YOU ARE THE GOD who inhabits the scroll,
We do not know how, we do not doubt it,
We trust enough to say "Glory to you, Lord Christ"
"Praise to you Lord Christ, and "The word of the Lord, Thanks Be to God,"
We say it about the weird, objectionable parts of the scroll
Partly by habit, partly because we do not listen very much
Partly because we hunger and want a word addressed to us.
So we thank you for this radio-active scroll that has been set among us,
For all our criticism and all our orthodoxy it is not tamed or domesticated or made safe
May it shatter and offend and heal and transform.
For a minute tonight position us in front of the scroll
Let it vex us and stir us and make us new.
We pray in the name of Jesus the sure child of the scroll. Amen.
It seems like a fitting place to start, the prayer that Walter Brueggemann said at the start of his first lesson about Jeremiah Walking Into And Out Of The Abyss, which begins with the historical context of the book in its setting in Israel and the surrounding lands and noting the similarity between the sacking of Jerusalem, the killing of the sons of the King, the exile of a limited number of the elite inhabitants of Israel in Babylon and the trauma in the United States caused by 9-11 as a symbolic event in American history. Walter Brueggemann notes that the actual text of the Old Testament which we have is a product that is intimately tied up with those events, a large number of the books are a product of the prophetic criticism of the political, religious and moral character of Israel to which it directly attributes the experience of disaster, foreign domination and destruction, exile, all of which is seen as a product of injustice and economic inequality within the society. For anyone who figures religion has no business being involved in civics and things like economic justice, they should read the Bible because the entire basis of the monotheistic religions and, in fact, most all religion is intimately tied to those things. On the side of equality and justice or, in bad religion, on the side of the elites. The Catholic right, financed by billionaires and millionaires, replacing here the gangsters who corrupted the Church since late classical kings and other thugs started making it the official religion of their gangster regimes is intimately tied up in the support of economic, social and legal injustice, the role that the polls indicate that most of "white evangelicalism" plays among that segment of Protestants. Right wing Judaism plays the same role today, despite their claims to be as devoted to this literature as the Christian right claims to be devoted to the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament. To anyone who reads the text, no, they are not.
The prayer that acknowledges the extremely disturbing and confusing and offending text of the Scriptures and how that potential is as well the source of its value for upsetting and renewing us if we think about it seriously and deeply and not taking any safe and devaluing view of it.
Walter Brueggemann starts out by considering the line of kings leading to the Exile, beginning with King Josiah's (626-609), death followed by the 3 month reign of his son and four other kings that followed in quick succession. Which can be listed as:
Josiah (627- 609) who Jeremiah considered the last good and just king, indeed the best of the lot of them.
Jehoahaz (609)
Jehoiakim (609 - 598)
Jeconiah (December 598-March 597)
Zedekiah (597-586), deposed in the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar.
In the short section of the video devoted to going over the historical background to Jeremiah (which ends about 17:45 on the video), Brueggemann notes the fall of the Assyrian empire to the Babylonians in 609 as an important event that isn't mentioned directly in the text. He recommends to the class that they read from 2 Kings 23-25 for a description of the politics of the thing and Jeremiah during the last five kings of Jerusalem.
If you don't understand what the book is about, you won't understand any of it anymore than you'll get the current American disaster up to and including the crisis in which the truth doesn't matter for a disastrous percentage of the population without understanding the politics and the rising levels of inequality and injustice. I would note one big difference between then and now is the factor of electronic dissemination of propaganda (it's interesting how what are lies are called "information" by our educated classes) and how scientistic secularism is certainly a contending force here which it was not for an understanding of Jeremiah. For those of my age cohort trying to understand how things went so bad, a lot of what was taken as good under the hegemony of popular, secular culture is as much a contributing factor in that as the old-line racism, economic injustice and other assorted evils attributed to the American right. If you have to justifying religion involving itself in "politics" and "economics" against the right, among the secular left there is a faction that demands an enhanced if not totalitarian "separation of church and state." To them I demand that they produce an a-religious movement for economic justice and equality (they are in fact the same things) as potent as that achieved by the work of Martin Luther King jr or the other religious reformers who tend to be minimized if not erased by lefty historians but whose work and influence and leadership of those whose motivations directly derive from their religious belief have the power to move politics and, with less success, the secular priesthood of the courts. That is what can shatter, heal and transform us, secularist atheism produces nothing but despair and impotent violence. That's what I've had to conclude.
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Someone who followed my very first period of writing online asked me how I got from the "separation of church and state" to my present skepticism of that, it was a product of an online discussion I participated in (NOT at Eschaton) surrounding that movie they made where Anthony Hopkins played a Hollywood conception of the post-presidential John Quincy Adams. The host of another blog complained that people had attributed the abolitionist movement to religious motivation. I pointed out that in at least one case I knew of, an abolitionist abandonned that in favor of slavery due to their reading of the Bible. Which is historically true in that one case. However, I didn't stop there, I read more about the history of the abolitionist movement and other movements that had political success in changing things toward equality and the claims to the justice of that made by those who had brought about that change and it led to me abandonning my "separation of church and state" absolutism and to believe that the American left got suckered out of not only one of but the decisive force for equality, not only in religion but, in the case of American society, the only one that will work to do it. Along the way I had to admit that while religion can and the Bible does support the existence of the foundations of equality, materialism, scientism and atheism not only don't support that, in most cases they actively oppose the reality of the moral obligation to do that. I did most of, though not all of, that research online. So, the internet can have an educational effect, if you're willing to put in the work and be changed by it.
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