering of the country and its occupation by foreign armies, the carrying off of a large portion of the people into captivity and exile in Babylon.
No doubt there were those back then, as there have been those among us, who wondered where God was in all of this. The society they had once taken for granted had fallen apart. Life as they knew it had disappeared. Maybe God had too. The god who was part of the furniture of their lives was certainly gone, along with any certainties they may have thought they had about God. The temple, where maybe some people thought God dwelled, but at least that served as a reminder that God dwelled among the people here, the temple was rubble. Where was God in all this?
Jeremiah had an answer for this question. His answer, the one that he seemed to articulate most loudly and frequently, was connected to the theology that I had said last week I have so much trouble with. Where was God in all this? God was behind the scenes orchestrating the whole thing, the drought, the destruction, the killing, the capture, the deportation. God was unhappy with the way things were in the state of Judah. That’s what Jeremiah said again and again and again until he was tired of saying it and the people were tired of hearing it. And because God was unhappy, bad things were in store for the people.
The implication, the pretty clear implication, was that God was punishing people for their wayward ways. Sometimes it was a lot more than an implication. “I have stretched out my hand against you and destroyed you, says the Lord. I am weary of relenting…I have bereaved them; I have destroyed my people because they did not turn from their wicked ways…I will give their wives to others and their fields to conquerors because everyone is greedy for unjust gain…They acted shamefully and I will punish them,” says the Lord.
I said last week how I have lots of trouble with seeing God in this way, using war as an instrument of punishment and so forth. It seems to me God could be more creative than that, finding other ways to express displeasure or communicate anger. But it’s not only the idea of God using armies and warfare to punish people that bothers me. It’s the whole notion of God being some divine manipulator of events, the heavenly orchestrator of what happens here on earth, the idea that whatever happens here is God’s will. That idea, not just using Babylon’s army to express divine displeasure, but the more basic notion that an all-powerful God decides what will happen here on earth is not just troublesome. It’s offensive. It’s the kind of thing I meant when I said that our ideas about God have to be able to stand up against realities such as Katrina or Virginia Tech to say nothing of the holocaust. Who is willing to say that such things, with all the human suffering that goes with them, who is willing to say that such things are the will of God? And so when Jeremiah says, or when even God says through Jeremiah, that the reason all those terrible things are happening to the people of Judah is because God has willed it—as punishment—I can’t accept it. I’m frankly not willing to say such a thing or agree to such a thing or to let such a thought pass without comment.
So I am grateful that occasionally a different note is struck, not so prominently or noticeably to be sure, but there are different kinds of images that come through in Jeremiah—in chapter 14, for instance. There the image is not so much one of God orchestrating these devastating events but more one of a God who has disappeared, and indeed the question becomes, where is God? Where has God gone? Why doesn’t God intervene? In fact in chapter 14 Jeremiah seems to identify with his people who are pleading for God to do something. “Although our iniquities testify against us, act, O Lord, for your name’s sake. Although our apostasies are many, and we have sinned against you” act, dear God, do something.
And then follows an image that is sort of along the same lines but also gave me a little bit different slant on things. “O hope of Israel, its savior in times of trouble, why should you be like a stranger in the land, like a traveler turning aside for the night. Why should you be like someone confused, like a mighty warrior who cannot give help?” I was talking last week about Judah being sent into exile and Jeremiah telling them that this was not a temporary or accidental condition and how this all suggested to me that their physical exile described the spiritual exile which is also not a temporary or accidental condition for human beings. Now, here in this brief moment in Jeremiah, we get a glimpse of a God who is in exile. God is imagined as being “like a stranger in the land, a traveler turning aside just for the night.”
This suggests a different kind of answer to the question of where is God. Where is God? God is in exile, which is where God’s people are as well. Where is God? Wherever God’s people live in exile, God is there with them. Where is God? Wherever God’s people know in their spirits that they are not at home in the world, God is there with them.
Isn’t this essentially what Jesus was saying in the Sermon on the Mount, what we remember as the Beatitudes or the Blessings?
Blessed are the poor in spirit, because wherever people are aware of the poverty of their spirit as opposed to being proud of how strong their faith is, wherever people are aware of the poverty of their spirit, God is there with them.
Blessed are those who mourn—not so much those for whom everything is going quite nicely, thank you, and who are pretty successful in shutting out from their consciences all the things there are in this world that should make a person mourn—blessed are those who mourn, for that is where God is.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, not those who have made their peace with the way the world is but those who feel their strangeness in the world because things are not the way they are supposed to be, blessed are those who hunger and thirst because in that hunger, God is to be found.
That little image Jeremiah gives us of God being like a stranger in the land, like a traveler herself in search of something, this very un-Godlike image, not of a God who is in charge and in control, but of a God who is much heavier on compassion than on power, of a God who in the words of Jeremiah is even a little bit confused, not knowing what to make of things, this un-Godlike image speaks truth to me. It is not the only truth to be spoken about God. It is a truth that perhaps needs to be spoken more than it is.
It may be that the problem in the relationship between God and God’s people in Jeremiah’s time was not only the specific offenses that Jeremiah referred to, their warring ways and the lack of concern for the poor and such things. It may be that behind all that there was a more basic problem, that the people had just become too comfortable with God.
They thought they knew all about God. They thought they knew what to believe, how to say the right prayers. They thought they knew where to find God and how to find God. They thought that God was on their side, and would protect them, and would forgive their sins—after all, God was said to be gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love—and people liked that description of God, they were comfortable with it, and so they knew it to be true. And they had grown comfortable with the “imperfections” of the world, even the ones they were responsible for or at least could be held somewhat accountable for.
God would not be so unreasonable as to expect the world to be perfect. God knew all about human beings. God is the author of human beings. God knows we aren’t perfect, so you have to expect some imperfections in the world. They were pretty comfortable with that idea, so no doubt God would be too. As far as the people were concerned everything was just pretty…comfortable. Maybe that was the real problem…that God had to do something about.
And what God did, essentially, I’m thinking, with this idea of God in exile still in my mind, is to say something like, “Let’s try this again. This whole story we are involved in here. How about if you go off into exile, like you were in Egypt, in captivity in a foreign land? How about if I do too, go into a kind of exile. How about if I become a pilgrim God and you become a pilgrim people again? Maybe we need to find each other all over again. And I will lead you home again, just like I led you through the wilderness to the promised land when neither of us could take the other for granted and there was no such thing as being comfortable in our faith. Except this time, let’s try to remember what this relationship of ours is really all about and not fall back into being comfortable.
I’m thinking maybe it was something like that happened between God and the people back in Jeremiah’s time. I’m thinking that it’s not only about Jeremiah’s time. I’m thinking that it’s never a good thing for the relationship between God and God’s people to grow too comfortable. I’m thinking that it doesn’t hurt me to imagine God in exile, because it reminds me that I need to be in touch with the exile side of me, if I am to be available to God, because that’s where God is, which those who are poor in spirit and with those who mourn and with those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Maybe God is everywhere after all, but God is especially present where people know themselves to be in exile in the world. And I’m thinking this morning that maybe it’s true that as between me and God, maybe insofar as my own relationship to God is concerned, maybe every so often and fairly often at that, maybe God and me, we just need to find each other again. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 10, 2008