So there’s one big thing in this story that can be distracting or even scary. It’s the idea that when the rich man dies, he is sent to a place of suffering. A place of flames where he’s desperately thirsty and can’t get relief. That’s pretty scary, right? 

Some of you/the grownups might have grown up in churches that talked a lot about how our beliefs and actions in life might mean we go to Heaven – or Hell – when we die. 

(You may have noticed that’s NOT stuff we talk about a lot here!)

In the story that Jesus tells, the places where the rich man and Lazarus end up when they die are not Heaven and Hell. 

In Jesus’ time people had a lot of different ideas about what happened after you die – just like today. 

Some people thought nothing happened. 

Some people thought you would sleep for a long, long time. 

Some people thought that you’d go to the land of the dead. Some parts of that land were really beautiful and lush and comfortable – like the valleys of Abraham. And some parts of it were terrible and dry and scorched. And there’s a chasm – a great big split in the ground – between those two places.

Jesus is using that idea to tell this story. 

He is not answering The Big Question about what happens after we die, here. There are a couple of other places in the Gospels where he seems to be trying to say something about that – like when he says, In my Father’s house there are many mansions. But it seems like what happens after we die is pretty hard to explain. And he’s not trying to explain it, here.

That’s not what this story is about at all. 

The point of this story is not that the rich man should have been kind to Lazarus TO AVOID PUNISHMENT AFTER HE DIED. 

That is not the reason he should have been kind!

God does not want us to do kind and right and just things because we are afraid. 

That was the church’s idea, I think. 

Fear is not a healthy heart-reason to do good things. 

The point is that the rich man should have been kind to Lazarus because it was the right thing to do.

It was what all the teachings and traditions of his faith told him – 

As well as just basic empathy and humanity! 

So, the point of this story isn’t to make us worry about burning for eternity! But what IS the point of the story? 

What does Jesus want to make people think about, here? 

One thing he wants us to think about is what can happen inside of people who have too much money.

Is that a strange idea – too much money? … 

Right before he tells this story, Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and money.” Only what he really says is, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” 

What’s Mammon? 

Mammon is an interesting word that shows up a few times in the Bible. It means wealth, like a lot of money – a LOT of money.

But it doesn’t just mean money. 

It means money that people are treating like a god. 

Mammon means that people are putting money at the center of their lives, instead of God or other people or the wellbeing of their community and world. 

The great reformer Martin Luther wrote about Mammon. He said, “Many a person thinks they have God and everything they need when they have money and property. They trust in those things, and boast of them so stubbornly and boldly that they don’t care about anybody or anything else. A person like that fixes their whole heart on their god Mammon, that is, money and possessions. Mammon is the most common idol on earth.”

I know people who have enough money to share and are very generous and thoughtful about sharing.

I don’t think I know anybody who is super duper rich. But it does seem like people who are super duper rich are not always very happy? … 

Jesus wants us to notice how Mammon is at the center of the rich man’s life. His wealth lets him make everything around him just the way he wants it – his home, his clothes, his food. 

Maybe he gets so used to having everything exactly the way he likes it, that when there’s something unpleasant – like a poor, sick man lying on the ground – he just doesn’t even see it.

It’s like he’s wearing special Mammon glasses. 

There is a lot going on in this story, even though it seems pretty simple, and there are a lot of things it might leave us thinking about or wondering. 

But maybe the thing Jesus would want us to hear in this story today is actually a word of consolation and reassurance. 

It could be easy to hear this story as telling us that we’re supposed to reach out and help people who are struggling or alone or in need… 

And then to feel guilty or ashamed or overwhelmed. 

Because we know about A LOT of suffering!! … 

I know the grownups and the big kids hear about news from all over the world. People hurt and sick and hungry and afraid in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Haiti. 

We hear scary or sad news from across our country, too. Acts of violence, communities under threat, ecological disasters. 

I don’t know what grade they start showing you news in your classrooms, but at some point even our younger kids start hearing about some of this stuff – from school, or from other kids, or from their parents and older siblings talking about it at home. 

A lot of us feel an obligation to stay informed. We’re citizens of a powerful nation; there’s not much that happens in the world where our country doesn’t bear some kind of responsibility. So, in turn, we feel responsible – to learn, pray, advocate, donate, vote. 

