Scripture: Jeremiah 36:28 – “Take another scroll and write on it all the former words that were in the first scroll, which King Jehoiakim of Judah has burned.” (NRSV)
I remember when my late friend Scott got married. We had spent a lot of time in our teen years on Bustins Island, an island in Casco Bay off the coast of Freeport, Maine, home of the original L. L. Bean. The night before the wedding, there was a terrible fire, and most of the items in the house were destroyed. However, as they dug through the rubble, they found the two wedding rings. I always thought this was miraculous, a sign of love enduring in the face of tragedy.
The fact is that we lose things all the time. We lose friends and family. We lose opportunities. We lose skills or abilities that we once possessed. By our love, our dignity, and our faith are not so easily lost, even when people try to take them away from us.
The Book of Jeremiah speaks of another fire, one not of accident but spite. Jeremiah was a prophet who preached during a time of irresponsibility and conflict in Judah, a time when the kingdom was pinched between two rival empires, Babylon and Egypt. Seeing the kings double down on foolish policies instead of serving the people with justice and righteousness, Jeremiah believed that it was inevitable that the city of Jerusalem would be destroyed. Naturally King Jehoiakim did not want to hear this and had the scroll of Jeremiah’s oracles burned in an attempt to silence him. As you might expect, this did not deter Jeremiah in the long run, and he simply rewrote his scroll of doom.
In the age of the internet, it is harder to burn scrolls and books to pretend like they have never been, but the powerful still seek was to ridicule people or push their truth out of the public consciousness. But the fires of spite and fear cannot silence love and truth. These reflections of the God whom we worship can never disappear. As we mourn our loses and sift through the ashes of the things we treasured, we can take comfort in the fact that love and truth always endure, and that as our risen Savior taught us, death and defeat are never the end. Life, love, and truth always win out in the end.
Prayer: God, help me to put aside my disappointments and find peace in my grief so that I may ever live out your call to love. Amen.
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