Tag Archives: Jeremiah

Whore (Jeremiah 3)

Posted on September 13, 2009 | 1 Comment

If a man divorces his wife and she goes from him and becomes another man’s wife, will he return to her?  Would not such a land be greatly polluted?  You have played the whore with many lovers; and would you return to me? says Yahweh.  Look up to the bare heights, and see!  Where have you not been lain with?  By the waysides you have been waiting for lovers, like a nomad in the wilderness.  You have polluted the land with your whoring and wickedness.

A cheery start to Jeremiah’s third chapter.  Certainly a bit darker than I like to paint myself.  I mean, you know, I dabble, fool around a bit, with Control, and with Adulation.  Oh, and with Performance, and with Production.  But they’re just flings.  You know, nothing serious.  I mean, it’s just sex.  It’s not love.  I love Yahweh.  And he’ll always come back to me, even if I keep messing around.  Right?

Have you not just now called to me, “My Father, you are the friend of my youth– will he be angry forever, will he be indignant to the end?”  This is how you have spoken, but you have done all the evil that you could.

Um, yeah…

Return, faithless Israel, says Yahweh.  I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, says Yahweh; I will not be angry forever.  Only acknowledge your guilt, that you have rebelled against Yahweh your God, and scattered your favors among strangers under every green tree, and have not obeyed my voice, says Yahweh.

This, this is my issue.  I don’t want to be guilty.  Guilty are those glum folk in courtrooms standing before juries.  Me, guilty?

As a faithless wife leaves her husband, so you have been faithless to me, O house of Israel, says Yahweh.  A voice on the bare heights is heard, the plaintive weeping of Israel’s children, because they have perverted their way, they have forgotten Yahweh their God: Return, O faithless children, I will heal your faithlessness.

Faith and faithlessness.  Belief and doubt.  All the same right?  Faith equals belief?  But no, what if faith is about marriage, and faithlessness is about adultery?  What if faithlessness is playing the whore?  What if my casual encounters with my not-about-love lovers is prostitution?  What if, when I hook up with Money or Success or Image to feel satisfied and virile, what if I’m being a whore?  Am I sex trafficking myself?

All this echoes a Derek Webb song that I haven’t been able to get out of my head recently- Wedding Dress:

I am a whore, I do confess.  But I put you on like wedding dress, and run down the aisle.

I, whore.  I use Yahweh like a wedding dress, to symbolize empty purity and to further my own agenda of serving Image and Adulation.

I must return.  I am so wrapped up and twisted in with these other lovers.  Yahweh, I must return.  Yahweh, please, heal me.

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Posted in South Central PA

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Sidewalks Day of Service

Posted on September 5, 2009 | 1 Comment

I’m that good kind of exhausted after our Sidewalks Day of Service with students from Millersville.  We had 10 students, our 2 interns, Betsy and myself for the day.  We started with looking at Jeremiah 2:31-37, and dug into the question of why we serve.  From there we worked with two local agencies, Beth Shalom (a ministry for women exiting prison) and Water Street Ministries (geared toward the homeless and vulnerable in Lancaster).  We spent the afternoon picking up trash, pulling weeds, and meeting neighbors.  I was again blessed by what a friendly city we live in (even with all our problems).  Then we returned home to eat dinner together, talk about the experience, and pray blessing for the people we’d met.

I wanted to fill out some thoughts on that bit from Jeremiah.  I noticed four problems in the text:

  1. We are free, and we will come to Yahweh (the Lord, God) no more.
  2. We have forgotten Yahweh.
  3. We seek other lovers (adultery against Yahweh).
  4. We kill the poor (the lifeblood of the innocent poor is on our clothes).

And in the face of these four problems, we continue to say “I am innocent; surely Yahweh’s anger has turned from me.”

