Seek the Welfare of the City

I'm a lectionary preacher. I have colleagues who are gifted at finding threads and themes in the readings for the day - which is especially intentional on the part of those who have put the lectionary together and especially with the Track 2 Gospel-related readings from the Old Testament. But in truth, I'm a one text at a time kind of preacher. I just need time to unpack the one. 

This Sunday as we begin to work on our fall stewardship campaign at St. Michael's, I am going to preach on the Gospel for the day: on the tenth leper, the one who came back to say thank you. The stewardship sermon literally writes itself, and I'll plan to post it here after preaching it. 

But for those who use Track 1 for the Old Testament readings (as we do at St. Michael's) this means skipping over the extraordinary reading from Jeremiah 29. So this is not a second sermon, it's literally just some ruminations on that text which I think is important for our time. It's the seeds of a sermon I might have preached and maybe will in three years. 

The lectionary readings for the day can be found here. The Jeremiah text can be found below. 

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Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

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.

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Remember that Jeremiah had a long extended ministry. Initially, his job was to speak the truth into a time when truth was in short supply. The exile was coming, and the temple would be destroyed and it was basically too late to change. 

That all happens just as Jeremiah "predicted." But remember that the prophets are not fortune-tellers. They are social critics who know that public policy matters and especially how a nation cares for the poor. The circumstances that led to the Babylonian Exile are geo-political; but the theological reasons that Jeremiah and others give is that Israel has been disobedient. 

So it all happens. Now the exiles are in Babylon. Time goes on. It's hard to live in exile. Beyond homesickness and despair and not knowing the language and missing the food from home, it can just be plain exhausting. And there is no end in sight. What lies ahead is a marathon, not a sprint. 

So the message that is sent by God through Jeremiah to the exiles is a hard word, maybe harder than the initial message that Exile was coming. It is that the Exile won't end anytime soon. It'll be decades. 

People cannot long live in perpetual crisis mode. So the word of the Lord here is to hunker down. Build and plant - we heard those words from Jeremiah at the very beginning. After plucking up and pulling down and destroying and overthrowing (deconstructing the old order) Jeremiah's ministry will be about building and planting. But everyone assumed that would be "back home" and eventually (it will be decades) that will happen. But in the meantime, Jeremiah tells the exiles to build houses and live in them and to plant gardens and eat the produce. IN BABYLON! He does further: survive. Marry and have kids and pray for the welfare of the city where you find yourselves. Extraordinary!

The reasons I'm bummed about not preaching a full sermon on this is that I think this is very much a "word of the Lord" for us. We are surrounded these days by so-called "Christian" nationalists who want the United States of America to become a fundamentalist theocracy. I will never (ever) sign on to that work. I choose resistance and the gospel of Jesus Christ who calls on us to be reconcilers and peacemakers. 

The United States is not the Promised Land. Certainly not today but probably never. This weekend we remember the Indigenous Peoples who lived here before Columbus - the real story is not pretty. The rhetoric about becoming a city on the hill dismissed the fact that people were living here and this country was not "discovered" it was "invaded." But that's another sermon...

The point is that the United States is Babylon. It's empire. Everything is organized to keep power. And followers of Jesus rightly should resist and remember who we are. 

And yet...

It feels like we have lost our way, but finding our way back home is going to be a long journey. Maybe decades. So much has already been lost. It's easy to despair. 

A friend of mine recently told me that he is pessimistic in the short-run and hopeful in the long-run. I think that's a wise place to be and I think it describes where I am as well. In the long-run all shall be well. In the short-run, it may get worse before it gets better. We need to not only resist but survive to "fight" another day. 

If this is right then Jeremiah 29 might be helpful advice to us, living in perilous times. It may feel counter-intuitive at first, but once we realize we need to take the long view it begins to make perfect sense. Constant reactivity will burn us all out and make us crazy. We need to be clear about whom we serve but at the same time we can and should create lives here and now. We need to build and plant and seek the welfare of the city where we find ourselves. There really is, in reality, no alternative.