HOW A GROUP survives under adverse conditions helps its members see and know who they truly are. These lectionary readings are instructive for politically disoriented and lamenting people groups attempting to build community in exilic situations while also finding hope in their distress.
Walls crumbled when the kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonian Empire and tribal social culture and customs ruptured. Forced migration compels ruptured communities to take stock. What carries cultural permanence and what gets reconstituted from one generation to the next helps us see that we are at our best when we recognize that our creaturely identity and divine potential are bestowed by a benevolent Creator.
In the epistles, Timothy is taught to call upon his spiritual heritage to accomplish his pastoral assignment in Ephesus, though Paul worries that Timothy’s mixed Gentile-Jewish ancestry might be more of a barrier than a blessing for him. The hope-filled message in Jeremiah is that God will make Israel a new people by forming a new covenant with them—a sustainable one, because it will be etched on their hearts.
Who are we becoming as a people? We are helped by knowing that nationalistic dogmatism and populist racialized eugenics movements cannot outlive the truth. By probing these scriptures to see how they might speak a new word for us today, we consistently learn that faith-tested people are made and remade for salvific purposes, and those who call on the name of the Lord best know it.
October 6
Death of a Nation
Lamentations 1:1-6; Psalm 137; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17: 5-10
The opening of the book of Lamentations recounts the mood of a people who sit among the ruins of Judah’s most fortified city, Jerusalem. Babylonian siege warfare—King Nebuchadnezzar’s slow and steady economic strangulation strategy—had precipitated the breach in Jerusalem’s walls. By 587 BCE, Jerusalem, a city once commercially vibrant, found its walls razed, its temple accoutrements torched, and attendance at its pilgrimage festivals brought to a halt—a sure deathblow to a divinely beloved people’s way of life. The forced migration of Judah’s elite to Babylon—its most promising minds and creative artists—marks an historic turning point for an apostate nation. Israel can no longer rely on God’s unconditional blessing of presence without moral stipulations. One covenant will soon give way to another—one with if/then clauses. Exile will be educative, and painfully so. There by the banks of the Euphrates River, lamenting past glory and homeland destruction, the exiles sat and wept before their Babylonian captors, who asked them to perform sanctuary-suited holy music, the songs of Zion (Psalm 137).
But how could the people Israel sing in a strange land? How can residents of blighted U.S. cities today sing joy songs in the face of property seizure and high rents, when the gerrymanderer’s political cunning and practices of eminent domain collude to manipulate voting processes and feed the materialistic imaginations of unprincipled investors who place profit over people?
Calling down curses on their Babylonian captors and Babylon’s Edomite mercenary militia, Psalm 137 becomes an imprecatory incantation amid the dark realities of war. In fact, what Israel recalls most palpably is not their feet-blistering trek to Babylon, but the impalement of her men and the lacerated wombs of Israelite mothers in past genocidal wars—wars waged to close off their future. What else could warrant the ghastly retort: “O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back for what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rocks” (verses 8-9).
October 13
Always Remember Jesus
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-12; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19
Remember Jesus Christ. “Remember Christ crucified and resurrected” is the non-negotiable veteran counsel Paul leaves with his spiritual son, Timothy, whose pastoral assignment in Ephesus will test his mettle. Even Paul himself subscribes to the ageless assumption that youth must learn the ropes to have community standing or voice.
At the same time, the apostle knows that the church’s future rests in the hands of the next generation. “It takes the wisdom of the elders and young people’s energy,” lyricized rap icon Common in his Grammy-winning song, “Glory,” capturing the spirit of Paul’s counsel to Timothy. A church is kept alive with Spirit-animated leadership, according to the experienced apostle. What was resident in your grandmother and mother, Paul exhorts Timothy, is now being called upon in a social environment where people will no longer hear or heed sound doctrine. To keep things simple for the young ordinand, Paul’s instruction is straightforward. When met with ungracious reception, he says to Timothy, remember that Jesus centers the church’s proclamation and empowers its witness. Still, we who serve should be vigilant in our charge, while knowing that Jesus takes full ownership of getting the gospel accomplished.
