In a very happy accident, I was assigned to write about today’s readings which just happen to include two verses from Jeremiah that I have long considered a major guiding point of my life. Combined with the other readings, these words span thousands of years of history and paint a vivid picture of who exactly God sees as worthy of blessing or deserving of woe. With the current news an endless cacophony of chaos, destruction and hate, I honestly can’t think of a better time to remember who and what the people of God are truly called to be.
Both the Old Testament writers and Jesus Himself say that sorrow will befall those: who follow the advice of the wicked and walk in their ways, who sit in the company of the disrespectful, who trust in the strength of humans alone, whose hearts turn away from God, who are rich only in earthly terms, who only laugh and do not grieve, and who try to please everyone.
Yet, on the other side of the coin, blessed are those: who hope in the Lord, who delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on it, who are poor and hungry and weeping, and who are hated and excluded and insulted because they align themselves with God.
I think now is the best possible time both to ask ourselves where exactly we stand by these measurements, and where do the people with whom we align ourselves stand? Then considering the reality, we can strive to make the necessary changes.
Narrowing in on Jeremiah 6:7-8, it reads as follows: “Blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD, whose hope is the LORD. [S]he is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream: it fears not the heat when it comes; its leaves stay green; in the year of drought it shows no distress, but still bears fruit.”
Since first reading these verses as a teenager, the image of a tree next to a flowing body of water has acted as a vividly clear symbol of my own spiritual life: I am the tree planted right next to the stream, the living, moving Presence of God. If we expand the metaphor, the idea is that when we trust in the Lord, when we hope in all who God says They are, then our roots grow down deep into the Stream of Life. And when our roots are deep, the situations around us—no matter how scary or even apocalyptic they may seem—can’t easily shake us. The Eternal Source supplies us with all we need, and regardless of our circumstances, we do not shrivel and dry up, but rather continue to produce and even thrive.
To me, this image is far more than a metaphor. When my own self-image and identity was deeply shaken in my teens, I saw myself as that tree and knew that my faith was far deeper than I could see right then, and it gave me reason not to give up hope. When I had my first panic attack in my early twenties, followed by countless more in the decades to follow, I could feel the roots of the faith I had watered hold me up when I could not stand on my own. When my mom died and my belief in a good God was nearly torn to pieces, it was the depth of those faith roots alone that sustained me. When I shake with panic or feel paralyzed with grief and fear, there is somewhere in my subconscious that reminds me I am not alone, that allows me to hear the Holy Spirit whisper Truth to me.
I don’t mean any of these examples to be overly-emotional or overly-Christianized. Rather, I hope to explain how words written by a minor Biblical prophet sometime around 600 B.C. have become a tether of hope to which I’ve attached myself. How God inspired the authors of the Bible to write the words that have been passed down through the ages for exactly such a time as this.
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