Weekly Lectionary: Let's Try This Again

For about three years, I would pick one of the Revised Common Lectionary passages for the forthcoming Sunday and write some kind of reflection about it. Sometimes short, sometimes long, sometimes earnest, sometimes goofy. But I stopped doing that a little over two years ago. Writing, which was once as natural as breathing, has become exponentially difficult for me of late. With apologies to Anne Lamott, I’m going to try to bird by bird this sucker starting with resurrecting this old practice. It might be rough, but I’ve got to start somewhere.

Jeremiah 23:1-6
First Reading for Reign of Christ Sunday (Year C)

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord.”

I’m going to try my best to be honest: Reading this my mind immediately goes to the dumpster fire and, I don’t know, port-a-john pyrotechnics that are presently engulfing our political and religious lives in America. And I want to steer out of that. It’s there. It’s important. We need to stay informed and be vigilant. But I am just too exhausted by it tonight.

But then the prophet Jeremiah comes along and decrees God’s woes on leaders who hurt and ostracize God’s people. Granted, we could take the out. Jeremiah is talking about Israel during the Babylonian exile. He’s not talking about the United States in the 21st Century. Yet that’s a copout because we are reading this passage and trying to learn from it even if Jeremiah is not talking to us. So as much I want to talk about how I feel like I am going insane because of the actions of old white men who have the last name Graham, I’m starting with the man in the…reflection of this computer screen.

When scripture rings out the woes, we want to dodge it. But the woe can toll for any of us. I’m a minister. If you follow Jesus, you are too even if you aren’t ordained. We all have a mandate to minister to other people: to do justice, love mercy, show them God’s love, etc. None of us want to be a shepherd who destroys or scatters. I certainly do not. Nor do I want to have any evil doings to which God or natural consequences sees fit to attend to.

Yet it can be so hard to know what the right thing to do is when we live in a time when even the very nature of truth seems like dust snapped away by some mad titan. When the culture is mean, vulgar, dishonest, lazy, or whatever else, it’s easy for it all to be normalized. Then we find ourselves being mean, vulgar, dishonest, lazy, or whatever else. I am not actively doing that. I’m trying not to, but God help us, it’s in the air that we breathe. So to where do we turn? And what do we do? How do I not scatter and destroy?

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”

Again, Jeremiah is talking to the Hebrew people in a specific time and a specific place. He most likely wasn’t thinking about a first century carpenter from Nazareth. But for so long Christians have seen Jesus in this promise of a wise, just, and righteous king. The language of king is loaded, I know. It doesn’t really work in our present context and it paints all sorts of pictures of colonialism and unjust hierarchies. If king doesn’t sit right with you, then find some other language that does.

But this is to whom we turn. This is to whom we look. When everything seems to be falling apart. When so much is being scattered or destroyed, we look to Jesus. We look to his life, his ministry, his compassion, his sacrifice, and his resurrection. If we don’t want to get caught up in this sick cycle of scattering and destroying, we have to realize that our North Star is Jesus.

And part of the idea of Reign of Christ Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year, is that no matter what leaders or rulers exist on this earth that the just and righteous rule of Christ sits above all of that. Not only does it sit above the destruction and fighting but, as the prophet says, the days are surely coming when wisdom, justice, and righteousness are the final word. We actually trust that those days are already here if we would just look for it.

I don’t want to be another cog in a machine that brings woe upon this earth. So let’s try this again and again every day until kingdom come: follow the way of Jesus as best we can.