That is the righteous work of citizenship and community. 

 And also: it’s much more than the folks who first heard Jesus tell this story would have had to deal with.

They didn’t have a 24-hour news cycle.

They didn’t have Instagram reels from war zones. 

They might hear, eventually, about a famine in that country, or a plague in that region, or a battle over there. 

But most of the suffering people knew about was the suffering they could see. The needs and struggles right there in their community, in their neighborhood. 

The rich man in the story isn’t reading about Lazarus in the newspaper. He’s literally walking past him – maybe stepping over him! – on a daily basis. 

So much information comes at us about human suffering around the country, around the world. 

I think sometimes it can be really too much for us.  

We get overwhelmed, discouraged, paralyzed. Numb. 

Sometimes it might even have an impact on our capacity to see and respond to the needs and struggles that ARE close at hand. That we could reach out and touch. 

Nobody, nobody in this congregation, 

if someone were literally bleeding and starving on your doorstep, 

would just step over him and do nothing. 

Nobody. 

But maybe we need permission 

to lift our eyes from our doorstep, but NOT TOO FAR. 

What’s the human suffering… on my block? 

Within a mile of my home, my work, my school? 

To read our local papers, and wonder: what are the ways people are struggling or suffering in my city, my town, right here?

Sometimes people could feel like focusing more locally means they’re ceding responsibility or closing their eyes and hearts to big needs elsewhere. We all need to find our own balance, and feel deeply inside us what we need to carry and stand for. 

But there are good reasons to think locally about how to connect and help and serve. I’ve learned this from folks with a lot more wisdom and experience about how to respond to needs, tend folks’ humanity, and build towards a better future, so my list of reasons is not going to be comprehensive! But here are a few. 

Responding to local needs may mean we’re more able to make a real difference, because we have a better understanding of the stakeholders and the needs and constraints and possibilities.

Responding to local needs can build networks and relationships that will help us better respond to other situations in the future. 

Responding to local needs is wise – shrewd! – in a time when some of our friends and neighbors are under threat and living with a lot of fear – because local, real-life connections can be safer and more trustworthy ways to connect and help. 

In our Godly Play classroom we ask, I wonder where you are in this story? If the person in Jesus’ story that you feel closest to is Lazarus – if you are down or struggling, in pain or in need – I hope this community will respond to you with compassion and care. 

Maybe what we need to hear in Jesus’ story today is permission not to try to carry the weight of the whole world – that’s the consolation, the reassurance I mentioned. 

And instead, an invitation to look for who and what is hurting, in our neighborhoods and networks, and to ask ourselves and each other what we can do about it.

How we can help, even a little – not because we’re afraid of eternal flames, but because that’s the kind of people God made us to be. 

Not to step over a suffering neighbor, 

but to step into our shared humanity. 

May it be so. 

We are living in complicated times. Difficult times. Unprecedented times. I hear it so often – I say it so often – that the words start to feel like ashes in my mouth. And yet: it’s true. These are bitterly, deeply, foundation-crackingly complicated times in which to live. 

There are moments and places and circumstances where things feel crystal clear. Things like our desire to protect our trans and nonbinary friends, loved ones, selves; our determination to stand with immigrant neighbors; our outrage about threats to access to healthcare, huge cuts to lifesaving research, protections for the environment we all share.

AND there are also moments and places and circumstances when things feel incredibly murky – around and within us. Maybe you feel trapped in daily choices, compromises and constraints. Maybe it feels like your bedrock values, the ones that have led you to be who you are and do what you do, now have to be whispered – if not entirely silenced – instead of shouted from the rooftops. Maybe you struggle with knowing how to feel, let alone what to do or say. 

I’m hearing hints of this murkiness from folks who work for the federal government. From folks who work in education and health care. From folks with any kind of public profile or platform. From people just struggling with how to read the news and then get up and go on with their day. 

These kinds of conversations have reminded me of the idea of moral injury. Moral injury happens when life injures your sense of being able to trust your leaders and do what’s right. The concept arose out of studies of healthcare personnel prevented from providing care by institutional constraints, and military veterans who had experienced their leaders, friends, or selves doing things that felt wrong, in the moment or in retrospect. A PTSD diagnosis didn’t fully capture the moral anguish these folks expressed. 

