Strangers in a Strange Land (15th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 29: 20-14; August 28, 2016)

Strangers in a Strange Land

15th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 29: 20-14
August 28, 2016

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

This was not the week that we had planned. The universe dealt us a wild card. We had a forceful reminder of how fragile our human arrangements really are, a reminder of the sheer power of something so simple and ordinary as water.

For many of us it has been a week for repairing the minor damages and cleaning up the mess left behind. This is has been an inconvenience that will not change our lives much one way or the other.

For those in our community whose houses suffered collapsed walls in their basements, it has been more than an inconvenience; it has been a disaster. Their homes unsafe to live in, they have become short-term "internal refugees" while they figure out what comes next and either rebuild or find other permanent housing.

But neither of these experiences can really be counted as exile. There can be pain from the loss of precious items stored in a flooded basement. There can be inconvenience from having to set aside plans and attend to the demands for clean-up and repair. There can be hardship from temporary homelessness. But this is not exile.

Even being declared a disaster area does not mean that this experience is equivalent to exile. Exile is when it is no longer possible to live in the place that you call home and when you have to live in a place that you cannot call home. A temporary relocation until life can get back to normal isn't exile. In exile life never gets back to normal. It seems to me that this distinction isn't about the amount of pain; it's about a quality of the experience.

A diagnosis of cancer is an exiling experience even if the cancer is successfully treated with minimally invasive methods and low levels of pain, because once having been diagnosed, "normal" life is changed. Successful treatment, even remission, cannot remove the possibility of recurrence. We don't have to think about it all the time or even often, but it is never not a possibility that hovers at the edges of consciousness. No amount of forgetfulness with restore life to normal. Exile is not about how much suffering there is, but about a quality of the experience that alienates us from our old lives and forces us into a new lives.

We Americans--and maybe everyone, but I know Americans best--resist the notion that we would be forced into a new life, one that we didn't choose for ourselves. History doesn't apply to us; we make it up as we go along. We are exceptions to the rules that bind everyone else.

For many Christians it is God who guarantees that our futures are sunny and bright, that we will have everything we need and, really, everything that we want. Some Christians even take this so far as to say that prosperity--material abundance--is God's gift to everyone who believes and acts in the right way. To them Joel Osteen´s 2.5 million dollar parsonage is not a scandal, but the necessary proof they, too, are the rightful heirs to wealth as God´s children. It´s not wasteful for him and his family to live in that monstrosity, but his duty as their spiritual leader.

Christians of this ilk scour the Bible for texts that will prove that God wants them to be rich. Every now and then they find a text new to them and ride it for a while. A few years ago it was the Prayer of Jabez that promised unending expansion. Recently, I've notice that they landed on this:

I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope. (Jer 29:11 CEB)

They read it from their favorite translation, the New International Version, which has slightly but importantly different language:

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." (Jer 29:11 NIV)

I've seen this text on plaques and calendars, notecards and posters, this assertion that our prosperity is God's plan, and that any hopeful future must be a rich one.

Not only do they pick and choose carefully among translations, but they take this text out of its context. You might remember--and if you don't I'll take this opportunity to remind you--that a few weeks ago I preached on the text that immediately precedes this one. The exiles in Babylon had asked Jeremiah what they should do there, especially since Hananiah was telling them in Yahweh's name that the exile was only going to last for two years. Jeremiah told them to build houses and live in them, to plant gardens and eat what grew, to marry and have children, and to pray for the shalôm of Babylon because its shalôm and theirs were bound up in each other.

Only then comes that promise that, after seventy years, God would return them to Jerusalem. God's plans for the shalôm of the community of exiles in Babylon are given in the context of exile. After seventy years, after three generations have passed, after there were no longer any survivors who had lived in Jerusalem as adults, then and only then God's plans for their peace move from future hope to present reality.

There is no shortcut past exile on the way from the collapse of dreams in the present to a life of shalôm in the hoped-for future. For the exiles, the full experience of exile is inescapable. There is simply no way around it.

The reason is this: something happens in exile. In the experience of exile, the exiles were transformed into something new, something they had never been before and never would be without that experience. Stripped of all the defenses that the elite of Jerusalem had used to avoid coming face-to-face with God, they were left with nothing but God. With no Temple and no sacrifices, with no kings and their royal yes-men, they were left with no alternative but to face God. And no one comes away from a face-to-face encounter with God without being changed.

Exile was like an alchemical crucible in which base materials are crushed and heated, the impurities burned away, and the rest transformed until what was left was the philosophers' stone. In the crucible of exile Judeans became something new; they became Jews.

We have a stake in this, of course, because without Jews there would have been no Jesus and without Jesus I would still be painting myself blue and worshiping trees as did my ancestors. That is not to make the experience of exile okay, to wipe away the real misery, suffering and death, that came with it. It is only that the misery, suffering, and death are not the only stories that exile has to tell.

We already know this, really. We just need to be reminded of it from time to time. Easter follows Good Friday, but something is happening on Holy Saturday. Out of sight and sound, some work of transformation is taking place in the sealed tomb.

Slavery in Egypt is followed by settlement in the Land of Promise, but along the way, in the desert, something happens to the ex-slaves, some transformation that begins the work of forming the People of God.

We see it in the world around us, too. Caterpillars weave cocoons and emerge months later as butterflies, but something happens inside the chrysalis, some work of transformation.

Seeds fall into the earth and seem to die, but out of that burial come new plants.

A little yeast is added to dough; the dough is kneaded until it becomes elastic, almost alive; the dough is placed in a warm dark place and it becomes a loaf; and, the loaf is placed in a hot dark place and becomes bread. Water and flour and yeast and a little salt become daily bread by processes of transformation that the dough, if it could talk, would regard as torment.

The experience of exile, whether it comes in the form of a forced march from Jerusalem to Babylon or the intensely personal form of a struggle against cancer, is an experience we avoid with all of our might and at the same time it is an experience on which our own transformation depends. New life requires that, in one way or another, our old life must end, or to put it more bluntly, we must die.

We Christians live under the sign of baptism. I am reminded that baptism in its boldest form is a ritual drowning. We drown our infants so that we may be reminded that, as precious as their lives are, their new lives are more precious still. We confirm our young people so that they can say, Yes, drown me, too, so that new life becomes possible for me. We remember our baptisms whether by crossing ourselves or by calling our baptisms to mind as a reminder that, Yes, we too are in need of fresh dying and new life.

We who fell asleep in an earlier time when churches were honored institutions in our nation's life and were readily given time, money and attention, have awakened from a long and unpleasant dream to find ourselves in Babylon. The values that dominate our national conversation are implacably opposed to the values that Jesus taught. Calls for justice and peace are sneered at and marginalized. Vengeance, intolerance, and selfishness are put forward as Christian virtues. Hate groups claim to be churches and are consulted when the media wants to hear from the "Christian" perspective.

We have lost our place of privilege in our culture. The strategies that used to "work" no longer put people in the pews. The United Methodist Church, our own denominational home, is wracked with self-destructive conflict as it relives in our own time the crisis years of 1844-48. The world has become a strange place. The church in North America has gone into exile.

What will happen? I don't know much. If ancient Judah's experience is anything to go by, three things can be said with confidence: (1) There is no getting around the exile. There is no magic way to recover the church of fifty or even ten years ago. (2) Much that we value will be lost. Our pain and grief is and will be real. We need to face that pain and honor that grief. (3) We will be transformed. We will come out the other end of this time a changed people. It is possible that none of us will live to see it. But it will come. After the disaster, it will come:

I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope. (Jer 29:11 CEB)

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