Minding Our Own Business

Proper 25C
Luke 18:9-14
October 24, 2010

Minding Our Own Business

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Jesus told a story about two people who went to church, one a Pharisee, the model of piety and righteousness, and the other a despised tax collector. Of the two of them, Jesus said, the tax collector found favor with God.

Honestly, I have to tell you that my reaction is, isn’t there another choice? Because, really, I don’t like either of them all that much. Isn’t there a third alternative?

We’ve all been taught to despise the Pharisee in the story. We’ve been taught to despise all Pharisees. The New Testament encourages us to believe that the Pharisees were all hypocritical folks who bitterly opposed Jesus and everything he stood for. If we read that a character in a story in the Bible is a Pharisee, that’s all we need to know about him. He’ll be the villain of the piece.

This rubs against the grain of our character a little. We mid-western folk, we tend to have our opinions, but we also believe in giving a fair hearing. Condemning the Pharisees out of hand would be a little out of character, even if Luke seems to be encouraging us to do it.

Giving Pharisees a fair hearing is harder than you’d think, though. We know very little about them, far less than we’d like. We know that there were various sorts of Jews in Jesus’ day. There were Sadducees who seemed to come mostly from the Jewish nobility and priestly families and focused on the Temple and its sacrificial system. There were Essenes who lived mostly (we think) in their own settlements, especially in the southern deserts, and about whom we know hardly anything at all. There were Zealots, who seemed to have believed that they could prompt God’s intervention in history by offering armed resistance to the Romans. And there were the Pharisees.

Even this very rough sketch is too detailed. For the last several weeks Bob Shedinger has been introducing some fascinating material from the Qumran scrolls. I don’t know for certain what other folks got from his classes, but I can say that I was struck once again by just how complex the religious situation was in Jesus’ day. It was like Jews had this amazing religious potluck supper and everyone who went through the line made their own selections from what was spread out in front of them. No two plates looked alike. I suspect that is how it was in Jesus’ day. Each community had its own way of doing things with no two alike.

The New Testament tends to make bad guys out of everyone except for the Jesus-followers, but I think that every group and every movement was composed of mostly sincere folks trying to solve a very difficult problem: How to live as people who were faithful to the God of the Jewish covenant in the face of their lives as Roman subjects.

Some people thought that faithfulness called for trusting in God to come to their help as they rose up in revolt against the Roman conquerors who trusted in false gods. Some people thought that life in Roman Palestine was hopelessly corrupt, so they retreated into their own communities to live faithfully by avoiding outside interference. Some people looked at the might of the Roman empire and decided that it would be best to cooperate in order to preserve at least some of their distinct life of worship.

And then there were the Pharisees. The Pharisees studied the Torah and the Prophets to discover how to live lives that were holy and just. They believed that faithfulness was lived out in the dailiness of ordinary life, in activities like prayer and eating and marriage and living with their neighbors. They saw the covenant as God’s gift that let them avoid being damaged by the corruption and immorality in the gentile world. They believed that anyone could live faithfully so they lived in villages and small towns and, generally, spent a lot of time among ordinary people. Pharisees were good people and I think I would have liked most of them.

Even so it’s hard to say much nice about the self-righteous jerk described as a Pharisee in our story. We’ve all known someone like them. They think that life is graded on a curve. The worse that other people are, the better their grade.

They check out the crowd when they pray. For them piety is a performance that needs an appreciate crowd of spectators. They come to church and look down on those who don’t. The come to church and look down on those who do! No one listens as well, sings as well, prays as well as they do, or gives as well as they do.

That may sound like a strange thing to say during a stewardship campaign. Why do we care why people give, as long as they give? Money is money, right? Well, I’m not altogether sure that’s true, to begin with. Money isn’t the morally neutral thing that modern economic theory holds it to be. There’s good money and bad; there’s happy money and sad money; there’s joyful money and grudging money. Motive matters even to the bottom line.

But the bottom line isn’t the bottom line. The bottom line for us is helping each other live lives that are faithful to the God of Jesus as his followers and holding out that possibility to our whole community. In a life of faithfulness motive matters.