The International Centre for Moral Injury states that moral injury “involves a profound sense of broken trust in ourselves, our leaders, governments and institutions to act in just and morally ‘good’ ways,” and the experience of “sustained and enduring negative moral emotions – guilt, shame, contempt and anger – that results from the betrayal, violation or suppression of deeply held or shared moral values.” (All citations from Wikipedia, Moral Injury entry.) 

Moral injury seems like a pretty good name for some of the internal murkiness – and associated distress! – that people are naming to me. Today’s Epistle from the first letter of Timothy urges Christians to pray for our political leaders, “so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life.” Pragmatic advice from a community at risk of political persecution – but I know that some of you struggle with how to respond to our liturgy’s invitation to pray for all those in authority, every Sunday. 

I know, too, that many have grappled deeply with how to feel, let alone what to say, in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk – whom some folks knew of as a Christian motivational speaker, and others knew as an incendiary voice who built his movement on targeting marginalized groups and stoking fear to mobilize outrage. Activist Gwen Snyder commented on Bluesky, “I think it is corrosive on a spiritual level to live in a world where we are so unused to justice that a political assassination feels [to some people] like cause for celebration.” Disciples of Christ pastor and writer Derek Penwell captured some of this corrosive confusion, writing, “Jesus says love your enemies. The timeline says humiliate them. I’m not trying to referee the news; I’m just trying to shepherd my own heart while the barometer drops. I’m stuck between the Sermon on the Mount and the comments section.”

Into all this disorienting murkiness, the Gospel of Luke drops this incredibly murky parable.

Some of Jesus’ parables have really clear messages! Like the lost and found parables: God loves us and will always seek us out! Good news! Some parables are a lot more perplexing, and this one is close to the top of that list. Not just for me! Every commentary I’ve looked at says some version of, Whoo. This one’s a doozy. 

Jesus tells different kinds of parables. They don’t all work the same way. For example, I often remind us not to assume that the king or the boss in every parable is a stand-in for God. Sometimes yes; sometimes no. Here, I think, no. This is a wisdom parable, not a kingdom parable – meaning it’s about the world as it is, not the world as God means it to be.

I suspect that the parable as Jesus told it ends somewhere before the word “Whoever.” It’s not clear whether that last little bouquet of sayings belongs with this parable, or not. Sometimes the Gospel writers added explanations to the parables, to make it clearer what they thought Jesus was talking about. Luke, here, is working with a source document consisting of a bunch of stories and sayings of Jesus. Sometimes he’s just trying to figure out how to string it together and fit it all into the Gospel narrative he gets from Mark. So these sayings may not match this parable at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus’ version ended with these words: “People who belong to this world are more clever in dealing with their peers than are people who belong to the light.” Or in the more poetic language of the NRSV translation: “The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” 

Let’s make sure we understand the story. There’s a boss, a rich man, a master, and there’s his business manager, sometimes called his steward. And the boss gets word that the manager has been wasting his money. 

Fun fact: the same word is used for the prodigal son’s wasting or squandering of his inheritance, in the story that comes just before this one! We don’t know what the manager has been up to, but apparently it’s nothing that has made him any lasting friends, or provided for his future – no secret account in Turks and Caicos. 

The boss calls the manager in to see him. What’s this I’m hearing about you?!? Bring me the account books immediately, show me what you’ve been doing! And then turn in your keys; you’re out. 

Jesus’ storytelling is so wonderful as he gives us the manager’s internal monologue: What am I going to do!? I’m not strong enough to dig, to earn my keep by manual labor, and I’m too proud to beg. I know what I’ll do – so that when I’ve turned in my keys here, some people will still welcome me into their houses. 

And then he starts calling in the people who owe something to his master. Maybe tenant farmers who work on the master’s land, maybe just ordinary neighboring folks who have gotten into hardship and had to borrow from the local wealthy landlord. 

The manager opens the account books, where the record of what is owed is kept, and he starts changing the numbers. Jesus gives us a couple of examples – a man who owes nine hundred gallons of olive oil has it reduced to four hundred and fifty; a man who owes a thousand bushels of wheat has it reduced to 800. But we’re to assume that this happens over and over, with ten, twenty, fifty different debtors. 

