Kathleen M. O’Connor has written a remarkable book, Jeremiah: Pain and Promise. Often I find trauma victims lives eerily similar to the prophets and Christ, victims of terrible injustice, betrayed by loved ones, given pat answers by religious leaders either too numb to hear their voice crying out or so dogmatically strait jacked they will not listen, and the book of Jeremiah is a fine example of a broken man stumbling through a horror-strewn catastrophe struggling to understand his God.
The following are some quotes from her book:
Jeremiah is not a hero of epic proportions. He is an anguished man, a kind of anti-hero, wounded, isolated, and broken like the people of Judah in the grip of catastrophe. Pain and suffering dominate his life…
Everybody is out to get Jeremiah for his dread-filled preaching, including kings, other prophets, priests, the people, and even his family and friends.
…the particular afflictions heaped upon Jeremiah by his people are not solely about him; they are a mosaic of the cataclysm. They incorporate the sufferings of the very people who reject him. In complex ways, Jeremiah’s biography is a work of social repair for rebuilding the community. His prophetic call, prophetic sign acts, and stories of his captivities create a prism through which to see the disaster, explain it, and survive it.”
His commission alienates him and isolates him from his people….his suffering is emblematic of the suffering of the very people who refuse to listen to this message.”
…..he breaks a jug in front of witnesses (19:1–15); he wears an iron yoke of captivity about his neck (chaps. 27–28); and in a more hopeful direction, he buys a field while invasion is occurring (32:1–25)
Jeremiah’s personal life itself becomes the sign. Rather than performing acts, God commands that he refrain from them. He may not “marry [nor] have sons and daughters in this place” (16:1–4, v.2), and he may not attend social gatherings.
In a culture built around community, he must remain alone without a wife, family, or friends, a situation he laments bitterly:
I have not sat in the circles of merry makers.… I have sat alone because of your hand upon me” (15:17).
From this prophet, God demands everything. He is to live without people, bereft of love and of human companionship, but these demands are very odd in the Old Testament because they overturn biblical confidence in the blessings of family and community.
To avoid marriage is to fail to keep the first biblical commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28). Such is the high cost of a prophetic vocation where life and message become indistinguishable, where, as Fretheim puts it, Jeremiah’s life “is an embodied word of God.”
The prophet’s lonely condition dramatizes God’s banishment of the “voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom or the voice of the bride” (16:9).18
In his most intimate life, Jeremiah personifies social rupture and communal erosion that consumes Judah.
One life expresses many. Jeremiah lives in social isolation just like other disaster victims. His own alienated body is an icon of the community’s alienation.
Painful though it surely is, Jeremiah’s captivity is neither permanent nor death-dealing. It ends, as do all stories about his incarcerations, with his surprising survival. His multiple miraculous escapes act out a promise sprinkled in various forms across the book’s second half: “You will gain your life as booty of war.”
The promise of life as booty made to several characters is ironic. To gain your life as “booty of war” means that your life is all you have at war’s end.
You acquire neither treasure, slaves, women for your harem, nor honor and glory in battle. You live. You survive. That is it. After every catastrophe, people, stunned by their losses, express their dismay in similar terms: “All we have is our lives!”
“Jeremiah does not explain suffering in any satisfactory way, at least to me (no biblical book does), but the book pledges that God will make a future and points the way toward it. Jeremiah’s literary artistry is a mode of survival, an expression of hope, even when the words themselves are hopeless.
Trauma and disaster destroy or at least undermine trust in God, other people, and the world. Trauma and disaster can leave people feeling betrayed and God-forsaken.
Beliefs and traditions, what Louis Stulman might call the society’s “symbolic tapestry,”those interlocking ideas and institutions that once secured them firmly on the earth and kept them grounded in daily life and communal identity—these no longer seem reliable. After all, God did not protect them, nor did prayer comfort them, nor is worship any longer possible because the gods of chaos rule the cosmos. No longer is there a stable, secure foundation upon which to stand.
To protect themselves from memories of violence, people “turn off” in an emotional and spiritual deadening. Amid such destruction of life, trust in God, the world, and other people becomes unsupportable.
Kai Erikson puts it this way: survivors of disaster “can be said to experience not only a changed sense of self and a changed way of relating to others but a changed worldview.”
