Jeremiah Towards the End
Inserted below is a portion of a column in the NYT after the Democratic National Convention. It has to do with a speech of Barack Obama during the convention. I thought, given our time this summer in the book of Jeremiah, that it was interesting to note that when more than one political commentator heard the speech, they thought of Jeremiah.
Note the word “jeremiad”. This has become a term used even to this day to describe a speech of warning.
We are at a turning in the book again. Jerusalem has been virtually destroyed. Most of the people of Judah have been taken into exile in Babylon. Some, defying Jeremiah’s warnings, have fled to Egypt still hoping for some military defeat of Nebuchadnezzar.
This would be a good time to read the book of Lamentations. These are the words that Jeremiah wrote at the fall of the city. The words have been taken up again through history in times of war and in times of disaster. “How deserted lies the city!” said Jeremiah, “My city of ruins”, sung Bruce Springsteen after 9/11 in NYC.
Things do come apart. Empires collapse. Nations fall, even our own eventually. May we know what it means, even now, particularly now, to “trust not in princes”. May out trust be in the love of Jesus Christ himself who is before all history and in whom all things hold together. AMEN.
(We’ll skip now towards the end of the book for final reflections this week. If you are reading through, note the happenings as Jeremiah is taken to Egypt. Note what he says about those who have gone to Egypt instead of into exile. Note God’s sovereignty over all the nations, even Babylon.)
From the NYT Column:
On Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2020, standing in front of an exhibition about the Constitution in Philadelphia, Barack Obama fully became an American Jeremiah.
Unlike that Hebrew prophet, Mr. Obama did not shatter the earth, nor predict the destruction of all our temples, nor see our Jerusalem quite yet in its deserved ruin. He did not tell us that collectively our “clothing is stained with the blood of the innocent and the poor,” as Jeremiah did. But he came close, even as he delivered a moving reassertion of American “ideals” and “creeds.”
Such is the purpose of the tradition of the “jeremiad,” in substance and style a rhetorical method born of Puritan sermons in the 17th and 18th centuries, and perfected by America’s greatest writers and some of its politicians in the 19th century.
