Ripe

Jeremiah 31:27-34

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord. In those days they shall no longer say:
‘The parents have eaten sour grapes,
   and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’
But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

When I first read this passage in preparing for this sermon, for some reason, I got tunnel vision about the imagery and the metaphor about sour grapes— I wondered if this, or one of the other mentions of sour grapes in the Old Testament was where the expression originally came from—you know, sour grapes meaning that you have a really negative attitude about something you can’t have. As it turns out, it originates from a fable attributed to the Greek storyteller Aesop. The fable goes that a fox is very hungry and he’s trying to reach for some grapes to eat. He can’t reach them, no matter how high he jumps or how hard he strains, so instead of admitting defeat or asking for help, or finding some creative workaround, he stomps away grumbling that the grapes were sour anyway, they weren’t even ripe yet, so who cares. So ostensibly, this story has nothing to do with our scripture passage for today— but my brain is wired a little weird, so I couldn’t help but still find a connection of sorts.

“In those days they shall no longer say: / ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ / But all shall die from their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.” This is a part of God’s sort of… revised covenant. It means that people will no longer pay for the sins of their elders. Earlier in the Hebrew Bible, and in ancient Greek mythology, if your parents messed up, then you were sort of doomed—that everything that happened was all part of a divine plan of fate, that anything that happened was your inescapable destiny, often because of factors or events out of your control. God is saying this isn’t the case anymore. This is great news, and this is pretty radical—because up until this time, there tended to be prevailing sense of doom when something would go wrong. If you were going through a tough time, it was because someone in your family probably messed up a century or two earlier, and you were paying the price, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It creates this sense of defeat, this sense of what’s-the-point, it really keeps people down and despairing. But now, God is saying, this won’t happen anymore. Those who mess up, will only hurt themselves in the long run; no one else will directly suffer for their sins. This revision of God’s covenant, (and I say revision, because it doesn’t do away with Mosaic laws or the fundamentals of the Jewish faith; it simply makes things a little more flexible, a little more accessible) came at a time of despair. The Babylonians had taken over, the promised land was no more, and if God’s people were going by the old rules, the assumption would likely be that there would be no escape from this cruel fate; that this was their destiny, to be an occupied people, separated from God’s love and mercy because of centuries of wrongdoing, greed, sin, corruption of those who came before. What would be the point in being faithful, of being a good person if you’re just destined to suffer? This is just not a sustainable way of being, and God apparently realized this. And so now, people would no longer be beholden to the despair that comes with knowing they’re doomed because of circumstances out of their control— and so, they would know there is good reason to keep their faith in God and help their fellow humans being held down by their occupiers, by their oppressors; because by helping those who are struggling, by uplifting the downtrodden, you’ll be contributing to a better world that is indeed possible, because your fate is no longer defined by what your ancestors did or did not do—in fact, the concept of fate is null and void.

In thinking about this radical generational shift, I couldn’t help but think of the generational divides of today. As someone who is peak millennial, born in 1987, graduated college during the height of the recession in 2009, my generation has come of age realizing that much of what we’ve been told about the how to achieve the American dream is just no longer feasible; and for some people, people of color and the disenfranchised, it was always an outright lie. And because of that, my generation has also come of age blaming those in previous generations for pulling the rug out from under us; and then the previous generations try to fight back against this millennial blame-game by calling us lazy or entitled. It’s a vicious cycle, and it leads to this same kind of defeatist attitude that the ancient Judeans may have had before this new covenant—if my elder screwed us over, what’s the point of trying to be good? If our elders destroyed the environment beyond repair, what’s the point of fighting for more environmental protections? If our elders put laws in place to stop the poor from being able to achieve upward mobility, if they put in place technically legal, but backbreaking working conditions to make sure workers remain struggling and too tired to fight, what’s the point of fighting if the laws our elders put in place make it so that we’re destined to fail? There is this prevailing cynicism in my and younger generations, and I get it, but it’s also just not sustainable, and it’s scary, and it can feel pretty bleak at times.

Now, back to the fable of the fox and the sour grapes—in the story, the fox doesn’t want to admit defeat. He doesn’t want to ask for help. He doesn’t do anything besides reach and strain to try to get these ripe and delicious grapes. So he takes the easy way out and he lies to himself that the grapes aren’t ripe, so why would even want to eat the sour grapes? In all three of the examples in this sermon so far—the fable, feeling doomed by your ancestors and then blaming your ancestors for your misfortunes, it involves creating a false or an exaggerated narrative in order to give up. It involves making up a story to rationalize to ourselves that there’s no point in thinking creatively or asking for help, no matter how desperate or hungry you may be; why there’s no point in remaining faithful to a God who you assume is going to doom you anyway; why there’s no point in fighting for a better world if those who came before us damaged it beyond repair.

