Reading Meditations
Whether we saw them with our own eyes or only on our television screens, it is certainly true that those images are hard to forget: the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center, a jagged scar on the earth in Eastern Pennsylvania, a gaping hole in the side of a burning Pentagon. Few of us had ever seen a great city in ruin, set afire by those who wanted to obliterate it. Other nations and their children have long known bombings and rubble, but this was the first time we in the United States saw our major cities under attack, with staggering destruction and loss of life; we have all felt less safe since September 11, 2001. It would be reasonable to say that our nation sustained a spiritual wound just as much as a physical one on that day, eleven years ago.
Perhaps then we can just begin to imagine how the people of Israel felt so long ago, when their city, their nation, was destroyed and their rulers and religious leaders carried off to a distant land. Our lectionary reading for this first Sunday of a new Church Year, the First Sunday of Advent, is from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. Six hundred years before Jesus was born, the people of Israel were carried off to exile in Babylon, after many warnings by the prophets, including Jeremiah, that their failure to live faithfully, to live in justice and righteousness, would bring their downfall. They must have felt that they had been cut down, like a tree felled by the ax of a brutal and heartless oppressor. Once, under the great King David, Israel had been a formidable political and military power, and its people still remembered those glory days and longed for their return. Now, their king was no more, that glory was only a dim memory, and their hopes were dashed upon the rocks of the brutal history of empire…more tomorrow.