Like a solar eclipse blotting out the sun, calamity blots out God because death and destruction obscure any sense of God’s protective and faithful presence.
It not only reflects the interpretive chaos that follows disasters, when meaning collapses and formerly reliable beliefs turn to dust. Jeremiah’s literary turmoil is also an invitation to the audience to become meaning-makers, transforming them from being passive victims of disaster into active interpreters of their world.
Liturgical language is action language. It coaxes people reduced to passivity by traumatic disruptions to move back together in a common effort.
Liturgies are public events that require people to gather, to use gestures and speech in an embodied enactment of a new relationship with God.
They provide patterned forms of praying and create a sense of order. They offer language to heal “ruptures in the cultural system of knowing” and promote cultural continuity by evoking prayers of the past.
“They piece together the traditions,” retrieving, reclaiming, reassembling them to make meaning in the present.
Rituals draw people back to one another from isolating pain and severed bonds that follow disaster. They stir people to life, require exertion and participation, and serve as an antidote to victimhood and helplessness.
One way Jeremiah describes what happened with the destruction of Israel is of Israel as an adulterous wife.
God’s broken household helps because it finds words for the disaster, simplifies its causes, creates a miniature version of a monstrous reality, and thins it down to approachable segments of pain. Jeremiah’s family tells the truth sideways, at a slant, and conveys the nation’s suffering more fully than any straight historical report could possibly do.
Attending to it, readers can find shadows of their own broken lives in a poetic world that is both alike and different from their experiences.
The household drama is looking for a way to speak of God when God has utterly failed them, when divine protection has disappeared. Through it survivors of disaster learn what they cannot see. They cannot see that God has been with them all along, sad and disturbed, angry and frustrated through the entire ordeal.
They cannot see that God is hurt and longs for them with the love of a husband who yearns for his beloved spouse and wants to be a father to the children. They cannot see that God is wrenched apart by this breakup and burns with loving desire for them.”
When Jeremiah places responsibility upon the people of Judah for the nation’s collapse, he helps them survive because he finds cause and effect in a world that has come unhinged. When he says God is not to blame but you are, he makes God a victim and puts readers on God’s side for God is brokenhearted and feels bereft.
But perhaps even more important and more surprising, when he places responsibility upon the people, he gives people a sense of control.
It is only one of many explanations of the disaster in Jeremiah…
Jeremiah’s poetry is not predictive of future calamity nor is it simply an historical record of past calamity. It is a potent agent of change. It acts upon the world by creating vital, explosive speech that both reveals and heals wounds.
Interpreting to Survive
“To interpret disaster means to generate new ways of seeing the past and to create language to speak about the unspeakable.
Interpreters have to search for ways to assimilate overwhelming experience into a comprehensive narrative, into a story that brings the violence into the stream of life rather than leaving it as an unassimilated anomaly, as an incomprehensible disruption.
Survivors of disaster can detoxify fractured memories of violence when they integrate them into a larger world of meaning, when they reframe them.
Although such interpretive processes may not destroy raging ghosts of the past, they can gradually deprive them of their power.
Interpretation can begin to heal horrible memories when it expresses them in terms similar enough to the violence to activate the past yet incompatible enough to change it.
…Jeremiah shifts the spotlight of blame again, this time onto God. “Then I said, ‘Ah, Lord God, how you have utterly deceived this people, saying, “It will be well with you,” even while the sword is at the throat’ ” (4:10)
Typical of interpretations after disaster, conflicts emerge here full-throttle. Leaders failed; God failed. It is God’s fault; it is our fault; it is everybody’s fault. There is no resolution, no single cause, only complex distribution of responsibility.
The poem “uncreates” the world as it reverses the work of God completed during the seven days of creation (Gen 1:1–2:4a). In the first chapter of Genesis, God says, “Let there be light,” let there be birds and beasts, let there be humans, and that divine word turns “waste and void” (tohu wabohu, Gen 1:2) into light and life.
In Jeremiah’s poem, the opposite happens. Like a film played in reverse, elements of the world disappear one by one until chaos returns:
I looked to the earth and, behold, waste and void and to the heavens and there was no light.
I looked to the mountains and, behold, quaking and all the hills were shaking.
I looked and, behold, there was no human and all the birds of the heavens had fled.