Whatever help toward a faithful life the Pharisee movement might have held out toward the first praying person in our story, couldn’t seem to get past his motives. He was conducting his spiritual life in front of a mirror. He caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the “other” of the tax collector and, to paraphrase TV’s Rick Castle, he exclaimed, “I really am a holy guy!”

We’ve all known someone like him. In fact, in my more honest moments, I have to admit there is more than a little of that guy in me. I suspect that I might not be the only one here who has to admit that. It’s okay, we’re among friends here.

So I don’t like the Pharisee, not because he’s a Pharisee, but because he’s a jerk and because I see a little too much of myself in him.

But what of this tax collector? We know some things about him. Tax collectors were not employees of the Roman equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service. Tax collectors were independent contractors, tax farmers who had won contracts to collect the taxes in a district. The Romans knew how much they wanted to collect. The tax collector promised to deliver that much to the Romans. He could (and did) collect more. As long as the extra wasn’t too much the Romans would look the other way and he could keep the difference.

He profited at the expense of his fellow Jews. He made his living serving the interests of the Romans. This went way beyond cooperation. He was a collaborator, a traitor.

So he went up to the Temple to pray and stood a long way away from the other pilgrims. If he hadn’t they would have moved away from him. He unburdened his justly guilty conscience in prayer. Jesus says that the tax collector was the one to imitate. “All who humble themselves will be exalted,” Jesus says. The tax collector had humbled himself. Of course, may I point out that, as Winston Churchill said of a political opponent, “but then he has much to be humble about”? Jesus tells us that the tax collector “went down to his home justified,” which is fine, I suppose. I’d like to know if he went down to his home changed. If he’s still in the same line of work, if he’s still selling out his neighbors for a few coins, then I don’t get it.

You see my problem? Two possible spiritual stances before God, neither of them very attractive. Do you see why I’m hoping for a third possibility? How about a woman who tries her best to live a life of faithfulness to the God of the covenant, but who in moments of weakness takes the easy road, who then goes into the Court of Women in the Temple in Jerusalem, who prays in genuine remorse for mercy, and finally who goes home resolving to keep trying her best? Wouldn’t that be better? Why use these two who, really, are more caricature than character?

Because this is a parable, that’s why. In the world of the parable, a realistic landscape of the universe is reduced to an ink drawing of a very few lines. The range of religious possibilities is reduced to two figures and their relationship with God: the Pharisee with whom we should feel some sympathy but who makes that impossible by being an utter jerk and the tax collector whom we should despise but find it hard to because we can’t help but feel sorry for the guy. Two guys and a choice.

A long time ago, when I was a seminary student, I was a student pastor in Vinton, the county seat of Benton County.. The nearest hospital for anything serious was St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids a little to our south. There was a small sign in the chaplain’s office, framed and hanging on the wall. In three words it summarized the human situation: “Humility is truth.” Humility isn’t this great virtue to be carefully cultivated. Humility isn’t a pose, either, or some sort of lifestyle. It’s just the truth, that’s all. Humility is the accurate description of our place in the universe, of our place in the human community, of our place in history, of our place even before God. Humility is truth. To be humble is to know the truth about ourselves.

This is how the Pharisee blew it. He was trying hard to live a life of faithfulness to the God of the covenant. He had let that effort shape his behavior, determine how he used his resources, and how he treated his neighbors. That effort even led him to express his gratitude to God. But when he stood before God and prayed, what came out was “truthiness”¹ instead of truth.

The tax collector, for all his moral failure—and there was and remains a mountain of moral failure—gets it. He knows the truth about himself. In his own words he is a sinner. It’s an old-fashioned word, one that makes us cringe sometimes, one we’d like to avoid, but it says something about us that can’t be said in other words. With this word the tax collector accepts responsibility for his own moral failure and places his own behavior within a framework of accountability to God. When I’m most honest with myself I have to admit that I don’t like the word “sinner” precisely because I’m not really keen either on responsibility or accountability. I’d like to imagine that I can avoid them both. But the tax collector knows better. He knows himself as a sinner.

He knows something else, too, something the Pharisee does not, something that I forget all too often: he is not being graded on a curve. Our relationship with God does not depend on how much better in comparison to others we are doing. It’s not as if God comes to us and says, “I guess you’ll have to do!”

