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Jeremiah 20.10-13
For I hear many whispering: “Terror is all around! Denounce him! Let us denounce him!” All my close friends are watching for me to stumble. “Perhaps he can be enticed, and we can prevail against him, and take our revenge on him.” But the Lord is with me like a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble, and they will not prevail. They will be greatly shamed, for they will not succeed. Their eternal dishonor will never be forgotten. O Lord of hosts, you test the righteous, you see the heart and the mind; let me see your retribution upon them, for to you I have committed my cause. Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.
As a Harry Potter fan, I’ve always loved the line that the wand chooses the wizard. Perhaps in this time of Lent, the passage chooses the Lenten Reflector, as this passage from Jeremiah seemed to call out directly to me.
Growing up as a gay Christian in the time of the Westboro Baptist church, I learned early to tune out the all too frequent recitations of Leviticus in favor of passages such as Matthew 7:2 “For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.” We learn to tune out the denouncements with the fervent belief that God knows what is in our hearts and minds and that our persecutors will stumble. We remain committed to singing God’s praise and walking the path of righteousness knowing that God will settle the score on our behalf in the end.
Jeremiah also whisks me back to the halcyon days of summer 2016 when Michelle Obama reminded us all that “when they go low, we go high.” The test of that faith surely landed hard upon many of us in November 2016, a mere few months later, when we had to channel Jeremiah in recognition of a new administration bent on terror and denouncement. I’ve spent a lot of days since then listening to some gospel music to remind myself that “God’s gonna set this world on fire one of these days, hallelujah and I’m gonna sit at the welcome table.”
Truth be told, I feel like Jeremiah has spent many years whispering in my ears reminding me that few people look back over a lifetime and regret the respect and the kindness they gave even when it was not always reciprocated or even deserved. I just know at the end of the day that God has my back just as He had Jeremiah’s so very long ago.