I looked and, behold, the fruited plain of the wilderness and all the cities were in ruins before YHWH, before his hot anger
(Jer 4:23–26, ).
And God’s word is still the active agent, but now it “uncreates” the world, “for I have spoken” (4:28).
Even as Jeremiah’s poem unravels the first story of creation, it manufactures a strange continuity with it by translating violent memories into the familiar terms of Judah’s sacred story. It reverses Genesis’ steady march toward lush abundance and harmonious goodness and turns it into a nightmare of terror. The world empties of creatures, cities, and human culture. Birds flee, desert returns, life disappears in the deathly stillness after battle.
Love turns to horror in a further blending of battlefield and household. God commands the Daughter of Zion: “Lift up your eyes and see those who come from the north” (13:20). When she wants to know why, the answer is clear. “It is for the greatness of your iniquity that your skirts are lifted up and you are violated” (13:22).
The “lifting of skirts” is probably euphemistic speech for rape, but the parallel clause, “you are violated,” makes rape certain. The poem leaves the violator unnamed in verse 22 but reveals his identity later: “I myself will strip off your skirts over your face” (13:25–26, my translation). God rapes her; Judah is destroyed.
The fact that God’s rape of Zion is outrageous, unbearable, and unspeakable is surely the point of the imagery. To be invaded by another country, to be victims of attack, occupation, and dislocation is outrageous, unbearable, and unspeakable. God’s rape of Wife Judah tells the people’s story and brings to speech the horror and harm of Babylonian assaults. Rape is a language for telling Judah’s memories and its experience of God.
Rape makes an apt language for invasion because it “reproduce(s) the difficulty of the world itself.
Jeremiah’s portrait of a punishing, raping God is a culturally potent conception that begins the work of interpretation, of uttering the unutterable, of making sense of the senseless. It is, like all portraits of the divine, a partial, provisional effort. It offers one way, among many in Jeremiah, to integrate the disaster into the long stream of the nation’s existence”
Jeremiah’s violent, raping God is “momentary” because it is not Jeremiah’s only word about God but one of many, none of which are final. The war poetry, like the rest of the book, characterizes God in complex, conflicting ways. They are momentary glimpses, provisional, partial attempts to say what cannot ever be fully said but which stave off chaos for the moment.
Rather than stripping away disaster’s horrors, they translate them into symbolic dramas. Paradoxically, these poetic worlds of war and marriage depict horror and mute it at the same time. By reconstructing memories of invasion in imaginative space, they invent other ways to speak of it.
They revise a vocabulary of experience and build common language to name what has happened, to give it shape, and to revisit it emotionally and spiritually.
The literary creativity of the war poems brings the community into its own fragmented memories of a world unhinged and makes collective experience conscious and public. In them, survivors can recognize both what they have lost and what they have endured and survived.
To remember is to tell stories, to build identity, to get through life; it is a moral practice that reconstitutes reality.
It is this poetic world itself that creates continuity in Israel’s narrative memory, its traditional story, and gives language to people whose memories have made them mute.
The war poems give little hope for a reconstituted life. Instead, they enact the breakdown of the culture and offer language to tell it.
They guide victims into the dark terrors of their fractured memories of violence, requiring them to process the war in bits and pieces, slowly, in small exposures. They relive Babylonian assaults in a controlled fashion, in a world apart from their own, in cosmic space.
By contrast to ancient Israel, modern western culture is “ritually adrift, bereft of custom, symbol, metaphor, and meaningful liturgy or language,” according to funeral director and writer Thomas Lynch”
God also mourns in this poetic dialogue among sad and frightened voices as they express abandonment and despair.
But a weeping God, like an angry one, arises from human experience to name the One beyond every name. Half a century ago, Rabbi Abraham Heschel rightly insisted that “the God of Israel is not a Greek deity of stoic power and unchangeableness but a fluid being filled with pathos and emotionally engaged in the life of the people.
SURVIVE BY PRAYING
"Even as Jeremiah speaks to God accusingly, even as they verge toward hopelessness, they adhere to God with fierce insistence.
Without complaint there are no prayers of lament. Laments argue, protest, whine, and mewl; they berate God even as the one praying holds fast to God like a lover in a life-altering quarrel. Laments compose a poetic forum in which to express fury at the deep fissures of the world and the ways God fails to care for it. These qualities make laments ready-made prayers for victims of trauma and disaster.”