How I’m doing in comparison with someone else really isn’t what matters. This life of faithfulness that you and I are trying to live isn’t a competition. I don’t get extra points if you finish behind me. Which is really good, because that means that you and I can give each other every bit of help, encouragement and support we can muster, and it won’t cost us anything. This isn’t a season of Survivor.

The tax collector knows one last thing. He knows that love doesn’t speak the language of earning and deserving. He knows that he comes to God with nothing in his hands that amounts to a claim on God’s love. As Gregory Palmer has been heard to say, “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.” The tax collector knew that. Of course, the flip side of that is, “and there’s nothing you can do to earn it, either!”

That’s the truth. And if that doesn’t make us humble, nothing will.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1A word coined by Stephen Colbert meaning “truth that comes from the gut, not books” and named as Miriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2006, http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/06words.htm.

Still Waiting

Proper 24C
Jeremiah 31:27-34
October 17, 2010

Still Waiting

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

At last we are done with Jeremiah! Today the barbed wire can come down.

Jeremiah has not been an easy companion. His was not an easy time but then, neither is ours, though perhaps for quite different reasons. Jeremiah faced a terrifying time when all appeared to be well on the surface. But Jeremiah knew that—seen through God’s eyes—there was disaster looming on the horizon. Jeremiah knew—long before and with a greater intensity than others—that exile was coming, that the people would be forced away from their homeland to a place they did not want to go and could not call home. In that sense Jeremiah’s experience of exile began far earlier than that of his fellow countrymen. Long before his fellow Judeans became strangers in a strange land, Jeremiah was a stranger in his own country.

Like Jeremiah, we know that something is not quite right. The gap between the wealthiest people and the poorest, even in our own country, let alone throughout the world is larger than at any time in our history and it’s growing. Across the country unemployment hovers close to ten percent. For some groups it’s much higher than that. Unemployment among black men was 17.6 percent in September and among black teenagers, a staggering 49 percent.¹ But for most of us the bad news is about other people.

Our lives, on the whole, are pretty good. We enjoy comfort and ease but watch with unease and discomfort the anger and resentment of great portions of the world’s population directed at us. We revel in our freedoms but are uneasy about the ways in which freedom becomes license. We bask in our prosperity but find ourselves impoverished in other ways. We have things that our parents could only dream of but we lack the time to enjoy them and especially we lack the time to enjoy each other, the time to build community, the time to become deeper. Across our land the mainline churches have suffered decline and a loss of influence. There are now as many folks who call themselves “unaffiliated” as there are who call themselves mainline Protestants.² We may feel secure behind the limestone bluffs that surround Decorah, but I doubt as Jeremiah did that we can hold out long against the armies of Babylon.

So, we too, live in a time of exile of the same sort as Jeremiah’s and find ourselves strangers in our own country, out of step with the beat of our collective drum. We find ourselves in that most-to-be-pitied of all groups: the unfashionable, the out of touch, yesterday’s news.

So Jeremiah is, I think, a neglected guide for us who live in this internal exile. He hasn't been up-beat and there have been times when his shrill voice has grated on our ears. Still, for those of us who find that our path lies away from rather than toward what we want, Jeremiah is a reliable guide. He has mapped the territory well. We can find our way because he went ahead of us.

Last week we heard his advice to exiles: build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what grows; marry; have children; see that they do the same; pray for the shalôm of your captors. We must live because we are the bearers of a legacy that must not be lost. Someone must carry the memories, the hopes and the values that have shaped us. Someone must carry them so that they will be available to those who find in them something of value. We are the only ones who can do that. We live in exile by looking to preserve the best of the past.

But Jeremiah has one last gift to give us: the gift of the future, the gift of hope. The words of our lesson this morning are familiar. They speak of the coming of a new covenant. We hear these words with Christian ears, long accustomed to assuming he means the Christian covenant, long accustomed to assuming that they have been fulfilled.

The practice of assuming so began very early in the midst of a bitter struggle between the Jewish followers of Jesus and the Jewish non-followers of Jesus. It has left its traces in the gospels. In Luke’s description of the upper room meal and the institution of the Lord’s Supper Jesus says, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Paul has similar words in 1 Corinthians, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” Hebrews has a number of references to “a new covenant,” one that is better than the old.

