God is getting out of our box.

As I have said a number of times the key questions facing us and all those who seek to follow God are “Who is God, who are we and what is ours to do?” Today’s readings are all about these three questions.

Jeremiah is writing to a people shattered by the events that have unfolded around them. They understood the answers to the above questions as God was their God alone, was all powerful and would protect them. All they had to do was trust. Well, they trusted and now Jerusalem was overrun with Babylonians, and the leadership was being taken to Babylon to live. Some prophets said “Do not worry. God will overcome and we will return very soon. Just trust!” Jeremiah said this was all God’s doing, and it was not going to be put right any day soon. Jeremiah said “we need new answers to these questions.”

Jeremiah is very important. As we learnt in our Lenten studies last year many scholars think he is the first to declare God to be more than the God of the Hebrew people, but God of all. This is a big shift. If God is just the God of the Hebrews that meant God would defeat the other gods and their followers and the Hebrew people would be victorious. But if God is the one God and God of all, that changes the relationships with the other people. The Hebrew people become a vehicle by which all other peoples come to know the one God. And that is what Jeremiah says is happening here. Through the exile the Hebrew people, if they stay faithful, will become a blessing for their conquerors and all they live among. This is not how they expected things to turn out. This was new. God was not fitting their idea about who God is and how God acts. It changes what being God’s “chosen people” means from special and treated differently to a people chosen to join God’s mission of offering life to all. This changes how they understood their way of life, from obeying rules to keep themselves apart and sacred for God to a people who offer God’s life to those they live among.

Australian New Testament scholar William Loader suggests we can see the same issues in Pauls writings.  Paul the Pharisee no longer understood God’s love as offered to Jews alone. He began to understand what Jeremiah was saying. Being God’s chosen people did not mean the Hebrew people were the only people of God. In Christ all were invited into God’s community. In writing about the passage from Timothy, Loader says, “The right way of leadership, according to 2:15 includes the right way to interpret scripture. In the tradition of Paul this is not in parroting its commands and prohibitions. On the contrary, to the ire of Paul’s opponents, it was sorting out what is central and what is not, what remains applicable and what is to be discarded in the interests of the radically inclusive message of grace. It got Paul into deep trouble with those whom we might call the fundamentalists of his day, who refused to contemplate that the word could be rightly discerned and critically engaged in this way.” 

We live in times like that of Jeremiah and Paul. At times it feels like we are in exile. God has not protected us. We are struggling to work out who we are and how to follow Jesus in this new age. Like Jeremiah and Paul we are being forced to read scripture in new times to meet new challenges and that is not easy. But we are not alone. Jeremiah and Paul go before us. Thanks be to God.

---