So you go to the house of the LORD on a day of fasting and read to the people from the scroll the words of the LORD that you wrote as I dictated. Read them to all the people of Judah who come in from their towns. – Jeremiah 36:6

Today's Scripture Reading (July 18, 2023): Jeremiah 36

Letters. Over my lifetime, the concept of letter writing has changed. When I was young, we used to write letters to people in far-flung places to communicate with them. Some even had pen pals, relationships built over long distances by sending letters. My mom and I went on a trip when I was eight. We traveled 3200 km (2000 miles) from home and stayed in this place for about a month. And during that time, I remember receiving one significant package from home. It was a package filled with letters from my grade two classmates. Since our trip involved traveling from east to west, most of my classmates wanted to know how many cowboys and Indians (not a politically correct term now, but common among my grade two friends when I was young) I had seen. Apparently, when you are eight years old, west still means "the old west."

When I was in college, letters from home were an essential feature of life. In an important daily ritual, we gathered at the mailboxes to see if we had received anything from home, often gathering there when the mail was due to be placed into our mailboxes. I remember one day when my roommate received a letter from home. But as he read the letter, he became perplexed. The news was old, stuff that he had known for quite a while. And as he read the letter, he began to get worried about the health of the letter's sender, his mother. Was this the early warning sign of dementia? And then he looked at the postmark on the letter. Mom had sent the letter over a year earlier. Somehow, it had gotten lost in transport. Who knows where it had been, but it took over a year to go from home to the college we were attending.

Today, we still write letters; we just don't often send them by mail, or at least not by what we would now call snail mail. We send our mail electronically, and instead of taking days or even weeks, and occasionally over a year, to get to us, the letters we write arrive in seconds. Or if it gets lost in transport, which still happens, maybe minutes from the moment when the sender sends the message. But, our letters still take our words to places we can't get to ourselves.

God has commanded Jeremiah to write down everything that God has told him until now. Likely, this writing is the root of the Book of Jeremiah that we are studying in this blog. Jeremiah gets Baruch to act as his secretary or scribe. And while Jeremiah speaks, Baruch writes down everything that Jeremiah is saying. But Jeremiah is "restricted" (verse 5). He is not in prison, he can go where he wants, but the officials have likely excommunicated him from the faith and Israel. The result is that he is not allowed to enter the Temple area.

But Baruch was able to go. And so Jeremiah asks his partner to take the letter that he has written containing all of God's instructions and read it to the Israelites that have gathered at the Temple. If Jeremiah couldn't go to the Temple, maybe he could become a pen pal with those who could go into the Temple area, so they could still hear the teaching God continued to give Jeremiah.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 37