Jeremiah 2:4-13

I imagine some of you are getting a little tired of Jeremiah by now. We saw similar warnings in Jeremiah 23 a couple weeks ago, then we went back and started at the beginning. There isn't a whole lot else in between. The specific “abominations” that are occurring are not spelled out in this book, they are in Deuteronomy. Traditionally, Deuteronomy is a series of speeches given by Moses. Scholars say it was written by the same author or authors as Jeremiah. (See JEDP in the glossary) The Kingdom was split and threatened by surrounding empires, so they went through a period of attempted reforms. They “found” the book of Deuteronomy to give them divine support.

This support includes the classic appeal to being brought out of Egypt. After decades of archeology, there is still no evidence of Jewish slaves in Egypt or of them wandering around in the desert for 40 years. There was a Kingdom, probably a lot smaller than the Bible claims. It was different in its philosophy of egalitarianism and social justice, but it had corruption and war just like any other kingdom. It appears to have broken away from Egypt but the details of how that happened are sketchy. This lack of understanding of history can be forgiven of people who only had a few scrolls and a small elite priesthood to teach them. The sad thing is, these lies are repeated today.

Sirach 10:12-18

Your Bible may not contain Sirach. It was written within a couple centuries of the New Testament. It talks of wisdom as a woman, given to us by God. Occasionally, it has some bits of wisdom that I find universal:

4:27 Do not subject yourself to a fool,
      or show partiality to a ruler.


And:

5:11 Be quick to hear,
      but deliberate in answering.

But it is still a product of its time:

7: 20 Do not abuse slaves who work faithfully,
      or hired labourers who devote themselves to their task.

And the overriding tone is set early:

1: 26 If you desire wisdom, keep the commandments,
      and the Lord will lavish her upon you.
27 For the fear of the Lord is wisdom and discipline,
      fidelity and humility are his delight.

And that is the theme of the Bible. Read your Bible, learn the rules, pray. A little fellowship and speaking the word is also helpful. This theme gets repeated throughout this somewhat disorganized list of tips and tricks for life. In light of the Jeremiah text, it's a little funny to see this rhetorical question:

2:10 Has anyone trusted in the Lord and been disappointed?

So even in Sirach, a book that really gives us some advice, and doesn't stress too much about how we will be wiped out if we don't take it, there is still this idea that we really only need to trust in the Lord.

The answer to the question is, “yes”. Even in the Torah, God changes his mind, can be bargained with, disappears for a while then comes back. Not to mention the time he wipes everything clean and starts over. All this is explained by the prophets as everyone not trusting in the Lord. Of course what everyone has actually not trusted is those very prophets who come down from mountains and say they are speaking for the Lord.

Can we salvage any of this wisdom in the book of Sirach? Or do we bring our accumulated wisdom of the ages to this book and throw out the parts about treating slaves well? If we throw out that, what else can we alter or should we re-interpret? Perhaps the place to start is with the question of how we decide what is true? Biblical authors went back as far as they could with their scrolls from earlier generations and their oral history, and they couldn't find any better explanation than God. We have since gone back quite a bit further and found our ancestors lived in caves and before that they hung around in trees and before that they were sponges and bacteria. How we became cooperative social animals explains a lot.

What we have in common with our Biblical ancestors is that we can't prove any of this with 100% certainty. I'll leave it up to you to explore epistemology and what “evidence” means or what “scientific proof” means, but I would never argue that life is anything but a mystery. We are clawing our way out of that mystery, but we have only scratched the surface of the part of the physical universe that we can see. We are like a ship in the middle of the ocean. We can only look out to a horizon that ends 13.7 billion years ago. Beyond that, the universe has not existed long enough for the light from it to get here.

If you are interested in epsitemolgoy, you might enjoy this introduction to the problem of not being able to know what we don't know.

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

This is another list of advice, mixed with the reason for doing it and the consequences of not. There's a bit more to this, but I especially like the idea of showing hospitality to strangers, because they might be angels.

As the singer songwriter Tracey Chapman says in “Heaven's Here on Earth”:

I've seen and met angels wearing the disguise
Of ordinary people leading ordinary lives
Filled with love, compassion, forgiveness and sacrifice
Heaven's in our hearts

In our faith in humankind
In our respect for what is earthly
In our unfaltering belief in peace and love and understanding.

