“Tend to Life!”

First Congregational United Church of Christ

October 10, 2010

The Rev. Sharyl B. Peterson

Scripture Readings:  Jer. 29: 1, 4-7; 1 Cor. 1:4-9

The reading you heard a few minutes ago from the book of Jeremiah is not one that is typically on the “short list” of most preachers when it comes to sermon-planning.  In part, that’s because most preachers, given a choice, would rather preach on the wonderful stories from the New Testament, rather than the somewhat ominous stories in the Old Testament.  And in part, it’s because the events that Jeremiah is alluding to seem so long ago, and so far away, it’s hard to imagine why modern-day people would care what he has to say.

            Today, I’m going to propose that while chronologically and geographically, those events may have been long ago and far away, the faith situation that Jeremiah is addressing is just as current as the events you read about in this morning’s newspaper.  And because it is so real and so present for us, the “solution” that Jeremiah proposes to the “problem” the people of his day were encountering offers – especially alongside Paul’s words of encouragement in the part of the letter to the church at Corinth which we also heard just a few minutes ago – some very helpful advice for us as well.

            Now, for those of you whose memory of long, long-ago Biblical events may not be quite what you wish it was, let me refresh you on what was happening in Jeremiah’s time.  Jeremiah lived roughly 600 years before Jesus was born, in the southern part of the land of (Biblical) Palestine, which was called Judah.  Judah was surrounded by three powerful kingdoms, the kingdoms of Assyria, and Egypt, and Babylonia.  And all three of these kingdoms were continually warring with each other, seeking to expand their respective lands and possessions.

            In 597 BC, Babylonia invaded Judah, and captured the capital city – which was also the holy city – of Jerusalem.  (And) the Babylonian king promptly deported (i.e., exiled) not only the reigning king of Judah (Jehoiachin), but also many hundreds (or thousands) of other nobles, government officials, and craftspeople back to Babylonia.  And there they stayed – some of the Jews in Babylonia, some (including Jeremiah) exiled a few years later to Egypt, and some still in their homeland – for some 40 … or 70 (the commonest estimate of how long the exile lasted), or 490 years, depending on which Biblical writer you refer to.

            Now I think it’s easy for us, some 2600 years later, to simply file this information away as one more dry and dusty piece of not-particularly-interesting historical information … and go back to planning this afternoon’s shopping-trip or this evening’s supper.  But instead, I invite you to imagine yourself in that setting so long ago.

Imagine that you are a moderately well-to-do person, with a nice home, a good job, and a healthy, happy family.  Because you’re pretty astute about your community and about the wider world, you’ve noticed in recent weeks, as you’ve gone to work, or to shop in the marketplace, that there are lots of rumblings and gossip about the foreign armies that are gathered on your country’s border, apparently ready to attack at any time.  But you try not to think about it too much, and instead attend to your clothing-store, where you sell especially nice robes and tunics, or instead attend to your very important job as a city administrator, or instead attend to the pots that you throw or the rugs that you weave and earn a good living to support your family.

            One morning, you wake up as usual, and eat your bowl of pottage for breakfast, and you wash and dress to leave for your place of business, when suddenly your world comes to pieces!  You hear squadrons of horsemen trampling down the streets, and thumps and screams, as they run over dogs, and children, and anyone else who gets in their way.  Out of your window, you see rough, battle-scarred soldiers leap off their horses, unsheathe their swords, and start making a door-to-door sweep of the lovely homes in your neighborhood.  You hear the crashing as they knock over furniture, and the screams as they grab women – your relatives, your neighbors, your friends – and hurt them, or as they grab children –kids who just yesterday were playing with your kids – and without blinking an eye, cut their throats and toss their small bodies to the ground.