Walk with me briefly into the weeds about these debts. It was and is against Jewish religious law to charge interest to other Jews. But we know from ancient records that people found ways to make a debt grow without calling it interest. The manager would likely also have taken a fee from every debt he handled. 

So we don’t know whether the cuts to these debts are reducing the principal, what was originally borrowed, or just taking off all the extra. If the manager is changing the debts back to the original amount – as some Biblical scholars think – then that’s very clever, because it leaves the master in a bind. It would be hard to publicly demand back all that that interest, forbidden by religious law. There’s a wonderful irony in that from the master’s point of view, this is yet more “squandering” on the part of the manager. 

The manager isn’t liberating the debtors entirely – he doesn’t just burn the files – but he is easing their burden somewhat. But he’s not doing it out of altruism. He’s doing it so that when he gets fired, in, like, ten minutes, he’s not public enemy number one. So that some people might give him a little food and let him sleep in their barn for a while. 

Who are we supposed to side with, here? The verses tacked on at the end include this question: “If you haven’t been faithful with someone else’s property, who will give you your own?” It’s easy to read this as a condemnation of the manager’s squanderings. But by making lucrative, predatory loans, the master has ALSO arguably been unfaithful with other people’s property. I suspect that Jesus himself did not care very much about people paying back their debts to the penny, especially in a brutally exploitative economic system that ground down the poor and enriched the wealthy and corrupted the middle management. And Jesus’ original audience, mostly working-class folks, probably empathized with the debtors – and appreciated the manager’s cleverness, even if his motives were skewed.

What are we supposed to make of this parable?…

In the translation we read today, the master commends the manager for his cleverness. In other translations, the original Greek word there – phronimos – is translated as shrewd. 

Shrewd is an interesting word. To call someone shrewd is a compliment, though sometimes a grudging one. It means someone’s good at understanding a situation and making things work out the way they want. But shrewdness is hardly a virtue – in fact it’s oddly amoral; we might equally note the shrewdness of allies or enemies. Likewise clever – it’s not necessarily praise. 

Phronimos, that Greek word, is sometimes translated as wise or wisdom. But it’s a very different wisdom from the more often-used Greek word sophia – wisdom as deep insight with a quality of moral rootedness and righteousness. Sophia-wisdom is associated with the holy, with God, with seeing things as God sees them. Phronimos is a much more contextual and ambiguous kind of wisdom – the wisdom of knowing which way the wind blows, and which side one’s bread is buttered on. 

What I’m hearing from friends, from family, from all of you who are both friends and family in this household of faith, is that the internal murkiness of this season is really hard. Living with moral injury, with ambiguity, with compromise and silence, with trying to make the best of a wide variety of bad situations – when it’s often really unclear what the best is, or what best is even possible. 

It feels bad and weird and gross. 

If, like me, you come from a middle-class white family, you may feel very deeply that standing up, being your authentic self, and speaking your truth – even if your voice shakes, as they say – is always the right and good thing to do. Your responsibility and your birthright. Holding back our words, keeping our opinions to ourselvses, can feel like fire shut up in our bones, in the words of our friend the prophet Jeremiah. 

Many of us face hard questions about how to be able to keep doing the most good we can, under our general and particular circumstances. And our information is imperfect; we just have to make our best guess, and try – and sometimes, that trying means that tolerating or participating in things that are deeply uncomfortable to us. That violate our values and sense of self. 

Back in May, I was invited to a gathering of clergy to talk about how to preach and pastor in these times. A number of Black church pastors were part of the group. Our Scripture theme was the turn from the Book of Genesis into the Book of Exodus. At the end of Genesis, Joseph has ingratiated himself with Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and he and his people, the Hebrews, are doing great, treated as part of the elite in Egyptian society. But a few generations pass and there’s a new Pharaoh, who doesn’t know or care about Joseph. And now the Hebrews, Joseph’s people, are enslaved, bitterly oppressed. 

At one point during our gathering, one of the Black clergy noted how surprised and distressed the white clergy seemed by our national circumstances. He leaned in and told us all – clearly, kindly – “We’ve always known we couldn’t trust Pharaoh.” 

It’s not news to us – he said, without saying – that the powers that be do not have our interests at heart. That the status quo was not built for our people’s flourishing, whether the party in power starts with an R or a D. 

