I have really appreciated reading the prophet Jeremiah over the last several weeks, as selections from that book have been set in the Daily Office Lectionary. Jeremiah was active for around 40 years, from about 627 BC until sometime after 587 BC. That means he witnessed a lot of what happened just prior to, during, and after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians; he covers a lot of ground. As the introduction to the book in the Common English Bible Study Bible notes: “Written for survivors of war and exile, the book is filled with pain and trauma. It bears witness to three Babylonian military invasions, resulting in the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and the royal palace complex, the taking of land, and the death and exile of thousands of people.” (p. 1205). And, so, as the commentator then writes, “The book of Jeremiah is disaster literature . . . but it is also survival literature. It is a survival guide for a suffering people . . .” (p. 1206).
In that regard, a passage that really hit home for me a few weeks ago was Jeremiah 4.27: “The LORD proclaims: The whole earth will become a desolation, but I will not destroy it completely.” I have to assume that there’s a little hyperbole there; I doubt that God (or Jeremiah) was referring to the whole earth in this passage. But, in the experience of Jeremiah, all that had provided stability was going, going, gone. And, that said, the passage did hit home for me in this time of pandemic, when much of what has provided stability for us has taken a huge body blow, and won’t come back in the same way, as much as most would like it. We’ve all felt it in numerous ways—corporately, and individually. We can identify with the description of Jeremiah as “disaster literature”! But the verse doesn’t end in disaster; there is a glimmer of hope: “I will not destroy it completely.”
Jeremiah didn’t live to see the exiles return from Babylon. He didn’t experience all the ways that they changed while there. And yet he could recognize—and said so—that God had something more in mind for the Jewish people. The exiles had to figure out how to worship without the Temple. They had to learn what it meant to be “ritually” pure in an impure country. They had to learn how to be, and how to worship as, a minority. And, so, when they returned to rebuild Jerusalem, certainly the Temple was first-and-foremost. But they also brought back with them the beginnings of what became the synagogue—worship built around a different set of assumptions, grounded, not in sacrifice, but in prayer and study. And it was out of that development that modern Judaism, as well as Christianity, eventually evolved. The “earth became a desolation," but it was not “destroyed completely."
Here, Jeremiah becomes survival literature. And I have to think that, if he’d lived to see it, he would have continued to write, and scholars would describe his later writings as a “literature of hope and renewal." And, just as we could see ourselves in the “disaster," we would see ourselves in the “hope.” We would see the Church coming back from COVID with the intent to “rebuild the Temple," but also with the experience and energy to engage in practices learned while we were exiled, such as ZOOM and digital church. And we could see that, just as the Jerusalem Temple and the synagogue co-existed, so we will find that some of our former patterns of being “church” will coexist productively with new patterns.
Building (or even re-building) is a challenge. Any contractor will tell you that there are always unknowns, some strange little “hitches and glitches” that demand attention and creativity.
We’re up to the challenge!