Wednesday, October 6
One of the lectionary readings for the coming week is from Jeremiah 29. It is written to a people who are living in exile, in Babylon. There they do have food and shelter, but their freedom of choice is limited. I think about this text in relation to the people who must rely on social assistance. Most can eek out a subsistence kind of life. It means they survive, but they don’t thrive. Where is the joy in seeing a bare cupboard, or a shelf that only has a bag of pasta? Where is the joy in perusing a cookbook for Thanksgiving recipes, when there is no turkey or tofurky and no pumpkin for making pie?
The words of the prophet Jeremiah speak to the hardship that the people are feeling. He reflects on their alienation and distance they feel from the culture around them. It’s a difficult and lonely place to be located. If you lived on social assistance, would you perhaps feel like you were exiled from mainstream culture? What is it like to always be dependent on what is given to you and to have so little choice in what you eat? I know well the story about manna, and surely, we all need to be grateful for the gifts God provides and the generosity of food banks and community programs. But, there is something wrong with a system that says it’s only the manna of “mac and cheese” for the rest of your life.
In addition to offering words of hope, wouldn’t Jeremiah also be saying “It’s time for all God’s children to have good food and a living wage?”
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