So why serve?  I see service as addressing each of these issues:

  1. We are free –> in service we are servants
  2. We have forgotten Yahweh –> in service we can take the posture of remembering Yahweh
  3. We seek other lovers –>  in service we return to Yahweh
  4. We kill the poor –> in service we seek to bring life to the poor

Finally, at the end of this section of Jeremiah, we read “You will come away with your hands on your head; for Yahweh has rejected those in whom you trust , and you will not prosper through them.”  As I’ve said in earlier posts, my good postmodernist self thinks this judgment is harsh (really, any judgment is harsh).  But as I sit with this, I think, what is the end result of prosperity for Israel in the text (and really, for me in my life)?  Prosperity is what leads to that blood of the innocent poor covering my clothes.  Prosperity is linked hand in hand with oppression and murder.  I don’t like to think of it that way, but my privilege and comfort come at an expense to someone else.  Since moving to the city, I’m reminded that the cost is often on my immediate neighbors.

So what is Yahweh’s judgment?  To cut off that prosperity, which effectively cuts off my lofty ability to hurt the poor without being touched.  And why is Yahweh so decisive in this judgment?  Because my prosperity is bought in part through my affairs with other lovers, other gods.  My lovers of choice happen to be Control and Adulation, but I also dabble with Power, Sex, Money, and Image.  What is judgment?  Yahweh is rendering these lovers impotent and exposing their hollow favors for what they truly are.

Why do we serve?  I’m afraid too often it’s out of loyalty to those other lovers (such as Image, or Control).  But what if we turned away from this sort of self-serving service and returned to a simple service of regarding our neighbors as better than ourselves (the way of Jesus)?  Not out of low self-esteem, but out of a deep desire to choose judgment for ourselves, a judgment that cuts off our lovers and clears the way to return to our one true lover, Yahweh.  May it be so.

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Posted in Sidewalks urban project, South Central PA

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Jeremiah 2

Posted on September 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

A couple of reflections from Jeremiah chapter 2.  The first thing that has stuck with me is from verse 13:

“For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”

I’m as uneasy about labels of “evil” as most good postmoderns, so it’s worth my pausing with this in the midst of Jeremiah’s larger message.  I am struck by what God calls evil- it seems to me to be self-destructive tendencies.  The two evils are first, disconnecting from the source of life (think, ceasing to eat food) and then trying to fill the vacuum with a new horribly leaky system (think, only eating junk food).  This is what gets God’s ire up.  I think of my friends with small kids, and the frustration they would feel if their child swore off mom’s (or dad’s, for my fellow male chefs out there) delicious homemade dinners with delightful fresh-squeezed juice to only eat a twinkie, a candy bar, a bag of pork rinds, and their obligatory Coke.  My stomach turns just thinking about it.  But is this how I think about faith, about spirituality?  Can I wrap my head around God’s perspective, his grief in watching me reject him for spiritual junk food?

A little later in chapter 2, in verses 27-28, Jeremiah voices God’s lament further:

“But in the time of their trouble they say, ‘Come and save us!’  But where are your gods that you made for yourself?  Let them come, if they can save you, in your time of trouble.”

God comes across as a bit harsh in sticking to his boundaries.  In a sense, his judgment is to let us have (and have fully) the thing we wanted.  He lets us feast at our table of junk food, and when we are rocked with indigestion and malnutrition he points us back to that table.

Now, all this can stay nice and abstract while I think in metaphors and make arguments on God’s decency as a parent.  But bottom line, in our tangible, concrete, real world, there is evil.  There is absolute evil.  And I say that again, as a good postmodern who sees just about everything in shades of gray and in terms of “maybe” and “sort of”.

But there are absolutely evil sexual behaviors.  I remember this picture that an IJM undercover investigator took in Southeast Asia, where he’s sitting in a tourist brothel presented with five young girls (ages 8-12 or so) to choose from.  That investigator has no qualms about the nature of evil in the world.  Sex trafficking and child prostitution are evil, period.  Again, this scope may still feel abstract and far away, even while 200-300 young girls are trafficked each month (streetGRACE.org) in the state of Georgia, where my grandparents live.  And I think about the nature of me-first sexuality that runs rampant on every college campus in the United States (and I’d assert that a repressed version exists on Christian college campuses as well), and I wonder and I ask, how big of a step is it to go from campus hook-up culture to sex tourism?  American sex tourists come from somewhere, and I’d say this evil is grown and nurtured on campus.