            And the door of your own home bursts open, and in come a half-dozen soldiers, yelling in a language you don’t understand, and they throw you on the floor, and kick you with their hard boots, and begin to grab food from your cupboards, and the silver-cups that your parents gave you for your wedding, and they lift your infant daughter out of her cradle, and your heart stops … But they toss the baby to your wife, throw ropes around your neck, and your older sons’ waists, and drag you all out into the street, where you wait for hours, in the hot sun, with nothing to eat, with no water to drink in the blazing desert sun, terrified that you and everyone you love will be slaughtered any minute, just like all those you hear and see dying all around you.

            You see the soldiers dragging out your best friends from the town council … the businesspeople who have the shops next to yours in the business district … even the mayor is brought out of his house, and dragged away battered and bleeding in chains.  Finally, mercifully, night falls.  There is more unintelligible shouting from your captors, and kicking and beating of many more of the captives, and more of the women are taken off and brutally assaulted, some returning bloody and broken, and others disappearing forever.  And you pray, and you cry, even though you try not to, and you wait for your family to be next.

            But by God’s grace, you all survive the night, and the next morning, your captors throw rough hunks of bread to you, and pass around a couple of skins of water, and then they line everyone up, tie and chain you together, and begin the long march away from everything you’ve ever known.  And along the long, hot, exhausting march to Babylon, the weaker ones die along the way.  Children who cry are grabbed by soldiers, and summarily killed.  Your middle daughter is bitten by a snake one day, and you are actually glad when she dies quickly from the poison, rather than suffering an even worse death at the hands of the Babylonians.

            And finally, after weeks of walking, filthy and emaciated, those of you who have survived arrive in one of the Babylonian towns.  Some families are split up, the women sent off wailing to some unknown location, the children gathered and herded like animals to somewhere else.  The lucky ones stay together, and are put in a crude stockade, where you live with barely enough food and water to keep you alive as the weeks drag on.  And then, the luckiest of all are given some bare plots of land, and a few basic tools, and told to make a go of it if they can, which is doubtful, since all of you are city-people, business-people, politicians … not farmers.

As you pick up the unfamiliar, rough-handled farm-tools, the reality sinks in.  You are an exile … perhaps a slave … and your home … and many of your family … and your job … are all gone, forever.  You have no idea what the future may hold, or if there is any future beyond the present moment.  You struggle with the most essential question of all:  what do I do now?

            And you realize that there are not a lot of choices for you and your people.  You could (and this may be most tempting of all) simply give up and die.  You could try to stage a rebellion against your captors – and almost certainly all die.  You could try to develop an escape-plan, but you can’t imagine how.  You could just spend all your energy fantasizing about some kind of miraculous rescue.  Or, you could choose – happily or not – eagerly or not – what Jeremiah is suggesting.  You can choose to tend to life.

But before we consider that option, I invite us to shift from our imaginings about that place long ago and far away, to the realities of the time and place in which we live.  I invite us to consider our own (very real) experiences of exile.

            Clearly, most (but not all) of us sitting here this morning have never been in a situation as terrible or as desperate as that of Jeremiah and his people.  Most of us have never been political exiles, or forced to live for decades (or for a lifetime) in a place where we felt like a total stranger, a place that we hated, a place where we felt bereft of everything that had ever been familiar or important to us.

            But even if we haven’t experienced that kind of exile, most of us have had times in our lives when things suddenly and unexpectedly changed, and our world has seemed to fall apart, and we just don’t know what to do.  Perhaps it was when we lost a job in which we were deeply invested.  Perhaps it was when an important relationship became broken, or came to end.  Perhaps it was when we, or someone we care about, was diagnosed with a serious illness, or had a sudden severe injury.  Perhaps, for many of us, it’s not a “was” but an “is.”  As in, we’re experiencing a form of exile right now, as our national economy continues to shift our lives in ways we never imagined.

