On
Refusing Comfort
Sermon by Cynthia
A. Jarvis
May 11, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Jeremiah 31:10-17
II Timothy 1:3-14
“Rachel is weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted
for her children, because they are no more.”
We begin with a troubling statistic for Mother’s Day: of the 35 million
people in refugee camps throughout the world, 80% of them are women and
children. This number was offered at a breakfast last Monday in New York
to honor women of faith by honoree and independent film producer Caroline
Baron. Best known for producing Monsoon Wedding, Baron is founder
of FilmAid International, an organization begun during the Balkan crisis
to address the needs of refugees through the healing power of film.
The idea came to her while listening to an NPR spot on boredom in refugee
camps, and soon she was busy raising money. In the initial stages of the
project, films were chosen to entertain and amuse, but education and activism
soon became equally important objectives. Gandhi is a favorite among
tribal warriors in Africa, she says, and films shown about AIDS have literally
begun to save lives. FilmAid’s newest initiative is in Afghanistan.
While visiting a camp filled with Afghani children, she told us of how she
had asked the children to sing their favorite song to her. The translator
interrupted to tell her that the children knew no songs, because singing
had been banned by the Taliban. Their ears had never heard, nor had their
voices ever sustained a single note. Most of us had come to this breakfast
for Auburn Seminary because Judy Collins was also an honoree and would soon
invite us to join her in singing “Amazing Grace” and “Last Night I Had the
Strangest Dream.” Now the ballroom, filled with Christians, Jews and Muslims
sipping orange juice and breaking bagels together, was silenced by the witness
of this quiet woman, whose refusal to be consoled had redefined her days.
“Rachel is weeping for her children,” begins the midrash of the prophet
Jeremiah, a midrash he writes as he watches the children of Israel pass
in front of Rachel’s grave on their way into Babylonian exile, on their
way to becoming refugees. Jeremiah had in mind the whole story of the children
of Israel, a story mostly lost to our enlightened but biblically illiterate
minds. Rachel, you may remember, was the second and favored wife of Jacob.
She had been barren while her sister, her maid, and her sister’s maid bore
the sons of Jacob: the tribes of Israel minus two. [Let’s hear it for traditional,
old-fashioned, biblical, family values!] Finally God remembers Rachel.
Her womb is opened twice and she first bears Joseph, the son who will be
sold into slavery by his brothers, but who, in truth and in retrospect,
has been sent before them into Egypt by God to preserve a remnant. Jacob’s
last son Benjamin, meaning, “son of my sorrow,” is born with Rachel’s dying
breath. She is buried on the way to Bethlehem and Jacob sets up a pillar
at her grave…which is there to this day” records Genesis, and so it is.
Say the guides winking, “Traditional grave of Rachel.” Traditional or
not, it is Rachel weeping from this grave that Jeremiah hears as he watches
the children of Israel march hopelessly into exile. A midrash written some
five centuries later asks, “What did Jacob see that caused him to bury Rachel
on the road to Ephrat? He foresaw,” the midrash tells us in echoes of Joseph’s
story, “that the exiles would pass by there [as they were being carried
off by Nebuchadnessar]. Therefore he buried her there that she might implore
[God] for mercy on their behalf, as it is written: Rachel, weeping for
her children….” The rabbis understood Rachel’s tomb to be the place
where “Rachel’s voice would rise to God, bewailing the fate of her children,
imploring God’s mercy on their behalf.” The rabbis understand this still
as, on Rosh Hashanah, the text of Rachel’s weeping recalls her to the role
of intercessor on behalf of every present day congregant. But Rachel
refusal to be consoled may be heard in this congregation too. Five centuries
after the Babylonian exile, Matthew remembers Jeremiah’s midrash at the
beginning of his gospel, incorporating it in his own midrash as he tells
us of Herod’s orders to slaughter all children in and around Bethlehem who
were two years old or under at the time of Jesus’ birth. “…wailing and loud
lamentation,” writes Matthew in sight of the tomb, “Rachel weeping for her
children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” Past Rachel’s
grave, the holy family flees, that the One born in a manger in Bethlehem—a
manger inexorably linked to Rachel’s tomb and her inconsolable weeping—that
this child, this only begotten Son of God, might live to die as our only
consolation on a cross. Later Martin Luther would engage in what some
would consider a Christian midrash on these same texts, literally connecting
Rachel’s refusal to be consoled to Christ’s birth and death. “By not believing
any consolation short of God’s own descent into hell in Christ,” Luther
understood Rachel’s refusal to be “a faithful witness to the Resurrection.”
