August 21; Jeremiah 1: 4-10; Luke 13: 11

What makes you tremble

There is are a photo and video image of a young boy in Syria that have caught the imagination of people around the world, including mine.  They are of a five year old boy sitting down in an ambulance. He is covered in dust and blood, but he is completely calm.  I think that is what’s different about him. He’s calm.  Images of children in wartime crying unnerve us, but then a child crying is not an earthshaking thing.  You take away a toy from a child and they’ll cry.  Children cry occasionally.  BBC commentators were saying that it is possible that for a five year old child growing up in a four year long war in Syria that world would be normal.  But something in us rejects that: war could never be normal for anyone, let alone a child.  What troubles us that this child is so traumatized that he is beyond crying, beyond trembling, beyond being shaken.

In Luke we meet a woman who has been so troubled by a “spirit” that she is crippled by it. We can only imagine what that spirit it. This was ages before the birth of the DSM manual for mental disorders.  If people didn’t know what it was, they would often call a “spirit.”  Something is weighing on her that was so heavy that it “crippled” her.  Friends, perhaps this is what we fear for this cute little boy: that the sounds and the sights and the losses, the spirit of the war has so moved into him that he is beyond repair, beyond saving, beyond healing, that something shook him so fundamentally, that there is no hope. The aid organization Oxfam says on their mailing that:”we are shaken to the core by the image.” If that were only true, we would do more. We’re shaken maybe but not yet to the core.

Friends, our lectionary passages in the Old Testament and the New Testament in a sense finish each other’s sentences. It is as the Old Testament passage says: it is good to tremble and the New Testament says: but it is bad to shaken.  It is bad to be shaken and good to tremble. Here is the young Jeremiah who absolutely does not feel up to being a prophet and who trembles at the thought. In our discussion Chakrita came up with the term: “trembling moment.” Jeremiah has a trembling moment. He does not like it. Nobody does.  But then there is the woman with the crippling spirit.  She is shaken beyond the core. If it were not for Jesus she would be shaken beyond repair even.  Finally, Hebrews tells us we are “receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken,” meaning God’s spiritual kingdom because it is not rooted on earth. That which is not rooted on earth cannot be shaken.

Being shaken affects the foundations of our lives, essentially shifts them.  This is profoundly unsettling.  We don’t want that.  But we need to tremble, like a race horse trembles.  The famous Dutch soccer player Johan Cruijff once said that just before kick off his intestines were often in turmoil and then when the whistle blew the feeling was all gone.  Trembling like the trembling Jeremiah can serve a purpose.  It reminds us of the depth within us when we embark on something that truly matters.  Henry van Dyke writes : “A tear that trembles for a little while upon the trembling eyelid, till the world wavers within, its circle like a dream, holds more of meaning in its narrow orb than all distant landscapes that it views.”  Trembling is part of the condition of life. Juan Ortega (y Cassett) said:” Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.   In other words trembling is an expression of our life force.  Then there is Pema Chodron, who grew up in New York, went to UC Berkeley and after her husband betrayed her and asked for a divorce, became a Tibetan Buddhist nun. She now runs a temple at Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.  She writes in her book “the things that scare us:” A further sign of health is that we don’t become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it’s time to stop struggling and look directly at what’s threatening us.” Well, Jeremiah knew what was threatening him: a thin-skinned hostile king and the enemies Jeremiah would soon make with his words.

Friends, we all have things that make us tremble: the fear of people disapproving of us or not liking us is one; the fear of loss; the fear of physical harm or pain. The fear of failure is another.  The fear of a moral mistake and the excruciating guilt that would follow is another yet.  Sometimes it is the fear of disappointing ourselves.  I have not been watching the Olympics much, but what I did watch quite some trembling in it. Think about having less than 10 seconds to show you are the fastest man or woman on earth or the second fastest or a footnote to history.   Jesus trembled before His task. Perhaps God even trembles at the thought of not being loved by us. Who knows?  Friends, may we tremble when we need to, but not be shaken.  Thanks be to God for being unshakeable.