Jeremiah 2.1-13: 1The word of the Lord came to me, saying: 2Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem, Thus says the Lord: I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown. 3Israel was holy to the Lord, the first fruits of his harvest. All who ate of it were held guilty; disaster came upon them, says the Lord.
4 Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of
7I brought you into a plentiful land to eat its fruits and its good things. But when you entered you defiled my land, and made my heritage an abomination. 8The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’ Those who handle the law did not know me; the rulers transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal, and went after things that do not profit.
9Therefore once more I accuse you, says the Lord, and I accuse your children’s children. 10Cross to the coasts of Cyprus and look, send to Kedar and examine with care; see if there has ever been such a thing. 11Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. 12Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, 13for 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.
Six hundred years before Jeremiah’s time, God rescued Israel from their slavery in Egypt, guided them through forty years of wandering in the deserts of the Sinai peninsula and the land east of the Jordan River, and finally showed them the way to the land of Canaan, where they were told to make their home and simply be faithful to the God who had done so much for them. But the whole time, while God was faithfully, lovingly caring for the people, the people were rebelling against God. They complained about the uncertainty of their new life under God’s protection; they bowed down to a golden calf while God and Moses held a parley on the mountaintop; they begged for a king like all the nations around them instead of trusting in God to provide. They took for granted the great beneficence of God and regarded their situation as one of their own making – and they paid the price for it when the Assyrians and the Babylonians destroyed their kingdom and sent the people of
This is not just
Did you notice the imagery in the first verse of the reading from Jeremiah? “I remember the devotion of your youth,” says God, “your love as a bride.” Even those of you who aren’t married know how the traditional vows go: “to honor and cherish, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, until death parts us.” Every wedding I’ve ever attended has used some form of that promise – and it’s no coincidence that Jeremiah uses the image of marriage here. The single most notable characteristic of the best marriages is not compatible personalities or physical attraction or sexual satisfaction or economic stability: what marks the best marriages is enduring trust in all circumstances. Even if you’re not married, think of your own friendships and your families: you know that the most rewarding relationships you have are the ones where trust endures to the point of being absolute and unshakeable, whether times are good or bad, rich or poor, whether you’re sick or healthy. It is this trust that God wants to create within us, too – a trust that endures through strikeouts and homeruns alike.
Martin Luther once wrote “By the wedding ring of faith [Jesus] shares in the sins, death and pains of hell which are His bride’s. As a matter of fact, he makes them His own and acts as if they were His own and as if He himself had sinned; he suffered, died and descended into hell that he might overcome them all…Thus the believing soul by means of the pledge of its faith is free in Christ, its bridegroom, free from all sins, secure against death and hell, and is endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ its bridegroom.”[1] But like all of our relationships, we can only know the strength of Christ’s promise by living it out in the real world. When troubles come and sorrows multiply, I know that in Christ I have a God who bears the load with me, step by step, and will never leave me or forsake me – even though I’ve left and forsaken Him time and again. If this truly is a marriage, then I’m the one with the loving spouse, and He is the one with the cheater – and it seems to me that God takes the vows much more seriously than any other god I know.
I can’t tell you that life will get better because we trust in God, that you’ll have more things or be more beautiful or drive a nicer car. I can’t tell you that because that’s not how this works. Relationships are complicated things, even the best of them, and no relationship works like a vending machine. If you’re looking for a God who can give you stuff then you’ve come to the wrong place tonight, because that’s not the God we believe in here. I can only tell you that in the God of Israel, the God of love and self-sacrifice, the God I know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I have found a God worthy of all the trust and worship I can muster, and in Christ alone do I know peace and joy, because this God has taken me in, with all my sin and death and evil, and given me nothing but life in return. As Luther wrote, “Here this rich and divine bridegroom Christ marries this poor, wicked harlot, redeems her from all her evil, and adorns her with all his goodness. Her sins cannot now destroy her, since they are laid upon Christ and swallowed up by him. And she has righteousness in Christ, her husband, of which she may boast as of her own and which she can confidently display alongside her sins in the face of death and hell and say, ‘If I have sinned, yet my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned, and all his is mine and all mine is his.’ As the bride in the Song of Solomon says, ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his.’”[2] Now that’s a promise that hold water – may you come to trust in the One who gives you that promise, and may you love living in that promise, now and always. Amen.
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