Life After the End of Life As We Know It (11th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 29:1-9; July 30, 2016)

Life After the End of Life As We Know It

11th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 29:1-9
July 30, 2016

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

This summer we have been exploring the experience of exile through the lens of Jeremiah. Against the mandatory optimism of the royal regime of Jerusalem, Jeremiah had announced first a call to repentance. Jerusalem had no free pass, no get out of jail free card. There was no Judean exceptionalism. If Jerusalem failed to care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, if the elite of Jerusalem continued to arrange things for their own benefit, if Judah's leaders continued to treat their relationship with God as a technique for gaining power and wealth instead of a way of life characterized by seeking justice for the poor and the powerless, God would bring about the capture of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the captivity of the people.

Then, when there was no repentance, no change of heart, only a self-protective defense of the status quo, Jeremiah announced that the time for repentance had passed and God's judgment would be executed by the hand of Babylon's empire.

Last week the disaster struck. In the summer of 587 the armies of Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem and in the spring of the next year it fell. Its walls were toppled, its gates burned, the Temple desecrated, the city looted, the leaders deported, and a puppet king installed.

The elites of Jerusalem found themselves living in Babylon, unable to live in the place they called home, and unable to call home the place where they were forced to live. They were exiles.

The Bible contains a single narrative pattern. It moves from optimistic complacency to abysmal despair, from abysmal despair to impossible hope, and from impossible hope to astonishing salvation. In the Hebrew Bible this is found most clearly in the movement from Isaac to slavery in Egypt to the Exodus deliverance and in the movement from faithless Judah to the exile in Babylon to the home-coming under the Persians. In the New Testament this is the movement from Palm Sunday to Good Friday to Easter Sunday.

This narrative arc from complacency to despair and from hope to salvation is a large part of what holds the two testaments together. And, because this is not just a plot device for a piece of literature but also characteristic of the life of God's people, themes like exile and home-coming, slavery and deliverance, death and resurrection resonate with us.

Of course, we'd like to skip from complacency straight to salvation, from wandering in the land to owning it, from prosperity to more prosperity, from Palm Sunday straight through to Easter without having to go through Good Friday. We are certainly impatient with Holy Saturday when nothing happens and we are stuck in death.

The people of Jerusalem, even after their defeat, were no different. There were some who were simply crushed by the exile, who suffered heartache and despair until they either literally died (not at all uncommon among captive people) or they died figuratively by becoming Babylonians.

Others wanted a shortcut. And these others had prophets who pandered to that wish. The prophet Hananiah declared that in two years Babylon would be overthrown and the captives would return, bearing the Temple utensils with them. Jerusalem would be restored and God would "make Judah great again". God was still on their side. This present unpleasantness was only a temporary setback.

Jeremiah countered that Hananiah was not a true prophet but a man who told lies and called them prophecies. Further, said Jeremiah, before two years had passed, before one year had passed, Hananiah would be dead.

No, said Jeremiah, the exile was not a temporary setback. Obedience to God now meant accepting Babylonian rule. For those still in Jerusalem it meant life in what was now no longer God's kingdom but a Babylonian province. For those in Babylon the easy paths of rebellion or assimilation into Babylon were denied to the people as faithful choices.

Some of the exiles wrote a letter to Jeremiah: What are our options? With the old covenant in ruins, what does faithfulness look like now? What should we do?

Jeremiah answered them:

The Lord of heavenly forces, the God of Israel, proclaims to all the exiles I have carried off from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and settle down; cultivate gardens and eat what they produce. Get married and have children; then help your sons find wives and your daughters find husbands in order that they too may have children. Increase in number there so that you don’t dwindle away. Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because your future depends on its welfare.

Going out in blaze of suicidal rebellion is not an option; giving up is not an option. They had not only to survive, but to prosper. There is a life after the end of life as they know it. And they are not allowed to throw it away. That's their impossible hope. That's the deal.

But wait, there's more! It's not enough for them to make a home for themselves in this place they cannot call home. They must not only live in the city of their enemies. They must also pray for the city of their enemies. (Jesus is not the one who came up with the idea of praying for one's enemies! Jeremiah had done it nearly six centuries earlier.) "Pray to the Lord for [Babylon], because your future depends on its welfare."

Their future depends on the welfare of their enemies. There's an idea. What if we let the notion that our future depends on the welfare of our enemies to rattle around inside us awhile?

But that's not quite right. The word translated as welfare twice in our reading is shalôm, the word that every other time in the Hebrew Bible is translated as "peace." Shalôm certainly has a broader meaning than peace as we use the word. For us it means that the fighting has stopped, but for ancient Hebrews shalôm meant the peace that comes when justice is done and the prosperity that comes when there is peace. After all, when you are constantly making spears out of pruning hooks and swords out of plowshares, your standard of living is going to go down. The reason we can't afford to feed all of our hungry children is because we are spending their lunch money on swords and spears. Shalôm assumes a society at peace with itself that gives itself to the happy work of assuring a good life for all its people.

To promote the shalôm of Babylon, to pray for the shalôm of Babylon is for the exiled Judeans to do more than wish it well, to bless its projects, and to celebrate its successes. To promote the shalôm of Babylon, to pray for the shalôm of Babylon, is to work to transform Babylon so that it loves mercy and does justice even if it doesn't walk with Judah's God, humbly or otherwise. Justice leads to peace; peace leads to having enough for everyone.

The exiles of Judah must do something harder than they had imagined. They have to let their full weight down: buy houses, get married, have children, see that their children get married, plant gardens, eat well, pray for their enemies, be God's people in a strange land, transform their captors' lives, change the empire they live in, bring hope to the world when they themselves have no hope and no Temple and no land of promise and no visible future.

They are not allowed to skip the exile; they are not allowed to skip Holy Saturday; they are not allowed to skip death on their way from life to resurrection. There is a life after the end of their life as they know it. There is life in exile. That was their impossible hope.

When our lives force us to live in a place we cannot call home, that is our experience, too. There is life after the end of life as we know it. There is life in exile. That is our impossible hope.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.