The Christian church and the rabbinic Jewish synagogue both emerged as products of mutual rejection. They were deeply shaped by the division that produced them. The fight was over the resources of faith: Who would have the right to claim the Hebrew scriptures as theirs? Whose interpretation would govern the reading of these scriptures? Who could claim to be the heir to the tradition of faith?

The New Testament, as a consequence, bears the marks of angry division. The division continued into the early Church. Christian writers made the following assumptions:

1. The scriptures of the Hebrew Bible are entirely, completely, and exclusively fulfilled in the person of Jesus.

2. There is no room for any other reading of the Hebrew Bible than ours.

3. Jews are wrong in stubbornly clinging to their outdated and superseded religion.

4. Christians have inherited all of the promises made to God’s people, replacing the Jewish people in the sight of God and disinheriting the Jews.

If Christianity had remained a minor sect of Judaism as it began, perhaps little harm would have been done by these assumptions. But Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and of its successor states, clear into the twentieth century. These assumptions became public policy and provided the ideology that led to two thousand years of persecutions and ultimately to the Holocaust. This alone is a good reason for removing our Christian glasses for just a moment to let Jeremiah be heard.

And when we do that a curious thing happens. We realize that the promised new covenant remains just that: a promise. Listen to Jeremiah describe the new covenant: It will be unlike the previous one. It won't be breakable. The law of this covenant will come from the inside out. It will not require any sort of instruction (so religious educators will be out of their jobs.). This new covenant will involve the forgiveness of sins.

When we look at the Christian covenant, the one we enter at baptism, we find that there are indeed some similarities with the one promised through Jeremiah. It is not like the earlier covenant in several ways. It is based on conversion, conviction and commitment, rather than inheritance. Forgiveness of sins is central.

But there are striking differences, too. People may indeed no longer remind each other to “know the Lord.” But as I see it, that’s not because such reminders are unneeded. And the Christian covenant seems to be just as breakable as the Jewish covenant. We still need to teach each other. We still need to struggle to be faithful. We still await the writing of the law on our hearts.

In other words, this promise has not been fulfilled in the Christian faith in spite of the anti-Jewish language in the New Testament and throughout church history. In other words, we are still waiting.

But we are waiting in hope. And it is a hope that is uttered in exile, not in the safety of our homes. God did not abandon God’s people in exile. God went with them. God continued to work among them in new and entirely unexpected ways, making bold new promises.

The exile became for Judah (and it can become for us) a place and way of life. No longer able to provide for themselves in a land of their own God’s people had to look to God for survival, sustenance and support. This total dependency reminded people of Israel’s time in the desert, a period the prophets of the exile came to think of as a honeymoon when God and God’s people lived in deep intimacy. So exile became for Judah a place of hope, a hope that escaped them in Judah. In Judah they ran around on God with the Ba’als. They maneuvered among the nations to build and maintain a power base. They ignored the covenant’s call for a just and humane society. In exile, stripped of those games, they found themselves once more completely dependent on God. They found the freedom to hope. They found they could trust the future, but not as the result of their own anxious scheming and toil. Those schemes, as we have discovered, could be spoiled with any downturn of the marketplace. No, they could trust the future because it would come to them as a gift from someone they could trust, the covenant God who had not abandoned them, the covenant God who still claimed them as God’s own people.

We, too, as a congregation of God’s people live in exile. We can come to the realization that we are completely dependent on God, that our future lies in God’s hands, and that God still has a new thing to do among us. We can find the freedom that comes from not having to do it bigger, or faster, or more profitably than someone else. We can find the freedom of not having to be fashionable, the freedom of being yesterday’s news and tomorrow’s hope. We can quit trying to succeed in a world that does not value what God values. We can tell our stories. We can live out our peculiar vision of the world. We can create a zone of contagion where people can catch our strange disease, the healthy, holy wholeness that is born out of memory and meaning and hope.

And we can live right now in the gift of hope that God gives us. There will come a day when Christian discipleship won’t be so much work. There will come a day when the struggle to be faithful as God’s people will be replaced by effortless delight. There will come a day when fulfilling God’s desires will come to us as naturally as swimming comes to fish, as flying comes to birds. In the meantime we live as the people of memory; we live as the people of hope. And as long as we cherish that memory and harbor that hope, there will be a future for us. God is not finished here. God still has a great work to accomplish among us. God is not done. And neither are we.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1 US Department of Labor, “Employment status of the civilian population by race, sex, and age,” October 08, 2010, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm.

