Was Jeremiah complaining about his life, or grieving for his nation?

 Christmas II, 2022 sermon delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville KY

Text: Jeremiah 31:7-14

If you take the time to read the whole book of Jeremiah, you’ll find that it is depressing. Jeremiah was not a happy person. He was not someone you would want to invite to a party. He wrote pages and pages of criticism and in fact, his writing left such an impression that there’s a term for a long list of woes and complaints: a jeremiad. Yet, in the middle of this really depressing book of gloom and doom are three chapters expressing hope and joy, and our Old Testament reading this morning comes from one of those chapters. Those three chapters are called the Book of Comfort because they provide a sense of comfort and relief from the negative story and laments of the previous chapters. After hearing Jeremiah recount how God is punishing Israel for the sins of its inhabitants, we hear about a future where people are happy, and celebrating the goodness of grain and wine and oil, among other things in their lives.

Jeremiah’s complaints express the grief that he experiences in his life. He and his people were conquered by the Babylonians and taken away to a distant place as slaves, a place where the language and religion were different. He has not necessarily had someone in his family or circle of friends die, but he has experienced the loss of his country, his culture, and even his language. Judaism at that time was closely tied to the land it had called home for centuries. Taking people out of it would have been like moving people in Louisville away from the Ohio river valley to a different place with a different language, and telling them that this was now where Louisville was located.

Such an event for us who live here would create grief, but not grief as we are familiar with it, from experiencing a death. We would feel a deep, melancholy yearning to return to the river valley and the Falls of the Ohio. We would experience unexplained anger, frustration with small inconveniences, obsession over small details of how life used to be, and accusations of who isn’t a true Louisvillian. We would try to console each other at the same time that we would express hatred for those who took us away from our homeland. But the thing is, we are experiencing those feelings now, never having left this community we live in. We are grieving a loss, but we can’t easily say what it is that we’ve lost. It makes our experience even more confusing and intense than it would be if we knew what we had lost. In reading about and listening to people’s feelings over the past few years in the media, online, and in conversations, I hear grief over the loss of the familiar things we grew up with: places, morals, and attitudes. I hear grief from being surrounded by more and more people unfamiliar to us, and over a loss of identity because our community is changing. This grief is real, expressed by people who truly feel that way, and it must not be trivialized by saying something like “Hey, life goes on,” or “You’ll get over it.”

As hurtful as discounting grief is by saying that life goes on, there is a small, core truth to those words: that grief is a place to pass through, not a place to stay, not a place to live in. Permanent nostalgia is not a healthy way of living life because it keeps us from working through the hardest part of grief: accepting the reality of what we have little or no control over. I think that’s why the Book of Comfort appears in the middle of Jeremiah’s laments. Jeremiah is saying that we can’t give up participating in life by living in the past. He is saying that there is hope for the future, but that the future won’t look like the past. Joy and a full life are possible even though the future will be different than what we’ve been used to, or what we thought life would be like once we got there. It is a matter of looking for, or being willing to look for where God is present in the world as it is now, and being willing to accept that something that looks different can also be a part of God’s will. We cannot dictate to God how we think the world ought to be, and we will find nothing but misery so long as we try to make the world conform to our expectations.

The baby Jesus brings to us a revelation that he is not ultimately the man who takes away our sins through his death, but is showing us that there is hope for a new life born into the present world. His future was not determined by where he was born, and our future is not determined by our current lives. Our future is determined by what we value, what we decide is important, and by how much faith we have in each other. It is determined by how willing we are to accept the implications of our faith in what Jesus taught us about sin, about our neighbors, about their dignity, and about finding justice for them. Jesus became our savior despite being born into a poor family and having no influence over the political and religious leaders of his time. His power came from God’s love and wisdom, love and wisdom that can help us find joy and contentment where we think it doesn’t exist. Jesus could see that we are part of something much larger than ourselves or the world when we could only see one small part of life, and it looks terrible. We have expectations of what life could or should be like, and we are disappointed and angry when life doesn’t turn out that way. Those are legitimate thoughts and reactions. It takes a lot of faith in God and trust in each other to also accept that there is still a place for us in our community, even when we feel as Jeremiah did, grieving what we have lost, feeling isolated and disconnected from those around us, and being afraid of changes.

I’ll bet that Jesus would have sung Jeremiah’s song that we heard this morning if he had come across it. He would have sung about hope when “the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.” I think that's what Jesus would have sung because that is what God has done for us out of love, through Jesus. We are not loved because of who we once were, or who we think we ought to be in the future. We are loved unconditionally as we are right now, even in the messiness of grief. We have to give ourselves time for grief to recognize the deep loss that has occurred personally and nationally, and what it means to us. It is only then when we have lived with that grief that we can truly appreciate the joy that Jesus can bring tomorrow, the joy that Jeremiah speaks of for tomorrow, and the joy of a child born to us, our savior Christ, for today. Grief does not have the last word in what our lives will be like when we take on Jeremiah’s words of joy, and Jesus’ birth as a sign of hope. We can pass through grief to find happiness again for everyone as a sign of our faith in God’s goodness and love for us.