Scripture: Jeremiah 29: 1, 4-14
I’m going to begin the sermon before we hear the scripture reading today. As you see from the bulletin, we’re still on Jeremiah. I’ve made it through two sermons based on Jeremiah without saying very much at all about the times in which Jeremiah lived, the history he was a part of. You can do this because so much of what Jeremiah says could be said about lots of societies at lots of times in history. I read some parts of Jeremiah and think to myself that the kingdom of Judah around 600 B.C.E. must have been remarkably like 21st century United States; some of the issues Jeremiah is speaking of seem quite familiar.
I think today, though, we’re going to need a little background. I’ll try not to dwell on the history part of this too much. We’re not here this morning for a lecture on the history of the near east in the 7th and 6th centuries before the time of Christ. But in order to hear the scripture for today, we probably need to know a little bit of that history and rather than wait until the sermon time, which is when I would normally do whatever explaining of scripture I felt needed to be done, I thought it would be better to do the historical part first. It may help to relate to what is being said in the reading. So here is a whirlwind summary of the history that lies behind the book of Jeremiah, particularly chapter 29 of the Book of Jeremiah. Then we’ll hear the reading.
The Jewish state of Jeremiah’s time was not a world super power, especially since it had been split into essentially two countries for several hundred years. What had been a united kingdom under Kings David and Solomon had long since split into a northern kingdom called Israel and a southern kingdom called Judah, leaving both of them too weak to defend themselves very well. And that was too bad because the super powers of the day wanted to control this land, which was strategically located both militarily and commercially. A hundred years before Jeremiah’s time Assyria had laid waste to the northern kingdom, Israel, which had become essentially part of the Assyrian empire. Then the Egyptians entered the picture and Jeremiah had been around when there was an enormous battle in the valley of Megiddo, during which the King of Judah, Josiah, had been killed. It had been an extremely bloody battle. Our word “Armageddon” comes from this. The battle of Har Megiddo—Armageddon—became synonymous with epic battles to the death.
And then finally the Babylonians came along, and they proved to be the most powerful of all. About ten years after Har Megiddo, where Josiah was killed, Judah was invaded again, this time by Babylon under its king Nebuchadnezzar. The political and religious leaders of Judah were all taken off into captivity. Babylon deposed the Judean king, put in someone else, and tried to leave Judea to govern itself while being a satellite state of Babylon. It didn’t work. Ten years later Babylon invaded again and the country was overrun. Jerusalem, the capital, was taken. The temple that had been the center and symbol of Jewish faith for hundreds of years was desecrated and destroyed. A large percentage of the population was deported, taken away from their homes and resettled in Babylon. It was the end of a series of devastations. The temple lay in ruins. The country was occupied by a foreign power which cared nothing for the laws and traditions of the Jewish people. The culture was destroyed. Most of the people were gone. There was almost nothing left that would make any Jewish person feel pride about the present or hopeful about the future.
Jeremiah meanwhile had been given the choice of going with the majority of his people to Babylon or of staying home surrounded mostly by Babylonian settlers and occupiers. He chose to stay in Judah. From there he wrote a letter to his sisters and brothers in Babylon. Chapter 29 is that letter.
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-14
These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon…
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the god of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the Lord.
For thus says the Lord: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me, if you seek me with all your heart. I will let you find, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you.
So now, of course, the question is: what are we supposed to make of this letter, even knowing some of the historical context. Does it have anything to say to us, or is it mostly just a piece of ancient history?
Of course there is a direct message that pretty much constitutes the whole book of Jeremiah, and I think I’ve pretty much said what that is the last two weeks. Jeremiah is upset about various social injustices, or rather lets everyone know how upset God is, and lets everyone know that bad times are ahead because of this. There is a price to be paid for greed and devoting yourselves to things that don’t matter and oppressing the poor and spending all your money on the military and…. And Judah is about to pay that price, or is paying it, or has already paid it, depending on what part of the book of Jeremiah we’re reading at the time. Babylon is the agent of God’s judgment.