In other words, human hope could only find its fulfillment in him who accompanies
us in the darkest exile of death itself. Therefore, says an interpreter
of Luther, “both the credulity that seeks comfort in false hope, and the
cynicism that says there is no hope that can be trusted in the manger adjoining
Rachael’s tomb, [both] are revealed as not to be believed.” I
think of this text of consolation refused on a day that has nothing to do
with the church’s liturgical calendar: Mother’s Day. I think of it because
the woman who began Mother’s Day did so as a woman who refused consolation.
Anna Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia, in 1858, organized a “Mother’s Work
Day” to improve the sanitation of Appalachian communities. Following the
Civil War in 1872, Julia Ward Howe proposed an annual “Mother’s Day for
Peace.” The original declaration read, in part, “Arise, then, women of this
day! Whether your baptism be that of water or tears, say firmly: ‘We will
not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall
not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons
shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too
tender to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure
theirs.” The declaration goes on to call for a worldwide congress of women
to “promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement
of international questions and the general interests of peace.” Anna
Jarvis of Philadelphia, daughter of Anna Reeves Jarvis, wanted to broaden
the day’s definition to honor mothers and their role in social reform. Denounced
by politicians and businessmen like, the second Sunday in May was finally
designated as Mother’s Day with the understanding that the only appropriate
social role for women was to teach their children to “obey the state.” Anna
Jarvis spent the rest of her life opposing the commercialization of Mother’s
Day but, according to the Florist’s Review, “Miss Jarvis was completely
squelched.” She was placed in Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester
where she died penniless in 1948. Adding insult to injury, the Florist’s
Association paid for her burial! The story and its aftermath simply
underlines that far from refusing comfort, we live in a society and especially
in a time that will pay any price for some semblance of comfort, will believe
any politician who peddles it, will support any preacher that proclaims
it, will tell ourselves any lie in order to believe the truth spoken by
comforters in high places. We want consumer confidence to rise, taxes to
fall, traditions to hold, aliens to leave, borders to be secured: Comfort!
Therefore let Hallmark prevail, FTD flourish and sentiment abound. Let glad
hymns drown out the sound of Rachel weeping, and cover the silence of children
who do not know how to sing, and ignore the cries from Jerusalem to Gaza,
from Basra to Baghdad, from Pretoria to Soweto, from Zagreb to Sarajevo,
from Belfast to Londonderry, from P’yongyang to Kanggye, from proper Philadelphia
suburbs harboring domestic violence to West Philly’s crack houses: do not
disturb the comfort of this day or any day with word of children who are
no more. Rachel surely weeps for us too, for God’s children in exile from
the witness we were born to bear for Christ’s sake. This is why there
is only one worthy of our trust and able to comfort, says Jeremiah and Matthew
and Martin. “Thus says the Lord, Keep your voice from weeping and your eyes
from tears, for there is a reward for your work, says the Lord: they shall
come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future, says
the Lord: your children shall come back to their own country. Indeed I have
heard Ephraim {Rachel’s grandson],” says the Lord. My inward parts tremble
for him, says one translation, “I will surely have compassion on him.”
Curiously, the verb “to have compassion on” shares the same root as “womb.”
According to the prophet Jeremiah, God is overwhelmed with the compassion
of a mother, with the compassion wherein we see what motherhood is. “It
is this love, compassion and faithfulness,” writes Susan Brown-Gutoff, “that
Jeremiah seems to be saying will be the new order of the day…will encompass
Israel’s puny reliance on human might…In answer to Rachel’s cries, God will
create something new in the land.” Though according to Matthew
in these latter days, God’s compassion is felt not from the distance of
heaven, but God has entered the womb of a woman to reveal God’s love and
mercy and faithfulness in One who had no place to lay his head, in him who
is both refugee with and refuge of those for whom God’s inward parts tremble.
In him, you and I are given the sure and certain hope that none will be
strangers and exiles in God’s kingdom; in him, you and I were born to refuse
any other comfort but this: that, in life and in death, every last child
on this earth belongs, together, to the God he came to reveal. Rachel’s
tomb [“Traditional,” says the guide with a wink] stands still on the road
outside Bethlehem, awaiting the return of tourists, exiled by violence,
who may one day again catch a glimpse of its pillar out a bus window as
they make their way to the little town of Bethlehem in the Judean hills.
Until that day, may we be those heard wailing and weeping: may we be those
who refuse to be comforted until all God’s children are home.
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