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DonateNovember 25, 2001 | See also: [Year C Archive] |
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Psalm 46
Jeremiah’s prophesies are not apocalyptic. Hence process theologians can take them much more straightforwardly. Jeremiah is hoping that a descendant of David will assume the throne of Israel and create a nation to which the widely dispersed Jews can return. He pronounced this vision of a hopeful future at a very low period of Israel’s condition. All of its leaders had been carried into exile or had fled to Egypt. Israel and Judah as nations had ceased to exist. Although Jeremiah had repeatedly predicted doom because of bad policies by the rulers in Jerusalem, once the worst came to be, he prophesied hope. One is reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr’s assertion that our preaching should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
Of course, if we take Jeremiah as a diviner who is predicting just what will happen in the future, we will have to judge that he was not very accurate. Nevertheless, at a deeper level, his prophesies worked. Judah, if not Israel, was reestablished and many exiles returned to live there. Jeremiah’s prophesy may have helped to keep alive the hope that led to this historic occurrence. It is a model for how those of us in the prophetic tradition should speak today.
When our nation is complacent, we need to warn against the evils that its own arrogance is bringing upon it. We must speak of the dangers of isolating ourselves and ignoring the conscience and concerns of human kind. Perhaps we should use some of the vivid images of punishment and destruction that are so common in the prophets.
When the destruction comes upon us, we do well to continue with interpretation, pointing out the ways in which we have contributed to the conditions that made the event possible. But it is also time to project a vision of hope. We will know that the picture we propose will never be fully realized. But without vision the people perish. The presence of a positive vision of what the future could hold may help to keep hope alive and to make more likely that some positive reality will emerge from the negative. Without a hopeful vision people feel trapped in pursuing destructive lines of activity and fighting one another for the goods that still remain.
What vision of hope might work for us as Jeremiah’s vision of a restored Davidic monarchy worked for the Jews of the exile? Like Jeremiah, our vision will be of restoration of what the attack on September 11 took away from us. Above all, this was a sense of collective safety. We knew that personal life is never safe. There are accidents and diseases. There are muggings and rapes. Some Americans knew that they might be victims of hate crimes. We even knew that there were angry people among us who shot up schools and blew up office buildings. We knew that planes were sometimes hi-jacked. We did not suppose ourselves as individuals to be entirely safe.
But all of this was in the context of feeling safe as a nation. Our enemies were far away and relatively weak in comparison with our military, political, and economic might. Wars were fought elsewhere. September 11 shattered those illusions. Americans came to know a different kind of vulnerability, a collective one, one all too familiar to many of the world’s peoples.
If we follow Jeremiah’s lead, we will prophesy the coming of a day when there will again be a sense of national security. But his example warns us against moving too quickly in that direction. We might support the illusion that by destroying those terrorist organizations now dedicated to attack us we would achieve that security. We might seem to be uncritically on the side of a war against a particular group of terrorists a war that brings terror to many for the sake of reducing their ability to bring terror to us. We might be heard as affirming the possibility that in a world in which so many have no security, we could be secure.
Jeremiah did not support the optimism that came when the Babylonians first withdrew from Jerusalem. It was only when the Jews were truly brought low that the word of hope was spoken. Let us hope that we do not have to witness such a plight for our own people. But let us also recognize that we will never attain true security by unilaterally imposing our will on others, thereby intensifying their hatred of us. Our hopeful vision must be of a world in which all people are secure, not just Americans. That means that we cannot envision simply the restoration of the situation before September 11. Our hope must be for something much better than that.
Freedom from fear of attack by external enemies is not enough to constitute a truly hopeful vision. We must envision also a world in which people are secure from hunger and pestilence as well. These are chiefly by-products of extreme poverty. We must envision a world that has overcome degrading forms of poverty.
This is an ambitious hope. Through most of history those with power have taken from the peasants and workers most of what was not necessary to their survival. The poor have been kept poor. Jesus assumed that we would always have the poor with us. Only in the latter half of the twentieth century have we had whole nations that virtually abolished poverty. This was true of Japan and to a lesser extent of Taiwan and Singapore. It was true of a number of countries in northern Europe. Since 1980, economic globalization has undercut this success to some degree, and once again many methods are being developed to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. Nevertheless, the possibility has been demonstrated. As we develop our vision of hope for the future, it will be for a world in which degrading poverty has been abolished. That, of course, will contribute greatly to the reduction of violence and to the security of all.
Meanwhile we have come to realize that a great threat to our security comes from the ecological degradation of the planet. Humanity is threatened by shortages and pollution. Our grandchildren will live in a more precarious and dangerous relation to the natural world than the one we have taken for granted. Against these changes we wave the banner of sustainability. Our vision of hope must contain this element as well. There can be no long-term solution to the problems of international hostility and poverty without a style of live that allows the natural environment to flourish. Unfortunately, a primarily military response to the terrorist attack upon us will only makes more difficult this shift to sustainable living.
The hopeful vision I have sketched is already in the minds of many. It guides responses to many of the concrete issues that face us. Whereas so many of our leaders measure progress by economic growth alone, popular understanding is increasingly affirming the need for other measures. As Christians we cannot support the service of wealth as the organizing principle of society and international life. We have a profound responsibility to challenge that idolatry and offer a much richer vision of a hopeful future.
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