One thing we can do – that white, middle-class “we” – in these frightening and murky times is to listen to those kinds of voices. To learn from people who have never assumed that they would be free to live as they please and speak their truth boldly. Who’ve had to be shrewd, clever, prudent, strategic – first to survive, then to build strength and move forward together.  

The little group here that’s been reading the work of 20th century Black theologian Howard Thurman together has appreciated grappling with and learning from Thurman’s mapping of the inner murkiness of life and ethics and humanity for Black folks in Jim Crow’s America. 

People who belong to this world are more shrewd in dealing with their peers than are people who belong to the light. We’re supposed to be people of the light, right? You are the light of the world; let your light shine, Jesus says elsewhere! But we also seem stuck being people of this world. And Jesus himself was, among other things, a man living in occupied territory. Shrewdness may not be a spiritual virtue – but if you read the Gospels with some understanding of the power relations of the time, you see Jesus being pretty shrewd. There’s a lot of strategic not-quite-saying things, a lot of ducking and dodging and plausible deniability – until the point when he’s ready for the final confrontation. Until he thinks his followers and his movement are ready to continue what he’s started without him. (If you’d like a fuller understanding of Jesus’ life and context, we’re planning a study on the Gospel of Matthew this winter; watch this space!) 

At the end of the parable, the master commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. Remember: The master in this story isn’t secretly God. But I still think it’s pretty interesting that Jesus ends the story with the master saying, You’re still fired, but that was pretty clever. 

And Jesus almost seems to echo the master’s grudging respect, as he observes – commends? – the shrewdness of the people of this world. He might be hinting that the people of light can be a little naive, a little idealistic, when it comes to doing what needs to be done in the murky reality in which we live. 

In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples that they’ll need to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves. The word wise there, in the Greek, isn’t sophia. It’s phronimos. Shrewd as serpents.  A little sneaky, a little slippery. 

What we have in this quirky, murky parable, I think, is – not an endorsement, but an acknowledgment of the necessity of shrewdness. Sometimes squeezing some tiny bit of strategic goodness, or at least less-badness, out of a lousy situation is the best we can do. 

I want to be clear that I’m not telling people that I think you should be more quiet, more careful, more strategic. I’m speaking to the many of you who are already feeling like you have to be quiet, careful, and strategic – and are struggling with what that means for your conscience, your heart, and your soul.

It’s a murky season, beloveds. 

But the people of light can be shrewd when we have to. 

May God help us live in the tension of these times, and help us be both serpents and doves, shrewd and wise, light-bearers and world-dwellers. Amen.

Today the lectionary, our calendar of readings, brings us two well-known and important parables of Jesus: the lost sheep and the lost coin. But there’s a third parable that completes the set – the story known as the Prodigal Son. The lectionary breaks them up; we got that one in Lent earlier this year. But in Luke’s Gospel, it follows these two simpler stories. It’s printed in the Sunday Supplement for those who may not know it! In brief: there’s a man with two sons. The younger one demands his share of his father’s wealth, then leaves home and wastes the money on profligate living. When he’s flat broke, friendless, and feeding pigs for a living, he realizes that he could just go home. He thinks, “Even if Dad makes me live like one of the farmhands, I’d be better off than I am now.” So he heads for home, rehearsing his apology speech as he goes. His father sees him coming and RUNS to embrace him. The son starts his little speech: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you… But the father isn’t listening; he’s giving the servants orders to throw a party. Soon everyone’s celebrating – except the older son. He’s coming in from working in the fields when he hears music. When he finds out what’s going on, he’s furious. His father comes out to talk to him. The older son says, I’ve been working like a slave for you for all these years, and you’ve never held a party for me, but you do THIS for that irresponsible scumbag? And the father says, Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found. 

It’s a complicated story; there’s a lot going on! But we grappled with some of that back in March. Today we’re looking at the set of three lost and found stories that appear here together – only in the Gospel of Luke. The similarities are obvious. Something or someone is lost – a sheep, a coin, a son. Someone is seeking what is lost – the shepherd, a woman, a father who stands on the road scanning the horizon. 