Between the complaint and the expression of hope lies a gap, an abrupt switch as the ones speaking seem to reverse completely their grasp of reality, as if voicing the complaint makes room for something new to break in.
They convey in the most vulnerable terms a grasping for faith and a desperate clutching toward God despite massive discontent with God’s treatment of the world. And because in them Jeremiah insists on his innocence and refuses to see himself as the cause of his suffering, they too participate in the book’s rhetoric of responsibility, ultimately turning blame onto God.
….the confessions blame God. God has failed, betrayed, turned away, left the prophet to suffer. In these prayers God is responsible.
Although his prophetic calling has made him truly miserable, he has never wavered.
And it is precisely this fidelity to his vocation that causes Jeremiah’s hopeless anguish. It is fidelity to that word that creates enemies who want to “cut him off from the land of the living” (11:19). His adversaries taunt him and scheme against him to silence him. They persecute him “like a lamb led to the slaughter” (11:19)
“Why has my pain become endless, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?” (15:17). In the midst of this overwhelming suffering, his prophetic fidelity turns out to be useless; God has abandoned him anyway.”
Jeremiah’s confessions ultimately resist the God-defending theology of much of the book. They provide another voice, another claim about the disaster. To the implied question, “Why did this happen?” the confessions reply: God is at fault. Whatever else his laments do, they challenge the book’s theodicy and its twin, the rhetoric of human responsibility.
Like all speech about God, biblical words are products of their culture; they are provisional, partial, and incomplete. They stutter and stammer to say that which cannot be fully said.
In the confessions, Jeremiah turns from an adamant God-defender to a passionate God-resister.
The prophet bemoans God’s complicity with his enemies’ treachery. The responsible party behind them, feuling and encouraging them, is God who is not just and not on the side of the good.
He begs for explanation: “Why does the way of the wicked prosper and all those who commit treachery flourish?” (12:1).
The wicked prosper because God favors them; they flourish because God nourishes them; they do evil because God enables them. God may claim to be just, and ancient tradition may claim that God is just, but the facts speak to the contrary. Jeremiah demands proof of divine justice in his own wretched life, and that proof will appear only when God separates the wicked from the innocent “like sheep for the slaughter” (12:3).
When he prays, Jeremiah accuses God of outright injustice. But here is his most fundamental complaint: God is a traitor and false friend who has forsaken him. “Truly, you are to me like a deceitful spring, like waters that fail” (15:18)
A God who is like a dried-up spring is worse than an enemy because divine pretenses disguise divine infidelity. A deceitful spring of a God cannot be trusted. A dried up river bed of a God is dangerous to life and not a “fountain of living waters” (4:13). An evaporated life-source of a God is a deceit, a treachery, and a death-blow.
In his last confession (20:7–13), Jeremiah’s accusations against God reach a pinnacle of abrasive speech. “O YHWH you have seduced me and I was seduced. You have raped me and you have prevailed” (20:7).18 Interpreters often shrink from the brutality of Jeremiah’s sexual language,”
Like the biographical stories about Jeremiah, his confessions trace the contours of open wounds of his people, draw the shapes of their suffering, and center on the invisible loss of faith and meaning. Jeremiah’s assault on the divine Judge looms over a nation that has watched Babylon flourish and wonders why.
The confessions provide language for disaster victims to complain about all that is unendurable. Attacked, defenseless, and mortally threatened…
He is isolated and alone; even his family and kinfolk turn against him (11:21–23; 12:6). His wound is incurable, refusing to be healed (15:18; 8:22, Eng.; 10:19; 14:20). And like his people, he too needs to be saved and healed (17:14–16; 18:20b).
People can identify with him because he suffers from the same festering wounds that afflict them. His profound misgivings about God portray a kindred soul who mirrors their suspicion, skepticism, and outrage. And because the confessions take the traditional form of lament, they have the capacity to bring the people together in communal worship and gather them again as a praying people.
They provide a way to pray that gathers in the afflicted, draws them back from social isolation, articulates doubt, and shows how it is possible to cling relentlessly to God in the wreckage of their world.”
