1 Jeremiah 20:7-18

An Almost Introduction: Let’s start with this, before we even talk about what was just read to us.

Emotion, in relationships, is a deeply scary thing. Showing emotion is a dangerous thing. And emotions, as a topic, are difficult to talk about with any vulnerability or authenticity.

If we’re women, to be emotional is to automatically be side- lined in the eyes of not only the men around us, but often other women, too, in our fallen society. To be emotional and a man, in the patriarchal society in which we live, is to be too womanly, and somehow to betray the gift of manly toughness that our world tells us men should have. Some of us, on account of nature or nurture, are totally clueless when it comes to our emotions, or have stuffed them because we learned when we were young that to express emotion would bring us punishment.

But love is a dangerous thing, too, of course, and few of us would say that’s so bad.

But emotions are not immoral, showing them is not immoral, experiencing them is not immoral. It is not immoral to feel, it is not a problem or devilish to feel, or to express what we feel. It is human. And the best prophets have felt, have 2 shown their emotions, have been contradictory, have been incoherent, irrational, have not decided to calm down, or just wait, or think rationally.

In today’s passage Jeremiah feels his emotions, gives voice to them, and is a real person, before God, for it. We’re going to look at what it looks like when Jeremiah feels, and we’re going to remember that if Jeremiah can says what he says, feel what he feels, and God can handle it, God can probably handle whatever we feel and express too. And, maybe, when we act like Christ to one another we create some space for each of us to feel and express ourselves with the same authenticity and vulnerability.

Let’s pray.

Prayer:

Walking Through: Let’s walk through Jeremiah’s emotional journey, here.

You deceived[a] me, Lord, and I was deceived[b]; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. 8 Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me 3 insult and reproach all day long.

There’s some translation question if Jeremiah’s saying “deceived” or something else. Whatever the specific word he uses is, his point’s the same: God has betrayed him. And worse than betrayed him: Jeremiah uses the language of abuse, here. “You overpowered me and prevailed.” God forced Jeremiah to do what God wanted. And what did it get him? “I’m ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me.” Remember, this happens immediately, immediately after Jeremiah spent the day in stocks, was released, and prophesied that Babylon was going to destroy Jerusalem and Judah, and all its people would be killed or exiled. “The word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long.”

Jeremiah’s been totally controlled by God, and all it’s gotten him is ridicule, insult, approach, and abuse. And he can’t even stop speaking for God. He’s been overpowered and trapped.

9 But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.

To not speak exhausts him, feels like he’s burning alive, and 4 to speak gets him nothing but abuse. No wonder Jeremiah tells God that God’s just his abuser.

And Jeremiah continues. Remember, Jeremiah had just renamed the priest over the Temple, Pashhur, “Terror On Every Side,” after Pashhur enacted Judah’s own stubbornness by beating Jeremiah and putting him in stocks. That new name was meant to symbolize how Jerusalem would experience “Terror On Every Side” when Babylon showed up to exile them. Jeremiah describes the taunts he’s getting:

10 I hear many whispering, “Terror on every side! Denounce him! Let’s denounce him!” All my friends are waiting for me to slip, saying, “Perhaps he will be deceived; then we will prevail over him and take our revenge on him.”

Jeremiah has no one. No one. Well...almost no one. Because having just condemned God as an abuser, in almost the same breath, Jeremiah continues:

11 But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail. They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced; 5 their dishonor will never be forgotten. 12 Lord Almighty, you who examine the righteous and probe the heart and mind, let me see your vengeance on them, for to you I have committed my cause. 13 Sing to the Lord! Give praise to the Lord! He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked.

Boom! Jeremiah flips! Jeremiah’s driven back to the Lord.

Back to trust. Back to faith. Back to the promise that God is on his side. His earlier rage and sense of betrayal and barrage of accusations against God gives way to this...deep trust. Jeremiah praises God!

And then...you know. He flips again. Immediately after declaring that God “rescues the life of the needy fro the hands of the wicked,” he despairs.

14 Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! 15 Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, “A child is born to you—a son!” 16 May that man be like the towns 6 the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. 17 For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. 18 Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?

I can’t add to this. Jeremiah wishes he’d never been born. He wishes he’d just been killed along with his mother before he was born. Anything would be better than this. “Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?”

Summary: In today’s passage, Jeremiah lets it out. He rages against God. He rages against people. He acknowledges God’s power. He praises God. He ends up in despair. He’s all over the place, and here, at least, there is no great release. His grief isn’t spent and ends in some moment of great trust; his grief ends in wishing God would kill the man who celebrated his birth. He’s left without hope. This isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, where Jeremiah emotionally vomits all over the Lord. It is, to me, the most hopeless.