Many mythologies have these stories. A god or a representative of the gods comes from wherever they reside and takes on human form, usually someone of below average means. They wander around, looking for compassion or assistance and if they find it, the ones providing it get rewarded. As a story to tell children, I kinda like it.

When the 13th Dalia Lama died, Buddhist priests went out in the countryside, looking like ordinary people. They talked to people and interviewed children, looking for pure hearts. They were looking for the person that the Buddha had reincarnated in to. How differently would we treat our children and each other if we felt there was a soul with infinite wisdom somewhere in our midst and that any stranger you met might be one of the people who knew how to find it?

When you're done telling the story be sure to tell those children that by “angels”, you mean “people”. They'll do funny things with that information at first and there is no need to force them to think like you do, since they don't. Eventually they start to figure out the difference between cartoons and real people and stories and talking animals and strangers and friends.

And hopefully, they will eventually understand that there is a reason for any myth. We still look for heroes, people who seem to know things before they are taught, geniuses. We are finally realizing this is not inherited, it is not passed on through royal blood and it doesn't float around and just attach to some child. The way to find it is to provide everyone with as much education as we can afford. There is no racial, sexual or geographical boundary that shouldn't be crossed to get as much wisdom spread as wide as it can be spread. If we allow each child to find their place, to find their own interests and let them pursue them, we'll have a lot more “angels”.

Luke 14:1, 7-14

The book of Luke is one of my favorites. Passages like this one are the reason why. The only verse I have any real trouble with is 11, because things don't always work out quite so nice. Besides that, it's fun to imagine Jesus telling this story and everyone glancing about then rushing to grab the seat of lowest honor so they will then be noticed as being honorable. It's the old joke, “It's hard to be humble when you're as great as me.” It's a sort of trap, if you are acting humble because God said it's a good idea, then you really aren't being humble, but it's still a good idea.

Nadia Bolz Weber, a tattooed former comedian turned preacher from Denver Colorado tries to explain it this way:

“So in the end, humility is not a virtue that makes us righteous.  But it’s not unimportant either, because humility is just admitting the truth of being human…humility is the naked state in which we stand before a righteous God who sees us as we are – sees every jealous inclination, every racist thought, every selfish desire every good deed done for the wrong reason and God sees all of it through the lens of the cross and says to us you are free. “

As much as I enjoy Nadia's sarcastic tone and humorous anecdotes, she always comes back to this “lens of the cross” thing, and never really explains it. Unless you really have a direct line to the divine, the closest the rest of us get to the type of vision she is talking about is our personal thoughts. We see ourselves naked, not everybody else. We see our own thoughts and desires. We know that others have similar thoughts through poetry, literature, intimate conversations with friends, and religion. Of those, only religion is designed to judge us for being human. It sets the trap; Trust religion, and it tells us we’ll be free to be a flawed human. Don’t trust religion, and you are imprisoned. Religion is alternately ambiguous about what will happen to you or grotesquely specific about what bad will come of not putting all your faith in it.

In a world of reciprocity, of getting paid what you're worth, the end of this passage is difficult. We would like to act like that, but we know what it might get us. If the promise of resurrection was a guarantee, we'd do it, but we would like a little evidence. We see evidence for people cheating the system and getting rewarded. We see people making billions and paying little or no taxes. We see people born into poverty and growing up being told they don't need to work, that they can take just like those billionaires.

It's harder to see the evidence of the rewards for giving to those who are not currently contributing or are even unable to contribute. If it were the only thing we did, it would not pay off, but that is not the future this story points toward, or one any reasonable person would. What has actually happened, as societies have provided more benefits to more of the people who are doing the work that leads to being able to provide more of those benefits, the work contributes back into the system, increasing what is available. The limits are what the environment itself can sustain.

Not too long ago, it was demonstrated that we could only feed 4 billion. Then we found ways to increase yields and grow food where we couldn't before. It now takes fewer people working at farming to feed many more. This was made possible by a few people in universities in middle America and some farmers in Mexico who built on knowledge gained over centuries. Solving that problem created new ones, but that's not unusual. The next solutions will most likely come from those same hard working individuals, not from the heir to an empire or from a messiah.