Now, O Lord,
Take my lips and speak through them;
Take our minds and think through them;
Take our hearts and set them afire with Your love.
Amen.

I
And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy,
and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord.
Having spent some time in the book of Jeremiah throughout this season after Pentecost, it
shouldn’t surprise us to see the recurrence of these negative verbs: “pluck up,” “break
down,” and “destroy.” God’s three strikes against Judah, as I called them a couple of weeks
ago.
These verbs have determined the dominant theme of the whole text
(God’s oracles against Judah, Jeremiah’s laments over Jerusalem, the background
narrative of exile).
God’s people were to know nothing of God’s future without facing the bleak reality of the
present moment of ruin in which they found themselves and in whose coming they were
complicit -- by virtue of abandoning the covenant.
The terms “build” and “plant” are not new, either. They’ve been there, but they’ve served
largely in a subordinate role: meant in some cases only to highlight and foreground the terms
of devastation. The verbs -- and the reality -- of hope have barely been discernible beneath
the din of destruction. The deck has clearly been stacked in favour of ruin at the expense of
redemption

And the inequality of negative over positive is not corrected even now as we move, finally, in
the direction of consolation and hope. Indeed, the negative side of the ledger is given another
verb -- “to bring evil.” Now it’s 4 negative verbs over only 2 positive ones.
This asymmetry
-- where evil would seem to have overtaken good, where ruin would have trumped
redemption, and destruction would have toppled hope --
this is an essential background for what is taking place in today’s reading.
It is only in this obscure and disproportionate light that the miniscule emergence of
hope could rise to clarity. And could begin to create a new reality for Judah, and Israel
-- and perhaps for us.
The minuteness, the obliqueness, the smallness of the hope that shows itself here is apparent
even at the textual level: Today’s reading is part of what scholars call the “little book of
consolation.”
There is still hope for Judah, but only a small hope. And this infinitesimal hope will
nonetheless make all the difference in the world for the people of God.
It is something like an inversion of one of Franz Kafka’s famously dystopic saying:
“There is hope,” Kafka says, “infinite amounts of it -- but not for us.”
Where Kafka sees hope in abundance, that nonetheless remains constantly out of reach and
uninhabitable, Jeremiah offers a discreet and almost insignificant consolation,
...that is nonetheless the truest and deepest reality of God’s creation.


So, how is such small hope to serve such an immense purpose? The answer, I think, can be
found in the idea of promise.
II
We usually understand a promise as a pledge or a vow that is made at some point in time, and
which will become redeemable, as it were, at some point in the future. There is a contractual
element to it. Promises oblige us.
And promises require faith -- the faith of the one to whom the promise is made and the
faithfulness of the one who promises.
14 members of the Jeremiah Community made a promise to live according to a common Rule
of Life. We are all, in some sense, accountable to the vow that we have made. But this
contractual dimension of the promise is not the most interesting or the most important.
A promise is more than a vow. A promise is evocative and creative. It brings a certain kind of
reality into being. A reality that did not exist prior to the promise.
Let me try to explain by looking to Jeremiah.
In one sense it’s obvious that promises bring a new kind of reality into being-- “the days are
surely coming” we hear over and over in today’s reading. This implies that such days do not
yet exist.
Promises name a reality that is to come. What we get in Jeremiah is the promise of
the reality of a “new covenant” and a life beyond fate,
where one will not be held responsible for the sins of his father, the transgressions of
his ancestors,
where one will stand in a singular and direct relationship to her Creator.
Where the source of all life and hope will be accessible to the whole of the people --
from the greatest to the least.

