June 9, 2013 Jeremiah 29:10-14 Well, before we get to the promise of today s text--to that amazing verse that graces the front of our worship folder, the one so many of God s people have memorized and claimed for themselves or for the people they love and care about before we get there, we need to know what we re stepping into this morning such a painful time in the history of God s people. You see, one of the things it doesn t take too long to figure out when reading the Old Testament is that the words of the prophets are not for the faint of heart, the Book of Jeremiah being no exception. Jeremiah, you might recall, came to be known as the "weeping prophet,"--his words filled with the imagery of death, the songs of wailing and mourning and grief (cf. 13:17; 14:17). It s because he prophesied in the days leading up to a truly dark moment in Israel s history the time of the Babylonian invasion, the day when the holy city of Jerusalem was destroyed and Solomon s glorious temple torn down. Jeremiah spoke God s word at a time when God s chosen people were about to be hauled off into slavery and their life as a nation so utterly devastated. It s called exile, that For 40 years Jeremiah prophesied-- spoke God s warning and grief over the disobedience of those people--pursued that message with a single-mindedness that irritated most everybody around him, including the king, to the point where they were ready to kill him (and more than once!). Jeremiah weeps, and when he does he s reflecting the very sadness and grief of God. You see, ours is a God who does not take any delight in the consequences of human sin; rather, it is behavior that grieves God to the core. And sometimes we mistake God s response to our sin for what it really is. Yes, God is angry, but it s an anger that arises from the hurt over the consequences we creatures suffer from our 1 P a g e
sinful doing. Like a parent angry at the foolish decisions a child makes simply because the parent knows those mistakes may cost the child his/her life--that s the anger, here, and as such it s another side of love, right? A love that suffers. It s not anger because people have violated a law and now deserve to be prosecuted and punished for that legal transgression; it s anger because they have failed to establish the most basic of relationship between themselves and the one who had given them life and purpose in the world; it s anger at the waste of a future created by God for these people, a future they have squandered in self-madeness, in pecking orders that secure our own deal at the expense of somebody else s, in eating off the table of a hungry sister or brother. That s the weeping of Jeremiah. He didn t sit around crying because he held a grudge; he wept because he knew the end was coming he knew God had had enough of indifferent affluence and cynical oppression and presumptuous religion. He knew these people had grossly violated the freedom of God, and that death was at the door and would not pass over, and so he wept, and exile came... A wise man by the name of Sam Keen once wrote an essay entitled Exile and Homecoming in which he suggested that sometimes we human beings choose to be exiles. I m not talking, here, about those catastrophic situations where one nation overtakes another militarily and carts everybody away--away from their homeland, making exiles of people. That s a form of exile, to be sure. But Dr. Keen s idea has to do with the kind of exile we bring upon ourselves; it s where a person chooses to live somewhere other than where they really are not in the present, but in the past or the future. And that first choice (living in the past) he calls nostalgia (a word that comes from a Greek phrase meaning to return home isn t that interesting). It s that desire 2 P a g e
we sometimes have to move back in time to some kind of elusive good old days, a time we remember as things being better than they are now. For some of us that might be when life was simpler when we didn t have so much responsibility (a job that demanded so much, or relationships that weren t past the honeymoon yet, or a mortgage hanging over our head). It might be a longing for the days when the church was at the center of the social order in the world, or when music and movies were more meaningful, or when life was as we believed it should be. (And for those of you who are younger, here, this morning, I don t expect you to relate to this; this is something we old people struggle with; you re not there yet, but you may well be one day.) And of course, the danger is when the good old days become the enemy of the rest of our days, right? Because while the past may be a great place to visit, it is no place to live. It is exile living back there, is what it is But the other choice we can make, according to Dr. Keen, is to reject the past and become preoccupied with the future somehting he calls revolution. Here s that great desire that can arise in us to change everything and start over, to tear down what is and build some sort of utopia. It s that conclusion we sometimes reach that everything back there is worthless and that our only hope is to put a torch to it and charge into the future. And people who are exiled in that way are every bit as obsessed with the future as the nostalgists are obsessed with the past. It s like when little kids tell me their age they say, I m four, but I m almost five. Can t wait to be five. Get to go to Kindergarten. And when you re five, guess what? Can t wait to be six get to go to school all day long. At six you re hoping for seven get to read. At seven it s eight you want get to write cursive. Pretty soon you can t wait to be in Middle School, and then 3 P a g e
