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Having acquired a taste for God’s truth, he could not return to the bland diet of gossip and rumor. All the same it was a lonely business.
is Jeremiah at prayer: scared, lonely, hurt, angry. A surprise? The indomitable Jeremiah praying like that? All of us experience these things. No one alive is a stranger to them. But do we pray them? Jeremiah prayed them. Everything he experienced and thought he set in relationship to a living, knowing, saving God. And the moment these things are set in relationship to God something begins to happen.
“Let them come over to you; don’t you go over to them” (Bright’s translation). Jeremiah was concerned about what people were saying; that is not his concern. God is his concern.
The job is either worth doing or it is not. What do I really want to do with my life—love others or flatter them, please others or please God?
it still God, in fact, with whom I have first of all to do, or is it not? Prayer is the place where the priorities are reestablished.
What we do in secret determines the soundness of who we are in public.
Prayer is the secret work that develops a life that is thoroughly authentic and deeply human.
hashkem.
shoulder. At the center of Palestine there are two immense shoulder mountains, Ebal and Gerazim.
[hashkem].
one of those times God confronted Jeremiah: “If you’re tired from running a footrace, how will you race against horses?” (Jer 12:5 Bright’s translation). What do you want, Jeremiah, a tame, domesticated life? A Sunday stroll with these bloated and cretinous people who are living like parasites? Or will you compete against horses? The confrontation galvanized Jeremiah out of his enervating despair: “I want to run with the horses.” The next morning he was again up before dawn, living persistently and urgently.
persistently”)
Jeremiah almost certainly knew Psalm 108; it would have been entirely characteristic of him to use it as a morning prayer:
resilient than it was in his youth. He wasn’t putting in his time. Every day was a new episode in the adventure of living the prophetic life. The days added up to a life of incredible tenacity, of amazing stamina.
“GOD’s loyal love couldn’t have run out, his merciful love couldn’t have dried up. They’re created new every morning. How great your faithfulness!” (Lam 3:22-23).
He had chosen what Jesus called “the one thing needful”—listening, attentively and believingly, to God.
Commands assume freedom and encourage response. Addressed by commands we are trained in response-ability.
the moment when it is remotely possible that a whole generation might have learned something both of theory and practice, the learners and their learning are removed by death, and the Church is confronted with the necessity of beginning all over again. The whole labour of regenerating mankind has to begin again every thirty years or so.”6 In this case, it was seventeen years.
His language, as described by George Adam Smith, is “terse, concrete, poignant and graceful.”8 We live on the gossip of the moment and the rumors of the hour. It is not as if we never hear the truth at all, but we don’t
Butler’s Practical Guide to Boat-Building.
Along with the sixty-four other books that have been added to them, they continue to present the word of God to shipwrecked people and to construct a way of salvation.
The crowd did not dictate his message. The crowd did not shape his
He became what Søren Kierkegaard, himself a strikingly Jeremiah-like figure, called, “the single one, the individual.”3
How can people who are conditioned to a life of distraction and indulgence be moved to live at their best, to be artists of the everyday, to plunge into life and not loiter on the fringes?
Their way of life was not formed out of historical conditions but out of centuries of devotion. The ancient command, not the current headline, gave them their identity. That word shaped and preserved their proud traditions as skilled craftsmen. Neither the hospitality of a kind host nor the customs of the city where they had come for sanctuary could distract them from what was essential: that they were a commanded people, that they were a disciplined people. Jonadab’s 250-year-old command carried far more weight with them than Jeremiah’s immediate friendship. The discipline that made it
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Commanded people
was not the specific details of the Recabite life that were held up but that they lived in obedience to a command and lived with integrity in a discipline. The essence of Jeremiah’s message here
Why will you not let God’s command develop in you a life of holy obedience instead of letting the crowd drag you into a sloppy indolence? “The descendants of Jonadab son of Recab carried out to the letter what their ancestor commanded them, but this people ignores me.”
moral level of our society is shameful. The spiritual integrity of our culture is an embarrassment. Any part of our lives that is turned over to the crowd makes it and us worse. The larger the crowd, the smaller our lives. Pliny the Elder once said that the Romans, when they couldn’t make a building beautiful, made it big. The practice continues to be popular: If we can’t do it well, we make it larger. We add dollars to our income, rooms to our houses, activities to our schedules, appointments to our calendars. And the quality of life diminishes with each addition.
