seeking the shalom of parkdale.

The Jeremiah Community is a mixed up people. I am not saying that we don’t know what we’re doing. Nor am I saying, in that all-to-easy and self-congratulatory way, that we are “diverse” and “inclusive” community. There may be elements of truth to both of these things, but we are mixed up in a more fundamental sense: we are a gathering of peculiar persons, with different histories, different passions, different gifts, and different weaknesses, who are somehow trying to become a peculiar people – trying to become a people gathered by and striving for the reign of God. But how do peculiar persons become a peculiar people? There is no easy path to this transformation. It is a process that must be undergone, not a plan to be implemented.

But there are ways to cultivate the space or the context within which such transformation can take place more effectively. When Jesus called his disciples, he did not mince words concerning what it was they were in for: “whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” (Matt 10:38) And yet, Jesus simultaneously calls his followers into a space of comfort and of “rest” (Matt 11:28-30). Within the space of rest – that invitation to participate in the Sabbath of God (Heb 4) – the hard work of transformation can take place.

It is a space or a context very much like this that we are attempting to create as a number of us formally commit ourselves to the life of the Jeremiah Community in covenant. Promise – paradigmatically in the covenants that God establishes with God’s creation, and by extension in a covenant made between persons before God – can become a context of safety and a space of stability within which the difficult work of “life together” can be undertaken. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove has spelled out the practical substance of such promising. Beneath the words that we will say before God, before the wider church, and before one another, is the promise to stick around in the hope of transformation.

  “I won’t run. I won’t run from the way this place exposes me as limited. I won’t run in the hopes that I will be appreciated more somewhere else. I’m going to stay. And in staying I’m going to trust that God’s love is enough to transform me and to transform this place… in the mixed up community of people that God is gathering in this place.”

“Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

- John 12:3

“the Church is first of all a kind of space cleared by God through Jesus in which people may become what God made them to be (God’s sons and daughters), and that what we have to do about the Church is not first to organize it as a society but to inhabit it as a climate or a landscape.”

- Rowan Williams

In this last Sunday’s Gospel reading we gained a clue about what it might mean to inhabit the reign of God as a “landscape.” While the New Testament does not speak of “building” the Kingdom, it does often use the language of “entering” the Kingdom of God. The clue comes from Mary’s gratuitous act of devotion, when she anoints Jesus’ feet with perfume. Her gesture is generative of an environment, a dimension of depth and a sensorium rich in texture, caress and fragrance. Mary doesn’t just perform a symbolic act, she creates a space into which Jesus is invited, a space that Jesus willingly inhabits.

That Jesus has entered into this space ahead of us; that this banquet includes among its guests, the resurrected dead (Mary’s brother, Lazarus); that in this small window of time, a space of blessing and abundance has been created and inhabited… what else could this be but an anticipation and a parable of the Kingdom of God – of the reign of God as a sensuous dimension of blessing and abundance.

As we approach Holy Week, let us, like Mary, seek to create spaces of grace and abundance. And may we seek to inhabit that space cleared for us by Jesus. Let us enter that dimension of the universe that has been purged of the specters of scarcity and retaliation, steeped in exorbitance and hospitality, ever mindful that we only enter into to such abundance on the other side of loss.

In hope,
Jason

Our genealogical work is beginning to bear fruit. As the Jeremiah Community delves into the complex depths of the figure, the text, and the name of Jeremiah, the resonances are becoming clearer – the call is becoming more distinctive. Jeremiah is often referred to as “the weeping prophet.” Are we then fated to become the weeping community? I hope not.

But perhaps weeping is only one aspect of the larger work of lament. Could we be called to become a community of lament? It is too soon to say. But we are being pulled into the orbit of lamentation. Not only has our patron prophet forced us to consider what it might mean to “raise a lamentation on the bare heights,” but he has done so on the threshold of the season of Lent, the season of mourning and repentance – and a season during which the lectionary will have us reading through a good portion of the book of Jeremiah! We would be foolish not to pay close attention to these subtle movements of the Spirit.

But how would one conceive of lamentation as vocation? Would this not be another name for melancholia, for an inescapable and debilitating sadness?

While lament involves the expression of mourning, it is not a petrifying mournfulness. From Jeremiah we learn that lament is a work that is at once unflinchingly realistic, stubbornly hopeful, and – for lack of a better term – utterly implicated. In our context, lament would be realistic in the sense that it would face truthfully the violence and brokenness of our world, even if this means facing the reality of the church’s complicity in this same violence. It would be hopeful in the sense that it would not accept such brokenness as normative or as normal, but instead would raise a pathos filled protest, in the anticipation of a fuller peaceableness to come. Finally, lament would issue from the experience of identification or implication, and not from the perspective of an external critique. That is, what Jeremiah’s effusive speech points to, the deepest origin of his distress, is the fact that it is his own people who have broken covenant, who have turned from neighbourliness to injustice, and who are therefore liable before divine justice. Lament, should one take up such a calling, does not permit self-righteous criticism, but demands a realistic, hopeful, and reflexive posture towards the world. Are we prepared to take up such a vocation?

“So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” Nehemiah 8:8

It was as though the words were written just for us: “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” It was the exhortation that was offered to a community who had recently come home; who had only just found their place in the sun after having become accustomed to being a people without place – in diaspora.   These words of comfort and assurance come from the book of Nehemiah. These words were read aloud in the hearing of the Jeremiah Community and Parkdale Neighbourhood Church as we gathered in the shelter of a secure and sacred space on Sunday. The centuries between the return of the Jews to the restored temple in Jerusalem and the arrival of the Jeremiah Community in its new sanctuary seemed to evaporate and the history of God’s saving work on behalf of God’s chosen people was rehearsed in this pregnant historical moment. Or so it would seem…

Fortunately for us, our preacher, Maggie Helwig, was more attentive to Nehemiah’s hermeneutical commentary (i.e. to the necessity that scripture is heard “with interpretation”) than she was to cheap historical comparisons. That is, instead of comforting us with the easy assurance of blessing, she warned us of “the dark side of homecoming.” She put before us a challenge very much in line with Duke Vipperman’s challenge from a previous Sunday: that despite our “landedness,” that we remain a “wandering people.” Maggie offered a particularly incisive textual insight. This insight came with the warning that the Jeremiah Community remain aware of the temptation to the exclusion of the other; a temptation that comes, almost inevitably, with the privilege of place and the desire for identity. Indeed, as Maggie pointed out, the Ezra-Nehemiah tradition is itself witness to this temptation. In Ezra 10, in an effort to purify the identity of the newly landed people of Israel, “foreign wives and their children” were sent away. The health of the community was seen to be contingent upon the exclusion of the other.

This is a difficult text at many levels, but it places before the Jeremiah Community a particularly striking tension. Indeed, our calling as a community – “to seek the peace of the city” – comes from Jeremiah 29:7. In this section of text we learn that what is at stake here is not just the need to be “good citizens,” but the need to find a home in diaspora. Exile, according to Jeremiah, is not an unfortunate detour, but the very context of faithful existence. For God is not only the God of the landed, purified people, but the God of the whole universe – including foreign women and children!

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ⁵Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. ⁶Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. ⁷But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

I don’t know precisely how to make the leap to application here. What is clear, however, is that the welfare – indeed the shalom – of the people of God is not to be found not in the exclusion of the other, but precisely in a deliberate solidarity with the other.