Even if only for a moment, he does turn to God with renewed trust and confidence. The final confession (20:7–13) concludes with a startling change in outlook that seems utterly contradictory of his previous discontents. “Sing to YHWH, praise YHWH, for he has rescued the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers,” Jeremiah urges (20:13). After all his churning spiritual turmoil, he asserts without explanation, without preparation, that the “Lord is with me as a Mighty Warrior.” Perhaps it is the capacity of laments to bring unspeakable suffering into the light that expands the heart and makes room for hope to emerge across the gap of emptiness.
"Like the stories of his captivity, the trajectory of Jeremiah’s confessions is toward survival. Following the form of lament, his accusations against God are, for the moment, absorbed in praise, and relationship with God again seems sure. So it might be for Judah. Yet Jeremiah’s confidence recedes quickly. He brings readers abruptly back to reality by cursing his birth (20:14–18, cf. Job 3). He would rather have been aborted in the womb than to have lived through this destruction. “Why did I come forth to see trouble and grief to end my days in shame?” (20:18). The reality surrounding Jeremiah and his readers remains a world of cursing, where life is filled with “toil and sorrow” and days are spent “in shame” (20:18). Jeremiah’s quick reversal from confidence in God to cursing reflects how fragile and elusive faith can be on the other side of catastrophe.”
….the confessions model how relationship with God might come back to life after disaster.
His words honor suffering in its many bitter dimensions and give voice to the mute pain of destroyed faith. They reflect back to victims their own spiritual and theological quagmire.
The confessions offer words and actions for spiritual survival of the nation by showing them how to pray in the thick of the theological devastation that accompanies disaster.
Here is what to do in the pit of hopelessness: cling to God, even when God has slipped away. Yell at the top of your collective lungs. Hold tightly, mercilessly, and with every ounce of strength, shout and scream at the deity. Tell the truth, voice rage and despair right to the face of the “Just Judge.” Hold nothing back. Complain, protest, resist. Reclaim experiences of misery and pain, see them and name them before God.
“Give God an account” and approach God “like a prince,” to return to the words of that other God resister (Job 31:37). Communicate all that is shattered, despair-creating, and spirit-defeating.
Lay it out so you can see it yourselves and can see each other in this deep, unending wound. God is hidden there in that space.
Turning to the disappeared God is how to survive disaster. Public, communal worship can revivify life with the God of their past.
Jeremiah’s confessions give shape and words with which to do this, not by wholesale invention but by reinvention, by retrieving and retooling traditional liturgical prayers of lament.
The sermon cares most about the invisible world of faith obliterated by disaster, the shared loss of confidence in the temple, the prophet, and in God.
…the point of the sermon is that Sabbath-breaking behavior reveals profoundly distorted relationships.
….Sabbath observance “is essential to the maintenance of the cosmos. As long as the Sabbath is sanctified, the community maintains some measure of blessing, protection, and order. Violation jeopardizes the social symbolic order of the world.”
The destructive swath of disasters includes the less visible world of meaning. They destroy faith and trust. They unravel the tapestry of beauty and sense that secured the world. Chaos prevails.
….the confessions blame God. God has failed, betrayed, turned away, left the prophet to suffer. In these prayers God is responsible.
Although his prophetic calling has made him truly miserable, he has never wavered.
And it is precisely this fidelity to his vocation that causes Jeremiah’s hopeless anguish. It is fidelity to that word that creates enemies who want to “cut him off from the land of the living” (11:19). His adversaries taunt him and scheme against him to silence him. They persecute him “like a lamb led to the slaughter” (11:19)
“Why has my pain become endless, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?” (15:17). In the midst of this overwhelming suffering, his prophetic fidelity turns out to be useless; God has abandoned him anyway.”
Jeremiah’s confessions ultimately resist the God-defending theology of much of the book. They provide another voice, another claim about the disaster. To the implied question, “Why did this happen?” the confessions reply: God is at fault. Whatever else his laments do, they challenge the book’s theodicy and its twin, the rhetoric of human responsibility.
Like all speech about God, biblical words are products of their culture; they are provisional, partial, and incomplete. They stutter and stammer to say that which cannot be fully said.
In the confessions, Jeremiah turns from an adamant God-defender to a passionate God-resister.