Remember Jesus. In Luke 17, 10 diseased lepers receive healing, but only one returns to say thanks. But why? The parabolic wisdom of this portrait of personal wellness and restored dignity is not simply to be thankful when Jesus heals you. Jesus also intends to teach risk-averse disciples that bringing persons to restored health means taking ostracism and marginalization seriously. Living under quarantine is one level of social death, but if the bacterium’s victim is a colonized Samaritan then that victim has suffered social malady’s double blow.
What if we are Jesus’ healing hands and feet now? What psychological barriers could we overcome and what cultural borders would we cross as first responders to 10 eager-to-be-healed Ebola victims? How close to our healing embrace are we willing to bring the culturally despised? Our refusal to demonstrate care and concern invariably will not earn us Jesus’ blessing, “your faith has made you well” (see verse 19b)—instead we will hear Jesus’ diagnostic rebuke, “your lack of faith has made you ill.”
October 20
‘I Will Be Their God’
Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14 - 4:5; Luke 18:1-8
“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts: and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31: 33). Can you comprehend a better promise? Were it not for the middle matter of the book of Jeremiah, this prophetic correspondence would be among the darkest communiques in Hebrew scripture. In the middle matter of the Hebrew scripture’s longest book, from the commonly quoted 29th chapter forward, a picture is revealed of God’s favorable plans for God’s exilic community. Israel is promised restoration and return, and these who survived the sword and found grace in the wilderness are to become recipients of God’s assurance to “make a new covenant.”
God is faithful even when we are not, and there is no truer truth than this. Interspersed with reviews of what led to Jerusalem’s destruction, the remaining sections of Jeremiah are promises of God’s judgment on the nations and cities with which Israel has had to contend. Babylon’s doom, for one, is forthcoming.
One can chock things up to ethnic favoritism, which I think is a valid reading of the text. But in doing so, one does well to also consider the sentiments of the psalmist who expresses details of what it means to be rightly postured before God and having the “law within” (Jeremiah 31:33)—”Oh, how I love your law! It is my meditation all day long” (Psalm 119:97). The fundamental idea to be grasped by postmoderns is not that God rewrites law haphazardly or condescends to coddle and console wayward human beings, but rather to see that God cares enough to make known God’s own unique capacity to annul death sentences through the power of mercy and forgiveness.
October 27
Daughters Too?
Joel 2:23-32; Psalm 65; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18; Luke 18:9-14
Yes, daughters too. The prophet Joel regales the people with a Spirit that splashes on sons and daughters alike. I have three daughters and they have voice, in more ways than one could ever imagine. Each one is unafraid to let what needs to be said known. What of these vociferous and dogmatic debates about gender roles today? Defining the merits of “gender-based complementarianism” (Google it if you are unsure what this concept means) or egalitarianism (neither of which the Bible coins) is the subject of hot discussion in some Christian circles today. God’s promise to “pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy ... even on the male and female slaves” (Joel 2:28a, 29a) is pretty unambiguous.
If the promise found in Joel that daughters as well as sons shall prophesy authorizes women “to minister the Word” and exercise authority in Spirit-animated work, then why the need for social rigidity in ecclesial contexts? The rush by some to Paul’s socially restrictive views should be tempered by Joel’s apparent egalitarianism with respect to who gets to be heard. As a point of real importance, it would be wise to see that the common ground between prophet and apostle is in their identical words for dangerous and uncertain times: “ ... everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Joel 2:32a) and Paul’s demonstrably Christ-focus version, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). If we dare to bring the Bible forward and press it into service for the living of our own terrible days, we might begin to sense that no one can afford to be silent or silenced in these death-dealing times.
Reflections on September 2019 lectionary readings can be found here. “Preaching the Word,” Sojourners’ online resource for Bible study and sermon preparation, is available at sojo.net/ptw.
Kenyatta R. Gilbert, founding director of The Preaching Project, is professor of homiletics at the Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, D.C. He is author of A Pursued Justice: Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights and Exodus Preaching: Crafting Sermons About Justice and Hope.
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