Of the prophets Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the one easiest to identify is Jeremiah. If you’re thinking of going to Rome, let me tell you where this Jeremiah is. Were our ceiling at Saint Francis like that of the Sistine Chapel, the weeping prophet would be up here directly above the pulpit. It is a potent psychological portrait of weakness, weariness and despair. His sitting posture, his crossed legs, his downcast eyes, his right hand covering his mouth, Jeremiah is a picture of anguish and inner suffering. Michelangelo uses every angle to convey his pain. Everything in the scene points down; his head, the fingers of his left hand. His right hand covers his mouth as if he’s weary of his own complaints, a prophet who has nothing more to say.

The book of Jeremiah is about the crisis of the last days of Judah, a crisis culminating with the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 587 BC. We read about it in the last chapter of Jeremiah (52: 12 – 14): “Now in the fifth month, on the tenth day of the month — that was the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon — Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard who served the king of Babylon, entered Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the LORD, and the king’s house; and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down. And all the army of the Chaldeans, who were with the captain of the guard, broke down all the walls around Jerusalem.”

Jeremiah was the son of a priest named Hilkiah. He was raised about three miles northeast of Jerusalem in Anata, a town halfway from Jerusalem to Jericho. He spent much of his life denouncing things which is why denunciations are called jeremiads. Recreational sex. The rich for exploiting the poor. The poor for having it coming to them. His own people for batting her eyelashes and winking at every new god who came riding in someone’s saddlebags into town. He stood at the gate of the Temple and told people as they walked in that if they believed God was touched by the highjinks that went on in there they should have their heads examined. When some took to indulging in a little human sacrifice on the side, Jeremiah showed up with a clay pot which he smashed to smithereens to show them what God was going to do to them when the time came.

At the beginning of the book we hear the voice of the Lord say to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” It sounds like a nice appointment but it isn’t long before the work of being God’s mouth, of trying to reform Judah, makes Jeremiah more pitiable and exasperated than any curate in the novels of Anthony Trollope, so that by the fifteenth chapter Jeremiah laments not just the work but the One who saddled him with it. Taking his complaint directly to God he asks him, “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will you be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?” To this last question there isn’t any doubt that Jeremiah thinks the answer is Yes. A little later he says, “Cursed be the day I was born. Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, ‘A son is born to you,’ making him glad. Let that man be like the cities that the Lord overthrew without pity. Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow and spend my days in shame?”

To understand his anguish, you have to remember that in the Jerusalem of Jeremiah the heart of the city was the Temple, and the heart of the Temple was the kapporeth or mercy seat — the empty space above the Ark of the Covenant between the two golden cherubim. It was the most potent sign of Israel’s repudiation of idols, the great speaking absence between the images. What the people of Israel lost above all when Jerusalem fell was the empty space between the cherubim, the place that was the center of their life as the covenant people, the space behind the curtained holy place where God is, the place where all the mercy comes from, what the psalmist refers to as “help from the sanctuary” and the “answer from heaven”.

The crisis that the burning of the Temple presented for Jeremiah was about the destruction of that empty space between the cherubim. If that seems strange to you just think of the crisis of having someone you cherish taken away. If you’ve lost someone you love you know a bit of what it is to live as Jeremiah had to, in exile. You have to live every day with what’s missing. When Jeremiah and the people of Israel lost the empty space between the cherubim, the place where all the mercy comes from, they lost everything. God himself was in the empty space, and the empty space was gone.

Today’s Gospel story takes place six miles up the road from Jeremiah’s hometown and six centuries after the destruction of the Temple. The silence between the cherubim, the silence from that empty space where God speaks becomes a God who has stepped into the world, becomes for a little while a physical hand outstretched as it were to Bartimaeus. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” he says. It’s the first time Jesus is called the Son of David in Mark’s gospel. Jesus stood still, and Bartimaeus came to him. “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus said, “Let me see again.” Jesus said, “Go; your faith has made you well.” He could see again but Bartimaeus didn’t go. Instead he followed Jesus.

