Fr Mark Schultz (Copy)

Dear Friend,

In our reading from Jeremiah this morning, the Prophet has difficult words for the people of Jerusalem: the city is going to be destroyed.

That a prophet should speak difficult words isn’t particularly new. Look at Amos, for instance: he’s likely the earliest of the prophets whose testimony we have, and his writings are filled with bitter, dire and difficult words (he’s also rhetorically mesmerizing and just plain brilliant). So acerbic is Amos’ vision, though, that many scholars believe that the happy ending to his book is probably a later addition tacked on to make the rest of the prophecy a little more bearable!

I suspect, though, that there are at least two reasons why Jeremiah’s words are so difficult to hear. First: Jeremiah affirms that God desires repentance. God is not at all interested in people perpetuating a status quo of oppression and injustice—in fact, God finds such behavior abhorrent and demands that the people change their ways. Repentance means radical change, means an undoing of the status quo, means, as the Collect for Social Justice states, “to contend against evil, and to make no peace with oppression” (BCP, pg 260). As Rabbi Abraham Heschel put it in his 1972 essay “The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement”: “Indifference to evil is worse that evil itself. […] The Prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings [… and] in regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are responsible.”

There’s something about this first idea that might strike us as familiar, as just the sort of thing that a prophet would say. But the second reason why Jeremiah’s words are so difficult is perhaps harder to hear, even as it re-enforces the first—indeed, what seemed to offend the leadership of Jerusalem most about Jeremiah’s words was this second point that made the first so unignorable. And that second reason is this: nothing we build will last if it’s not built on God’s righteousness and built in us by God’s grace. Nothing of mere human ingenuity or craftiness or skill is eternal. Only God is eternal. Which is to say, if what we do does not participate in and come from the goodness and love of God, you can bet it won’t last.

This is something of a reality check. Despite our pretensions to eternity, we’re mortal and so are our works. The more we insist otherwise, the more we become blind to the ways by which God is calling us to participate in God’s own divine and eternal life; the more we fail to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. We may build some grand and glittering cities, lofty towers, mighty walls, thriving economies…but it will all be undone in the end insofar as the justice and righteousness of God have been alienated from it, insofar as Love has had no part in it.

This is why the salutary reminder of Ash Wednesday that we are dust and to dust we shall return is something we need to hear. This is why the reminder that we and all our works are frail and liable to crumble is actually good news: it means there's a chance for us to wake up to what’s Real; it means there’s an end to injustice; it means that’s it’s possible, with God, to make a new beginning in righteousness, to receive the grace of transformed lives, to humbly live the Life that God desires for us that is, in fact, inseparable from God’s own life. It means repentance can become a live possibility, that love can live in us, that justice and righteousness can live in and through us. Thanks be to God!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+