Heartbreak That Leads to Hope

Heartbreak That Leads to Hope
A sermon related to Jeremiah 8:18-22 and 31:2-6, and to Prophetic Imagination
 
Central Focus:
The Prophetic journey through grief to hope.
 
Jer 8:18-22
I drown in grief.
    I’m heartsick.
Oh, listen! Please listen! It’s the cry of my dear people
    reverberating through the country.
Is God no longer in Zion?
    Has the Sovereign gone away?
Can you tell me why they flaunt their plaything-gods,
    their silly, imported no-gods before me?
The crops are in, the summer is over,
    but for us nothing’s changed.
    We’re still waiting to be rescued.
For my dear broken people, I’m heartbroken.
    I weep, seized by grief.
Are there no healing ointments in Gilead?
    Isn’t there a doctor in the house?
So why can’t something be done
    to heal and save my dear, dear people?
 
Jer 31:2 - 6
This is the way God put it:
 
“They found grace out in the desert,
    these people who survived the killing.
Israel, out looking for a place to rest,
    met God out looking for them!”
God told them, “I’ve never quit loving you and never will.
    Expect love, love, and more love!
And so now I’ll start over with you and build you up again,
    dear young and innocent Israel.
You’ll resume your singing,
    grabbing tambourines and joining the dance.
You’ll go back to your old work of planting vineyards
    on the Samaritan hillsides,
And sit back and enjoy the fruit--
    oh, how you’ll enjoy those harvests!
The time’s coming when watchmen will call out
    from the hilltops of Ephraim:
‘On your feet! Let’s go to Zion,
    go to meet our God!’”
 
 
For the Word of God in Scripture
For the word of God among us
For the word of God with in us
Thanks be to God
 
What is breaking your heart right now?
What is breaking your heart right now?
 
Or if that doesn’t resonate for you today:
What has really broken your heart in your life in the past?
 
What is breaking your heart is a question we use in the Inner King Training that I sometimes take time away from church to lead (like this past May). It turns out this a potent question in helping people experience unconditional love and blessing in their lives. That includes being a portal for people of Christian faith, especially a people professing the social Gospel, the prophetic Gospel, a Gospel that might change lives and our collective life as humanity.
 
If you have been able to keep feeling during these times of pandemic, of rising inequality, of authoritarian vitriol and violence, and of the earth’s struggle to bear the burdens we humans put on her, you likely have experienced heartbreak. If you are part of a historically marginalized group, you have known it most, if not all, of your life. There are so many opportunities for heartbreak in this life.
 
We just heard the prophetic voice speak of heartbreak. 
In the first part of the Scripture reading we just heard, Chapter 8 of Jeremiah, the prophet channels the voice of God, broken-hearted for the 6th century BCE siege of Jerusalem that led to the downfall of the southern realm of Judah and the exile of many into Babylon. The Divine pleads like a parent over the bed of her dying child, heartbroken that there is no balm in Gilead, no physician to stem the suffering and death. Jeremiah speaks of drowning in grief and wondering if God has simply left their land. Jeremiah is expressing heartbreak, plain and simple, as he sees destruction coming for the people.
 
The prophet who is sees with the lens of the Divine, feels with the heart of the Divine, encounters the reality of the day with the sense of the Divine. And, so often, what is seen and felt and sensed is the reality of the empire system of Pharaoh or Caesar or Putin or Mao or Trump or whichever representative of the domination system is current. For those who are in touch with the love and justice of God, with the Good News of Jesus, or with the loving and liberated state named in another faith tradition, this encounter with the system of empire is painful and truly heartbreaking. Instead of grace there is harsh judgment, instead of freedom there is bondage and oppression, instead of connection and community there is alienation and suspicion, instead of cooperation and solidarity there is accusation and fear, instead of peace there is violence, instead of the growing and life-giving power of the earth there is a sense life draining away as the earth is dominated.
 
A powerful book, The Prophetic Imagination, by Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann reminds us that the Prophetic Imagination begins with the willingness and ability to feel anguish and to express grief in the face of and the experience of empire or empire consciousness, the consciousness of domination and of fear and separation by "isms." Simply put, in the face of this encounter, for the faithful prophet, there is heartbreak.
 
Have we allowed ourselves to feel the heartbreak of that gap, the gap between life and history as we’ve so often known it and the Beloved Community as God has dreamed it?

That heartbreak is our connection to our yearning for God’s intended vision of justice and peace and freedom.  And that kind of yearning is a source of life-force, soul-force, Spirit-force. It is our deep tunnel to hope, our birth canal to new hope and life in God, to the alternative consciousness of God’s faithful community.
 
For the Hebrew tradition, this yearning life-force feeling generates prophetic vision and prophetic proclamation.  The prophets were the ones to herald God’s dream, God’s activity and coming, not as fortune tellers/future predictors, but as voices of the present moment seeing into the deeper currents of God’s longing and God’s activity to liberate. When God heard the cry of the Hebrews, Moses was called to proclaim another reality amidst the darkness of slavery and Pharoah’s way of thinking. When the Israelites had established themselves in Palestine, even to the point in Solomon’s time of building a temple for God to live in, the prophets eventually spoke against the regime, seeing that now Israel had become like Pharaoh, content with a status quo that tried to domesticate God and ignore the cries of the oppressed and ignore the imbalance and injustice of such unequal sharing of the blessings of life.
 
