Poolesville Presbyterian Church
03.25.12; Rev. David Williams
Few things are more exhausting as a parental unit than having to lay down the law, again and again and again. There’s a basic order to things in a functioning household, you say. There are just certain requirements and obligations if we’re to keep things running smoothly and together.
You try to teach some of these basic principles to your progeny. Socks do not belong on the kitchen table. Towels do not live in a moist pile on the floor of your room. Getting out more-or-less on time is of more importance than racking up another three-thousand points in Battlefield Three. College admissions officers aren’t particularly impressed by how many virtual MVP ribbons you’ve racked up, last time I checked.
And yet the socks still seem to spontaneously generate in the living room, appearing from out of nowhere like stinky white tube sock tribbles beamed onto a Klingon warbird. The towels sit in moist piles, and sometimes seem to have been sitting there so long that they might evolve into their own form of life. At least then they might start crawling their way back to the bathroom under their own power.
But then there are the days it works. You awake to a tween cheerily making his own breakfast, and a teen taking a shower without you so much as having to mention it. Not even once. Teeth are getting brushed. Hair is getting brushed. Clothing that hasn’t been worn five days in a row is being put on. Homework is done and more-or-less in the place it needs to be so it’ll get turned in. Life is flowing smoothly. Things are as they should be, not because you’re micromanaging every last moment, but because things are just...well...as they should be.
Like when my teenage son went out on a long afternoon walk to a nearby collector card store this Friday afternoon. About twenty minutes after he’d left, the phone rings, and it’s him, calling to let me know he’d decided to chill at a coffeeshop for a few minutes while he sipped a root beer on a warm spring day. But he didn’t want me to worry. I’ll be a few more minutes. Is that cool? And as you say, yeah, sure, you think to yourself, what? I didn’t even have to ask?
When those patterns of life that make life good aren’t something external, but are written into the heart of a person, that’s when you know things are really working.
The prophet Jeremiah knew all about what worked and what didn’t work. He knew all about the place of rules and law.
Following the destruction 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 of imperial oppression. 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 destruction of Judah. He was not a popular man in Judah, because he proclaimed that to resist Babylon out of national pride would result in complete destruction. The visions he received from God were relentlessly negative and challenging. 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 traitor. How dare you undercut us? How dare you tell us that God will not always support us no matter what we do!? He was imprisoned. He was thrown into pits, actually and physically. His life was threatened.
But a funny thing happens to Jeremiah’s preaching as he was proven right. 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, booyah, in yo’ face!” Jeremiah suddenly starts speaking words of comfort and reassurance, and challenging the despair that overcame his inevitably defeated people.
In the face of hopelessness, Jeremiah assured the people that even though temple and king and the instruments of the power of the state were crumbling, there would come a day when none of that mattered. That was never, and is never, a source of real and meaningful power.
In today’s passage, Jeremiah tells the people that even though the power of king and temple and nation that enforced the law has crumbled, God’s intent for his people goes deeper than that. The law that connects us to God, Jeremiah declared, was not going to be rooted in an external covenant. God’s best intent for us goes deeper than that, into the heart of who we are as people. If we embrace the law of God, it’s not something outside of us. It’s woven into our persons. It’s an essential part of our identity. The knowledge of the right and the good isn’t a question of outside forces and powers. It needs to be an integral part of us.
I was thinking about that as I stood in my kitchen, and out the window watched my teenage son returning from his Friday walk. As he came loping down the hill, long legs and easy strides, a shaggy mop of hair over sharp blue eyes, all on top of a broadening, ever-growing frame, I thought how much he’s internalized the things I’ve taught him. But I also thought about another teen, and another walk, and the law.
My teenage son can walk my neighborhood without fear. Sure, the world tells us to be afraid, that there is terror all around, but this is just because frightened, anxious people are more likely to watch ad-driven news. I’m not afraid for him. I have not needed to teach him to be paranoid as he moves through the world.
But if you look different, if that difference is a look that we’ve been trained to fear, then things become very different. Things go very wrong. The story of Trayvon Martin has been all over our national consciousness this last week, as well it should be. He was a teenager, like any other teen. His only mistake, and it wasn’t really a mistake, was to walk through a neighborhood in which an armed man prowled the streets. For that, for the crime of being black and walking home with a bag of Skittles and an iced-tea, he paid with his life. My son is not black. But that does not mean I lack the capacity to see what occurred that day, or the capacity to feel a father’s pain at the pointless death of a son.
Two laws failed Trayvon that day in late February. The first was the law of the state of Florida, as understood and enforced. No law can ever justify the preemptive killing of an innocent. Even if the now-infamous “stand your ground” law was not meant to allow you to stalk, approach, and gun down someone who stirs your fears, that it could be construed that way is a legislative failing. But honestly, that misbegotten law was not the deepest failing. The law that failed when Trayvon Martin was killed was the law written in the heart of George Zimmerman.
I will not pretend to know the fullness of that human being. From what is public record, it seems clear enough that all was not well. In ways that mattered, George Zimmerman carried within him beliefs that laid the groundwork for the death of an unarmed young man.
Because not everything we make a part of us speaks into God’s love or God’s justice. We can be guided by biased assumptions about race. We can be governed by fear and paranoia and the desire to prove our worth through power. A heart ruled by those things will act in ways that diminish life and cause harm.
Seeing another pointless killing might lead to despair. Has nothing changed, we might ask? In some ways, it hasn’t. We still cling to laws and to the power of force, imagining that it will make everything better. It never has.
But the days are surely coming, says the Lord through Jeremiah, when we’ll live differently. The days are surely coming, we hear, when what is written on us isn’t power and fear, but the heart of grace and forbearance and love that is the essence of covenant. And like the best of possible parents, God will lay down that law for us, over and over again, until we have finally really heard.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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