The small and delicate Jewish mother had her baby secure in a cloth cradle draped across her chest as she balanced a wicker basket on her head filled with turnips and leeks and and olives and onions and barley for bread and a few fish. She was leaving the market on the southwest wall of Jerusalem only a few hundred cubits from the temple....but through the Essene Gate could be seen a giant statue of Moloch. The market was crowded....and the fruits and vegetables for sale or barter were in abundance. The day was warm and the aromas of cooking fish and roasting lamb were wafting across the entire city. She passed the many booths with small idols of pagan gods....not in need of any....for they had two of them prominently placed in their home.
It was a loud cacophony of voices.....and laughter....and shouts proclaiming all the various wares that the marketeers were selling. She walked north at first....passed 'the Temple....the Temple....the Temple'...that was presumed by its mere presence to guarantee safety and prosperity for the city. On the steps of the golden edifice were temple prostitutes awaiting men to take them and offer a lustful sacrifice to the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. She then turned towards home on the Western Hill....an expanded area meant to handle the refugees from the northern tribes conquered by Assyria. She would often walk about and smell the flowers....or just sit in the security that the great city of Jerusalem always provides.With the sounds of the marketplace growing dim....she could hear the shouts of the prophet....as he walked about....hands raised.....proclaiming destruction upon the city....where laughter would be taken away....and there would be no more marriages or feasts....as an enemy from the north would be setting up siege mounds outside the barred gates. A few men walked along side of him in prayer but no was listening to the madman who had been shouting this warning for many days.
The prophets voice was now gone as she entered their humble home....and laid her baby comfortably in her little cradle. They had a son who was sacrificed in the fiery arms of that Moloch statue....but God....the pagan god Moloch presumably....had provided another child....with another on the way. Their life....that of her and her husband and their infant daughter.....was idyllic....barring the sacrifice of their first child....and now if she could only get the ramblings of that prophet Jeremiah our of her memory!
Folks....if you....on a warm spring day like we had today in Western Pennsylvania....or nearly any day in the South....if you simply leave your home and walk either the town square or along a country road with wheat blowing gently in the wind....and the smell of lilacs possibly causing you to breath deeply through your nose....and if you expel from your mind any news of the day....all elections....and everything not within eyesight....then there will be.....as there was with this woman of Judah....no cares in the world!
Yes there are exceptions but generally all we have to do in America is take a walk....consider only that which we can see with our eyes or hear with our ears or experience directly with any of our senses....and today will be pleasurable....and tomorrow even better. Surely all the rantings of ministers of the gospel come from the fears within man. Nothing of the sort can directly be seen....no murders or wars....no starvation or plagues....no devils or cosmic mountains flying to earth.
That mother would raise her child....and maybe the next one....until the watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem blew the shofar....for the banners of the Lion of Babylon could seen in the distance....and the shouting of the name of their God Marduk faintly heard over the bleating of goats. The people of Jerusalem would be eating their children before all the prophecies of the still shouting prophet Jeremiah would be fulfilled.
We in our culture....even in the church....want no part in warnings that might unsettle us or threaten our goals. We see no wars in our little town....no people dying in the streets....no children gaunt and thin as rails....no longer anyway people wearing masks....no devils ripping men's flesh with chards of glass....and no asteroids darkening the sun....and until we do....we shall go on living as we are....sacrificing babies....engaging in spiritual adultery....worshiping our sports idols on the Lord's Day....making merry and feasting....while going to our temple....the corner church....to assuage any guilt that the prophets of doom might bring.
