🦁 Epiphany 3-2
Readings: Psalm 62:5-12; Jeremiah 20:7-13; 2 Peter 3:1-7.
From the TRNG Room:
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the second Friday after Epiphany. This is brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Psalm 62 Jeremiah 20 and second Peter three and the I have to apologize for being absent yet again for the Thursday reading. I to say that Wednesday reading, many of you probably know about the ice storm and that I have two young children. So they've been canceling school, delaying school, and it's just been a frickin pinball game.
And both the kids are now back in school for one day and the next week will hopefully have a routine back. But I will also be uploading the sun readings soon for everybody. I won't make you wait until Sunday. And as I've said, brother Tim Tribble, who's an official in the hospital at the Saint Martin, will be taking up a number of the the weekday daily readings. So that being said, Jeremiah is always one of my favorite prophets and not nice. That's not the right word. I admire and am awed by Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a part of the Southern Kingdom of Judah as the Assyrians I'm sorry, the Babylonians were threatening the stability of the last remaining tribes of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah, and he was told by God that they're doomed and they needed to let the Babylonians take over. And if you try to fight back, you're going to be exiled. And we don't know what would have happened if they hadn't fought back.
But they did. And Jeremiah was forced to watch the destruction of the temple of the holy city and of many of the most powerful Judah idols. And he dies while everybody's in exile. I believe he flees to Egypt. In the meantime, he doesn't go with them, as Ezekiel does, if my memory serves. And so he he is called the weeping prophet because he knew that he was preaching against his own people for their benefit. And yet he probably had an inkling that they weren't going to listen.
The Judah sites were kind of the seat of the Davidic monarchy. A lot of archaeologists and historians think that, you know, the the the Kingdom of Judah, you know, there was some kind of there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on in academia about, you know, the social differences between the two kingdoms and how many of the prophets came out of the north. And there's just a lot more activity in the northern area, both before the unified Kingdom and even during the unified Kingdom, like Elijah was up at Mount Carmel in the northern area, the land of Zebulon and Naftali, as opposed to the land of Judah and Simeon and Efraim or Benjamin. I can't remember which tribe held Jerusalem. But anyway, there's a lot of really fascinating stuff about the distinction between North and South and how that had a lot to do with class. And so the the southern tribes, the monarchic Davidic tribes had a little bit of you know, they had reason to look down their noses at the northern tribes, which were largely more rural, more agrarian. Jerusalem was a big city by then, and the only comparable one in Samaria, which was the capital of northern tribes, was maybe half the size of Jerusalem. And so he's called to preach against not just his own people, but kind of the the cool kids of his people and some of his own people, Jeremiah's people in the North probably thought that that's great for them. They were they'd already been destroyed and quote unquote lost. But there's always multiple ways to interpret all these stories. And Jeremiah is in the middle of this really just catastrophic moment that has no easy answers, right? It's not that the Judah rights were all bad and thank God the Army destroyed it. Wasn't that the you know, when I think of the exile, as you know, as Jeremiah saw it coming, I think of look, of course, they're not going to give up to the Babylonians. Of course, they're not going to roll over and let them have their way with them. And yet that's what God seemed to be commanding. And so the the status quo, you know, kind of business as usual, you're going to defend yourself, Of course. And yet God doesn't necessarily call us to that all the time. God does not call us to always try and get out of this life alive, to use the words of other theologians, we have to remember, and I think military families know that they're you're going to die one way or another. The chances are very high in combat or higher than normal. And so you have to wrestle with that. I remember when I was going to Iraq, I wrote letters to all my family basically saying goodbye, sealed them in envelopes and told my dad here, if if I die, give these out to, you know, X, Y, and Z. And so the reality of death is something we don't like to think about. But if we know that death is not the end, then there's it stands to reason that whatever the end is is more important than, you know, whether I survive. I think that the end is to be a good person, to be the kind of creature that God intended us to be. God said that we are made good and God said, that is not good, that we are alone. So we are made to be together. We're made for community and we are made good and communities may die, but that doesn't affect whether they're good or bad, right?
Losing because, you know, we think of like defeat in battle. The good guy can lose and the bad guy can win. If the point of faith is to become and remain the kind of person and the kind of community God created us to be, that doesn't guarantee that we're going to survive, That doesn't guarantee that we're always going to come out on top. And certainly if they had rolled over, many of them would have died. But I don't know what would have happened if the dude I had obeyed Jeremiah's prophecy as the voice of God. I don't know. All I know is what history leaves us that they rebelled and they were exiled and in exile they made. There's this whole renaissance. The second temple period was incredible, but it makes me wonder how much what could have been different if the word of God had been obeyed and we had done the difficult thing. If the people of God had trusted God with their lives and their their eternal character, I guess, for lack of a better word, I don't know what would have happened, but I do know that what they were told to do, by God, they didn't do. And I know it sucked. It still sucked. Many of them still died. And so Jeremiah and the whole notion of what happens with the exile is just so complicated morally that we shouldn't just kind of give these pat answers of like, well, you know, of course, we shouldn't roll over. Right. But that we trust God in both the good and the bad, whether God is doing something that we want God to do with our lives or whether there's something that God wants us to do that we don't want like Jonah. And we do it anyway simply for the fact that God is in charge and we are not. And I think that that path does not spare us from pain, but it does protect us from becoming or being antithetical to the word and the will of the creator of the entire universe.
