Today’s Scripture Reading (March 17,
2014): Jeremiah 30
One of the ugliest scars that we have inflicted on our planet
has absolutely nothing to do with strip mining or any of the other ecological
disasters that we insist on inflicting on this planet on which we live. The
scars even worse than the ecological ones (as if the things we are doing to our
ecology was not bad enough) is the insistence that we have in behaving in a
bigoted way. The discrimination that we visit on people because of their race,
creed, sex, health, or even sexual orientation is unconscionable. In the midst
of our hate, we seem to forget that these are the creations of a living God –
and recipients of the most important gift God could give us – life – and the
objects of God’s biggest sacrifice – his only son – so that they could live
that life he had given to them to the absolute fullest extent possible.
Discrimination belittles us and our belief in God.
Jeremiah prophecies that the exiles from Judah will one day return
to their native land. And historically we understand that prediction. In less
than a hundred years, the Babylonian Empire would lie in pieces and Judah would
return home. But Jeremiah does not just say that Judah will return home – he also
says that Israel would return home.
In popular culture, we seem to believe that that is a prophecy
that still remains outstanding. We speak of the lost ten tribes of Israel
meaning the tribes of the Northern nation that were carried into captivity by
the Assyrians more than a century before Judah was carried into exile by the
Babylonians. But the tribes were never really lost. The children of the
northern ten tribes slowly filtered back into their homeland. But the insidious
plan of the Assyrians was to intermarry with the captives from Israel. The
result was that the descendants of the Northern tribes that returned to their
homeland were no longer genetically pure. They were half-breeds. Israel was
never lost – just watered down.
By the time of Jesus, the Northern tribes had become the
hated Samaritans, a group that was routinely discriminated against by the
citizens of Judah. For the Jews, the Samaritans represented something that was
almost less than human. They were a people who had been created as the children
of God, but had traded that position in for something else. Yet, Jeremiah
reminds us that God doesn’t see half breeds when he looks at the Samaritans of
Jesus time – all he sees is his children.
Whatever it might be that we see in the people around us, God
still sees his children. Children worthy of his love – and so worthy of ours.
God’s children now includes us, and one day God is going to bring us all home –
to the land that he has given to his children.
Tomorrow’s Scripture
Reading: Jeremiah 31
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