2 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. "U.S. Religions Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation: Diverse and Dynamic." (2008), http://religions.pewforum.org/reports.

Shalom for the City

Proper 23C
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
October 10, 2010

Shalom for the City

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I’m sure you’ve heard the story: A week ago last Wednesday, Gene Granick’s home outside of South Fulton, TN, caught fire. He called the South Fulton Fire Department and they came but refused to put out the fire. Instead, they sat in their trucks and watched as his house burned to the ground.

Inside the city limits, fire protection is a public service, like police protection, but county residents must pay an annual fee of $75 for fire protection. It seems that Mr. Granick had not paid his fee. He forgot, is what he said. So he wasn’t on their list. So they sat and watched until the fire threatened a paying neighbor and then they intervened to protect that house.¹

It has been both fascinating and horrifying to hear the opinions expressed. About half say that neighborliness and compassion dictate that the fire fighters should have responded. About half say that Mr. Granick got what he paid for.

In itself this event is not all that important. It seems to me, though, that it is emblematic of a seismic shift in the bedrock of our culture. It reveals a fault-line between two different ways of living together.

One way I’ll call a “culture of quid pro quo.” Quid pro quo is a Latin phrase, of course, but it simply means, “something for something” or “what for what.” You want me to do something for you? That’s fine. What’s it worth to you? What’s in it for me? We live a good deal of our lives in the culture of quid pro quo. When I go to the butcher counter at Fairway and ask for a pound of chicken breasts, the butcher weighs out and wraps my order and slaps a price label on it. I take it to the front of the store and pay for it. I don’t think about it much and I don’t mind. I don’t expect the butcher to give me meat just because I’m hungry.

On the other hand, when Iowa City was threatened by flood waters two years ago last spring and there was a call for help in building a sandbag levee, People didn’t ask, “How much are they paying?” They didn’t ask, “What’s in it for me?” We just went and helped, even though we had a pretty good idea that the sandbags wouldn’t hold. That wasn’t really the point. The point was that what the community needed at that moment was a tangible display of solidarity. Our efforts were successful not because they held the flood waters back but because they helped to build a community that was desperately needed after the flood waters were gone.

This other way of living together I’ll call a “culture of community.”

Most of us recognize that there are times and situations that call for a culture of quid pro quo and there are times and situations that call for a culture of community. In my lifetime I’ve watched the culture of quid pro quo advance, spurred on by calls for “free markets,” and I’ve watched the culture of community retreat. I’m not the first to notice this. Adrienne Rich, one of our poets—and poets are our prophets nowadays—wrote way back in the mid-90s that she strived to

...note
precisely how the air moved
and where the clock’s hands stood
and who was in charge of definitions
and who stood by receiving them
when the name of compassion
was changed to the name of guilt
when to feel with a human stranger
was declared obsolete.²

There was a time in the United States when the language of compassion was a part of our public conversation, when, if someone wanted to speak for greed, they had at least to disguise it, cover it up and use other words. This reflected the influence of denominations like ours, the mainline denominations. To hear the strident and clamoring voices of quid pro quo today is to awaken from a troubled sleep to discover that the Babylonians have breeched the walls of the city. It is to find ourselves waking up in Babylon itself. It is to find ourselves living in exile in our own land.

The the hills looks the same. The streets, the houses look familiar. But a different language is being spoken. Different gods are being worshiped. Life is moving at a pace and with rhythms that jar us to the bone.

From the membership figures of mainline denominations, to the absence of calls from our church’s leaders for peace and compassion, to the increasing distance between life as it is described in the churches on Broadway and life as it is lived on Water Street, a hundred different clues point us to what I believe is an inescapable fact of our lives in the United Methodist Church today: we are a church in exile.

Living in exile isn’t only painful. It’s also strange. It’s a new place for us. And we have no idea how to do it.

Whenever I gather with other pastors and there is a book table, I pay close attention to the titles of the books and I watch my colleagues. Cokesbury, our denomination’s publishing house, has a pretty good idea of what they can sell to pastors. Let me tell you that books that ask us to think deeply and carefully about where we are are pretty rare. The books that might help us to read the Bible in such a way as to give us some insight and hope are almost non-existent. My colleagues don’t go for those, anyway.

