Gird up your loins

The prophet Jeremiah spoke truth to power over the reigns of three monarchs in Judah, the southern Israeli kingdom that remained after civil war and the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom. Over the course of his career, Judah (and the capital Jerusalem) took constant military and political damage, eventually succumbing to the Babylonian Empire in 587 BCE. Jeremiah himself, constantly under threat of political banishment, became a refugee in Egypt and likely died there, waiting for Israel’s restoration.

So: what does it look like to lead a faithful life, working every day to understand where God is and what God is doing, when every day brings more bad news that you are powerless to affect? Some highlights from Jeremiah’s oracles point toward possibilities for our own lives under political, religious, and economic threat.

For each week, we’ll read a selection from Jeremiah as the primary preaching text, with accompanying stories from Luke’s gospel that resonate with each theme.

The call. Jeremiah has a famous call narrative. It comes in a very specific historical period; God’s work is never in the abstract but always deeply situational/contextual. This call includes the instruction to “gird up your loins” (v. 17), and surely there are generalizable instructions here for all who heed God’s call to purposeful living: “Why am I here? What am I for?” We are not all prophets like Jeremiah, but we are all invited to participate with God in our specific time and place.

The Indictment. Among other things, Jeremiah indicts Judah (on God’s behalf) for their economic practices – not just individual offenses committed against the poor, but an economic system that favors the rich and ignores (or tramples) the needy. And the religious establishment supports it all (v. 31). Watch out, says the prophet! It is appalling! Like, God seems *actually* shocked. There’s just not too much that makes God mad like this.

The sorrow. Jeremiah expresses the ache of the heart that accompanies his visions. He both understands how things ought to be; and how very far reality is from God’s ideal. Theologians surmise that “the weeping prophet” (as Jeremiah is called) is actually God’s emotional surrogate, expressing the deep grief of God’s own heart at the brokenness of the world God loves.

The economy of rest. In the middle of all the devastating geopolitical conflict, with intra-Judah political conflict and Jeremiah’s own life often in danger, comes a rant about the people’s failure to hallow the Sabbath – like, just take a day off. It’s that damned economic pressure, and the lie that we cannot “afford” to rest. The flourishing God has in mind for God’s people will not come because they work incessantly; it will come when they have enough trust in God to actually lay down their burdens every once in a while.

The restoration. So much of this book is deeply unpleasant – God’s anger unto wrath, the notion that God pulls geopolitical strings to punish and reward – but Jeremiah is clear that God’s punishment is for the sake of the people’s restoration, rather than an end in itself. We can reject (or at least question) the notion that God is orchestrating global events to teach anybody a lesson, but still take the promise of our “return” and the language of “new covenant” as a promise for us.