“When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen. “When you come looking for me, you’ll find me.”
if it be asked how a society so crude, imperfect, unmoral, and even immoral as that in which we live is to mould a personality truly moral, it is here that Christ comes to the rescue with the gift to faith both of an active Spirit and of a society complete in Himself. PETER T. FORSYTH1
experience from time to time. Inner experiences of exile take place even if we never move from the street on which we were brought up. We are exiled from the womb and begin life in strange and harsh surroundings. We are exiled from our homes at an early age and find ourselves in the terrifying and demanding world of school. We are exiled from school and have to make our way the best we can in the world of work. We are exiled from our hometowns and have to find our way in new states and cities. These experiences
Exile
But this very strangeness can open up new reality to us. An accident, a tragedy, a disaster of any kind can force the realization that the world is not predictable, that reality is far more extensive than our habitual perception of it. With the pain and in the midst of alienation a sense of freedom can occur. FALSE DREAMS
Pain
Welfare: shalom. Shalom means wholeness, the dynamic, vibrating health of a society that pulses with divinely directed purpose and surges with life-transforming love. Seek the shalom and pray for it. Throw yourselves into the place in which you find yourselves, but not on its terms, on God’s terms. Pray. Search for that center in which God’s will is being worked out (which is what we do when we pray) and work from that center.
George Eliot, in her novel Felix Holt, has a brilliantly appropriate comment on this question: “Everything’s wrong says he. That’s a big text. But does he want to make everything right? Not he. He’d lose his text.”5
Or we can say: “I will do my best with what is here. Far more important than the climate of this place, the economics of this place, the neighbors in this place, is the God of this place. God is here with me. What I am experiencing right now is on ground that was created by him and with people whom he loves. It is just as possible to live out the will of God here as any place else. I am full of fear. I don’t know my way around. I have much to learn. I’m not sure I can make it. But I had feelings like that back in Jerusalem. Change is hard. Developing intimacy among strangers is always a risk.
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When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen. When you come looking for me you’ll find me.” Jeremiah habitually used words greatly, but never more so than in these sentences.
When you come looking for me, you will find me.
They did not lose their identity; they discovered it. They learned how to pray in deeper and more life-changing ways than ever.
They lost everything that they thought was important and found what was important: they found God.
They embraced the everyday, but did not become absorbed in it. They did not let the duties and routines of life dull them: they prayed and they searched. The search paid off: they noticed the texture of life; they became responsive to the many subtleties just waiting for an eye to notice them, an ear to listen to them, a mind to find them worthy of attention.
Exile pushed them from the margins of life to the vortex where all the issues of life and death, love and meaning, purpose and value formed the dynamic, everyday, participation-demanding realities of God’s future with them.
of us are given moments, days, months, years of exile. What will we do with them? Wish we were someplace else? Complain? Escape into fantasies? Drug ourselves into oblivion? Or build and plant and marry and seek the shalom of the place we inhabit and the people we are with? Exile reveals what really matters and frees us to pursue what really matters, which is to seek the Lord with all our hearts.
People didn’t like that. They kept trying to find ways to avoid the reality of judgment, to think in other categories than those of right and wrong, sin and irresponsibility. One of their substitute ways of thinking was in terms of loyalty and disloyalty. Patriotism
Judgement
was a man who used his job to escape his responsibilities as a person. He was a bureaucrat in the worst sense of the word, a person who hides behind the rules and prerogatives of a job description to do work that destroys people. Without considering morality or righteousness, God or person, he did his job. We meet these people all the time. And there are more and more jobs like this all the time. Every day people are hurt and demeaned by officeholders who refuse to look us in the eye, shielding
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe him.6 Incalculable evil comes from these unlikely sources: quiet,
Zedekiah shows that good intentions are worthless if they are not coupled with character development. We don’t become whole persons by merely wanting to become whole, by consulting the right prophets, by reading the right book. Intentions must mature into commitments if we are to become persons with definition, with character, with substance.
Character
“One friend in a lifetime is much,” wrote Henry Adams, “two are many; three are hardly possible.”7 Jeremiah had three.
abstract but were worked out with persons, persons with names. He never used labels that lumped people into depersonalized categories. It can come as no surprise to find that there are more personal names in the book of Jeremiah than in any other prophetic book.8
applaud the emphasis. This claim to be practical is a basic stance of biblical faith. It can be fairly stated, in fact, that biblical and practical are essentially synonymous. If it is practical, it is biblical; if it is biblical, it is practical. Biblical faith rejects, fiercely and unhesitatingly, any conduct or thinking that diminishes our ability to function as human beings in time and space. Ideas that drive a wedge between God and creation are false. Prayers or acts of devotion that divert or incapacitate us from the here and now are spurious. Biblical faith everywhere and always warns
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God’s next project for Israel, an investment that, as we now know, paid off admirably. “As long as matters are really hopeful,” wrote Chesterton, “hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.”5
God is not against you; he is for you. God has not rejected you; he is working with you. “A time of deep trouble for Jacob—but he’ll come out of it alive” (Jer 30:7). “So why all this self-pity, licking your wounds? . . . As for you, I’ll come with healing, curing the incurable”
