The minute I read the first reading, my eye caught the last line where God tells Jeremiah: “They will fight against you but not prevail over you, for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD.”
Knowing the story of Jeremiah, I realized that if you hear the Lord say those words to you, then know two things, The Lord will deliver you, and He will deliver you just before the enemy overcomes you, because that is what He did with Jeremiah. Jeremiah, was one of the three major prophets who came to a point where he wished he was never called to be a prophet. Actually, unlike the other two, Moses and Elijah who asked to die, Jeremiah cursed the day he was born. Why, because he suffered so much at the hands of the people who tried to silence him. Yet, he did as God told him and sounded the warning that the people needed to change their ways, or they would die. They remained obstinate and were conquered by the Babylonians in 587 BC. Those who heard my homily last week, will remember I gave a short history lesson and part of that included the time when Babylon conquered Judah.
Jeremiah was not defeated, though he suffered greatly in his seeking to do the will of God. He was called and did not choose to do this will, he was chosen, whether he liked it or not.
The greatest sin he fought against was idolatry. that is always the greatest sin, because all the other sins came from idolatry. Idolatry was actually about prosperity. Let me give you an example of modern day idolatry. How many have heard of planting St. Joseph upside down on your property so that you can sell your house. That is not much different to what they were doing in Judah. They would take in their homes these idols of the false gods of the surrounding territories, mostly of the god Ba’al who was the god of fertility. In a agrarian culture, the god of fertility is not about having lots of children as much as having a bountiful harvest and lots of livestock. That means prosperity. So having the god ba’al meant having all that was needed to live a good life here and being well off. It also meant turning your back on God, because he does not promise prosperity as much as he promised holiness and justice and peace and beware the preacher who says that He does. Once you are focused on prosperity in this life more worldly sins will follow. This is what happened.
When Jeremiah is telling people to turn back to God, they are seeing his call to also turn their backs on seeking to be prosperous and they were not going to do that. They will also work to silence the voice of God who is Jeremiah. So he suffered terribly, he was not only harassed and insulted, he was thrown down a well. His suffering was so terrible that he cursed the day he was born. If I were to call Jeremiah a patron saint, I would call him the patron saint of Tourette Syndrome, because, like Tourette Syndrome, if you try to supress the symptoms, they just come out anyway and stronger and this is one of the things Jeremiah complained about. He tried to supress his prophecy yet it just came out anyway.
The important lesson for us now is to ask the question: If Jeremiah was a prophet, then who are we?
St. John Chrysostom said that our vocation is greater than that of Jeremiah the prophet. You and I have the call to be prophets to the world. And we as a church suffer when we are those prophets. I laugh when people say that Catholicism is the only acceptable prejudice in the United States. Today, the issue is not that this happens, the issue is why and the reason is that we as Catholics have the calling to be Jeremiah of our day. That goes for each and every one of us. We are all called to be Jeremiahs. We are all called to be prophets and so the way we live our life must be different than the world around us, because as the bible teaches many times and as the people of Jeremiah’s time learned, the world will change and the stability we see on Sunday could be gone on Monday.
However, if we do not understand our role, then we become part of the culture with nothing to offer the world around us and we are not doing the will of God, then God will terrify us in front of them. Case in point, have you noticed how much purification has happened in the Church of late, do you not think that God is aware of this and may also be part of this?
I have said before, please get rid of any belief that it is our role to be good so that we can go to Heaven, you and I were called to be the prophets that Jeremiah was in a culture that seeks to silence our voice, just the like the culture that tried to silence Jeremiah’s As in the days of the Jeremiah there were the false prophets who told people that prosperity was ahead and there was no need of change and conversion.
So it is in our day, for there are those who are preaching that there is no God and, therefore, there is no need for us to pay Him any heed. Yet the signs are there how wrong they are and other signs are showing that soon they will see how wrong they are. You and I have been called to be prophets to them that they may learn the truth so that they will not be as lost as those were in Judah when Babylon wiped them out.
You can expect the road to be difficult always. We live in a time where there are TV dramas that make it a rule to bash agents of the Catholic Church in many episodes. Such Catholic bashing is well known. We know that agents of news and other outlets seek to bash the Catholic church because of our stand on many issues in which this culture does not agree. They will not tell you that we as a Church also stand between the universities and billions of dollars in research grant money for embryonic stem cell research and cloning, again what is at the bottom of this: a promised prosperity for some, even if it will lead to greater suffering for others.
Like Jeremiah, the enemies of the Church seek to silence our voice. Like Jeremiah, it is easier for us to remain silent and to blend in with the crowd, but like Jeremiah each of us have been called to live our faith so that all will not be lost.
Many criticize our Archdiocese for much that we have gone through in the line of purification. They see the purifying process, without understanding the reason for the purification. You see, we are in a seat of world secularism, including a place that teaches people at to emulate the devil to get what they want, and what they want is a Catholic Church that embraces secularism, so that they can find their concept of prosperity.
They will not defeat us, but they will certainly try and come close. The question remaining is do you chose to embrace as parish and as Church the role of Jeremiah for today, or do you choose to join our enemies. In Jeremiah’s day, they went off into Babylonian oblivion. Yet, we have spent about ten minutes talking about God’s prophet, whose words we still read to this day and who remains in the Kingdom of Heaven, with those who chose to hear his prophecy. Let us be the prophets we are called to be in be rooted in prayer where we found the strength to be the channels of God’s power, grace and message. Otherwise we become like everyone else whose only message is a false promise of future prosperity.
God bless you,
Fr. Robert J Carr
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