And when the sheep, the coin, the son is found – there’s a celebration. A party! The shepherd brings home the wandering sheep, and calls together his friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost!” The woman finds the coin, and she, too, calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.” Surely the party costs more than the value of the lost coin! And the father tells the servants, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”

I’ve heard, read, and preached sermons on these parables that focus on the straying, and the seeking. Back in March, a friend shared a sermon on the Prodigal Son story that focused on the celebrating. I’m going to share some of his insight today – from a sermon preached by Eric Biddy, rector of St. Paul’s, Augusta, Georgia. Eric writes, “Luke often gives some interpretation for a parable in the setting, the context, that comes just before. And here, the setting is scandalized religious folks. ‘All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ Jesus tells three parables in response to their complaints… I think this context of offended religious folks can help us see that the first point of the parable is not the ways that we are prodigal or resentful [like the sons]. Rather, the first and main point of the story is about the scandalous love, mercy, and joy of God.”

Last week – just a few verses before this text – we heard Jesus say, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple,” and advising people to sit down and consider whether they really have what it takes to follow the way of Jesus.  

Whether they’re ready for everything that it could cost them – family harmony, earthly wealth and security, even their lives. It’s a pretty big pivot from all that caution, to all these parties. 

Yet these passages don’t clash, exactly. The invitation to join Jesus’ mission to seek and find the lost is deadly serious. Let’s peel away – if we can – the layers of religious rhetoric that treat lost as a shorthand for not Christian. Look at the people Jesus hangs around with: people who are pushed to the margins, seen as unimportant at best, unwanted and unclean at worst. For the sheep in the story, lost means alone and in danger from harsh terrain, weather, and predators. For the coin in the story, lost means that its value may never be seen and shared, that it won’t get to fulfill its purpose. For the sons in the story, lost means broken relationships, broken hearts, broken lives. 

When those are the stakes, the risks, the costs – then of course you throw a party when lost is found. When danger finds safety, loneliness finds belonging, pointlessness finds purpose. Last week I said that following Jesus isn’t all rainbows and puppy dogs and s’mores around the campfire. But sometimes it is! 

Eric writes, “[God’s] constant love for us and for others saves us and unsettles us, but it also throws a party. And that party I think gives us another chance to locate ourselves in [the] story [of the two sons]. Because, sure, we are used to finding ourselves here as people who know we need mercy, or who resent the mercy given to others. But I think that we together, as the church, might be the party that God’s outrageous love throws, out of sheer delight of being with us. There is more here than just the salvation of individual souls. There is also a communal party that is a kind of spilling out of the father’s love and joy… At that party we are certainly not the father, the source of mercy and grace. We are the partiers, sharing and sharing in that mercy, love, and grace.”

Maybe last week and this week’s Gospel texts together invite us to hold two things together: both the seriousness and urgency of following the way of Jesus – and the possibility, indeed the responsibility, of joy. 

There’s not much joy in today’s Old Testament lesson from the book of the prophet Jeremiah – or the Psalm that echoes its themes of intransigence and calamity. Writing this sermon, I pulled out the folder from my seminary Old Testament classes, twenty years ago, to remind myself of Jeremiah’s story. 

Jeremiah was called to prophetic ministry, speaking God’s words to God’s people, in a particularly tumultuous time for Judea and Jerusalem. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had already been conquered; Judea has become a vassal state of the Assyria, under their authority, forced to send their wealth to feed the appetite of the empire. Jeremiah begins his prophetic ministry in the year 627 before the time of Jesus. He preaches through the religious reforms of King Josiah, and Josiah’s death. Through the Babylonian Empire taking over from the Assyrians, and the installation of King Jehoiakim as a puppet king for Babylon. Jeremiah preaches through Jehoiakim’s rebellion against Babylon, his defeat and death, and the first deportation, when the Babylonians took most of the upper classes away from Judea to live in exile, with the intention of further subduing the territory. Jeremiah preaches through King Zedekiah’s rebellion against Babylon, through Babylon’s invasion of Judea and destruction of Jerusalem in the year 587, and through the second deportation, in which most of the surviving population are dragged away from their homeland, their holy land. Jeremiah himself is taken to Egypt by a small group of survivors, but continues to correspond with the exiles in Babylon. 