The prophet bemoans God’s complicity with his enemies’ treachery. The responsible party behind them, feuling and encouraging them, is God who is not just and not on the side of the good.
He begs for explanation: “Why does the way of the wicked prosper and all those who commit treachery flourish?” (12:1).
The wicked prosper because God favors them; they flourish because God nourishes them; they do evil because God enables them. God may claim to be just, and ancient tradition may claim that God is just, but the facts speak to the contrary. Jeremiah demands proof of divine justice in his own wretched life, and that proof will appear only when God separates the wicked from the innocent “like sheep for the slaughter” (12:3).
When he prays, Jeremiah accuses God of outright injustice. But here is his most fundamental complaint: God is a traitor and false friend who has forsaken him. “Truly, you are to me like a deceitful spring, like waters that fail” (15:18)
A God who is like a dried-up spring is worse than an enemy because divine pretenses disguise divine infidelity. A deceitful spring of a God cannot be trusted. A dried up river bed of a God is dangerous to life and not a “fountain of living waters” (4:13). An evaporated life-source of a God is a deceit, a treachery, and a death-blow.
In his last confession (20:7–13), Jeremiah’s accusations against God reach a pinnacle of abrasive speech. “O YHWH you have seduced me and I was seduced. You have raped me and you have prevailed” (20:7).18 Interpreters often shrink from the brutality of Jeremiah’s sexual language,”
Like the biographical stories about Jeremiah, his confessions trace the contours of open wounds of his people, draw the shapes of their suffering, and center on the invisible loss of faith and meaning. Jeremiah’s assault on the divine Judge looms over a nation that has watched Babylon flourish and wonders why.
The confessions provide language for disaster victims to complain about all that is unendurable. Attacked, defenseless, and mortally threatened…
He is isolated and alone; even his family and kinfolk turn against him (11:21–23; 12:6). His wound is incurable, refusing to be healed (15:18; 8:22, Eng.; 10:19; 14:20). And like his people, he too needs to be saved and healed (17:14–16; 18:20b).
People can identify with him because he suffers from the same festering wounds that afflict them. His profound misgivings about God portray a kindred soul who mirrors their suspicion, skepticism, and outrage. And because the confessions take the traditional form of lament, they have the capacity to bring the people together in communal worship and gather them again as a praying people.
They provide a way to pray that gathers in the afflicted, draws them back from social isolation, articulates doubt, and shows how it is possible to cling relentlessly to God in the wreckage of their world.”
Even if only for a moment, he does turn to God with renewed trust and confidence. The final confession (20:7–13) concludes with a startling change in outlook that seems utterly contradictory of his previous discontents. “Sing to YHWH, praise YHWH, for he has rescued the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers,” Jeremiah urges (20:13). After all his churning spiritual turmoil, he asserts without explanation, without preparation, that the “Lord is with me as a Mighty Warrior.” Perhaps it is the capacity of laments to bring unspeakable suffering into the light that expands the heart and makes room for hope to emerge across the gap of emptiness.
"Like the stories of his captivity, the trajectory of Jeremiah’s confessions is toward survival. Following the form of lament, his accusations against God are, for the moment, absorbed in praise, and relationship with God again seems sure. So it might be for Judah. Yet Jeremiah’s confidence recedes quickly. He brings readers abruptly back to reality by cursing his birth (20:14–18, cf. Job 3). He would rather have been aborted in the womb than to have lived through this destruction. “Why did I come forth to see trouble and grief to end my days in shame?” (20:18). The reality surrounding Jeremiah and his readers remains a world of cursing, where life is filled with “toil and sorrow” and days are spent “in shame” (20:18). Jeremiah’s quick reversal from confidence in God to cursing reflects how fragile and elusive faith can be on the other side of catastrophe.”
….the confessions model how relationship with God might come back to life after disaster.
His words honor suffering in its many bitter dimensions and give voice to the mute pain of destroyed faith. They reflect back to victims their own spiritual and theological quagmire.
The confessions offer words and actions for spiritual survival of the nation by showing them how to pray in the thick of the theological devastation that accompanies disaster.
Here is what to do in the pit of hopelessness: cling to God, even when God has slipped away. Yell at the top of your collective lungs. Hold tightly, mercilessly, and with every ounce of strength, shout and scream at the deity. Tell the truth, voice rage and despair right to the face of the “Just Judge.” Hold nothing back. Complain, protest, resist. Reclaim experiences of misery and pain, see them and name them before God.