            And our choices are pretty similar to those of Jeremiah and his people, all those 2600 years ago.  We, too, may be tempted to just give up altogether.  To simply put our heads down, and die.  Or (and I believe this is a choice many people are making right now based on the campaign-ads and political rhetoric I read and see), we too may be tempted to stage as much of a rebellion as can be mustered against those in political power whom we see as “the problem” in our situation (although I suspect that which people those are perceived to be “the problem” probably varies widely among us).  Another option that may tempt us, like Jeremia’s people, is to try to figure out how to escape – in our case, to move to another part of the country, or to try to find a different job that pays better, or to escape into the fantasy worlds offered by books, television, movies, or into alternative realities offered by drinking too much … or eating things we shouldn’t … or experimenting sexually … or looking for something, for anything, that will make us feel like there’s a way out.

            My friends, Jeremiah may have lived long ago and far away, but as I said earlier,

the life situation – and the faith situation – he is addressing in these Biblical passages is not.  The faith questions that emerged all those centuries ago for those people who were in exile are the same faith questions that emerge for us today:  where is God in all this mess?  how could God let this happen?  what does it mean for us to stay faithful, to remember that we are God’s beloved children, that we are God’s people, in the middle of all this?  And so, Jeremiah’s answer to the questions of his people is important for us to consider. 

            “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles …: 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… (S)eek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

            When the people of Jeremiah’s time heard these words, they must have thought:  That man is flat out of his mind!  Build houses?  Plant gardens?  I’m a government bureaucrat, not a builder.  I’m a seamstress, a tailor, a cook, a potter, not a farmer.  I wouldn’t know a 2 x 4 from a fence-pole, much less how to make a building with it.  I don’t know a carrot seed from a coconut, much less how to raise them!  And actually mingle with these horrible strangers?  I don’t think so!  Take a new spouse for myself from among these hateful people?  No way!  Marry my children off to these foreigners?  Not a chance!  I am not going to adapt to this place.  I am not going to give up everything I know and love.  I am not going to change, just because I’m here rather than at home.  What does that Jeremiah think he’s saying, anyway?!

            Yet, what Jeremiah was suggesting was this.  You may not like the reality you’re in, but you have to accept it … and learn to live with it.  Yes, you’re suffering … but part of the bigger reality of life is that everyone suffers.  Suffering is simply part of the human condition.  And your suffering – because it’s yours – truly is terrible.  You didn’t get to choose whether or not these awful things happened to you.

            Part of the good news is, you do get to choose how you’re going to respond.  And you can choose whether to make your suffering worse – or to make it better – by the choices you make about how you will live.

            Yes, you can give up.  You can choose death – personal death, social death, the death of your faith.  Or, you can choose life.  You can choose to build homes for your families to live in.  You can choose to plant things.  Every time you put a seed in the ground, it’s a sign of hope for the future.  You can make babies, make families.  Every time you join your life to the life of someone else, it offers a whole new set of possibilities.

            You can choose to plant yourself.  To root yourself.  In this place, and this time.  In this community.  Because, as Jeremiah reminded his people, whatever is happening to us, we are still part of a community.  Whether or not you like all those folks who live around you, whether or not you always agree with all of those folks who share this community with you, we are all in this together.  And staying together – nurturing life, supporting community – is the only way that anyone is going to get through these hard times.  Remember that deep truth that we have always known, that our faith has always taught us, which is that with God, together, we can get through anything.

            And don’t forget that “with God” part, either.  Which is what our entire faith witness reminds us of, and which Paul describes so beautifully in that promise we heard today from the first part of his letter to the church at Corinth:  “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him … so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He will strengthen you to the end … God is faithful.”

            Jeremiah knew, as Paul knew, that even though things were really bad, in time God would “lead the people home.”  We need to remember and trust that promise too.  In time, things will come ‘round right.  Jeremiah and Paul both knew that God is faithful.  We need to remember and believe that too.  God is, and has always been, faithful.  And Paul knew that Jesus came in the middle of horrible circumstances, when many of the Jewish people were living in exile in their own homeland.  And he knew that Jesus, our Christ, will strengthen us in whatever faces us.  We need to remember that too.

We need to rely on Christ’s strength – on God’s love – on the Spirit’s wisdom – when our own is not enough.  And in time, if we choose to partner with God, and with one another, and to tend to life, God will lead us home.  Amen.