In short, the day is coming when there will be justice. But for now, there is no justice.
So, the reality of the promise remains, to some degree utopian: it is a reality that does not
exist concretely, it has no place in the world as it is.
Utopian visions of the future can serve
to awaken hope,
to mobilize a people in its pursuit,
and to critique present conditions -- because they are not what they are supposed to
be.
But utopia can also cause us to take flight from the concrete reality before us, inviting us to
dwell only in the imaginary.
So, utopian visions on their own are not sufficient to the demands of a world shot through
with injustice and haunted by the incompleteness of God’s redemption.
When a promise points to the future -- when God says that “the day is surely coming” this
also sheds a particular light on the present. It makes a difference now.
The present, in the perspective of God’s future, comes to be seen as broken, incomplete, and
therefore, not what it claims to be: namely, fully present and fully real.
The present, in the light of God’s promise is shot through with absence and unreality. And the
“not yet” character of the present shows itself more clearly to the eye that has seen and the
ear that has heard of the promise of redemption.
The “not yet” spaces of the present, the lands forgotten by the state, the territory trampled by
the market, the “abandoned spaces of empire,” these are also the places of hope, the spaces
that God has opened to us in Jesus.
***

The promise functions in precisely this way in Jeremiah -- the promise of a new future opens
up a new way of being in the present.
When the Judean exiles in Babylon would have heard these little words of consolation, a
utopian possibility would have been opened up -- in the future there will be justice, there will
be a new covenant to replace the one we have failed to keep and we will no longer be
alienated from our own lives.
But the effectiveness of the promise did not wait for the future. The exiled community was not
to await the promised justice, instead the promise opened up a new way of seeing the
present: It put the totalizing claims of Babylonian supremacy into proper perspective.
Any claims to military, political, or spiritual sovereignty would be relativized and disarmed in
light of the promise. Promise opened up new possibilities in the present: by showing that the
gaps in Babylonian power were precisely the spaces of Israel’s defiant and hopeful life of faith
-- the way that the exilic community could becomes symbols of redemption and restoration
now, in exile, even in the ruins of its former certainties, in the abandon spaces, the open
places.
Let me give you some examples.
The songs of lament that were sung down by the rivers of Babylon were not songs of
resignation, but manifestations of lived hope.
The planting of gardens, the building houses, and living peaceably, even in the heart of
the empire: these were not quietistic practices, but the sowing of the seeds of another
world. Something new, in the brittle shell and in the widening cracks of the old world.

Thirdly, the emergence of rabbinic Judaism (a way practicing Israelite religion without a
temple and in a foreign land). This was not just a practical necessity, but the
manifestation of a faith that could exist and flourish without political power.
And prayer… to bring things closer to home.
Wouldn’t prayer be another way to inhabit a broken and incomplete present with a hopeful
and defiant faith?
Wouldn’t contemplation be a posture and a practice that could offer respite from the society
of the spectacle and teach us to refuse the capitalist lie of endless productivity? Couldn’t this
counter rhythm become a space of welcome and of hope for the world? Listen to the words
of John Main.
The increasing godlessness of so much modern consciousness has raised an urgent concern
about the survival of humanity, not only of the race but of the humanity of the race. Rather
than merely denouncing atheism, faith needs to seek a contemporary means to meet the
godless, in sympathy and compassion. This means discovering an experience in common. We
can find this common experience in the silence of God. Differently interpreted as it may be, it
remains a common ground in which the word of faith can be transmitted.
Silence, I would add, is a potential common ground precisely because it is a space that
remains uncolonized by commerce and advertising. The powers don’t know what to do with
silence they only know how to destroy it. Silence is dangerous to empire because it creates
time and space for reflection -- and reflection opens time and space for critique. Silence is one
of those abandoned places.
And there are other forms of prayer...
Even to pray “Your Kingdom come,” as we so often do...
This is not to wait for the Kingdom’s arrival in the future, but to become the very site of its

coming. It is a prayer for justice, now!
Indeed, today’s Gospel reading says exactly this:
And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay
long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.
We look to the future that God has promised -- to Israel and to us -- and our hearts ache for
its arrival: for redemption, for justice, for wholeness and healing. But the God-given
restlessness that is awakened in us by the promise,
by little consolations,
and miniscule hopes,
should not be squandered in the waiting for the a certain duration to pass.
Just as little as it should it be confused with a mandate to bring the kingdom by will or by
force.
Instead let us watch for the revelation of those empty spaces.
And let us fill those places with practices of anticipation and imagination,
let us become people of hope.
And let us learn from the very Judaism that was born by the rivers of Babylon, in the midst of
exile. For whom the Messiah was to come not at some point in the future, but for whom every
second of time was the small gate through which Messiah might enter.
Not only in the future, but in our lives and in our prayers, may your kingdom come!

Amen.