“Give God an account” and approach God “like a prince,” to return to the words of that other God resister (Job 31:37). Communicate all that is shattered, despair-creating, and spirit-defeating.
Lay it out so you can see it yourselves and can see each other in this deep, unending wound. God is hidden there in that space.
Turning to the disappeared God is how to survive disaster. Public, communal worship can revivify life with the God of their past.
Jeremiah’s confessions give shape and words with which to do this, not by wholesale invention but by reinvention, by retrieving and retooling traditional liturgical prayers of lament.
The sermon cares most about the invisible world of faith obliterated by disaster, the shared loss of confidence in the temple, the prophet, and in God.
…the point of the sermon is that Sabbath-breaking behavior reveals profoundly distorted relationships.
….Sabbath observance “is essential to the maintenance of the cosmos. As long as the Sabbath is sanctified, the community maintains some measure of blessing, protection, and order. Violation jeopardizes the social symbolic order of the world.”
The destructive swath of disasters includes the less visible world of meaning. They destroy faith and trust. They unravel the tapestry of beauty and sense that secured the world. Chaos prevails.
It is a profound paradox that when there is no way forward, when the future is cut off and death is winning, hope can appear unexpectedly, and the universe expands in unthinkable ways.
After disaster, hope emerges slowly, if at all. First, it needs space in which to take root, a fallowing of the land, a turning of the soil to aerate and open it. Before hope can appear, survivors of disaster have to find language to tell of it; they have to grieve accumulations of loss and begin to place the catastrophe into larger frames of meaning. Hope arrives in stops and starts, risings and fallings, in painful switchbacks between despair and trust.
Hope in Jeremiah is not optimism but unbidden, unexpected revelation of divine love.
….readers are simply not prepared for the explosive beauty of the “little book of consolation.” These brief chapters of hope are a tour de force that sweeps aside the general bleakness of most of the book.
Jeremiah’s words of comfort in these chapters disrupt the harsh, clamped-down life of people who live in the persistent grip of trauma and disaster. Hope’s abrupt appearance wakes them up to visions of an alternative world. That world is utopian; it exists only as a promise, as a call to bring the people back to life.
Those usually judged least suited for leadership—the feeble and the vulnerable, the lowly and the wounded—will become the center of new life.10 The ones whom God calls home in this poetry are the same ones who cried out in panic, had no peace, lived in distress, and endured terrors (30:5–7). They are the ones freed from bondage, whose hurt is incurable. They are without medicine, without healing; plundered and preyed upon, they cry out in endless pain (30:12–17). They are the victims of disaster.
The survivors returning to Zion will form a procession of the forgotten, the disabled, and the vulnerable. Although they are the lowest in the society, they will be the beating heart of the restored community. The blind and the lame are physically different, weak, deemed deficient in the ancient world, stigmatized, and perhaps despised.
Pregnant women are of low public stature and holders of little political power, but together these people have the astonishing capacity to give birth to new life. For a nation seemingly doomed to extinction at the hands of Babylon, the vulnerable and broken themselves will become the promised bearers of its future, a future of unimaginable reversals. The whole people, once afflicted, despised, and broken, will live together in safety, merriment, and thanksgiving (30:18–20).
When the scroll of consolation reconvenes God’s broken family, there are no requirements and no demands placed upon its members, only announcements of divine love: “I have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you (31:3b)
What is new about it is the manner of speaking about it as a deeper, more intimate, more egalitarian union. The new covenant resembles a miraculously revivified marriage, begun again after conflict, infidelity, and a long, painful struggle. This time, “I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts.” God recommits the divine self to them and announces their transformation in which the law will be part of them, internal to their beings.
No longer will the covenant exist only on tablets of stone and require obedience to external rule. The law will be something they live and breathe, it will take up residence within their very beings. They will no longer have to teach one another about God or say to one another, “know the Lord.” Soon “they shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord for I will forgive their sins” (31:34).”
The future is an act of God, beyond the capacity of human beings to bring it forth.