And, man, do I identify with this. I have been in hospital 7 rooms, in moments of fear, when I have bounced from transcendent trust in God to despising my own existence. I have bounced from anger to despair to praise to despair again. And if we haven’t, then we all still got time. What’s amazing about this moment, and the others like it, is that God never blasts Jeremiah into bits for accusing Him, God never crowns Jeremiah with glory for his obedience. God never overreacts to Jeremiah’s reactions; God never condemns Jeremiah’s emotional authenticity or vulnerability. God simply waits it out, and persists in the relationship He has with Jeremiah. And my guess as to why is because God, who is, like, the most emotional person on the Bible, gets what it means to be an authentic, vulnerable person, and loves people who get it, too.

If there is a lesson here, we mortals who have God’s Spirit, it is that we are meant to, I think, be both God and Jeremiah: Both deeply, deeply emotional and deeply, deeply relational, responding well rather than poorly to the emotion of others and the emotion of ourselves. A great trick of the devil has been to shape a society in which any show of emotion is considered weak, to be despised, and just a teensy-bit immoral. Resist that lie, and we resist the devil who nurtures it.

Back to Jeremiah: But again, this long cry of Jeremiah: 8 We see praise, here. We see trust. But much of what we see is lament, and it ends on lament. We’ve talked about lament, oh, three or four times during COVID, which is...probably not an accident? To lament is to grieve passionately; to let it out--the hurt, the anger, the fear, the anxiety, all the stuff that we nice, polite people tend to hide away from each other--and worse, from ourselves. We never can hide it from God, of course; God knows it all, and loves us in spite of it.

The miracle of this moment in Jeremiah’s life is that he doesn’t hide it. He lets it out to God who already knows what it is to feel the depths and the heights of emotion.

We’ve talked about lament so many times recently, but it’s worth mentioning again because more of the things that make up life have happened since we last discussed it, and every single new grief we face needs, well...grieved. This is emotional math, you know? A grievance comes in, grief must go out.

So Let it out, let it out, let it out. But don’t let it out at me, don’t vomit your emotion on me; it’s not mine, and I don’t need it. Your computer doesn’t need it. Your dog doesn’t. Your spouse or friend doesn’t need it. And you’ll only make a mess that you’ll have to clean up. But you have got to let it out. Anger, sadness, despair, fear: do you really think you’re hiding this from God? 9 Do we really believe God doesn’t notice it? Do we really believe God likes us better because we smile and resort to platitudes and easy phrases when we wish we could die, or someone else would? I think we often honestly believe that God likes us better when we’re not emotional. And that’s a lie from hell, because again: Even a skim of the Bible reveals a God who is way more emotionally than you or than that friend or spouse that you feel isn’t as good as you, because they’re just so emotional.

We worship the faithful, majestic, compassionate God who knows all about us and loves us anyway, and just wants us to draw close to him authentically and honestly. If he answers before we call, don’t you think he might be aware of what we’re calling about? We have to let our emotional arrows fly to the Lord.

But guess what? Sometimes lament doesn’t make us feel better, not immediately, at least. What I appreciate about the, oh, the emotional expression Jeremiah has here, much of which is lament, is that it’s not tidy. And neither is grief. But resolution often does come in our untidy grieving. And this is not Jeremiah’s last exchange with God, and this is not the end of their relationship.

Noticing: So. What can we notice in today’s passage? 10 We can notice that authentic relationships are emotionally full and full of emotion. To be alive is to feel, and to feel is to need to grieve sometimes, because the world causes grief.

But we can notice--must notice--that Jeremiah’s lament does not, right here, leave him full of faith, or at peace, or hopeful, or anything. We want our lament to exhaust us of grief, but here Jeremiah is only exhausted. We leave him, the book leaves us with him, at hopelessness and a regret that he’s alive. Again: He will move on from this. He will praise God again. But this moment that ends in such hopelessness is a reminder, I think, of just how important it is that we grieve well.

Conclusion: Grieving well begins, of course, in grieving at all. It depends on safe relationships in which we can grieve without shame. And this moment in particular reminds us that grieving can take a long time and it is not always tidy, just wrapping up quickly with a little bow, a sitcom-like emotional arc that we can ignore ever happened.

I can’t make us less scared of feeling what Jeremiah felt at the end of today’s passage, you know? I can’t re-write the scripts we learned at some point that taught us to fear the momentary despair Jeremiah has here. But I do know that our ability to feel wonder and joy and awe, these amazing positive things, is tied to our ability to feel sadness, 11 hopelessness, and anger. The highs come with the lows, and both make up an authentic human experience.

Feel what you need to feel. Do not shame those who express what they feel, because when you do you take part in a devilish lie. Grieve, lament, but know that it is not magic to grieve, does not automatically make us feel better--although without it, I don’t think “feeling better” is ever really on the table. Jeremiah moved on from here, you know? He did awesome things, and his relationship with God persisted. Jeremiah persisted. We can too, whatever it is we feel. And remember that if this is where Jeremiah ended today, for us sometimes that hopeless is where we start. If that’s the case, let’s not let anyone shame us because we need carried a bit until we hit praise, joy, and hope again.