Jeremiah 2:1-3, 13, 31-32
I want to start out this message with a risky venture. I am going to try and share some of my pain with you.
We’re all pretty private out here on the high plains. At least we think we are. We think we get to hold our cards pressed up against our chest and never give a peak. Then we find out everyone knew what our cards were already. It’s one of those ironic myths we live by in our small towns. Nobody knows, and at the same time everybody knows.
There may be times when you feel like you need to talk to someone about your stuff. You try to figure out who you can talk to, and who you can’t or won’t talk to. Maybe I will be one of those people on your short list, if you have something you need to work through. It’s a risky thing, I realize for people to come see me and talk through their struggles about life. It usually takes a congregation and pastor a few years to build up that level of trust. Well, I’ve been around for 5 1/2 years now, so I’m going to take a risk and share a little more of my story. See if we can increase our level of trust with each other.
Back in 2006, when I was living in Bakersfield, I got engaged to a woman. We had been dating for over 3 years. We had what I thought was a good relationship. We were both excited about our life and future together. We were to be married in the middle of July that year.
Everyone in the church I was serving was so excited for me. They were so happy that love had come around for us both. She’s a wonderful Christian woman with a great heart. Even though she was not a member at the church I served, she had grown up in Bakersfield. Her father owned several restaurants in town that were really popular, and most people knew her. The closer we got to our wedding date, the more the excitement was getting ramped up. All the plans had been made, and all we had to do was anxiously wait for the date to come.
Two and a half weeks before the wedding, she walked away--from the wedding and the relationship. She said she felt like God was telling her she shouldn’t be married or even thinking about marriage. That’s all she’d say. I asked her why the (hell) God didn’t tell her that a year, two years, even three years earlier. She had no answer.
She cut off all communication and left me to deal with the feelings of personal devastation and rejection. I was angry at her for using God as an out. Basically, I was just really angry. What can you do when someone plays the God card? It trumps all other cards. The God card is usually played in order to end all conversation. “It’s the way it has to be.” “It’s ordained by the Almighty.” I was angry at God, because if God was really behind this, I wanted to know why. I felt I deserved an explanation from either her or God. I have received none. Which deepened my sense of emotional and theological trauma.
People in my congregation were literally coming up to me in tears, grasping me and telling me how sorry they were, and how badly they felt for me. I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to handle all their grief. I didn’t even know, exactly, how to handle mine. I certainly didn’t handle it very well. I stuffed my feelings and told everyone I was fine. We were getting a new senior pastor the next month, and I felt like I had to put on a strong face to help everyone get ready for that transition. There was too much going on at church, and I didn’t want my personal stuff to derail any of that, or flatten the mood as we began to launch a new senior pastor as well as our new Fall programs. So I just pretended I was OK.
And then I crashed and burned. As I said, I didn’t handle my grief very well. I didn’t choose a healthy way to cope. Which is ironic in that I consider myself an expert on grief and grief care. It is one of my specialities. It is what I help people do best--get through their traumatic times. I, who know so much about grief care, didn’t take very good care of myself. If I would have come to myself and said, “Steve, what should I do? How should I handle this?” I could have given myself some pretty good advice. I had done it for hundreds of people through out my ministry. But I didn’t for myself. I played a role I thought everyone expected me to play as Minister of Pastoral Care--that is, the role of the strong pastor who sucks it up and moves on, continuing to take care of others even if it meant not taking care of myself.
A year later, the woman who walked away, leaving me at the altar so-to-speak, feeling God didn’t want her to be married, got married to a doctor in town, whom she had just met and whom she hardly knew. And that made me angrier.
I’ve put a lot of distance, geographically and emotionally and theologically from that chapter of my life. I’ve spent a lot of hours in therapy trying to finally understand and deal with what happened, both in the rejection and how I cratered personally, in making some really poor choices in the aftermath of it all. I am past it, for the most part. And you have all had an embracing hand in helping me get back on my feet and feel good about myself again—unbeknownst to you. For that I will always be grateful.
I tell you all this not so you can feel sorry for me or whatever it is that you may be feeling as you hear about this piece of my past. I tell you mainly so you can hopefully, through my experience, see an illustration of, and get a glimpse into the heart of God. Jeremiah is trying to give us the beginning peek into God’s heart in this second chapter. Part of what we see there is the pain of being “left at the altar” by his people, not just once, but on a continual basis.
Jeremiah starts out by describing the wedding of God and God’s bride--the people whom God has called his own. “I remember your youthful loyalty, our love as newlyweds...” God sings. But by verse 32, that song of wedded love has turned mournful:
“Brides don’t show up without their veils, do they?
But my people forget me,
Day after day after day they never give me a thought.”
How does God do it? That’s what I wonder. I know what it feels like because of not one, but two incidences of marital abandonment. I know what was going on in my heart. I know how angry and rejected I felt. I know the hurt of being walked away from with no discussion, no say, no power. How does God deal with it, “day after day after day?”
My people have walked out on me... (God laments)
Have I let you down, Israel?
Am I nothing but a dead-end street?