They go for the how-to books. They go to the congregational self-help section. This is where the books that tout the latest technique or serve up the program du jour are found. My colleagues are very busy and they are moving fast, but—if you (and they) will pardon my painting with a broad brush—they have very little idea of where they are going or why. They want a technique they can use or a checklist they can work through with the certainty that they will get the desired results if only they follow the program. The trouble is, they don’t recognize that we are living in Babylon.

Living in Babylon, we are soaking up Babylonian values and habits without even noticing. Peer behind the language of “making disciples of Jesus Christ” and all too often I suspect that what we’re really talking about are customers. We talk about stewardship, but all too often I suspect that what we’re really talking about is increasing income. The church, we say, should be run like a business. Several years ago I heard Bishop Peter Storey, who was Nelson Mandela’s chaplain when Mandela was in prison, say to a class of people being ordained as United Methodist clergy in Ames: “You are not being ordained to serve as the managers of the local franchise of the United Methodist Church, Inc.”³ But for far too much of the time that is precisely what we are being asked to do.

We despair that anything or anyone will ever overcome the Babylonians. But we can hardly be blamed for this. We have no prophets except for the poets and we don’t have time for poets. So we have to turn to our ancient poets and prophets, like Jeremiah.

Here’s what was happening: The cream of Jerusalem society had been exiled to Babylon. They, too, were trying to find their way through a landscape that was unfamiliar. They didn’t know what they were doing, either. Some prophets in Babylon—Ahab son of Kolaiah, Zedekiah son of Maaseiah, and Shemaiah of Nehelam—were telling the exiles that all they had to do was to rise up in arms against their captors and God would liberate them and bring them home. The exile was only a test of their faith and it would soon be over. I think that this message was also born of despair: they could not beat the Babylonians, so at least they would go out in a blaze of glory.

So Jeremiah wrote them a letter, and this is what he said: “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.”

Unpack your bags. Settle in for the long haul. That was Jeremiah’s message. They have no right to give their identity away. They have no right to cease to exist. They have no right to become Babylonians. Instead, they are to insure the survival of their community. That means having a place to live, even if they can’t call it home. That means have food to eat, even if it’s not the food they ate at home. That means making sure that there is a next generation and one after that so that their children can learn what it means to be Jews, learn it well enough to be able to teach their own children. They have a mission and it is not theirs to accept or reject. Despair is not authorized. Despair is an indulgence to which they have no right. What do you do when you can no longer carry on? You carry on.

But that’s not all. “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,” writes Jeremiah, “and pray to Yahweh on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” That’s what it says in our translation. But I’m afraid that we are likely to hear “welfare” in strictly material terms, since that’s the way that Babylon or any other quid pro quo culture thinks about welfare. But the word being translated is shalom. “Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile...”

shalom can be translated a number of ways. Mostly, the NRSV translates it mostly as “peace,” but sometimes as “welfare” or “well-being.” Shalom is the state of being in right relationship, a state in which people are at peace with each other and treat each other justly. When a community has shalom, it enjoys the fruits of peace, a state of well-being that is enjoyed by all its members. When a community lives in shalom, it is unthinkable to stand by and watch a house burn down because its owner has failed to pay an annual fee.

So if the first rule about exile is the rule about carrying on, the second rule is this: there is no separate shalom. The Jewish community—or the church for that matter—cannot enjoy shalom unless Babylon enjoys it, too. That’s not welfare as Babylon understands it, but covenant peace, justice and well-being as God’s people understand it. The call of the exiled community is not to shun Babylonian culture, nor to violently overthrow it, but instead to resist and convert it. The call of the exiled community is to transform that part of the world in which it finds itself.

We don’t know what we’re doing. The how-to books are pretty much useless, written as they are to avoid acknowledging exile rather than to discern how to live in exile faithfully. Like the exiled Jews, we’re not allowed to fade away into the community. Nor are we to overthrow the community in anger and violence. No, we are to transform the community, embracing what is acceptable, changing what we can change, and resisting what we can neither accept nor alter.

