Faith

Dear Friends in Christ,

This morning a group of us met at Big House Beans coffee shop in Brentwood for Sacrament of the Bean. The downside of this method of bible study is we don’t get to select which passages we reflect on so sometimes, like this morning, we are confronted with uncomfortable and difficult passages. The upside is that being forced to wrestle with uncomfortable revelations invites transformation and change in a way that passages that affirm and reinforce our own world views don’t. The passage the Holy Spirit led us to this morning was a challenging passage from Jeremiah (Jeremiah 50:17-20) that compared the nation of Israel to sheep that were being hunted and devoured by the “lions” of Assyria and Babylon. Jeremiah was promising Israel that God would restore their fortunes and avenge them by destroying their enemies.

It was a hard passage for the group to parse. We don’t have experience of being “hunted.” By most standards we are not oppressed or persecuted. We eventually landed on the understanding that in this passage the US is more like Babylon than Israel, and our discussion focused on what warnings might be present for us and how that might change our response.

The challenge of scripture is that it was written for the oppressed and persecuted to offer them assurance that God sees their plight and encourage them to have hope in God’s mercy and goodness when time are very hard. Very few Western Christians are oppressed and persecuted in this way, so our faith becomes associated with our experience of ease and prosperity, and when things get hard, we often feel abandoned by God and question our faith. Worse still, we begin to see ourselves as persecuted and oppressed when others disagree with us. It is this misplaced sense of oppression and persecution that has led to the rise in Christian Nationalism, where people with power and privilege scapegoat the poor and marginalized for everything that they think is wrong with the world.

Scripture reminds us that God sees the oppressed and persecuted; that God is with them and will vindicate them. Scripture also reminds us that God is with us when times are hard – when we someone we love dies; when faced with a devastating diagnosis; when confronted with financial insecurity; when unimaginable disaster occurs; even when trying to make sense of the political discord and social division we are currently experiencing. Faith does not promise us ease and comfort or wealth and prosperity. It does not make us immune to the loss of loved ones or health, or disaster and tragedy. Faith reminds us that our hope is not in the political and social systems of the world to save us, but in the God who created all things, redeemed all things and makes all things new.

AMEN.