What Breaks God’s Heart

Sermon

(Prayer for illumination, by Walter Brueggemann in Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000)

“No wonder the prophet weeps yet –
We begin again, but not innocent…
As we begin, the powers of globalization surge;
There are victims, but we are mostly beneficiaries.
There are wars and rumors of wars,
there are victims, but we are likely perpetrators.
There is violence, among women, toward the poor,
Violence that refuses to forgive,
And we are a mix
Of victim and perpetrator.
The democratic process continues
But it is mostly devoid of gravitas,
And our alarm is modest.
No wonder there is fear, reams of despair, and acres of weeping!
And we feebly watch for you and wait.
Teach us how to weep while we wait,
And how to hope while we weep,
And how to care while we hope.
Teach us through this strange, ancient, immediate text. Amen.”

You might be familiar with the word “jeremiad” meaning “a long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes.” Today’s text puts the Jeremiah in jeremiad.

 It’s a hard text to hear. God is really, really, really ticked off at the people of Israel. You know when you’re so angry you can’t see straight, and you literally spit your words out, and your clenched fists are shaking in emotion? That is the God Jeremiah presents here. Deeply, bitterly enraged and hurt.

Why? Because God’s chosen people, God’s beloved people, have been unfaithful to their God. They have worshiped other gods; they have chosen pagan rites to help them get what they want; they have not pursued the justice and mercy that God has called them to pursue. They have taken for granted that God will protect them, and protect their Jerusalem, and protect their temple. They have sinned and neither confessed it nor atoned for it. And God has had it.

God’s words here are vicious and mean. God will meet their sacrilege with God’s own sacrilege, digging up the bodies of the dead and spreading the remains out in a hodge-podge pile before those powerless celestial beings of sun, moon, and stars. God’s punishment of the people will be so severe that the people will wish they were dead. God will give women to the enemy like some sort of horrific bounty. The enemy will come from the north, from the region of Dan, and God will do nothing to stop the onslaught.

Sometimes, when we are seethingly furious, there is something beneath the anger. I think that’s what’s happening here. The prophet presents God’s anger, but beneath that is God’s deep sorrow. It’s the grief that comes when we are made vulnerable because of our choice to love. It’s the sorrow a parent has for a child who is suffering. Or, as Frederick Buechner puts it, “To love another, as you love a child, is to become vulnerable in a whole new way. It is no longer only through what happens to yourself that the world can hurt you, but through what happens to the one you love also…. When it comes to your own hurt, there are always things you can do…. But when it comes to the hurt of a child you love, you are all but helpless…. The child’s pain becomes your pain, and as the innocent bystander, maybe it is even a worse pain for you…” (Now and Then)

God loves the people of Israel, but the people have turned their backs on God. And God’s heart is broken.

We know what that is like; our hearts break all the time. This week Gregg and I learned that a friend of ours had her baby, but there were complications at birth that will lead to complications for the baby’s life. Our hearts are breaking over this, so I did one of those things that God railed against. One of Gregg’s dear friends and mentors was a magnificent woman named Darlene; Darlene also knew this new mother. Darlene was a force of nature and one of the most faith-filled people I have ever known. So after hearing about our friend and her baby, I gave my excuse to God and prayed straight to St. Darlene, because if anyone can get God to do something, it would be Darlene.

Right now, our hearts might be breaking over the fires in Australia, and the damage to the ecology there, and the harm to all the living creatures. It is ghastly to read about and worse to see.

Right now, our hearts may be breaking because there are still children who have been separated from their parents at the border, terrified children whose lives and emotional and physical health will forever be altered because of our government’s decision to treat them as lesser things.

Do those things break God’s heart too? I think so. Our God is a god of justice and mercy, and those Central American children languishing in inadequate detention centers have received neither justice nor mercy. God made this beautiful creation for us to enjoy and care for, and we have neglected the gift with our rampant consumption of the earth’s resources. God is a god of life, a God who came to the earth as a child whose birth was medically uneventful, as far as we know; God stands alongside these beleaguered parents and grieves at the different life this baby girl will have.

Is there no balm in Gilead, in Australia, at the Texas border, in the NICU ward?

Is there no balm in Gilead?

