We are going to need to set some context this morning since we have skipped ahead in the Book of Jeremiah. Ten chapters before where we are today, Jeremiah’s truth to power speaking has gotten him in a boatload of trouble, and he is put on trial for his life. Though his life is spared, he is declared persona non grata in the Temple. There will be no audience with the king ever again. How will the words of God filling Jeremiah’s mouth be heard?
So hear these words from Jeremiah 36:1-8, 21-23, 27-31. 
These are from The Message a paraphrase written by the late Eugene Peterson. Well now, God has found a way for God’s words to be heard through Jeremiah dictating them to Baruch. God has instructed Jeremiah to dictate everything he has been speaking up to this point to the people of Judah – the community, the king, the leadership. The words on the scroll point to the Temple corruption, the abusive and oppressive treatment of people on the margins – the immigrants, the widows, the poor.
It is a way to enshrine in writing the ways in which God will keep covenant with the people if only they return to God. God wants to forgive them if only they will confess their sin. But if they don’t more destruction will reign down on them and to a traumatized people, that isn’t something pleasing to hear is it?
So Baruch takes the scroll to a prominent place and reads it on a festival day when there are sure to be loads of people at the Temple. The people react, but when the king gets wind of this, he sends for the scroll and as it is read, the king cuts off those pieces of the scroll which offend him (which is the whole scroll!) and puts it in the fire. The king is trying to obliterate the memory of hard truths – of God’s words that are tough to hear – of the history of destruction.
But he is also trying to erase the covenant God has made with the people going way back to Abraham. What happens when you erase the history of a nation – traumatic and promising? In Judah’s case, what happens when the king decides that the history, the memory of either speaks too much truth and might lead the people away from loyalty to the king and back to honoring the covenant with God. Because you see in burning the scroll, King Jehoiakim demonstrates his contempt for God – God’s word, promises and covenant – and discounts the people’s pain.
If the word of God can be destroyed, how will the people find the language to use to name their pain? How will they deal with the trauma of violent invasion, occupation and exile? How will they know to turn back to God? How will they know about God’s promises of a covenant of love and mercy, grace and forgiveness? How will they know?
Ah, but the scroll, the word of God can’t be destroyed for the scroll continues to reappear. Jeremiah is instructed to get a blank scroll and start all over again. God’s word will not end; the memories of pain and promise will be stored in a place where they will not be erased. And, the king’s attempt to hide all of this from himself and the people will fail. Walter Brueggemann writes this in his commentary on Jeremiah: “That is, the scroll is not designed to give information, nor even to make an argument, but it is to authorize, energize, and evoke a transformed life that will avoid and deter the coming evil.”[1]
In other words, the scroll which outlines all that has happened burning memory into the hearts and minds of the people, is meant to turn them back to God and in that turning to live transformed lives where they won’t buy into the corrupt Temple leadership, and they will begin to honor the covenant by loving and helping others. The scroll and the memories will remind them of what God has done for them in the past and what God can do again. Those memories help them name pain and receive promise.
Just look at Psalm 42. The Psalmist is so distressed – Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.
Then the Psalmist goes through line after line of memories of what God has done in the past. The Psalmist can name his/her pain but the memories that come flooding in give promise and hope that God is ever present accompanying us on our journey of faith – as individuals and as this community of faith.
How do we as individuals and this community of faith try to erase hard memories and truths? How do we bury them? What happens when we try to erase or evade or destroy those truths – they just keep bubbling up don’t they? They still confront us. Can we like the Psalmist remember the promises of God in the midst of pain we can name? What memories or history do you wish you could erase in the life of this congregation? How does that deny us hearing the memories of promise in the midst of the memories of pain?
And, it’s not just this community. As a history major I grieve the ways in which our current national leadership is trying so desperately to wipe out history that is full of painful truth that this nation has yet to grapple with. What happens when we try to minimize or erase the history and memory of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the Civil Rights movement, of the racism we are seeing now? What happens when we try to destroy the history and memory of women, of LGBTQ folks, of Asian, Latino/a, and other ethnicities?
There are hard truths we as a nation have not dealt with fully and erasing the history and memories won’t make those truths go away. For the king I think it is about power – if folks turn to God, where is his power? For us, is it white guilt when dealing with the tragic history of racism? For us, is it a lack of curiosity? For us, how do we name the pain, and look to the promise of God’s kindom where all are loved and included. Where all are welcomed. We need all those memories – good and hard, painful and promise filled – to guide us to a place of Love – a place where we turn back to God and become the people God calls us to be.
That isn’t easy or painless work. But it is work that can be done if we rely on God’s guidance and presence to deal with the memories of pain and promise. It is work we can do if we fully surrender our will to God’s desire for us. It is work this community of faith can do as we look to the future. May it be so.
[1] Brueggemann, Walter. A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998, page 346.