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.