The light shines on in the darkness and the darkness has never put it out. John 1:5
I have been living a lot with this Scripture as this election proceeds. I've unfortunately spent a good bit of time being scared by the anger and seeming ruthlessness of the people who are following Donald Trump. It seems more and more possible that he could win this election, no matter how many scandals are attributed to him.
I've also been drawn to read again in the book of Jeremiah because we too are confronted with a stark choice between addressing our problems reasonably and descending into hatred and delusion. As you know, I'm not a biblical scholar so this teaching may not jibe with what some of you learned in seminary. And I am mostly quoting from the early parts of the book of Jeremiah. His prophecies and oracles go on and on for 52 chapters.
I just love Jeremiah because he's so human. He reluctantly becomes a prophet; he begins to tell the people what God says, and when they don't pay any attention he gets mad and tells God to destroy them; he tries to save his own skin no matter what happens to the rest of them; and at bottom he suffers anguish for what he sees is going to happen to Judah, which he loves with all his heart.
Here's a description from Cliff's Notes about Jeremiah's time.
The period in which Jeremiah lived and worked was one of the most critical in Hebrew history. His public ministry began during the reign of King Josiah (640–609 B.C.) and lasted until sometime after the fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of the Babylonian captivity. He encountered strong opposition from King Jehoiakim (609–598 B.C.) and King Zedekiah (597–586 B.C.), and on more than one occasion, his life was threatened. After the fall of Jerusalem, the Babylonians permitted him to remain in his homeland; many of his fellow countrymen were taken into captivity. Later, he was taken to Egypt against his will by a group of exiles who found it necessary to flee Jerusalem for their own safety. In Egypt, Jeremiah died after a long and troublesome career.
Jeremiah tried in dozens of ways to warn Judah. He tries to scare them with threats of what life is going to be like for them. Speaking as God tells him to he says:
O Lord, do not your eyes look for truth? You struck them but they felt no pain; you crushed them, but they refused correction. They made their faces harder than stone and refused to repent. I thought, "These are only the poor, they are foolish, for they do not know the way of the Lord, the requirements of their God. So I will go to the leaders and speak to them, surely they know the way of the Lord, the requirements of our God. But with one accord they too had broken off the yoke and torn off the bonds." (Jer. 5:3-5, 26-29)
The whole land will be laid waste because there is no one who cares. (Jer 12)
I have withdrawn my blessing, my love and my pity from the people. (Jer. 16)
Through your own fault you will lose the inheritance I gave you. (Jer. 18:4)
These warnings he proclaims are some of the milder ones. And yet no one listened and repented.
There are also passages of promise if the people will repent and care for the poor and aliens, keep the Sabbath, stop worshipping false idols, and come back to God who loves them.
But blessed is the person who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit. (Jer. 17:7,8)
Jeremiah's fundamental commitment and passion for God's people is always clear. He is suffering for love's sake but sometimes he gets so furious he begs God to save him, to remember all his obedience to God's call, and to wreak terrible vengeance on the people who persecute him.
Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed: save me and I will be saved, for you are the one I praise. They keep saying to me, 'Where is the word of the Lord? Let it now be fulfilled!' I have not run away from being your shepherd; you know I have not desired the day of despair. What passes my lips is open before you. Do not be a terror to me; you are my refuge in the day of disaster. Let my persecutors be put to shame, but keep me from shame; let them be terrified but keep me from terror. Bring on them the day of disaster; destroy them with double destruction. (Jer. 17:14-18)
And when the disaster did happen, Jeremiah didn't gloat or celebrate. The intelligentsia and wealthy who were sent into exile received practical, down to earth counsel from him:
This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in numbers there; do not decrease. Also seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.
I can't help seeing a parallel between Jeremiah's situation and our own. I don't meant to imply that we are some special nation that God loves more than all the others, but in the sense that if we give way to the hatred and vitriol that are being held out as solutions for our national problems, I believe we will suffer some truly terrible consequences.
There have always been threats to our Constitutional way of life—slavery most of all—and we are still struggling with that heritage: the Civil War, an outcome of the ownership of slaves; World War II and the myth of a master race; the McCarthy Era and its heritage of suspicion and casting out people who don't belong; and now the decline of one of our major political parties into a fear-mongering, hate-filled mob, which is also related to our heritage of xenophobia.
Something happened when President Obama came into office. It was as if all the covert racism, which many white people didn't know still lurked, erupted into the open, beginning with the President's first address to Congress when a Congressman shouted during his speech, "Liar!” I was completely horrified that a representative of the government would say something so outrageous and on a state occasion. Things have steadily gone down from there. Although we have a president in office who has been a model of integrity, decency, and intelligence, a mood of resentment and disrespect has grown in the Congress and among some citizens, fanned by a press that fabricates stories and has little regard for real reporting. We've had many prophets warning of the evil of this national darkness but racism is looming large to this moment.
So I've been torn between hope and dread, between trusting the Lord to keep us in his care and lying awake at night scared by Trump's latest shock. It's one of those liminal times, we're on the edge of we don't know what. We may be called to suffer for our faith and we may be entering a time of hope. I agree with President Obama, "Don't boo, Vote!"
When I'm afraid I turn to Scripture, to history and to poetry and recently I found a poem that captures some of what I feel right now. Don't feel bad if you don't understand all of it—I don't either. But that's part of the gift of poetry—you have to live with it for a while to get what it's saying and sometimes you never do "figure it out." But if it gives you a sense of something deeper than words you're getting it.
Song of the Shattering Vessels
by Peter Cole
Either the world is coming together,
or else the world is falling apart —
here — now — along these letters,
against the walls of every heart.
Today, tomorrow, within its weather,
the end or beginning’s about to start —
the world impossibly coming together
or very possibly falling apart.
Now the lovers’ mouths are open —
maybe the miracle’s about to start:
the world within us coming together,
because all around us it’s falling apart.
Even as they speak, he wonders,
even as the fear departs:
Is that the world coming together?
Can they keep it from falling apart?
The image, gradually, is growing sharper;
now the sound is like a dart:
It seemed their world was coming together,
but in fact it was falling apart.
That’s the nightmare, that’s the terror,
that’s the Isaac of this art —
which sees that the world might come together
if only we’re willing to take it apart.
The dream, the lure, is the prayer’s answer,
which can’t be plotted on any chart —
as we know the world that’s coming together
without our knowing is falling apart.
This is one of the best descriptions of liminal space I've seen. And even though we don't know what's going to happen in the next couple of months we entrust ourselves to God's faithfulness and sovereignty.
At this point I believe we should all become prophets—not of doom and despair but of hope and a way out. Our prayers should be about loving the enemy; our efforts should be directed to reaching out in reconciliation. It's very hard to do that because the polarized groups don't even know each other and so can't talk about differences but I think we have to begin now because if Donald Trump becomes president it will be even more important that we are a center of gravity in the chaos that may ensue.
I want to close with this encouraging word from Walter Brueggemann:
Of course prophetic hope easily lends itself to distortion. It can be made so grandiose that it does not touch reality; it can be trivialized so that it does not impact reality; it can be “bread and circuses” so that it only supports and abets the general despair. But a prophet has another purpose in bringing hope to public expression, and that is to return the community to its single referent, the sovereign faithfulness of God.
And finally, the verse we started with: The light shines on in the darkness and the darkness has never put it out.