Jr 29:1, 4-9

14 October 2001

 

“Message for the Exiles”

 

Have you ever felt like you’d been sent into exile?  Have you ever been forced to live in a place that you really hated?  Sometimes exile isn't somewhere you have to live; sometimes it can be a place in which you just have to stay for a while.

One summer, when I was about ten or eleven years old, my sister and I were banished to rural West Virginia, to visit an aunt and uncle for a week.  Don't misunderstand me; they were a nice couple.  But being old enough to be my grandparents, their kids had long ago moved away, and they lived alone.  The nearest neighbors were about a mile down a country road.  To a kid from a neighborhood in Virginia Beach, that was an enormous distance!  As I look back on it now, I can see that the area was a beautiful, peaceful place.  But at that age, I was bored out of my mind!  I didn't think that week would ever end!

Still, that wasn't the worst of it.  My aunt and uncle were regular churchgoers; it had been several years since I had darkened the door of a church building.  It never even dawned on me that I might be compelled to go to such a place.  Well, come Sunday morning, I found myself in my uncle's truck on the way to church.  Remember, I hadn't expected this, and thinking of the summer weather, I had only packed short pants.  For some people, it would be no big deal, but I was…embarrassed.  (It wasn't a big deal for the people in that church; they were friendly and didn't seem to care at all that I was wearing shorts!)

But that wasn't the end of it.  Apparently, they were taking requests for hymns, and my uncle recommended that I suggest one.  Not being a churchgoer, I knew almost no hymns—with the exception of a few Christmas carols.  So thanks to me, in the heat of July, we sang, "Joy to the world!  The Lord is come…"  I was glad when the week was over.

There are other ways in which the idea of exile is used.  Sometimes it's used in a more symbolic way—in a psychological or spiritual way.  We can be exiled from ourselves, our true selves.  A few months ago, I shared with you in the newsletter a quote from Thomas Merton, who speaks of this exile from our true selves:^[1]

"Our ordinary waking life is a bare existence in which, most of the time, we seem to be absent from ourselves and from reality because we are involved in the vain preoccupations which dog the steps of every living man [and woman].  But there are times when we seem suddenly to awake and discover the full meaning of our own present reality."  There are times when we, so to speak, come back to ourselves.  We've been away, lost in illusion.

Merton continues, "We recapture something of the calm and the balance that ought always to be ours, and we understand that life is far too great a gift to be squandered on anything less than perfection."  We return from our self-imposed exiles to where we need to be.

Today’s Old Testament reading is about people who know very well what it means to be sent into exile.  The prophet Jeremiah is writing to people who've been taken to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar.  In chapter 29, the first group of exiles has already been deported.  So this would place the letter at about the year 594.  Some in Babylon claiming to be prophets of the Lord have been promising the people that the stay will be short.  In no time at all, Nebuchadnezzar will be overthrown, and they’ll be able to return home.

The purpose of Jeremiah’s message for the exiles is to shoot down that idea.  Not only will their stay be a long one, but the sooner they get used to the idea, the better off they’ll be.  But this isn’t a harsh letter; Jeremiah is wanting to give his fellow Judahites hope.  He’s no longer predicting disaster—that’s already happened—now he’s looking to a brighter future.  It just so happens that that brighter future begins in the here and now, on Babylonian soil.

He uses language reminiscent of his call.^[2]  In 1:10, Yahweh tells Jeremiah, while still a boy, “See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”  To build and to plant.  So far Jeremiah has been busy with the earlier parts of his call.  Now it’s time to put the pieces back together.

He advises the exiles, “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce” (v. 5).  Far from planning some kind of revolt, they should instead settle down and literally make themselves at home.  And if they do begin to make homes for themselves, they’ll do what verse 6 says and start families.  Their numbers will increase, not decrease.  It sounds a little bit like Egypt, where the Israelite nation was born.

This letter of Jeremiah’s to the exiles has been called “one of the most significant documents in the Old Testament.”^[3]  Besides the importance of its message, it records a key moment in the life of the Jewish nation.  This is the beginning of what later becomes known as the Dispersion, the series of movements of Jewish people throughout the world.  Jews have made homes for themselves all over the globe.  That all begins during Jeremiah’s lifetime.

But this isn’t exactly a happy occurrence.  Try to imagine how they must feel.  They’ve been taken from their homes by force and sent to a distant land, the land of their conquerors.  Remember my question at the beginning.  I asked if you’ve ever felt like you’d been sent into exile.  I don't suppose anything like what we see in the Bible has happened to anyone here.  But if there has been a place where you lived, that you absolutely hated—times one hundred, imagine being told that you would spend the rest of your life there!  Even though Jeremiah’s message is one of hope (in the long run), it’s a bitter pill to swallow.

We can see how bitter it was by looking at Psalm 137, which is dated just a few years later, after the destruction of Jerusalem.  Verses 1 and 4 make the point:  “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion¼How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”  The people are brokenhearted¼and bitter, so bitter in fact, that the psalm goes from being rated PG to being rated R in the final verses (8-9).  Speaking of Babylon, it says, “Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!  Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”

As you might imagine, the task Jeremiah assigns the people isn’t an easy one.  And it gets even more difficult in verse 7 of our reading.  This is where he tells them to seek the welfare of the city of their exile.  They must pray for it, for in its welfare, they will find their welfare.  The word translated as “welfare” is one of the best known words in the Hebrew language:  !wolv; (shalom).  By the way, in Arabic it would be salaam.  !wolv; has the sense of “peace” and “well-being,” but it goes beyond what we usually mean by those terms.  It refers to every aspect of life and creation.

Where there is !wolv;, there is no violence, hatred, or fear, but there is love, security, and joy.  And !wolv; isn’t greedy—it wants what’s best for everyone, even the enemy.  Quite a step, then, from wanting to bash a baby’s head in to wanting to care tenderly for that same child!

That’s why Jeremiah’s message for the exiles is so revolutionary.  It wants us to move from where we’re stuck—in bitter exile, hating those around us—to knowing the freedom of praying for and working with those same people.

Still, this may sound like one of those things that we know is right, that would change the world if we did it, but we just can’t seem to do it!  God knows, we are weak.  We can’t seem to make it work on our own initiative.  But there’s another part of the message, given later in Jeremiah’s letter.  In verse 11, God says, “I know the plans I have for you¼plans for your welfare (your !wolv;) and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”  The exiles can take comfort in the fact that their Lord hasn’t abandoned them, even though they are in Babylon.