A House Divided

But this command I gave them: "Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you."

Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but in the stubbornness of their evil will,

they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than forward.

From the day that your ancestors came out from the land of Egypt until this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day; yet they did not listen to me, or pay attention, but they stiffened their necks.  They did worse than their ancestors did.

So you shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you.

You shall call to them, but they will not answer you.

You shall say to them: "This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God, and did not accept discipline; truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips."

-Jeremiah 7: 23-28 (NRSV)

Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert, and house falls upon house.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Luke 11:17b

The theologian Karl Barth said, "Take your Bible and your newspaper, and read both, but interpret newspapers from your Bible."  I agree with that advice, but I will warn anyone who would take up the discipline of trying to do so, it is going to trouble you greatly.  Barth also is reported to have taught that we should do theology with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, but I would not refer to what happens from this practice as theology, that term is too sterile. What happens when you read the Word along side the news of the day is that you are very likely to hear a prophet's voice speaking to you.

The two bits of Scripture above are not cherry picked for my purposes, they are the assigned readings from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel for this day in the Revised Common Lectionary.  I have been following the lectionary for the purposes of preaching for quite some time time now, and I will tell you that it very rarely lets me rest easy when the waters of our world are troubled.  Sometimes it seems almost spooky how the text for a given day or week applies to something happening in the world, given that these texts are selected by what has to be the most boring and un-mystical thing ever: a committee.

The words of a prophet are always there to correct us, whoever we are and wherever we are.  Notice in Jeremiah above, you could find a critique of conservatives in the statement: "in the stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than forward."  You could also find a critique of liberals in the line: "This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God, and did not accept discipline..."  And honestly you could apply the last bit, as well as the Gospel to our entire political scenario at this moment: "The truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips."

This is not, by the way, an isolated example.  This is a daily occurrence when you do what Barth recommended.  It is enough to drive you a bit nuts.  It will certainly get you in trouble with ideologues on either the "left" or the "right."  It will run you into some places where you find you must simply be un-patriotic and admit that your nation, whatever that happens to be, cannot and will not be synonymous with the Kingdom of Heaven.  It will also sometimes lead you to an almost delirious hope that if only the people would change their hearts then God's mercy would surely rescue them.  AND it will often remind you, with brutal honesty, that you can say or shout all these things until you're blue in the face, but ain't nobody gonna listen to you anyway.