Not Taking No for an Answer

Two unrelated and diametrically opposed endeavors from the past fifteen years might have something to say to today’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah. The first dates back to 2008, probably in Japan, when rage rooms were developed. Sometimes called smash rooms or anger rooms, they are now popular across the world. A brief Google search will reveal that there are rage rooms nearby, both in Philadelphia and in West Chester.

These rooms are places where people who are presumably filled with pent-up anger pay money to spend time smashing things. Some rage rooms allow you to bring in your own boxes of things to break. Others have mock living room sets that you can delight in destroying.

Rage rooms are supposedly about letting off some steam and having fun while doing so, all in an apparently safe environment. But a 2017 study showed that perhaps these rage rooms are not effective in serving as a safety valve for bottled-up emotions. They can, in fact, increase one’s anger.[1]

I, myself, have a number of questions about such rooms, even though I’ve never been to one. What is the real goal of such rooms? Is it really about letting off steam? And is breaking a bunch of glass with a hammer the most effective way to cope with stress? What happens when you leave the room? Does your anger disappear, or does it simply manifest in different ways? And when you become angry again, is it necessary to return to the rage room to deal with it?

Now, the second, very different endeavor that might tie into the Old Testament reading from today is the 2013 opening of the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand. You may recall that in 2011, a disastrous earthquake devastated the city of Christchurch and severely damaged the Anglican cathedral. Shortly thereafter, the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, often characterized as a “disaster architect,” was invited to design a temporary cathedral that could also host concerts and civic events. Shigeru Ban came up with plans for a so-called cardboard cathedral, constructed from cardboard tubes, timber, and steel. The cathedral congregation still worships in this building to this day. Significantly, this temporary building stands on land where Anglicans in Christchurch built the very first church of permanent materials in the mid-nineteenth century.[2]

It strikes me that the production of the Cardboard Cathedral is precisely the opposite of a rage room. A rage room purports to serve a purpose by providing people a venue in which to let off steam, but I’m not sure it really does this. Rather, it seems to channel anger into wreaking destruction, even if on low-value objects. There is nothing creative about it.

But the cardboard cathedral is the result of a creative response to disaster. When faced with the mystery of human tragedy and suffering, creativity is not always the most obvious option. But when channeled properly, it enables a movement from destruction to rebirth.

Now, with these images in mind, let’s return to the prophet Jeremiah and to the very beginning of the book that bears his name. We hear Jeremiah’s call story, where God’s word comes to him, unbidden, and informs him that he has been predestined to serve as God’s prophet to the nations.

Jeremiah is wise and discerning. He knows this is not going to be easy, and so he makes excuses. He is too young, he says. It’s not dissimilar from God’s call to Moses, who hems and haws and tries to get out of a call, too. But with both Moses and Jeremiah, God is not taking no for an answer.

It seems that Jeremiah has no choice. God touches his mouth and puts his words there for Jeremiah to speak in the face of a recalcitrant people who will not want to hear these words. They will not be naturally inclined to turn back to God quite so easily.

Jeremiah is given an enormous charge. He is granted a significant amount of power to act in God’s name. He is able “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” But lest we forget what is really happening here, we must remember that Jeremiah is merely a vessel for God to act. Even if we’re reluctant to attribute destruction directly to God’s hands, it is God who acts in the midst of tearing down and overthrowing. It is God who can then build and plant.

God has done this before, after all, hasn’t he? When God’s good creation had so lapsed into sin and evil, in the time of Noah, a flood wiped out all of creation except for those saved on the ark. And then God renewed this creation and repopulated the land.

When God’s people later turned away from him and rebelled, and when they forgot to own up to their part in their covenant relationship, God’s people fell prey to their warring neighbors. Jeremiah is writing in such a time when God’s people are forced into exile and their Jerusalem home has been destroyed.

But after a time, God’s people returned to the Holy City. They were able to rebuild, and the Temple was restored to its central place in the life of Israel. And centuries later, when God’s Beloved Son has breathed his last on the cross and when Jesus’s disciples are left, forsaken and alone, God rebuilt once again. By the power of the resurrection, God’s people were empowered by the Holy Spirit and the Church was formed from the very rubble of a Roman crucifixion. God is not absent when destruction occurs, but God is most obviously seen in the rebuilding that follows. God’s nature is creative and is inclined towards restoration.

But for us, it is indeed the immediate aftermath of destruction that is the most spiritually precarious time. This moment, in between dismantling and rebuilding, is charged with great potential. Two directions are possible: one is towards a place of eternal despair, the other is towards a place of eternal hope. In this moment, a weighty decision lies. One can choose death, or one can choose life.

And this is why the development of rage rooms and the building of a temporary cathedral in New Zealand are so very different. One act deals only with anger and a need to express emotion through violence, even if it masquerades as silly fun. The end is destruction, with no positive response to reconstruction. The other moves from devastation into creative hope, from death into life.

And the great spiritual temptation for all of us is to choose wrongly. It is satisfying to hold onto our resentment in the face of injustice. It is pleasurable to feel righteous anger and then to act on it. It’s tempting never to let our rage go or to imagine that it can ever be transformed. All of this is quite easy. It’s not difficult to tear down, but it’s much, much more difficult to build up.

God’s words to the prophet Jeremiah suggest that destruction is not the end of the story. While it’s impossible to avoid misfortune or tragedy, and while on this side of heaven there will always be some measure of pain and loss, hope does not have to smolder in the ruins.

God made it clear to Jeremiah that what follows the plucking up and the pulling down, the destruction and the overthrowing, is building and planting. God is always moving us from places of destruction to places of renewal. God is always pushing us from death into life.

God will not take no for an answer. God didn’t accept Jeremiah’s no, and God won’t accept ours. It is assumed that each of us, as we walk in the paths God has prepared for us, will face rejection. We will face opposition. We will encounter destructiveness, whether in others’ behavior or in the suffering that is part and parcel of life. We will be tempted to try to evade God’s call, like Jeremiah. And even after we’ve accepted God’s call, we will also be tempted to claim power through our rage, to mope in the aftermath of devastation, to relive our ruinous past and to resist creative transformation.

But hear the call to the prophet Jeremiah and learn from it. You and I are more than our rage or anger. We are more than the wreckage of our lives and the world. It is sometimes in the tearing down that God is able to build something newer and better. And everywhere that human sin wreaks havoc, God is waiting to rebuild and usher us into places of forgiveness and hope. 

However much we might protest or choose complacency, God will not take no for an answer. When we are faced with despair or hope, when we can go the way of death or the way of life, God is very clear about where he is sending us. God won’t accept our no. Choose life, he says to us. Choose life, and live.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
January 30, 2022

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_room

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardboard_Cathedral