We don’t know for sure how to do that. We’re bound to make mistakes. That’s the beauty of not knowing what we’re doing. We have permission to get it wrong, maybe even a lot. What we don’t have is permission not to try. So, just like the Jewish community in Babylon, we’ll try a lot of things, and some of them will work. We’ll try to figure out why and then we’ll adjust a little and try some more. And, also like the Jewish community in Babylon, we may find that this place of exile is the most productive and creative place we have ever been.

Yes, “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 shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to Yahweh on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.”

1 MSNBC.com. "No Pay, No Spray: Firefighters Let Home Burn: Tennessee House in Ashes after Homeowner 'Forgot' to Pay $75 Fee " http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#.

2 Adrienne Rich, “And Now,” Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 31.

3 Storey, Peter. "Re-Evangelizing the Church to Its Prophetic Ministry." 2005.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

The Rivers of Babylon

Proper 22C
Lamentations 1:1-6
Psalm 137
October 3, 2010

The Rivers of Babylon

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Just as Jeremiah had warned, the other shoe dropped. Jerusalem fell to the armies of Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon. After nearly eighteen months of siege, there was no food left in the city. The defenders of Jerusalem were exhausted by hunger. Zedekiah and a few companions attempted to escape by night but they were soon captured. In the presence of Nebuchadrezzar Zedekiah witnessed the slaughter of his sons. They put out Zedekiah’s eyes, bound him in fetters and led him away, this petty king who had dared to defy the gods and the armies of Babylon.

Zedekiah did not go into exile alone. With him went all the leadership of Judah—the nobles, the soldiers, the artisans, leaving only the peasants and common people behind to till the land and to keep gold flowing into the coffers of Babylon.

Judah now had a governor, the captain of Nebuchadrezzar’s bodyguard, in place of a king. Judah was now a backwater province in a vast and sophisticated empire. The governor burned the Temple, the royal palace, and all the great houses of Jerusalem. He looted every Temple implement that could be melted down—all the bronze, silver and gold. He broke down the walls of Jerusalem so that the city could not be defended.

So says the account in the second book of Kings and, while it may not have all the details historically correct, it doubtless is faithful to the thoroughness with which the servants of Babylon did their job.

The people of Judah—and especially those of Jerusalem—had endured bad leadership, a year and a half of imprisonment in their own city, and the looting and damage that came after the fall of the city. They watched the defenders get cut down. They stood by in helpless rage as jack-booted Babylonian thugs defiled their holy places. They cowered in anguish as women and girls were raped and infants tortured and killed. And then, starved though they were, they were lined up and marched off to the northeast, toward the Tigris River, through the heart of the Babylonian Empire, and then, finally, southeast to the city of Babylon itself.

The Judeans had lost their land. They had lost their independence. They no longer had access to the holy places that had anchored their lives in space. They were forced to live among a people who knew nothing of the sacred rhythms that had anchored their lives in time. They were taken to a place of strange tongues, strange foods, strange habits of dress, and strange gods.

Perhaps the worst of it was that they had been living under a promise. They had thought that God would protect them. They had thought that Zion—the place of God’s own dwelling—was safe. But the defenses did not hold. The promises failed. And now they found themselves forced to live in a place they could not call home. They were in exile.

It seemed God had deserted them. And, to make matters even worse, they suspected that God had good cause to desert them. It was not just that they had suffered an awful calamity; in some sense it was their own fault.

How did they survive? How do the people of God survive when the worst case scenario turns out to be hopelessly optimistic? Well, to be honest, I assume that many of them did not. How many lost their lives or their minds on this ancient Trail of Tears we do not know and cannot know.

It’s remarkable that we know anything at all about them. Of course, there was a history written by the winners, the Babylonians. This was all duly recorded in the annals of the kings of Babylon so that all coming ages would know that Nebuchadrezzar was a mighty warrior who lived in the favor of his gods. But that story is lost. For once, history was not written by the winners, but by the losers!

The losers survived, somehow. Even more remarkably they didn’t simply melt away into the population of their conquerors. Somehow they remained a people. Conquered, they were not destroyed. Exiled, they lived. How?

