Jeremiah 4: 11-28 (links validated 8/13/25a)

Although the language of his poetry may be antiquated now, his concern for the failings of a people should be familiar to us today. Alexander Pope wrote his own version of a “Jeremiad” in the early 18th century. A satirist who poked at the “strange gods” of the Enlightenment era in which he wrote. Book 4 of his poem, Dunciad, warns of encroaching chaos and dullness (see the similarities in metaphor with Jeremiah 4:23) as a result of the people chasing after science, wit, logic and reason. He refers to this chaos and dullness as “an uncreating word,” which Pope decries as “sophistry” resulting in the removal of all transcendence and divinity. “Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d; Light dies before thy uncreating word; Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall, And universal Darkness buries All.” The text of the poem is long and not easy for preachers during the week or (most) congregations on Sunday morning but the wit of it is arresting and worth reading if only to wonder: if I were to write of those foibles—silly, salacious and life-threatening—that assail God’s people today, what would I name? And how can I do it with some measure of Pope’s playfulness so that God’s people will recognize themselves before they have capacity to reject the accusation?

Silent Spring. Or better written, Silent Spring in italics as befits a book title because that was indeed the title of Rachel Carson’s well-known book that was among the first cries of the modern ecological movement. Years ago, before I knew what that book was about, upon hearing the title I pictured some serene setting: a natural spring bubbling up silently in some lovely mountain valley while a man and woman take their ease on a picnic blanket, enjoying sips of some shimmering glasses of a light and oaky Chardonnay. “Ahh, it’s so peaceful here” the one might say to the other. How wrong that impression was! Because what Carson feared, and warned about, was a season of spring that would be silent because no birds would be alive to warble their beautiful tunes, no loons would cruise atop lakes to issue their hauntingly lovely cry: spring would be silent, not raucous with nature’s sounds, because pollution (and now maybe we need to add global climate change) would have wiped them out, obliterating creatures into extinction. Silent Spring could be an apt title for a good portion of Jeremiah 4 as well...

I just finished re-reading 1984, the extremely grim portrayal of a world ruled by Big Brother. The insanity of that dystopian world was depressing. So I appreciated the Afterword by Eric Fromm. He pointed out that the Enlightenment brought a new literary genre into the world, the utopian novel filled with hope for a new world created by human effort. However, the horrors of WW I and II resulted in the reversal of utopian hopes and the creation of dystopian novels. The leading examples were Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Fromm points out that even as the Enlightenment brought a hope rooted in a resurgent humanism, the near destruction of the civilization by world-wide war spawned a hopelessness rooted in human evil. That hopelessness is now the dominant mood of our time, says Fromm. And that gives us as Christian preachers a powerful connecting point for such seemingly hopeless texts as Jeremiah 18.

"In That Hideous Strength, the final volume of his Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis showed that he understands the way evil seeks to sully God's good creation. Witness the following conversation involving a group of evil people and their plans for the physical environment of earth: 'Having heard that the leader of a certain group had just ordered the destruction of a number of beech trees on a local estate, someone asks why he did such a thing...."

("a word which literally means the state of being 'at one' is the concept of 'tikkun olam', which literally means 'world repair'. Today it is used to refer to the pursuit of social action and social justice, but its roots originate in the teachings of the 16th century mystic Isaac Luria. Luria believed that in order to make room for the world to be created, God needed to contract, to 'hold back' in order that something else could grow"...)

("Last summer Janet and I visited the Culloden battlefield, near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. On April 16, 1746 the armies of Bonnie Prince Charlie and George II met in a boggy field. Charlie was trying to retake the British throne for the Stuart dynasty, but it was to be to no avail. He made a number of miscalculations, and the British took advantage of them. In less than an hour, the battle was over. But that's not the end of the story..." and another quote)