As Brueggemann notes, it is the prophets’ job to bring forth a new consciousness, an alternative to the imperial consciousness of Pharoah, of the established monarchy, of the Roman Empire, and, more recently, of the European colonizing powers including, eventually, the United States. For us, in the USA, our dreams of freedom and justice for all have been imperfect, unevenly distributed, obstructed, distorted, and blinded because they were contaminated by colonial, empire building consciousness. Our self-evident truths cannot be realized in this state of mind and heart. We need God’s alternative consciousness, the alternative sacred vision, the Divine Heart that we witnessed in the Good News proclaimed and lived by Jesus.
 
Prophets old and new bring forth God’s alternative consciousness in two ways; by speaking another truth to the current colonial or empire consciousness and then by energizing those open to the new way, the new Light amidst darkness. But prophets critique the old most effectively not by moralizing, but by presenting their heart break and the heart break of God for what is happening.  Amidst the illusion and trance and numbness of the empire’s status quo that says, "Everything is all right. Just go shop. Watch TV. Cruise the internet. Just let us have more authority and we’ll make it all great again," the prophet instead remains vulnerable to wounding, remains compassionate and therefore awake, and from that place voices the heart break of God, expressing the grief of those whose cries refuse to be heard. 
 
The wise elder, scientist, and earth advocate Jane Goodall years ago, upon realizing the profound intelligence and heart of chimpanzees was heartbroken to know these kin of ours were locked up in research labs. She set about to get the social, intelligent, and feeling chimps released from isolated 5x5 iron bar research cages. But she did it, not by yelling and pointing fingers, but by staying close to her heart break, telling stories of intelligent, feeling chimpanzees to those organizing such research. Her storytelling powerfully proclaimed another story, another narrative of what chimpanzees were and what a respectful relationship to them would be.
 
The cautionary tale here for those of us open to the prophetic and to worthy causes is to make sure our voices do not merely become brittle, partisan, moralizing voices pointing the finger at the evil "other." The prophets instead rooted their voice in the Divine heartbreak of the ones crying out.  They broke the spell of the dominant status quo, not with white papers or resolutions or character assassinations, but with images and voices of the grief of those unheard and unseen, of the pain of the inconvenient truths of the empire, and with the proclamation of the Presence of the God of compassion and justice.
 
It is only after the prophet proclaims Divine heartbreak and acknowledges the felt cost of the imperial consciousness, the injustice built into colonial achievements, and pain exacted by those illusory values that enslave or dominate or discriminate against some for the purpose of others that the prophet can bring the energy of hope to those poor in Spirit, to those crying out, to those broken-hearted ones.  So in the second part of the reading we heard today, Jeremiah, in the midst of the darkness of Exile, after naming the grief and heartbreak, can proclaim God’s faithfulness in a new day, a day of justice when those who plant shall enjoy the fruit, when those who have been crying shall sing with joy again.
 
Grief is a way of connecting. The heartbreak we allow ourselves to feel if we acknowledge the suffering of those shut out of history’s voice, those left behind in globalization, those impacted by global warming, those discriminated against, is a way to reconnect with those marginalized people of the human family.   And this applies to ourselves and our inner life as well. Remember, last week, Pastor Jane Anne spoke of the macro and micro, of the patterns that repeat in large and small forms in the world. So, too, for our collective and individual lives. The prophet speaks to society and the empires of history, but also to the ways of empire we internalize, dominating and neglecting some parts within ourselves.  Then we shut out God’s Grace and justice within. That is also worthy of grief.  But feeling heartbreak for those parts of ourselves that are dominated, neglected, wounded, or silenced is a way of re-connecting to those parts within. For the world and the worlds within us, heartbreak is the prophetic way of acknowledging what is not right or well and beginning the process of the re-igniting the hope that brings it back from Exile and death to healing and life.
 
Following the Divine Heart through heartbreak, Jeremiah is able to find hope. Did you hear it in the reading?
God told them, “I’ve never quit loving you and never will.
    Expect love, love, and more love!
And so now I’ll start over with you and build you up again,
…
You’ll resume your singing,
    grabbing tambourines and joining the dance.
You’ll go back to your old work of planting vineyards
    on the Samaritan hillsides,
And sit back and enjoy the fruit--
    oh, how you’ll enjoy those harvests!
 
The time’s coming when watchmen will call out
    from the hilltops of Ephraim:
‘On your feet! Let’s go to Zion,
    go to meet our God!’”
 
How beautiful!
What good news for the poor of the world and for the poor parts within us!
 
I invite us to be a prophetic community of faith like this, honoring the prophetic way of knowing and expressing the Divine heartbreak and grief of what is not well, what is in Exile, what is worthy of tears in the dark places of history and society, and of the self and soul.
 
In the way of the faithful prophet, heartbreak is the beginning of the journey to Divine Hope. Let us have faith in both the heartbreak and the hope. AMEN