A friend of a friend, an ordinary person and neighbor, shared a public post reflecting on the events in St. Paul this week. Sara Ford writes:
I sit in the comfort of a home office, teaching English to immigrant adults in Minnesota. They are bright, funny, kind, and hard working. Today, we worked on noun phrases and adjectives, learning how to build sentences like this: ‘It is difficult to focus when you are distracted.’ And a text comes to my phone, and to my wife’s phone upstairs, where she, too, sits at a computer working. The text tells us that ICE, the FBI, and DHS have amassed a large force at a park not four miles from our house. I can’t go. Or can I? I have a job to do. I have a class waiting for me.
My wife goes—runs to the suffering of our neighbors, runs to the families being torn apart as their loved ones are kidnapped. Runs to the tear gas. Watches ICE tow away the cars of protesters. Watches them push people, steal people, breaking any laws they care to break. I explain the way to build a sentence: It — “form of to be” — adjective — infinitive. My wife texts me: “we need to get gas masks.” I explain infinitives. My wife texts me, “they took maybe 15 people.” I praise a student who is just learning to pronounce a word that requires her mouth and lips and throat to make a sound they have never made. My wife texts to tell me her eyes are watering from the gas. I celebrate another student’s new sentence: “Learning English will make it much easier to find a job and build a better future.” I hope with all I have that she is right. My wife texts, “15. We think they took 15.” 1
I notice a connection between what we are experiencing in our streets and what the people of Israel went through in the days of the prophet Jeremiah. Those appointed as our leaders, those given the authority to protect and serve and guard our rights—they are corrupt; they are masked; they are armed and violent; they are breaking the law and disregarding the constitution. Similarly, in chapter 22 of Jeremiah, the chapter before today’s reading, the prophet lays out the sins of the Kings who ruled the nation. Given that Israel was a theocracy, these monarchs were supposed to be accountable to God’s values and God’s laws. Jeremiah articulates the basics in verse 3: “Act with justice and righteousness and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place.” In other words, the just use of power is for the common good, to protect vulnerable populations.
The prophet then provides a picture of what the Kings are doing instead, and it sounds eerily familiar:
Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness
and his upper rooms by injustice,
who makes his neighbors work for nothing
and does not give them their wages,
who says, “I will build myself a spacious house
with large upper rooms,”
and who cuts out windows for it, paneling it with cedar
and painting it with vermilion.
[…] your eyes and heart
are only on your dishonest gain,
for shedding innocent blood,
and for practicing oppression and violence. (Jeremiah 22:13-14, 17)
The immediate context of today’s passage seems to be the moment in which the Babylonian armies prevailed after a long siege, destroying Jerusalem, murdering civilians, and dragging people off into exile. This morning’s reading evokes the scene—people were afraid and dismayed, and folks had gone missing; they been disappeared; they were being held in unknown circumstances. The prophet seems to make conflicting arguments about the cause of this distress. He argues the nation’s suffering is the result of the bad leadership of Israel’s Kings. “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” Later in the passage the prophet also implies that God is responsible, that these terrible times are some sort of divine punishment. Perhaps we grasp the deeper truth if we hear Jeremiah speaking amid a traumatizing moment—with raw emotion, in a fractured way, straining to make sense of a senseless experience.
At the same time, Jeremiah’s prophecy also appeals to the imagination. Using subtle yet distinctive imagery, he calls the nation to remember their foundational stories and understand themselves as agents within these powerful narratives. “I shall bring [the sheep] back to their fold and they will be fruitful and multiply.” This is a reference back to Genesis; it’s what God said to the first humans after making them. In other words, when God brings the people back from exile it will be act of abundant life that will continue the story of creation. At the same time, the final verses of the passage declare that the return home will be a new Exodus, a second liberation from slavery, oppression and death. And finally, Jeremiah also envisions leadership with integrity. God will send a “righteous branch” after the model of David, the very human, very imperfect King who both struggled to use power justly, and listened, learned and made amends when the prophet Nathan called him out for his bullying behavior.
Sara Ford’s reflection on the events of this past week closes with these words. “When do we keep teaching?” she wonders.
When do we disappear from our obligations to jobs, to families, from the tasks of everyday living and run into the brutality? Not to stop it—no. But to witness, to document, to make sure our brothers and sisters in those awful unmarked cars can see our love for them. To feel the power of the hundreds of others who also ran into this madness, this absolute horror. It is, after all, “difficult to focus when you are distracted.” But this distraction, this one—it deserves our full, human, vulnerable attention. We must link hands and hearts. We must run to the brutality. Because we are all, have always been, will always be, very much in this together. My love flies to the broken families. We need to develop more resources to help them. Add that to the list. And then let’s run. Not away to the bright flashing lights telling us not to worry about it, but to the inhumanity itself. We run. Hearts breaking, eyes stinging, we run in. For me, it’s time to order my very first gas mask. I don’t know how else to sleep at night.
Friends, as we run in, run toward pain, fear and fury, we do not go empty-handed or unprepared. Yes, we may have to pack gas masks. And we will need to something else in our response bags, too—something less tangible yet equally protective—the imaginative capacity to envision justice grounded in love and dignity and community honoring our interconnection. We carry with us at all times the essential guidance of own sacred stories—Creation and Exodus, Exile and Return a Good shepherd, a Righteous Branch, a Holy Child. God is with us as we run in, not to rescue or to punish, but to be our muse and our inspiration as we hold the creative tension of hope (as Parker Palmer puts it) between what is and what could and should be and as we, each day, do something to narrow the distance between the two. Amen.