The way Mark tells the story, here’s the next thing he writes: “Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the village of Bethany and you will find a colt tied….” And riding that colt Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the Temple.

I picture Bartimaeus watching Jesus ride into Jerusalem where he’s brought to trial, following Jesus as he is led by the Praetorian guard outside the walls of Jerusalem to Golgotha, named for the skull of Goliath whom David defeated to win victory on behalf of all the people of God. It was at Golgotha that they crucified him. According to Mark, Jesus’ last words were, “’My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ … And with a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.”

There is that silence again, the silence between the cherubim from which God spoke becomes the silence culminating in the death of the Beloved Son; the silence where God has nothing more to say.

You and I live between the Old Jerusalem and the New. Jesus is our altar and our sanctuary, our kapporeth or mercy seat. He’s the One I trust, the One you trust. He knows what it is to experience God’s absence, the empty space, the empty space being gone. And when he breathed his last the curtain of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Why? Because the God of Jeremiah, the God of the Temple, the God of that empty space between the golden cherubim had come out from behind the curtain to hang between two thieves.

Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,
and raise shouts for the chief of the nations;
proclaim, give praise, and say,
“Save, O LORD, your people,
the remnant of Israel.”
See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth,
among them the blind and the lame, those with child and
those in labor, together;
a great company, they shall return here.
With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back,
I will let them walk by brooks of water,
in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.

— Jeremiah 31: 7 – 9

That physical courage is not at all on the minds of people who think of Francis indicates how little people actually know his life. He’d been a fierce warrior as a young man. He survived fighting in two wars (we would call them battles today), one that saw the slaughter of his town Assisi in a battle so brutal it turned the Tiber River red. There were a total of nine crusades waged by Christians in the west to try to take back land that had been seized by the Saracens, as Muslims were called at the time. Living in the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries, Francis lived in the middle of this period. When Pope Innocent III dispatched the fifth crusade, Francis jumped at the chance.

So off he went with a few of his brothers, setting sail from the shores of Italy across the Mediterranean to Damietta, Egypt near the Nile delta. That’s where the fiercest battle was going on, in that critical port city. The Christians were fighting valorously and were being slaughtered. Francis went to the man leading the Christian forces and asked him permission to go into the Saracen camp to meet the Sultan. The commander summarily denied his request. Francis received that denial and went anyway, his brother Illuminato going with him. They walked straight into the Muslim camp.

As they drew near the Saracen perimeter, Francis repeatedly called out, Sultan! Sultan! Sultan! and because he was calling specifically for the Sultan the guards didn’t kill him on the spot. They thought the Christian wanted to convert and weren’t willing to deny the Sultan such a conquest.

The Sultan’s name was Melek-el-Kemel, and he received the Christian graciously. Have you come to convert? It was the first thing the Sultan said. No, Francis demurred. I’m not here to become a Muslim. I’ve come to implore you to convert to the Lord Jesus Christ.

This stunned the Sultan. Flabbergasted, he summoned his sages. This is what they told him, “The law forbids giving a hearing to infidel preachers. And if there be someone who wishes to speak or preach against our Law, the Law commands that his head be cut off.”

The Sultan knew the law, knew that it bound him to cut off the heads of these two men. But the Sultan said, “I am deciding to act against my own law, because it would be an even reward for me to bestow on one who conscientiously risked death in order to save my soul for God.”

Disarmed by the physical courage of Francis, Melek-el-Kemel asked Francis to stay for a while. I imagine Melek offering my church’s patron saint some tea. Francis declined. The Sultan said, “At least let me send you back with gold and silver and silks and other treasures.” No, Francis declined again, disappointed. There was only one treasure Francis came there looking for and that was the Sultan’s soul; if he couldn’t offer that to God he’d just as soon return home empty-handed. He was hungry, though. He said that he wouldn’t mind a little food. So the Sultan gave him all the food he could possibly need, and gave him a military escort back to the Christian camp. I’m not making any of this up.