Bringing it back to God, what is a parent’s response to their grown offspring’s sex tourism, for example?  How would you as a parent counsel?

Sex is just the beginning of gods we’ve made for ourselves, gods we’ve nurtured on campus.  We have gods of money, success, perfection, identity, and on and on.  We devote ourselves, we give ourselves, we offer ourselves to these gods.  We give God the Father our middle finger, we storm out, and we choose at best spiritual junk food and at worst spiritual poison.  As we lay gasping, we cry out for God the Father to save us.  But where are the gods we made for ourselves?

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Jeremiah 1

Posted on August 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

Last week at our area staff team meeting we studied Jeremiah page 1.  We talked a lot about Jeremiah’s appointment by God, to go, speak, pluck up, pull down, destroy, overthrow, build, and plant.  Four of these are negative actions, and only the last two are positive.  Usually we spend so much of our time in ministry just wanting to build and plant, which if we think about it, really is like wanting to construct a building on whatever happens to be there: a sinkhole, a road, a sidewalk, a dilapidated slumlord apartment.  It’s not a good idea.  Or it’s like starting to plant a garden as is, regardless of the soil condition, the drainage, the weeds that are still deeply rooted, the children from next door who like running through that particular bit of ground.  It’s not a good idea.

I resonate particularly with the planting imagery because of my green-thumb efforts this summer in our newly purchased city home.  I planted quickly, and our backyard transformed from a weed pit into a lush garden, yet several times a week I need to carefully pull out weeds, trying to uproot as completely as possible, but never quite fully.  And in front of our house, in the midst of all the concrete and pavement is a small cutout for what was a garden.  Again, I planted quickly, not anticipating the number of things that would fall into this garden (marbles, balls, bicycles, children, candy wrappers, empty bags of chips) not to mention the usual weeds growing up.

So as much as I wanted to just partake in the positive activity of planting, this accounts for a very small portion of my gardening time.  Far more time is spent plucking up, pulling down, destroying, overthrowing.  In the garden this centers around deeply rooted weeds, and in the city this includes ubiquitous bits of trash.

And I wonder, what does this look like campus, and in our ministry efforts?  What are the deeply rooted weeds of campus culture and our ministry habits?  What are the ubiquitous bits of trash that flutter around campus and in our ministry?

As we welcome a new wave of students to our campuses , these are critical questions.

What is God calling us to?

Like Jeremiah, let us be aware of our lack of qualifications, and simply trust that God is with us to deliver.

city garden

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Jeremiah

Posted on August 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

Our area staff will be studying Jeremiah this year, in particular Jeremiah 29-33.  We’d welcome you to join us.

Our area vision comes from Jeremiah 29:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:  Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.  Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.  But seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.

This is our hope, our longed for future for our slice of the world, South Central Pennsylvania, this place that is a mix of urban and rural, historic and contemporary.  As we work on the college campuses here, we see too the mix of local students with those from other states and other countries.  And we see too many students viewing their college years as a time of exile, either the idyllic exile of Animal House glory, or an inconvenient hurdle on the way to their future glory.

We see through Jeremiah that God’s call is not to avoid exile nor even suffer through it, but to invest deeply in the place where he has brought us.  To build, to plant, to grow families.  To seek shalom, that amazing word of peace and wholeness and everything-as-it-should-be.

Pray for us as we seek the shalom of our campuses, and in turn seek the shalom of South Central Pennsylvania.  Pray for us as we build and make plans and carry out strategies.  Pray for us as we plant and start with small acts and wait and watch for something beautiful to grow.

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Posted in South Central PA

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