I have to say that I am not fond of this theology. I don’t like the idea of God using war to get a point across. I don’t like the idea of God punishing people by sending armies to conquer and kill them. I don’t like the idea that people or nations win wars because God wants them to and that people or nations who lose wars probably deserve it, that they have lost the war because they have done things that made God want to punish them. That whole way of thinking that runs through Jeremiah pretty much from beginning to end offends me and it’s hard for me to deal with. But I do appreciate Jeremiah’s outrage at various social evils he talks about, and I even appreciate that Jeremiah’s God is not some predictably loving, forgiving God who in the face of such evils says “whatever”, “I love you”, “you are forgiven”, “don’t worry about it”. God is a more complex character than that, and while the theology that the book of Jeremiah presents us with is troublesome to me, to say the least, there are parts of Jeremiah’s direct message that I can hear and appreciate.
But sometimes the scriptures speak to us not so much by presenting us with a direct teaching or offering a clear lesson or an underlined point that we are supposed to take home with us, but more by calling things to mind in a suggestive sort of way, giving us things to think about but also asking us to do some of the work ourselves. Jeremiah speaks to me in that way through the letter that is quoted to us in chapter 29, and here are some of the things that letter calls to mind for me.
Remember a sentence in there that said simply “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Of all the hard things Jeremiah ever said—and he said plenty of them, angry words, tearful, pleading words, predictions of horrible things that were to take place—but of all the hard things Jeremiah ever said this simple, un-angry statement I’m thinking was one of the hardest to hear. “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile…”
The city we’re talking about here is Babylon, hated enemy of the Jewish people. The situation we’re talking about here is the same situation that produced Psalm 137, which I can remind you of quickly. It reads: “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormenters asked us for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of your songs of Zion.” (They were probably having a diversity festival of some kind and thought it would only right to have the Jews sing one of their songs along with all the rest.) How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? (How could we sing the songs of our hearts for someone’s entertainment?) If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy…O daughter of Babylon you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back for what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”
That’s the way that Psalm ends. Is it clear that there are hard feelings here? Is it clear that maybe what the Jewish people in Babylon think they should be praying for, the only thing worth praying for, is Jerusalem, not Babylon, Jerusalem, night and day Jerusalem, and their eventual return to it? Is it clear that the Jewish people in Babylon feel like they are in a hostile environment—after all they have been attacked, plundered, and carried off to a far country against their will—not too surprising they would feel their environment is hostile—and that the only thing they can do is to try to survive as best they can, just get through this ordeal somehow, hoping that someone will come and do to the Babylonians what the Babylonians have done to them, so that they can go home?
And then Jeremiah sends them a letter that includes the simple statement: “Seek the good of the city where you have been sent into exile…” From the standpoint of the exiles such a statement was not so much simple as crazy. Seek the welfare…? …of the Babylonians…? Pray for them…? The man has always been out of step. Now he’s out of his mind. Does this call to your mind Jesus saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’ but I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you?” “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you and pray to the Lord on its behalf…”
Does this call to your mind the idea of forgiveness, after all? It does for me. In this case not the taken-for-granted forgiveness of God for the hard-heartedness of the people of Judah, but the forgiveness of the people of Judah for the people of Babylon. The forgiveness of human beings for each other. Although I admit forgiveness may not be quite the right word, because it’s not so much forgiveness in the sense of “oh, that’s all right” that’s at stake here. It’s forgiveness in the sense of asking us to reassess whether our enemy is really our enemy—or whether our enemy is going to stay our enemy forever. It’s not such a simple thing, this business of forgiveness or whatever the right word is for what we’re talking about. It’s not some pious admonition that forgiveness is a good thing and we ought to practice it. It’s not all about letting bygones be bygones, though of course there are times when that’s a good thing too.
