Reflection Roundup reports from conversations couched in relationships. Here, readers will find boots-on-the-ground and “live from the field” items important to Christian leaders. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but which may not concur. This month’s conversation includes suggestions from the example of an ancient prophet that raises interpretive frames today’s leaders might apply to contemporary contexts. This month’s conversation finds its seat in Jeremiah’s, our, and our congregations’ relationship with scripture. 

Time is filled with swift transition,
Naught of earth unmoved can stand
Build your hopes on things eternal
Hold to God's unchanging hand
Hold to his hand (to God's unchanging hand)
Hold (to his hand) to God's unchanging hand
Build your hope on things eternal
Hold to to God's unchanging hand [1]

I woke up this morning with this hymn in my heart, something for which I have my heritage in the Churches of Christ to thank. I probably have not heard this song with my own physical ears in over thirty years; the main voices in my memory are my mom’s warm alto and my dad’s marching bass. I was reminded recently of a few unique aspects of our denominational heritage, one of which is our theologically sound (for the most part!) hymnody. My gratitude is refreshed each time an “oldie” bubbles up and attaches itself to the present.

A prophet’s job is to direct people toward a faithful future in light of the past, interpreting what this means for the present. Recently, I’ve felt the urge to wonder about this with Jeremiah as a partner. In Leadership, God’s Agency, and Disruptions, Mark Lau Branson and Alan J. Roxburgh describe Jeremiah as an interpretive leader. Jeremiah is doing theological, prophetic work for the people of Judah in a way that has captured my theological imagination as a new leader in my own congregational context. Within our staff, we are blessed to have an executive minister who has made it her habit to wonder about scripture, which is precisely the habit that captured Jeremiah and  influenced his leadership in a time of “swift” (in ancient terms!) transition. Jeremiah’s time is similar to ours in uncanny ways: mixed political messages and obstacles both unexpected and staunch.  As proper practical theologians, we must ask ourselves: What is happening? Why? What needs to happen? And, what might we do? It is a time of significant challenge.

Leaders engage the groups of which they are a part to attend to the meanings they embody, reshaping them as necessary, during times such as these. [2] Interpretive leaders do this while examining meaningful texts and traditions to determine how a present moment of disorientation reflects the faithful nature and actions of God. [3] We listen to our stories. A time of discontinuous change and  unprecedented shifts calls for adaptive leadership. Herein the people of God apply the litmus test of God’s truth to reality. We ask ourselves, “Is what I’m thinking, feeling, and experiencing consistent with what I know to be most true about God?” We reconsider our values in terms of God’s kingdom and the mission of God. 

Jeremiah’s example prescribes a learning posture in our challenging contexts. How might God be instructing us through what appears to be a divergence? Rather than resenting the challenging people and situations, we can allow them to teach us how God might be using them, lovingly, for our growth. Remember what we’ve all heard from our own parents and have likely said to our children? It’s for your own good.  All of this takes place in what Heifetz and Linsky call the “holding environment,” a disruptive set of circumstances. [4] For Jeremiah, it was a fast and an exile (14:12, 20:4). For us, COVID? Polarizing political and social realities? Doctrinal interpretations of scripture?

What, in your context, is begging you to ask “What is happening?” There it is.

We want to know; we’re used to knowing, and Jeremiah was no different, save one thing. He was open to the possibility that God might use what was old to do something new, enacting an awareness of God that his buddy Isaiah had encouraged: “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?” (Isa. 43:19). Jeremiah gave God “permission” to apply what has always been true in a new way. He allowed both himself to wonder and God to speak to his prophetic imagination. Jeremiah acknowledged God’s ontological power over what “really” is, and demonstrated epistemological humility. He knew some things to be true about God while demonstrating how limited and proximate to his own lived experiences the things he knew were.  Jeremiah gave God free reign to be God, and it changed both how he viewed ancient scripture and how he led the people.

What was happening? King Josiah had begun temple renovations, which included finding a Torah scroll, a book of the law, which his successor Jehoiakim tried to get rid of by systematically tearing it up and throwing it into the fire. The Babylonians had besieged Jerusalem, and the people were exiled, a situation which Jehoiakim had tried to prevent by enlisting Egypt as an ally and which the palace prophets  (namely Hananiah) described as “a temporary setback.” What needed to be happening? Jeremiah instructed the people to:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jer. 29:5-7)

In other words, live life. Build, plant, marry, reproduce; be a good neighbor. This admonition demonstrated to the people Jeremiah’s instructive reliance on Yahweh over and above both the king, who wanted to fight, and the king’s prophet, who predicted a peace that the people had yet to experience. Fertilized by faith in Yahweh, they were to cultivate this shalom with their lives. 

Even more meaningfully, Jeremiah’s instructions reversed the curses associated with the people taking matters into their own hands in the law book of Deuteronomy, likely the same that Josiah had uncovered, in a timely fashion: “You shall become engaged to a woman, but another man shall lie with her. You shall build a house but not live in it. You shall plant a vineyard but not enjoy its fruit” (Deut. 28:30). What should have been  happening? Jeremiah preached reliance on Yahweh in what we would call “practical” ways, no matter in what circumstance or where we might find ourselves. God was showing the people, through Jeremiah’s interpretive leadership, how to live as the people of God in the new environment in the same ways they always had. This was Jeremiah’s answer to “What might we do?” As my dad would say, “Keep on keeping on.” 

The present is a liminal time in many ways. Yahweh says, “Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you so that it may be well with you” (Jer. 7:23).  How might we, as adaptive, interpretive, epistemologically humble leaders, interpret this ancient word from the Lord currently, wherever we might find ourselves?  How are the ancient words, even the old hymns, ringing in our ears and attaching themselves to immediate circumstances, rivers in which we would have never thought we would be swimming, and at such a depth!

Remember this oldie? It is a little more obscure nowadays, but embedded in some of our internal playlists all the same: “Ah Lord God! It is you who made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you” (Jer. 32:17) [5].

Jeremiah’s leadership offers us an invitation to test, to experiment, with what has always been true in a new context; Yahweh uses the new to prove the truth of the old.

[1] “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand,” Hymnary.org, accessed June 25, 2023, “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand,” Hymnary.org, accessed June 25, 2023, https://hymnary.org/text/time_is_filled_with_swift_transition.
[2] Mark Lau Branson, Leadership, God’s Agency, and Disruptions : Confronting Modernity’s Wager (Cascade Books, 2020), 84.
[3] Branson, 85.
[4] Branson, 92.
[5] This verse inspired the hymn “Ah Lord God, Thou Hast Made The Heavens,” Divine Hymns (blog), accessed June 28, 2023, https://divinehymns.com/lyrics/ah-lord-god-thou-hast-made-the-heavens-song-lyrics/.