God had had enough of indifferent affluence, cynical oppression, and presumptive religion

In this context I suggest Jeremiah as the clearest model for prophetic imagination and ministry. He is a paradigm for those who address the numb and enying posture of people who do not want to know what they have or what their neighbors have.

One of the problems of going through this complex text the way I am is that those who jump in or skip sections might not understand passages such as this and, especially given the pandemic and the death that comes from it and the witness of the Repubican-fascist indifference to the spread of the infection - in fact they are probably the leading vector of the spread of it in the United States - and the deaths even among their fellow Republican-fascists (Herman Cain, for example) that is the kind of thing that Walter Brueggemann means when he says about "people who do not ant to know what they have or what their neighbors have". Even though that's not only what he means. The evil of indifference is solidly founded in the evil of self-absorption and is often accompanied by the evil of self-satisfaction and sanctimoniousness - of which Chuck Grassley in his James Stewart Iowa inflections will ever be the quintessential example for me. 

Jeremiah is frequently misunderstood as a doomesday spokesman or a pitiful man who had a grudge and sat around crying, but his public and personal grief was for another reason and served another purpose. Jeremiah embodies the alternative consciousness of Moses in the face of the denying king. He grieves the grief of Judah because he knows what the king refuses to know. It is clear that Jeremiah did not in anger heap scorn on Judah but rather articulated what was in fact present in the community whether they acknowledged it or not. He articulated what the community had to deny in order to continue the self-deception of achievable satiation. He affirmed that all the satiation was a quick eating of self to death. Jeremiah knew long before the others that the end was coming and that God had had enough of indifferent affluence, cynical oppression, and presumptive religion. He knew that the freedom of God had been so grossly violated (as in Gen 2-3) that death was at the door and would not pass over. The prophets do not ask much or expect much. In his grieving Jeremiah asked only that the royal community face up to their real experience, so close to the end. What both prophet and king knew was that to experience that reality was in fact to cease to be king.

We will see if this is the case or if the secular institutions of the American Constitutional system can drag us into a perpetual continuance of a failed system - the Pharaonic system lasted centuries, though there were certainly cycles of rise and fall within it. It would be one of the greatest ironies of modernism if, along with the fact that secular, even academic ideology being the replacement of established religion in nominal republics are even better at building durable horrors. The body counts of  modern scientistic regimes is certainly higher, the corruption of Christianity as "white evangelical" religion within that modern, industrial, scientific model of reality isn't really different from it. It is certainly no more of an expression of the Mosaic consciousness of God than the kings Jeremiah preached against.  In so far as the current crop of establishment priests,ministers, etc.  it shouldn't be missed that some of the most severe of the opponents and oppressors of Jeremiah were the priests of the Temple and other big, official religious centers who were as in on the corruption and idolatry and injustice of his time as Franklin Graham,  Cardinal Timothy Dolan et al are in the Trump regime. 

 

Note:  I posted this prematurely, I'd been preparing it for tomorrow.  But now that it's up I'm going to leave it up.