One thing they did was to turn their pain into poetry and their anger into anthems. They wrote their wrath and sang their sorrow. Some poet or poets of exiled Judah—and it was probably not Jeremiah—wrote the book of Lamentations in our Bible. Whoever wrote our lesson for this morning was a skilled poet. According to one scholar the poem moves through no less than three distinct kinds of literature in the first eleven verses, as if the depth of the poet’s anguish, sorrow and rage cannot be contained in any one form.¹ And yet, at the same time, the poem is carefully controlled and crafted. Of the five in Lamentations, the first four poems are acrostic, that is, the first letter of each of the twenty-two verses together form the Hebrew alphabet.² The pain is real and its expression is genuine, but it is not without order or structure. Perhaps the poet is looking back on the disaster from far enough away that he or she is no longer overwhelmed by it.

If so, then the psalmist who wrote Psalm 137 is still in the midst of the catastrophe, too close for artful speech. Newly arrived in Babylon and finally able to sit and mourn their loss, the survivors cannot imagine ever singing again. Their harps are hung up to collect dust. Their repertoire of holy songs is reduced to a source of entertainment for pagans. “Come on,” urge their jailors, “sing us one a’ them Jew songs!” It’s impossible for the psalmist even to imagine.

Instead, his or her heart is filled with revenge fantasies, imagining the walls of Babylon torn down to the bedrock and its infants dashed against the rocks. It’s hard for us to imagine these words being used for worship. I was surprised to find them in our hymnal, as squeamish as the editors of our psalter seem to have been. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask you to use them in worship, so I read them instead.

We have a hard time with the place of so-called negative emotions in our spiritual lives. We try not to feel those things or think those thoughts but the harder we try the stronger they seem to be. We try to banish such feelings. We would never pray to see our enemies treated in the way that they have treated us.

After 9/11 and the loss of so many, so many, so very many fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and husbands and wives, we didn’t pray for the deaths of the fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and husbands and wives of someone else. Nevertheless that is what the last nine years have brought. Doubtless many bad people were killed along with the innocent, but the innocent have died in their tens of thousands. We didn’t pray for their deaths, but they happened.

In contrast the psalmist prays for revenge. The psalmist entertains revenge fantasies. The psalmist takes those fantasies, takes all that rage and horror, and turns it into language, into conscious thought, and places it into God’s hands. And that, apparently, was the end of the matter. We have no evidence that Psalm 137 was a prelude to baby-killing.

We imagine that we are morally superior to this psalmist because we won’t pray such things. But today we will gather at the table with our brothers and sisters from all around the world. Among those gathered with us will be Christians of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many of our fellow guests will come missing family members? And will they charge us with fratricide?And what will say in return?

Maybe, just maybe, it would have been better to have prayed for revenge, to have included Psalm 137 in our service, to have admitted our own rage, given it to God and left the matter in God’s hands. I can’t know for certain.

While we do not yet know whether we will survive our exile in the world into which 9/11 thrust us, we do know that the people Judah survived theirs. They raged and they wept and they did it all before God. They turned their weeping and their revenge fantasies into poems and prayers.

“How can we sing Yahweh’s song in a foreign land?” the psalmist asked. How, indeed? And yet these words were embedded in a song. The psalmist sang the unsingability of exiled Judah’s situation. And in that song, life in exile became possible.

So, if these texts are sources for seeing ourselves as the church, what do they tell us? Who might we become if we took these texts seriously? Or if we seriously let them take us?

We might be a people who sing. We would sing our praise and our thanks. We would sing our joy. We would sing of justice. We would sing of peace.

But we would also sing of sadness and loss. We would sing of anger and grief. We would sing of pain and longing. We would sing for ourselves and for each other and for those who cannot sing and for those whose song goes unheard. We would sing for the widows and the orphans. We would sing for the bereft. We would sing for the angry and for the bitter. We would sing for the hopeless.

And, as long as we sang, the reign of God would be present in our midst. In our song, there would be a little bit of home that could still give us hope against the day of our return. In our song, God would come to us still, even when the place where we find that we must live is not a place that we can call home.

“How can we sing Yahweh’s song?” the psalmist sang. Yes, precisely.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1 Dianne Bergant, "The Challenge of Hermeneutics: Lamentations 1:1-11: A Test Case," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2002).

2 Chapter 3 is composed of sixty-six verses. Verses one through three all begin with aleph, the next three with beth, and so forth.