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Well this I am certain of, as I am not certain of much else: thank God I do not have the same friends as Jeremiah. “All my close friends are watching for me to stumble” he tells us.  Maybe it is a little delusional of me, but I would like to think that my friends are always rooting for my success.  

Jeremiah was born in the mid 600’s BC in Anathoth, near Jerusalem, the son of one of the priests who lived with their famiies close to the temple.  From a very young age, he felt called by God to be a prophet and began his ministry before he was 20.  So totally devoted to his task was Jeremiah, that he neither married nor had children. Depsite the lack of support he receives in his work, Jeremiah does not falter in his mission, which is to call the rulers and the people to make changes to the pagan lifestyles they had adopted.  

The message Jeremiah shares in the first reading is reitrated in Matthew’s Gospel:  “Fear no one,” Jesus tells his apostles, “for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.”  We all have our secrets – pieces of ourselves that we share with no one, not even those closest to us.  Some of those secrets are, if not dark, ones that do not show us in our best light, or ones that would embarrass us.  Yet our secrets don’t define us.

Even with our secrets, something known by Jeremiah and Jesus with complete confidence, is the presence of the Lord in their lives.  Jeremiah feels the “Lord … with me like a dread warrior.” For Jesus, “even the hairs on your head are all counted. So do not be afraid.”  Imagine a God who knows us even down to every hair on our head, knows us completely, knows all our secrets, and still loves us. 

Jeremiah thought that the world was in too much of a mess to bring children into it.  I am certain there are some who feel that way today – the world does seem to be in chaos.  Still, if Jeremiah felt this way over 2800 years ago, for us the lesson is the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Nearly 100 years ago, Helen Keller said “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”  A world full of suffering will always exist.  Two thousand years ago Jesus told us the Kingdom of God is at hand, right now, if we believe and live the Good News.  Two thousand years, and we still only have glimpses of that Kingdom.   Maybe those glimpses are enough.  

Far be it from me to correct the prophet, but maybe Jeremiah was wrong in his decision to not have children.  Maybe, because the world is in such a mess, we need to make sure we continue to bring children into it … and eventually one of those children will correct that mess, will bring to fruit that Kingdom.  

Ultimately, Jeremiah’s harsh judgement of the people he was living among led to his exile to Egypt.  Right to the bitter end however, he remains definant, refusing to allow his spirit to be broken.  So we know, that despite his concerns, he had hope – that “thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tunes without the words, and never stops at all” that Emily Dickinson wrote of.

A favourite song of mine is I Hope You Dance sung by Lee Ann Womack.  “I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance, never settle for the path of least resistance,” she sings.   We will always encounter a mess, but to give up because of the mess, means the mess will never be cleared up.  I’m with Jeremiah … it’s not about success, it’s about doing the job we are called to do.  I will leave it to God to worry about the success.

Ellen Bennett