A Bad Taste In Your Mouth

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
10.21.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Jeremiah 31:27-34

It’s been one of those days. We all have those days. It’s late one evening and you come home from a day that’s left you utterly spent, feeling like a cell phone on it’s last hopeless red bar of battery juice, feeling like you were the only donor to show up at the blood drive of the Transylvanian Red Cross. You fumble with your keys, your mind a blurry haze. When you finally get into the house, just shambling to the sofa and collapsing is more than you’re sure you can manage. You drop your stuff on the floor, and then you realize...oh...I’m really, really hungry. Did you even eat lunch? You were so busy today, you can’t even remember. Maybe you did. Or maybe that was yesterday. You’re too tired to tell. But you haven’t been shopping in over a week. Is there even any food in the house? It’s not like you were planning to whip up some crepe suzette, but you don’t even have the energy to get on the phone and order pizza. And you’re hungry right now. In 45 minutes, you might not even be awake to answer the door.

There’s gotta be something in the fridge.

So to the fridge you go. You open up the icebox, and a stale rush of cold air pours over you. The freezer’s pretty much empty, the last of the frozen meals having been the last thing you can remember eating. There’s a half a tub of generic Rocky Road, and an ancient bag of frostbitten peas that looks like it might have been found buried next to the ice-hardened body of a mummified Siberian mammoth. You open up the fridge. There’s a random assortment of tupperware containers. Hmmm. How old is that soup? You think back. Well...how long have you lived there? Better pass on that one. Near the rear of the top shelf, though, there’s a Chinese carryout container. It looks pretty recent. Was that last week you got Chinese? Or was that last month? Must have been last week.

You pop open the container. It’s three-quarters full. What was this again? Special Kung Pao Big Happy Family Shrimp? Something like that. Is it still any good? You give it a sniff. You’re not sure. You drop it in the microwave, nuke it for a minute, and take a taste. Hmm. Still not sure. You keep eating. Still not sure.

But when you wake up at three that morning, you’re sure. Whatever microorganisms had made that shrimp their Big Happy Family home are now blissfully reproducing in your digestive tract. Your entire gut feels distended, bloated, like it’s filled with a solid churning mass of undead shrimp, wriggling and poking about with their little sharp legs and fluttering their tails. And the taste in your mouth seems to rise up from deep within, filling your throat and your sinuses with a heady cocktail of decay and mealy white crustacean flesh. It’s going to be a fun night.

When you finally come out on the far side, even after gargling your way through a bathtub’s worth of Listerine, that...taste...will be with you for days. The sense memory of that taste will last far longer. You may never even be able to look at a shrimp again.

The prophet Jeremiah knew all about bad tastes that lingered. He lived at a time when everything that the Hebrew people had hoped and dreamed for had gone sour, turning to bitter foulness in their mouths.

After the collapse of the Assyrian empire in 627 BCE and the death of it’s last emperor, Ashurbanipal, the people of Judah had hoped that they would finally be free. Judah and all of the other nations that had been enslaved by Assyria rose up in revolution. Led by the wise and noble King Josiah, the people of Judah re-established worship of the God of Israel, and hoped for independence. But it was not to be. In 609 BCE, Josiah was killed by the Egyptians at the battle of Har-Meggido, as the Pharoah’s army raced up to aid what was left of Assyria in it’s struggle against the new power that was rising in the region.

That power was the Babylonian Empire. Judah found itself enslaved again, under a more brutal master than before. All of it’s efforts to rise again were brutally crushed, until in the year 587 BCE the Babylonians finally destroyed Jerusalem completely, tearing down the temple and scattering the people to the four winds.

Jeremiah lived and preached in those last, terrible days before the collapse. He was not a popular man in Judah, because he proclaimed that to resist Babylon out of national pride would result in complete destruction. At best, he was seen as a prophet of doom, a weeping prophet, a proclaimer of despair. At worst, his fellow Judeans saw him as a collaborator and a traitor. How dare you undercut us? How dare you subvert the will of the king and say we shouldn’t fight!? He was imprisoned. He was thrown into pits. His life was threatened.

But a funny thing happens to Jeremiah’s preaching. Before the destruction of Judah began to finally unfold, Jeremiah’s teachings were all about challenge, warning, and wrath. As soon as the horrible things the Lord had proclaimed through him began to happen, though, Jeremiah’s whole tone changes. Instead of shouting out rebukes, or telling the people “Hah! I told you you deserved this,” Jeremiah suddenly starts speaking words of comfort and reassurance, and challenging the despair that overcame his defeated people.

The common saying that Jeremiah challenged in this morning’s passage was a fine example of how far the spirits of the Hebrew people had fallen. The saying went like this: “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The people of Judah had utterly lost hope, and believed that they were doomed to be punished for the failures of those who had come before them. They were convinced that the suffering they were going through was God’s punishment for all that Judah had done before. What was the point? There could be no escape for them. They were trapped by what had gone before. The taste of inherited sin lingered in their mouths.

Jeremiah challenged this hopelessness. Yes, there’d been destruction. Yes, the people hadn’t listened. But Jeremiah proclaimed God’s word that sin is not something that lingers, not something that God holds against a people in perpetuity. The people of Judah couldn’t allow themselves to imagine that God would condemn them for things they hadn’t done, or snare them in a trap that was not of their own making. Other prophets shared Jeremiah’s proclamation of hope. The entire 18th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel ..who lived at the same time as Jeremiah...is dedicated to attacking this hopeless saying.

That sense of hopelessness that Jeremiah and Ezekiel battled wasn’t just restricted to ancient Judah. Many of us bear within us that same despair...either consciously or subconsciously. We feel trapped by our past, trapped and condemned by things that have come before.

This happens in so many ways. In an era when so many children have watched parents struggle through the collapse of their marriages, there is a sense of being trapped by the past. How can I ever make it work? We can feel trapped by the expectations of our culture, channeled into broken ways of living that we know are wrong but feel we cannot escape. This isn’t the life I wanted...but there’s nothing I can do.

It isn’t just our ancestry or our culture that traps us. It can be our own past, the sour chapters in the story of our own lives. We feel we can’t break out of old patterns of doing things, that we’re forced to live our future based on the ways we have fallen short in the past. “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” How many have watched a relationship filled with hope and love go sour, and then yielded to the despair that whispers in your ear, ”It can never work for you again. You’re too flawed, too broken, too poisoned.” Old angers, old biases, old jealousies and conflicts and bitterness, those things in our past can become that sinful parent, and it is too easy for us to imagine our future as that doomed child of bitterness, trapped forever by the way things were.

But that is not God’s desire for us. That flavor of bitterness, that sense of being pinned under the weight of your past, that is not what God seeks for any of us. We are each called instead to cast aside that saying, to refuse to let the past turn us from the future that we are each called to discover. Ask yourself...what sour flavors color your life now, what bitter taste poisons your hope? What stands in your past that prevents you from moving towards your future? None of those things...not one of them...are from God. There is a feast of hope set before you, a table open to anyone willing to step forward and partake. Hear Jeremiah. Take heart, and taste the goodness of a new life.