you can t wait for High School, and then you can t wait to be a senior, because seniors rule the school. And then you re a senior and you can t wait to graduate and move on. And then it s college or some sort of vocational school and you can t wait to get out and have a career and then you ve got a career and you can t wait for what? Retirement! And before long, in the blink of an eye it seems, you can t wait for it to be all over with You see the exile in that? And I sometimes wonder if that isn t what s most going on in this country people exiling themselves in one or the other of those directions either into the past or into the future. It s like we re in a theater full of people and somebody stands up and yells, Fire! What happens? Everybody tries to get out, some running for the entrance (the way they came in) and some heading for the exit (the way they would be getting out at the end of the show), and everybody s running into everybody else, all chaotic, people trampling each other in their effort to escape It happens in governments, it happens in communities, it can happen in church or in families or marriages that exile we choose that keeps us from living in the now. It s the story of the Bible, the exile thing. The Israelites are being delivered at long last from their bondage in Egypt. For hundreds of years they ve been the slaves of an oppressive foreign power. Until one day God taps Moses on the shoulder and he agrees to lead them out out of Egypt to the place that would be their new home. But in order to get there in order to take up their place in the Promised Land first they had to pass through the wilderness. And it was hard. No creature comforts out there in the desert. Living by the skin of their teeth. And what happens? They start to complain start longing for the way things were (even though the way things were was 4 P a g e
miserable!). We would rather live in that miserable past than have to live by faith in this present moment is what they said. Or, skip ahead a couple thousand years. It s the time of Jesus and things are starting to unravel for him and his little band of followers. So much so that Peter, the leader of the band, decides to take matters into his own hands and takes up the sword and cuts off the ear of the servant of the high priest poor guy by the name of Malthus (John 18:10). Unable to trust in God s providence and sovereignty in the moment, he chose the way of revolution, and Jesus was appalled; told him to put his sword away. You know what I so love about those words we read from Jeremiah a bit ago? When we look at the whole picture of what happened, here, we discover that for the 70 years God s people were displaced from their homeland and forced to live the lives of refugees in Babylon. But just then, all of a sudden, there arose in the neighboring country of Persia a new king (one by the name of Cyrus). And Cyrus, as it turned out, was sympathetic and benevolent to the Jews said they could at long last return home. No more Babylon. No more displacement. No more being vagabonds. And I try to imagine what that would have been like hardly anybody even old enough to remember the life to which they were now returning. All they ve known (most all of them) has been this life the one as despised foreigners, the bottom-rung-of-the-ladder people. But now all that is about to change. There s a promise God is making. It s not a nostalgic or a revolutionary promise; it s a promise for right now. And right now, God says, you can count on this: My plan for you, says the Lord, is not for your harm but for your good, for a future for you with hope (a hope that begins right now). When you call on me I will hear you; when you pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me. When you seek me with your whole heart, I will let you find me. I will restore you and gather you and bring you back. No more exile. 5 P a g e
And I can t think of a promise I more need right now. Change is hard. It s hard for Chris and Kristin and Sam and Annie Lindholm, a family we so love and friends who have made such a difference in this place since God led them here ten years ago; it s hard for me and Julie and our family; it s hard for Emmaus and for the Park Avenue Church of Minneapolis where we ll be going people saying goodbye to a pastor they love this morning (right now). It s hard. And God comes to us, in all those different places we find ourselves, and God says, I ve got a promise for you; I ve got a plan for you. Even if you can t see it all yet, keep talking to me, keep searching for me, keep seeking me with all your heart. 6 P a g e