There was a lot of history being made over twenty five hundred years ago when Jeremiah started his work in the little kingdom of Judah and its capital Jerusalem. And Jeremiah was very concerned about the shape that history was taking and what it meant for his nation and the people around him.
The big worry was Babylon, a strong, warlike state that was flexing its muscles as it prepared to expand its control over smaller states to its west and south, over smaller states like Judah perhaps. It wasn’t absolutely certain, of course, that Babylon would get as far as Judah, and it could have been that if Babylon headed in that direction, Egypt would send armies to stop it and thus keep Judah as a buffer state between the two great nations. Anything was possible.
The prevailing opinion in Jerusalem was that everything would turn out okay. There were reasons for this kind of optimism and those reasons were what today’s jargon would refer to as ‘faith-based.’ That was a big and crucial difference between that age and this: everyone back then saw things in terms of religion, in terms of what their God or gods were up to, in terms of whose God or gods would prevail. So Jerusalem’s optimism was based on two perceived religious bulwarks, on two promises they firmly believed their God had made to his people. One was that the line of David would endure for ever on the throne of Judah. The other was that Zion would never fall as long as the Lord God was worshiped there.
There was one voice that cried out that these beliefs were folly, that the great bulwarks were no stronger than certain levees in New Orleans proved to be. That voice was, of course, the voice of Jeremiah. Yes, Jeremiah cried, God was to be worshiped, but not through the increasingly empty rituals of the great temple liturgies, but through the quest for justice in the public arena and righteousness in people’s private lives. Yes, Jeremiah cried, God may have promised an eternal kingdom to the descendents of David but there was an ‘if’ there— IF they followed the ways of David (before the Bathsheba incident) and obeyed the commandments of God. Those people, he went on, those so-called prophets who promise you peace and safety are dreamers and their dreams and their promises are false. The reality is Babylon, and Babylon will come and come soon, and nothing will prevail against it because it is God’s will that it be so! (That was an age, as I said, where everything had a religious underpinning.) It is his righteous punishment upon us because we his people have left his ways, have sought wealth rather than equity, personal gain rather than justice, ease and comfort rather than righteousness, the solace of dreams rather than reality.
If you asked the man in the street what he thought of Jeremiah’s bleak prophesies, you would have heard something like, “Ol’ Jeremiah? He’s nuts.” And if you asked the powers that be in the Temple and royal palace, you would have heard, “He’s unpatriotic, a traitor really, a disgrace to his people and his city and his country.”
Well, as it happened, Babylon came and Babylon prevailed. They tore down the walls of Jerusalem, they razed the great Temple of Solomon, they marched the people off to exile. They proved Jeremiah right and those other prophets, the dreamers, wrong.
Today’s world is quite different from the one Jeremiah knew; but like it, there is a lot of history being made and there are many voices clamoring for our attention as to the nature and import of that history as its bearing on our lives.
We are involved in a couple of wars. There are allegations of skulduggery in high places. There is the enormous question of gay and lesbian rights. But I would like us to look at one example of history in the making today: the warming of the climate. Hardly anyone anymore claims that this is not real; hardly anyone anymore claims that we human beings are not responsible for some of what is taking place. But beyond that there are those who look for dire consequences around the globe if the current trends continue unabated, while others say that the effects will not be so bad. We read of the dangers facing the polar bear as its frozen world shrinks, the dangers facing the coral reef as the seas warm and rise. We hear of the extraordinary longevity— 500 to a thousand years— of those awful little plastic bags they pack your groceries in these days, and the enormous amounts of timber it takes to keep up with the good old paper sack— and it is the earth’s vegetation, as we know, that pumps oxygen back into the air we breathe.
History will one day show whose voices speak to the reality of the situation and whose tell only dreams. But there are, even in this day and age, some ‘faith-based’ guidelines to help us through the cacophany.
First, we can look at Scripture. The earth is the Lord’s, says the psalmist, and all that therein is. And Genesis tells us that God ceded to us, his creatures, his men and his women, stewardship over that world of his. And then there is the Book of Common Prayer which bids us pray in one place “for the good earth which God has given us, and for the wisdom and will to conserve it” and in another to “open the eyes of all people to behold [God’s] gracious hand in all [his] works… that [they may] be faithful stewards of [his] bounty.”
This is not the place to dictate how we are to respond to this modern bit of history in the making, but it is a time and place to urge us all to listen carefully and critically to what is being said, to sift the dreams from the reality, the vested interests from the good of the whole, and then to act as Christian men and women, as responsible stewards of this beautiful planet, and as good providers for the generations that follow us.
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