Jeremiah 31:27-34
Proper 24 (29) - Year C
While it sounds like a good thing to be responsible for one’s own actions and consequences therefrom, there is a significant loss of responsibility for the common good of the community. Yes, it can be posited that what is best for each is for the best for all to take place. However, to break a dynamic tension between an individual and their community predictably opens several doors to dysfunction for both an individual and their larger context.
Foremost among the difficulties is a lack of a feedback loop which allows folks to plausibly deny their actions carry any sin for they are thick with G*D.
It would be interesting to have a conversation about covenants. It won’t be long before it is recognized that we each have multiple covenants. The same is true for groups as small as friends and as large as one multi-national group against another multi-national group. Where these covenants rub up against one another there is a weakening of integrity. Some of us have more weak spots than others, but the number is basically immaterial. One is sufficient to cause trouble for all.
It is helpful to remember these words in their context and to remember that we have our own current context where we periodically need to remember to engage the other side of whichever individual/communal pendulum swing we are on at the moment.
It won’t be long after Jeremiah's message when this whole section will need to be repeated with the position of individual and community reversed for there is an eternal dance between me and thee and us’ns and y’all.
We need to do a better job of wrestling with our multiple covenants and applying the many, varied, and even conflictual gifts all needed at the same time to make reasonable decisions better enough to last a traditional 7 generations long.
Blessings on dealing with your complicity in the social sins of your cohort as well as your own personal sins. One exacerbates the other and addressing any of them will likely start in bailiwick of the other. This is a much more difficult and worthwhile encounter than leaving it to G*D to bail us out of our latest Egypt or to take over our internal guidance system with the excuse that it is what is best for us.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2013/10/jeremiah-3127-34.html
Jeremiah 31:27-34 or Genesis 32:22-31
What does it mean to be made in the image of G*D? Jeremiah suggests that it is not simply mirroring (where things turn out to be turned around so left becomes right and good becomes evil). Image that is only skin deep is a pretty shallow way to live. But when image goes all the way through so there becomes an equivalency, that's deep imagery (where to say G*D is to say human, and vice versa).
This imagery needs to go as deep as a hip bone and leave its mark. So you and I wrestle with G*D, receive new names, and move, together, one step closer to wholeness.
Now, who will you wrestle with until they learn a new name. It is all too easy to give up on folks, pull up the covers, and hide away. But this is a call to action, so back to the joy of G*D-wrestling, neighbor-wrestling, self-wrestling.
- - -
speaking of a call to action
hopefully I'll see some of you
at this year's
Call to Action
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html
Note the lack of difference between:
"The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth have been set on edge" and
"The leaders have eaten sour grapes, and the community's teeth have been set on edge".
Unfortunately, the solution to this is not to do a pendulum swing and have everyone dying for their own sins, their own sourness. This shift passes right over the interface and interrelationship of our communal and our individual selves. This avoidance also shows up in the imagery of everyone knowing the same larger reality, G*D, if you will. It misses that we also need one another to be able to work through the perpetual disagreements that rise with one generation following another, each having a different experience base. Even within a generation there are varying understandings of personality type, gifts and abilities, any number of entitlements, and basic political power theories. Without entering into an admittedly difficult interrelationship with both G*D and Neighbor, self and others, we either harden ourselves into authoritarianism or participate in constant blame.
This little story is about more than Atlas Shrugged type individual responsibility or some grand cult in lockstep from the inside out. It raises questions about our being persistent and hopeful "widows" at one point in our life and "unjust judges" in another as seasons of experience and generations succeed one another. What covenant do you see following the one proposed here, as it takes into account this covenant's failure point of pride at having G*D's law within one, G*D defined as "on my side"?
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2010/10/jeremiah-3127-34.html
It is so easy to see trouble coming. It doesn’t take much projection of current processes to see that we are walking down a path to great difficulty. It shows up in economics with profit being the be-all and end-all of too many. Educationally, we have been testing to a test that keeps us limited to the past rather than learning how to learn into the future. Spiritually, we divide ourselves into smaller and smaller communities, each claiming truth and power. And the list could go on.
It is a very hopeful outlook to see within the coming falling-apart, a new way of doing business. In this case moving from the cultural and communal to the individual being responsible for their own acts. This hope is not without its dangers. Foremost among them is a reliance upon intuition, some knowing of G*D that isn’t grounded in everyday experience. It is too easy to want our iniquity erased and so go out of our way to put a cart before a horse and claim a knowledge of G*D, even greater than G*D knows, that will guarantee removal of iniquity and arrival at a pearly gate.
In the United States of America we have abused this hope of individual responsibiity and are falling apart into extreme individualism and states-rights. This means that we need to hear hope in a return to another universal way - that we are in life together and have opportunities and responsibilities for one another.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/03/jeremiah-3127-34.html