All Saints by the Lake, Dorval
September 18, 2022
The prophet Jeremiah, from the Sistine Chapel
My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. … O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!
I wonder what the prophet Jeremiah would say if he were in Canada in 2022.
For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Weeping is heard in the land, for the young left behind by vaccines, and the old left alone in nursing homes.
The children look with jealous eyes upon their parents, who enjoyed security they can never dream of. In every city, the houses grow in size and price, while the widow and orphan shake their empty coffee cups outside the metro stations. The rich look down upon them from their million-dollar 5 ½ s and say in their hearts, “It’s their own fault, they must be on drugs.”
The true children of this land are forced to the margins, denied clean water and adequate education, while their human rights are trampled and their ancient wisdom ignored.
The skies darken with smoke as the forests burn; the rivers burst from their banks and overwhelm the land; the fields are drenched with poison and the cattle die.
The people turn their backs on the Creator and worship the gods Ashtaroth, Mammon, and Moloch.
Ashtaroth, the goddess of so-called “fertility”, because sex sells everything and relationships are reduced to a swipe on a cell phone and a quick, anonymous hookup.
Mammon, the god of gold, for the needs of human beings are ignored as long as the stock market keeps going up, and the essential worker is valued with slogans but not with resources.
Moloch, the god who demands the sacrifice of the helpless, as the disabled are not so subtly encouraged to commit suicide, because it’s too inconvenient to provide them with safe housing and an adequate livelihood.
Weep, O Canada, rend your garments, for after almost three years of a global pandemic you have learned nothing. The invitation to rethink society, to become gentler and more generous, to slow down and prioritize what’s really important, has been rejected in favour of rushing back to a “normal” that serves only the powerful.
And most of all, Canada, you have not grieved. You have not sat down in the gate of the city and poured ashes on your head, and wept for the forty-five thousand people who have died from, and the tens or hundreds of thousands more living with the long-term effects of, COVID. You have not reckoned with the horror, you have not let yourselves lament and mourn the way that these beloved children of God deserved. You have not lifted up your voice in psalms of abject despair, demanding of God how such things could happen.
O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance; they have profaned your holy temple; they have made Jerusalem a heap of rubble. They have given the bodies of your servants as food for the birds of the air, and the flesh of your faithful ones to the beasts of the field. They have shed their blood like water on every side of Jerusalem, and there was no one to bury them.
Thank God for the Psalms. Once the prophets have confronted us with all the ways in which our situation is hopeless, in which we have strayed far from God and have no idea how we can get back, in which disaster has piled on disaster until the weight threatens to smother us – the Psalms give us our own words to cry out to God. And, impossibly yet compellingly, at the end they turn to hope, or at least to impassioned pleading that indicates that all hope is not yet lost.
Remember not our past sins; let your compassion be swift to meet us; for we have been brought very low. Help us, O God our Saviour, for the glory of your Name; deliver us and forgive us our sins, for your Name’s sake.
Even Jeremiah, the “Weeping Prophet,” allows glimpses of a new world beyond the catastrophe he sees all around him. Not in today’s passage, but scattered here and there throughout the 52 chapters of the book, are occasional flashes of the kind of triumphant hope featured in the later prophecies of Second and Third Isaiah.
But we can’t go straight there. We need to get there through lament. This is perhaps the most profound message offered by the prophets: there is no healing without reckoning. The balm of Gilead can be applied only after we have plumbed the depths of our suffering and grief.
Because when we have done so, when we have wept every tear we have in us – we will discover that life is not over, and that God is still there.
And what will the prophet say to give us hope, in Canada in 2022?
Take heart, my people! Stand up and look around you. The peoples come from far away, they come to your shores to worship the Lord. The lakes and the rivers rejoice, the trees of the field clap their hands. The children are washed in the holy waters and anointed as kings and priests; they are embraced by friends and strangers, the old are honoured for their wisdom.
There shall come a day, O people, when the poor are lifted up, when work is valued over wealth and wealth is shared for the good of all, when the ruins are raised up and the land flourishes. When the voices of all our relatives, human and otherwise, are united in a song that moves from lament to joy, and when the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
Amen.
Leave a Reply