On the tombstone of one of the Sultan’s sages who was present at this meeting of Francis and Melek-el-Kemel there’s this cryptic remark. “The things that befell Melek-el-Kamel owing to the monk are very well known.” Ten years after this meeting between Francis and the Sultan, in 1229 Melek-el-Kamel freely remitted Jerusalem to the Christians. Not a drop of blood was shed in this transfer. Francis didn’t live to see that. He had been dead three years.

Saying my prayers fifteen years ago in Jerusalem I stuck a note in the wall of the Second Temple built by Herod the Great and completed in the late first-century BC. The famous Western Wall that I stuck the note into is actually the top layer of retaining wall below Mount Moriah. The actual bottom of the Temple’s wall is at bedrock sixty feet below. What’s going on here is a complex of little things, the biggest of them all being this. Micrometeorite dust falls on the earth at the rate of a ton every hour.

Thanks to a friend, Victoria and I have heard a number of writers read from their works. Several years ago we heard Christopher Buckley read AC in DC, a comic short story he’d written about the advent of air-conditioning in Washington. With Laurel and Hadi Bahar at this year’s literacy event, I noticed that Buckley had written a memoir and I asked Laurel what she knew of the book. Her brow furrowed. “He airs dirty linen,” she said, disapprobationary.

I google Losing Mum and Pup this morning and find Growing Up Buckley wherein Chris begins by describing his mother’s death in the hospital. Coming to the end of that description, he writes:

Soon after, a doctor came in to remove the respirator. It was quiet and peaceful in the room, just pings and blips from the monitor. I stroked her hair and said, the words coming out of nowhere, surprising me, “I forgive you.”

Not often do the words “I forgive you” cause a priest of the church to utter fecal indictments. My parents are both living. Their home is on Lake Gogebic in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but they are with us now, here at the ready for the high school commencements of Gillian (Friday morning at the National Cathedral) and my nephew Sean Jr. (Friday night, in West Chester, PA). Dear reader: If ever I write a word about my mother’s deficiencies or my father’s, please. Come over to my house. There is a baseball bat in the carport shed. Get it. Find me. And knock my brains out.

Being a Christian, I stand under the authority of the divine law that enjoins us to honor our fathers and mothers. That is now an oddity, sheer mindlessness in this era of overweening self-analysis which eagerly and remorselessly begins by rooting one’s own problems in one’s parents’ shortcomings, thereby dismantling any honor supposed to attach to them. But for any serious Jew or Christian, a most solemn interdict lies across this path. “Honor,” the commandment says, and our Lord Jesus affirms, “honor thy father and mother.” And Jesus, quoting from Exodus 21:17, adds something not taught in Sunday Schools. “He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die,” (Matthew 15).

What does this mean? It means this: Whoever it may be who bears the responsibility for pointing out to others a mother’s faults it is not her son.

Writing about my Great Aunt Mena recently, I used a biblical figure of speech, “singing the Lord’s song in a foreign land”. That phrase is used in Psalm 137, a prayer in a collection of prayers that, like the Bible, wasn’t written for children:

By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, ”Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!

C. S. Lewis says this about Psalm 137. “I know things in the inner world which are like babies; the infantile beginnings of small indulgences, small resentments, which may one day become dipsomania or settled hatred but which woo us and wheedle us with special pleadings and seem so tiny, so helpless that in resisting them we feel we are being cruel to animals. They begin whimpering to us ‘I don’t ask much, but’, or ‘I had at least hoped’, or ‘you owe yourself some consideration’. Against all such pretty infants (the dears have such winning ways) the advice of the Psalm is the best. Knock the little bastards’ brains out. And ‘blessed’ is he who can, for it’s easier said than done.”