Sunday, June 22, 2014: Jeremiah 20:7-13; Matthew 10:24-39
Jeremiah has great resolve—at least in retrospect.
Fire in the bones. It’s a great metaphor for the passion of our youth, used to explain an unquenchable desire to give our lives to full-time ministry. Credentialing bodies were thrilled to hear our call stories, especially when we peppered them with scriptural references. These verses from Jeremiah offered solid punctuation to our naive declarations.
A few years into church work, we found ourselves tending to decisions about the carpet color for the church parlor or the appropriate chaperone-to-youth ratio for the upcoming ski trip. Worthy matters, but they lack the gravitas of Jeremiah’s encounters. Oh, to have adjudications that might get us thrown in a well!
And here is the great anachronism that haunts much of our reading of scripture. From this side of history, it seems that Jeremiah has great clarity and resolve. Yet the shifting political allegiances he struggles to interpret are not so different from our own uncertainties about the world. The dilemmas faced by those who gather to hear arguments and pass judgment on the law of the Judean land are echoed in congressional debates about farm subsidies, pipelines, and health care. Only in retrospect do Jeremiah’s claims seem so clear.