Those are very real feelings and emotions that God is displaying. If you don’t think God should have feelings, you better not read Jeremiah. You’ll find in these pages the picture of God who feels things deeply.
I know those feelings. Some of you may know those feelings. You begin to wonder, “What did I do?” “Should I blame myself?” God wonders. “Could I have done something different, more, or better?” That’s the triple threat combination when you’re in the midst of a disintegrating relationship, that sends you into a self-destructive spiral. If only... If only I did something different. If only I did something more. If only I did something better. If only...then all this nightmare wouldn’t have happened.
But God, like many of us, came to the realization that it wouldn’t have mattered. It wouldn’t have mattered if God had done more, better or different. The people would still have abandoned God. That’s their nature, not Gods. That’s OUR nature.
Why do my people say, “Good riddance!
From now on we’re on our own”?
...My people forget me...
How does God do it? God cries out. But to whom does God cry? We all cry out to God. Who does God have to cry out to? We may be tempted to counsel God, telling God to just forget those people. Let them go. They aren’t worth it. Just get on with life; move on. But those people are us. There are other people who won’t abandon you, we tell God. And we think we are in that company, not the former losers. There are other fish in the ocean, we say, and we think we are those other fish. But the hard reality that we all must start with, that Jeremiah starts with, is that we are all runaway brides. We are all the ones who skip, sulk, run, crawl, or back away from the altar. God is waiting for us as we, at one point, came down the middle aisle. God was waiting to proclaim his love for us. God was waiting to hear us proclaim our love for God. And then God watched, dumbfounded, as we all turned tail and walked, nay, ran away.
The question that God then keeps coming back to, the question that is the question behind all the “if onlys...”, the question that is behind all of God’s questions to his people is this: “What am I supposed to do with all this love?” God is saying, “I have loved you, and I have loved you deeply and well. What am I supposed to do with all that now that you have walked away?"
I recently rewatched the movie, “Blind Side." Has anyone seen it? It’s based on a true story about a white family in Tennessee who takes in and adopts an abandoned, black, high school boy. The kid is huge. His grades are all D’s and F’s. But in going through his records, they discover a psychological evaluation on which he scored in the 98th percentile in “protective instincts.” He has run away a lot, previously, from the foster homes he was stuck in. Every time he runs away, he tries to find the mother who abandoned him. She is a crack head. A drug addicted piece of work, who doesn’t care for any of her 12 children, and has no idea who the father is of any of them. She doesn’t care where her kids are or how they’re doing. To her, her children are out-of-sight-out-of-mind. Given the chance to meet him, to meet her son, she refuses.
But this boy keeps trying to find her, protect her, if not from the world, at least from herself. He has this love for his mother that he won’t let go of, no matter how messed up she is, no matter how invisible she tries to make herself from him. Even though she doesn’t want to be found, and doesn’t want to be a part of his life in any way, he is still driven to keep searching her out. “Why?” is what I asked myself, as I watched the movie. And, “Why?” is what I ask God as I read this second chapter of Jeremiah.
That’s the same glimpse into the heart of God that Jeremiah is trying to show us. We are these wayward, piece of work human beings. We probably don’t deserve the ways and lengths God goes to to keep searching us out, keep protecting us, keep loving us. “What am I supposed to do with all this love?” God keeps asking himself. Even when we people put ourselves out of God’s reach, and don’t want to be found; even when we totally forget about God and treat God as if there were no God, or with uncaring indifference; even when we abandon God at the altar as runaway brides; even when we say, “good riddance,” why does God keep searching? Why does God keep coming around?
God says that he and his love is like a spring. God says that our love is like cisterns. You know the difference between a cistern and a spring, right? A spring is a gift. It’s grace in the form of water. You can’t make a spring happen. It does it on its own. It is a constant flow of clear, clean water.
A cistern, on the other hand, is a technique for trapping water. Especially rain water. A cistern could be small, to catch rain water off your roof; or like large hand dug, bell-shaped, wells. If you had your choice, where would you get your water? Out of a stagnant cistern, or out of a running spring? You get water each way, but they aren’t quite the same, are they?
And that is exactly God’s point. Given the choice between the spring: sacrament, gift, grace, devotion, ever-faithful love; or the cistern: technique, the search for love in all the wrong places, draining emptiness--what do people choose? Sadly we choose the cistern rather than the spring.
One of the qualities of Jeremiah’s words that we will constantly have to pay attention to is not just the words or the imaginative images behind the words: the bride and groom; the cistern and the spring. What we must pay attention to most is the emotion, the pathos, the feelings that Jeremiah is trying to describe with those words and images.
Imagine, then, the feelings of God behind these images. The feelings God must have as his bride runs away from the altar; as the bride runs away from his spring water love; as the bride turns to others thinking they have the key to her ultimate happiness; as the bride pledges her love to those who cannot and will not fulfill her love; as the bride tries empty technique after empty technique in some vain attempt to gain the sacramental love she deeply longs for; as the bride continually says to God, “No, you’re not the One”; as the bride turns her back on the spring so close to her in order to dip and drink water from a stagnant cistern. Imagine. Imagine how God must feel, Jeremiah is saying, when we simply refuse to be in love with God. Because that is all it takes.
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