But if we have real enemies at any level of our lives, from the personal to the international, it’s not such an easy thing to just say forgiveness is a good thing. It is, though, crucial for us always to be able to call to mind whether an enemy is forever someone for whom we wish vengeance and whether an enemy needs to stay an enemy forever. If we don’t at least ask ourselves such questions, there will be no hope of anything like forgiveness, and we will all be the sadder for it. I point out just quickly that Jeremiah concludes his statement by saying “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile…for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” As anyone who has struggled with the issue of forgiveness knows, in the end the real beneficiary of forgiveness is not the one who is forgiven but the one who forgives. When Jeremiah says to the captives in Babylon that in seeking the welfare of Babylon they will find their welfare, I am reminded of that thought about forgiveness.
But there’s more going on here too, more than whatever thoughts we may be led to have about forgiveness and enemies and the like. Jeremiah, in a sense is telling people to adjust, to adapt to their new surroundings, and even to adopt Babylon as, in a way but in a very real way, their home. Don’t just sort of hide out in the basement, he’s saying. Don’t just hope that nobody notices you or bothers you until some miracle brings you back to Jerusalem. Marry. Have children. Plant gardens. Join the League of Women Voters or the NAACP or the Sierra Club. Embrace this place that you find yourselves in against your will.
Besides the fact that maybe, just maybe, the Babylonians are not your enemies after all, there is another implicit message here. The letter warns the people living in exile not to listen to the false prophets that are among them. And what were those false prophets saying? They were saying that this little visit the people were paying to Babylon was just that: a little visit. An insignificant thing really. An interruption. A detour. Something they would have to put up with for a short time, but only for a short time. Before you know it, they would say, you’ll be back home in Jerusalem. Can’t tell you how that’s going to happen, but it will. God will see to it. You’re the chosen people. God will make it happen. In contrast, Jeremiah is saying in this letter, “Don’t count on it.” In fact, he is saying count on that not happening. It’s not going to. You’re going to be here for a while, seventy years to be exact. Might as well settle down and act like you belong.
I read a couple of things in Jeremiah’s message here. The false prophets were saying that the exile of the people of Judah was not really for real. It was just a temporary thing, a blip on the radar screen, a minor inconvenience. Sure there’s sadness and grief, but it’s not for long. Exile is not your lot in life, they would say. God will restore you, so think positive here; have a little faith. Jeremiah’s response: Exile is in fact going to be your lot in life. Jeremiah does in the end promise a return to Jerusalem—after seventy years roughly the span of a person’s life. No one Jeremiah’s letter is written to is ever likely to see Jerusalem again in this life. Those who do return to Jerusalem will have been born in Babylon and for them returning to Jerusalem may feel like exile. Exile is to be an ongoing condition. At the same time, Jeremiah advises the people to make themselves at home as best they can, to act like they belong, and even to devote themselves to the welfare of the place where they find themselves.
I would not for a moment imagine that Jeremiah had anything like this consciously in mind as he wrote this letter, but what he says calls to mind for me the whole question of how Christians think of themselves in relation to this world. Jeremiah’s words, said in this distant time and place, encourage us never to allow ourselves to get too comfortable with the world as it is, feeling as though we belong here, feeling as though the world is our home. Exile is a permanent condition for us humans. From a Christian point of view, if there is not a certain strangeness, a sense of not belonging, of longing for someplace from which we have come or to which we may return, if there is not some restlessness about our living, then we have been listening to false prophets who promise us that any grief or spiritual restlessness we may feel is just a temporary thing, nothing to worry about. Pay it no attention. Think positive. Have faith. Such feelings will pass.
At the same time, our faith calls us to act as though this God-created, God-gifted, God-infused world is in fact our home. It is where we have been set down for a time, and although it may not be our final destination, it is worthy of our care. “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Jeremiah’s words, though surely not intended this way, remind me that I am called to care for, to embrace, to love this place, this world, even though I am called to live in this world also as someone who belongs to God and who is not at home here, not really, who will always live in this miraculous place as an exile, yearning for home. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 3f, 2008