[CatherineTorpey]

Our wonderful Chad Tanaka-Park is preaching a sermon called “Speak Forward” and his text is Jeremiah 1:4-10.

Jeremiah was a priest from a town near Jerusalem. He was active from te 620s BCE until after the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586.

In some of his prophecies, Jeremiah seems to believe that the northern kingdom of Israel (which had been destroyed by the Assyrians a hundred years earlier) could be re-united with the southern kingdom of Judah. For a modern parallel, one might think of the Germans who lived with the pain of one half of their country under foreign rule for decades. For the Germans, there was a happy ending. That was not to be the case for Judah/Israel.

Jeremiah’s ministry was shaped by the context of the reforms of King Josiah, who reigned from 641 to 609. Josiah is a great hero in the Bible, because he was very dedicated to “true worship” of Yahweh, and he had his scribes compile what is now more or less our Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament). Most significantly, during this time, the “lost” book of Deuteronomy was “discovered.” Modern scholars say that Deuteronomy was not, in fact, discovered, but rather was written at this time, pretending to be from the time of Moses to give justification to the reforms that Josiah was implementing. These reforms shifted Jewish worship to Jerusalem and its temple alone, and demanded more strongly than ever that Jews worship no other gods. Jeremiah grew up in this time and, as a man of the priestly clan, was wholeheartedly in favor of this stricter interpretation of Yahweh’s will.

Presumably, Josiah had instituted these reforms in the hope and expectation that purifying the worship of Yahweh would protect Judah from the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Babylonians, who were vying with one another to take over Judah and other small nations. Josiah fought the good fight and died in a big, consequential battle at Megiddo, also known as Har Megiddo (Mount Megiddo), also known in Greek as Armageddon. The battle at Armageddon spelled the beginning of the end of Judah.

The kings that followed Josiah were very much in the pocket (by necessity) of the Egyptians and then the Bablyonians. They were desperate to be let out from under the yoke of these foreign oppressors.

Jeremiah is the one that God has chosen to convey the bad news to the people of Judah that their destruction was inevitable. Jeremiah’s message is, essentially: “Well, folks, you have disobeyed God’s commands, and now it’s all downhill from here, and why are you even trying to stop what is inevitable? You are about to face the fiddler.”

Jeremiah absolutely hated the task of bringing this bad news, and he is often called “the weeping prophet,” because he wants to love the people, not castigate them. But God says, “Jeremiah, you’re my boy, so buck up and tell them what I tell you to tell them.”

As one can imagine, Jeremiah’s prophecies made him quite unpopular. People tried killing him, and they threw him in a cistern (a kind of well) for him to die. He gets rescued from there, but troubles continue and continue. When Babylon does finally destroy Judah, Jeremiah stays behind to be with the people at the time of horror. The book of Lamentations is Jeremiah’s witness of the destruction of Jerusalem.

It’s all a very sad story, but throughout it all, Jeremiah prophesies that although destruction is inevitable, God will restore the people in the end.

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