That’s the question, isn’t it? Does God will our suffering or does God allow our suffering or does God suffer with us? All those questions emerge from this text and all those questions can be answered with a “yes.”

What we learn in this text is that God takes the human-divine relationship very seriously. God takes the relationship so seriously that God is grieved and angry when the relationship starts to fall apart.

Of course, all this talk about God’s heart breaking and God’s anger and all of that is anthropomorphizing God, giving God human characteristics which the Creator of All may or may not possess. We are limited in our talk about God; limited because, while God knows what it is to be human, we do not know what it is to be divine. We are limited by characteristics of God given to us in scripture by ancient writers like Jeremiah. So maybe God does not have a heart, or maybe in God’s omnipotence if God did have a heart it could not be broken. But still, there is a pathos, a passion, an energy to these words in Jeremiah that somehow convey God’s love and God’s suffering. That’s the best we can describe it from our human end of things.

So what do we do with this? How does this text impact our relationship with God, as individuals but more importantly as a congregation, as a community?

Maybe we begin by taking our relationship with God seriously. That could mean taking holy scripture seriously enough to really study it, to know it, and to have the teachings in it affect our living.

Taking our relationship with God seriously could mean listening for how God is calling us today, by knowing the grand themes of the Bible: care for the creation; care for the widow and orphan; care for the poor; mercy over punishment; love without condition.

Taking our relationship with God seriously could mean taking our relationship with others seriously: our relationships with our families, which for some is the hardest place to start. Here in Portland, it could mean taking our relationship with our homeless neighbors seriously enough to want better for them – better health, better sobriety, better options for shelter, better places for community.

It could also mean taking our relationship with people of color in mostly white Portland seriously – learning about the city and state’s history of racism; learning about the disparity in our public schools between schools in wealthy areas and those in poor ones; listening to voices of those on the margins and not telling “them” what to do.

So what do we do with this? Maybe we begin by taking our sin more seriously. I know there are some among us who wonder about the unison prayer of confession, the call to say things that they may or may not have done. And maybe some of you are like me; I am grateful for the opportunity to come clean with God, and the silent prayer is never long enough for all I need to say. But how many of us confess, in one way or another, and then go back and do the same thing over again? How many of us ever really take a good, hard look at how we’re living, look at the choices we make and ask ourselves if we are hurting or helping?

So what do we do about our relationship with God? It could be that we become more intentional about seeing God in our lives. Often I’ll go back on a Sunday afternoon and think about my sermon and once in a while I’ll realize that I didn’t even mention God. Shame on me. It’s so easy to confuse busyness and action with relationship.

I might throw a dinner party for my neighbors, and make a meal that fits all their dietary needs and restrictions, and I might clean the house and set a beautiful table, and have a place for coats and purses, and make sure people’s glasses are topped off and that they know there are second helpings. But doing all those things doesn’t mean I have deepened my relationship with my guests. In keeping so very busy, I have not found out what is breaking their hearts, or what is bringing them joy, or what they wonder about or delight in.

It could be that in all our busyness – especially with church things – we have forgotten about our relationship with God. Perhaps this is an antidote to that: when caring for someone, when serving someone, or providing for them, to see the face of Christ in that person.

You all have stuck with me quite admirably through a sermon that has been a bit on the heavy side with doom and gloom, and missing the light. So let me say three things about that.

First, to hear about the light, the grace, the love, the hope – all the good stuff – you really need to come back next week for our last sermon on Jeremiah, from chapter 31.

Second, it’s hard to reckon with our sin, to admit not just our failings but also our the outright harm we have caused others. We might worry that we will be punished for our sin; we might worry that God will give up on us. The message of our faith, throughout the whole of scripture, is just the opposite. God already knows our sin and awaits our confession so that we might receive mercy. God will never abandon us.

And finally, this. I know that some of you are suffering for all sorts of reasons – because of relationships that are broken, because of the grief that accompanies loss, because of unwanted crises in health or welfare. So coming to church for some encouragement and hearing this sermon might not have been what you needed today. Perhaps there is small solace to know that you are not the only one who suffers and to know that God suffers too.

Because if there is a balm in Gilead, it is these words from the psalmist: God’s “anger is but for a moment; [God’s] favor for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”

May it be so. Amen.