My Old Testament professor, Ellen Davis, described Jeremiah as prophesying over Jerusalem as her night comes down. The looming destruction of Jerusalem and Judea – as we see it in the terrifying poetry of today’s reading – is the central theme of the first 30 chapters. The text is full of oracles of warning and judgment: Turn back now, return to God’s ways! Though Jeremiah seems to have little hope that this will happen, and rightly so. 

In this passage, Jeremiah has a vision of the future – a vision that will be catastrophically fulfilled by Babylon’s invasion, years later: darkness, death, and desolation. Cities ruined, land abandoned and barren. A future that feels inevitable because the people and leaders are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good. 

The Psalm picks up that theme: The foolish have said in their hearts, “There is no God” – meaning, here, that it doesn’t matter what I do, because there’s no power, no moral standard, to hold me to account. All are corrupt and commit abominable acts; everyone has proved faithless; there is none who does good – no, not one.  

There’s a kind of grace in encountering texts like this, sometimes – anybody else feel that? Because it makes us feel less alone in the chaos and bleakness of our times. When we feel untethered, unprotected, un-led – at least Jeremiah and the poet of this Psalm are right there with us?… 

Later in Jeremiah’s work – after the worst has happened – there is a shift in tone, towards imagining a future for God’s people beyond destruction and exile. This part of the book is sometimes beautifully called the Book of Consolation. In a few weeks, we’ll hear about Jeremiah buying a field while Jerusalem is under siege – a gesture of absurd hope. We’ll hear Jeremiah’s counsel to the exiles in Babylon: Live. Don’t give up. Your story isn’t over. It reminds me of a favorite line in a favorite song, Tom Rosenthal’s Throw the Fear: Keep watering the plants, love. 

Keep watering the plants, love. A gentle invitation to keep putting one foot in front of another. Not exactly a party. But: not giving in to despair, either. Holding onto life, love, the possibility of joy. And there are passages in the Book of Consolation that do imagine future celebration – like these verses from chapters 31: “Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O daughter Israel! Again you shall adorn yourself with your tambourines and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers!”

Which is all just to say that the Book of Jeremiah is one great big lost and found story. God’s people had wandered off like that wayward sheep: torn by thorns, menaced by lions and wolves, endangered by storms and the harsh, stony landscape itself. Lost. 

But God does not forget them. 

God seeks them out, and promises to bring them home. 

God throws a party. 

Eric Biddy writes, “…This is what it means to be members of the party that is the church. We are not those who have lived so righteously that we have deserved an [invitation]… We are those who were dead and have come to life again, to share in the scandalous joy and mercy that has brought us back to life, and to new and deeper life.To be a community made by this outrageous grace of God makes us a little odd. It should mean that at times our convictions and habits surprise and affront some of our neighbors. Because it means that we live by the currency of mercy, rather than esteem; of forgiveness rather than debt; of hope rather than reputation. It means that we think by the logic of resurrection, where what has seemed dead can come to life as long as the love of God keeps spilling out of all the containers within which we try to enclose it.” 

There are a lot of metaphors for the church – the local parish church like this one, or the capital-C Church, the whole messy body of Christ’s people throughout the world. Maybe the church is like a family, or a household. The church is like a city, or a building, or a ship. 

I’m taken by this idea of the church as a party. An ongoing celebration. Rejoice with me! Because somebody or something lost is always being found. And part of what attracts me about this idea is how strange and challenging it feels to think of church as a party, church as a place for the intentional cultivation of joy, when we’re living through such difficult times. When we’ve lived through a difficult freaking week! Is it OK to laugh? To be playful? To be planning parties and talent shows and community meals? 

I think it’s okay, and more than okay. I think it’s necessary. My smart friend Kyle Oliver says, Joy is a catalyst for change, not a reward. Louie Crew, who spent decades patiently nudging the Episcopal Church towards inclusion for LGBTQ+ folks, lived by the motto, Joy anyway! Alongside the undoubted seriousness of striving to follow Jesus in difficult times, we need joy. We need the release of laughter, the comfort of friendly companionship. We need to feel cared for and celebrated, and we need opportunities to care for and celebrate others. We need the work that joy does inside us and among us. 

Eric concludes, “We have been brought back to life whether we deserved it or not, and we keep hoping for the same among others, even our enemies, whether they deserve it or not.”

We have to celebrate and rejoice, because what was lost has been found.

Joy anyway, beloveds.

Amen.