Jeremiah’s vision disrupts the inertia of the present time26 And portrays God as the interrupting energy at heart of the world, the enacting agent of return, and the designer of a society led inexplicably by the weak and vulnerable…
The book of Jeremiah has no proper ending, no resolution, no summing up of interpretations, and it has no set of agreements about how to go forward. It simply stops.”
Brueggemann describes the book as having an “ending that does not end” precisely because it plunges into “unreadable lived experience.”The searing pain it portrays does not end but lingers as turbulent presences for generations. By refusing closure, the three endings continue the work of survival that gave rise to the book in first place.
Jeremiah’s portrait of God in its many dimensions stammers toward the unsayable. God receives many names, many characteristics in this book, yet none can satisfy, none can fully convey the experience of the divine. Jeremiah’s God is the living God.
After disaster, hope emerges slowly, if at all. First, it needs space in which to take root, a fallowing of the land, a turning of the soil to aerate and open it. Before hope can appear, survivors of disaster have to find language to tell of it; they have to grieve accumulations of loss and begin to place the catastrophe into larger frames of meaning. Hope arrives in stops and starts, risings and fallings, in painful switchbacks between despair and trust.
Hope in Jeremiah is not optimism but unbidden, unexpected revelation of divine love.
….readers are simply not prepared for the explosive beauty of the “little book of consolation.” These brief chapters of hope are a tour de force that sweeps aside the general bleakness of most of the book.
Jeremiah’s words of comfort in these chapters disrupt the harsh, clamped-down life of people who live in the persistent grip of trauma and disaster. Hope’s abrupt appearance wakes them up to visions of an alternative world. That world is utopian; it exists only as a promise, as a call to bring the people back to life.
Those usually judged least suited for leadership—the feeble and the vulnerable, the lowly and the wounded—will become the center of new life.10 The ones whom God calls home in this poetry are the same ones who cried out in panic, had no peace, lived in distress, and endured terrors (30:5–7). They are the ones freed from bondage, whose hurt is incurable. They are without medicine, without healing; plundered and preyed upon, they cry out in endless pain (30:12–17). They are the victims of disaster.
The survivors returning to Zion will form a procession of the forgotten, the disabled, and the vulnerable. Although they are the lowest in the society, they will be the beating heart of the restored community. The blind and the lame are physically different, weak, deemed deficient in the ancient world, stigmatized, and perhaps despised.
Pregnant women are of low public stature and holders of little political power, but together these people have the astonishing capacity to give birth to new life. For a nation seemingly doomed to extinction at the hands of Babylon, the vulnerable and broken themselves will become the promised bearers of its future, a future of unimaginable reversals. The whole people, once afflicted, despised, and broken, will live together in safety, merriment, and thanksgiving (30:18–20).
When the scroll of consolation reconvenes God’s broken family, there are no requirements and no demands placed upon its members, only announcements of divine love: “I have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you (31:3b)
What is new about it is the manner of speaking about it as a deeper, more intimate, more egalitarian union. The new covenant resembles a miraculously revivified marriage, begun again after conflict, infidelity, and a long, painful struggle. This time, “I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts.” God recommits the divine self to them and announces their transformation in which the law will be part of them, internal to their beings.
No longer will the covenant exist only on tablets of stone and require obedience to external rule. The law will be something they live and breathe, it will take up residence within their very beings. They will no longer have to teach one another about God or say to one another, “know the Lord.” Soon “they shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord for I will forgive their sins” (31:34).”
The future is an act of God, beyond the capacity of human beings to bring it forth.
Jeremiah’s vision disrupts the inertia of the present time26 And portrays God as the interrupting energy at heart of the world, the enacting agent of return, and the designer of a society led inexplicably by the weak and vulnerable…
The book of Jeremiah has no proper ending, no resolution, no summing up of interpretations, and it has no set of agreements about how to go forward. It simply stops.”
Brueggemann describes the book as having an “ending that does not end” precisely because it plunges into “unreadable lived experience.”The searing pain it portrays does not end but lingers as turbulent presences for generations. By refusing closure, the three endings continue the work of survival that gave rise to the book in first place.
Jeremiah’s portrait of God in its many dimensions stammers toward the unsayable. God receives many names, many characteristics in this book, yet none can satisfy, none can fully convey the experience of the divine. Jeremiah’s God is the living God.