But we’re not doomed. This world isn’t damaged beyond repair. We have the power to change the future and to usher in an earth as it is in heaven. “I will watch over them to build and plant,” says God. No longer will we be punished for the sins of the past, as long as we actually work to right those wrongs.

Last winter, I preached about the uncertainty principle, discovered by the physicist Werner Heisenberg that proved wrong the concept of determinism. Determinism—this prevailing scientific theory, supported by thinkers like Albert Einstein—is the idea that all events, that any and all things that happens in the world, are determined by something that happened before it; which means that in theory, we can understand why things happen, and maybe even predict some of the future. Heisenberg discovered that this just isn’t the case. The world is random. We can’t predict anything. Now, in the winter when I preached about this, I preached about the sort of existential crisis this brought about, as author Benjamin Labatut writes, “However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.” I talked about how, as someone who struggles with anxiety, this lack of certainty certainly puts my teeth on edge. But I’m thinking about it in a much different way now. There is a real freedom in this! Nothing is determined! No matter how much those before us have sinned, have messed things up, there’s nothing telling us that we’re definitively doomed. There’s no way to prove that we can’t fix what others have broken.

And there may be cynics among us who will say, “well yeah, but that means there’s no way to prove that we won’t be… say, sucked up by a black hole.” And sure, that’s true. But at least as people of faith, we can know that regardless of what happens, there is a God who loves us no matter where we are, no matter what we do. In today’s passage, God’s people are despairing because they know longer have a homeland to call their own. But God makes it clear that that’s okay, because God’s love can’t be contained by borders or shielded by walls. God’s laws and love are written upon our hearts. That love is with us wherever we go, in whatever kind of world we live in.

Church, we need to have faith that God’s love is with us no matter what happens, but we also need to have faith in the unknowable, we need to embrace the unknowable. I will admit that I have a very hard time with this, I can’t promise that, in this case, I will always practice what I’m currently preaching, but I will try. We have to understand that despite what the statistics say, despite whatever recent climate doom headline pops up on your phone or on tv, despite what the numbers say about church attendance or religious affiliation, despite the generational wars and divides promoted by the media, social or corporate, we are not against each other, we are all in this together, and therefore, we are not doomed.

Now this isn’t to say we should ignore troubling statistics, it’s not saying that don’t mean anything— what I am saying is that whatever legitimate statistics or studies we see is a warning, it is not a set-in-stone sentence. Going back to the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Einstein hated it. He spent years trying to disprove it to no avail. At one point he reportedly spat at Heisenberg, “God does not play dice with the universe!” Labatut writes of Einstein’s objections to the uncertainty principle, that to him, “…physics must speak of causes and effects, and not only of probabilities. He refused to believe that the facts of the world obeyed a logic so contrary to common sense.” It’s a hard pill to swallow, for sure—that we can never determine how something will end up, that we can never predict something exactly, that we will only have probabilities to work off of. But really—what freedom there is in this! What freedom there is in realizing that the future is open to so much possibility! What freedom there is in knowing that we are not determined to fail, that we are not doomed, that we can fix what our elders, what those in power have tried to destroy!

But we have to be creative. We have to ask for help. We can’t be like the fox who makes up a story so that he can feel okay about giving up. We can’t do things the same way we used to. At clergy convocation a couple weeks ago, in talking about how church is going post-covid, I just said… I don’t really know! I don’t know what normal is, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back there, and I don’t know what a relevant, good normal looks like! But we’re figuring it out. We’re not gonna give up, and decide, ‘eh, church isn’t really working anyway.’ Because this is church is working. There is so much love and so much faith, and so much devotion to this community that I know you all still believe in. But we can’t keep doing things the same way. We can’t just stretch and reach for those grapes, we have to ask for help. We have to work together. We have to think of new ways to act our God’s call in the world.

This is a new era, and it is ripe for positive change and new ideas. It’s ripe for optimism, and the freedom that comes with knowing that we can’t know. It’s ripe for the hope that comes from the fact that, no matter when or where we find ourselves, we know God’s Love is permanently etched on our hearts; we can escape our fatalistic ideas notions of doom and despair, but we can’t escape the Love of God. We are forgiven and we are loved. And that Love will buoy us whenever those in power try to bring us down; that love will sustain us whenever we fear the world is broken beyond repair.

Nothing is set in stone, Church, except for God’s unconditional Love. Nothing is determined, Church, except for the fact that we don’t know, and may never know. But let’s embrace that. New ways of being are ripe for the picking. Amen.