Planting in Exile
Jeremiah 29:4-13
March 29, 2020
Matt Goodale
To hear an audio recording of this sermon, follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLSK-QkjtDQ&t=
Our scripture reading today comes from Jeremiah 29:4-13. Hear the word of the Lord:
4 “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. 6 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. 7 But seek 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. 8 For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, 9 for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, declares the Lord.
10 “For thus says the Lord: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. 11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. 13 You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”
In the Jewish rabbinical tradition, they talk about scripture having seventy faces. So when you read it, you keep turning it like a gem, letting the light refract through the various faces in new and unexpected ways. That’s why we can come to the same passages of scripture over and over again throughout our life and always find something new. We keep turning the gem and the light refracts a new shade, a new color, a new face we didn’t notice before.
Some of you may remember that I preached on this same passage last summer, but as we read it through a new lens and a new context, God’s Spirit speaks a fresh word. My prayer is that this familiar scripture will speak afresh to all of us today.
In our text today, Jeremiah addresses a letter to the exiles in Babylon. His words bring them unexpected news. His message is the last thing they expect or want to hear. Speaking as God’s prophet, he delivers no announcement of imminent deliverance for the exiles; in fact, he gives no announcement of deliverance at all. Instead, he tells the exiles to put down roots in the foreign place they now reside; he instructs them to build houses, plant gardens, marry and have families, pray for the welfare of their new city, Babylon. They are to settle in and make the most of their time in exile because they will be there for the long haul. This is not the news the exiles had hoped to get from God’s prophet!
Israel was taken into exile in 587 BC. Jerusalem was overrun by the Babylonians – the world superpower at the time – and many of the people, including all of their leaders were taken captive and marched 700 miles across the Middle Eastern desert into exile. The people were uprooted from the place they were born. The land promised to them by God, the land they had inhabited for centuries, which they had built upon and poured their sweat and blood into, was violently seized from them. They were gathered together and marched against their will to a foreign land, Babylon.
In their new land, Babylon, the customs were strange, the language incomprehensible, the religion and landscape are new and peculiar. All their comforts and familiar parts of life – their home, their food, their temple, their landmarks – are gone. They are in a place they do not want to be, surrounded by people they do not want to be around, and they wonder when God will intervene. They wonder if they’ve been abandoned by their God who promised to take care of them.
Israel’s exile was a violent and extreme form of what we all experience from time to time. The essential meaning of exile is that we find ourselves where we don’t want to be. Something happens that dislocates us from our preferred or normal ways of living. Illness. Job loss. Accident. Depression. Retirement. Divorce. Death of a loved one. Coronavirus. The reality of our lives are rearranged without anyone asking our permission. Our life no longer looks the way we wish it did; it feels disjointed; we are in unfamiliar and uncharted territory; we long for things to return to normal or to return to the way they used be. We are no longer at home.
The exile experienced by the Israelites is a macro scale of the minor and major exiles we all experience simply by being alive. Repeatedly, life throws us curveballs – as we’re experiencing in extreme forms right now—and we find ourselves ripped from our comfortable and familiar ways of living; we no longer feel at home. We feel as if we too have been forced to march 700 miles across a God-forsaken desert to a strange and unfamiliar place.
Those in Babylonian exile complained bitterly about their new circumstances they were forced to live in; they longed to return to Jerusalem. They wallowed in self-pity.
We can all understand their complaint; we can all understand their self-pity. We might even say it’s justified! We’ve had these same thoughts, these same complaints. God, why me? Why did this happen? I can’t stand this new life I’ve been forced into; it’s not fair.
The problem for the Israelites in Babylonian exile was not in their complaints, but it was that they had religious leaders who nurtured their self-pity. Jeremiah gives us three of their names: Ahab, Zedekiah and Shemiah. These religious leaders, who claimed to be God’s prophets were at odds with Jeremiah. They called attention to the unfair plight of the exiles. They claimed that exile would not last long.
As Eugene Peterson writes in his book on Jeremiah: “These three prophets made a good living fomenting discontent and merchandising nostalgia. But their messages and dreams, besides being false, were destructive. False dreams interfere with honest living.” (Peterson)
Because if the people thought they were going home soon, if they thought their exile would be short-lived, then there was no reason to engage in faithful committed work in Babylon. If there was a good chance they would get back all they lost, then there was no reason to develop a life of richness or depth in the place they lived. There was no need to live intentionally in Babylon because it was only temporary. The prophets manipulated the self-pity of those in exile, promising them false dreams and fantasies of a normal life that would soon return. The people, glad for a religious excuse to be lazy, lived irresponsibly, unintentionally and without any richness or depth to their lives.
And then, one day a letter arrives to the exiles from Jeremiah. It is unexpected news. Jeremiah writes: “This is the Message from God-of-the-Angel-Armies, Israel’s God, to all the exiles I’ve taken from Jerusalem to Babylon: ‘Build houses and make yourselves at home. Put in gardens and eat what grows in that country. Marry and have children…Work for the country’s welfare. Pray for Babylon’s well-being…Don’t let all those so-called preachers who are all over the place take you in with their lies.’” You will be in exile for awhile – seventy years to be exact – so you should make the most of your time there.
Jeremiah’s message would have dropped jaws and turned heads. You want us to what? To build houses and plant gardens? To marry and work? Here in Babylon!? In exile!?
Jeremiah’s message is a rebuke and an invitation. Jeremiah challenges those in exile: “Quit sitting around feeling sorry for yourselves. The aim of the person of faith is not to be as comfortable as possible but to live as deeply and thoroughly as possible – to deal with the reality of life, discover truth, create beauty, act out love. You didn’t do it when you were in Jerusalem. Why don’t you try doing it here, in Babylon?” (Peterson). Don’t just live in order to get through life, waiting for some miraculous intervention. Yes, you can pray for a miracle, but that doesn’t get you off the hook from living a faithful life where you are in exile. You only get one life, and exile may be your only reality for days, months or years of that life, so will you choose to throw it away, or will you seek out the good where you’re at; will you seek to plant roots and live a life of depth, texture and richness, even in exile?
As Peterson writes: “The only place you have to be human is right where you are right now. The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day.” And this very day we find ourselves in exile. Not exactly away from home (we find ourselves too much at home in fact), but away from our routines, our relationships, our comfortable and normal ways of living. This virus has forced us to march 700 miles across the desert to a strange and unfamiliar place. And in this strange place we might call exile we are faced with a decision: will I live intentionally and faithfully in the circumstances I’m provided this very day? Or will I squander these days, these weeks, these months of my life just waiting for things to get better?
Jeremiah’s message to the exiles is one that we all desperately need to hear. We live in a culture obsessed with quick-fixes. We hate exile and will do whatever we can to avoid it. If we don’t like a job, we get a new one. If we don’t like our house, we buy a different one. If we don’t like our life at the moment, then we seek out escapes and addictions. We try ten-step programs, new diets, new cars, anything we can get our hands on to help us endure the unhappy and unfulfilled life we are living. As Americans, most of us have lost the ability to be courageously human in the midst of exile.
Exile, or being where we do not want to be in life, forces a decision: Will I focus my attention on what is wrong with the world and feel sorry for myself? Or will I focus my energies on how I can live at my best in this place I find myself right now? It is much easier to focus on problems than it is to live a meaningful life. Today and in the weeks to come we will be faced with decisions about how we will respond to our exile conditions.
Jeremiah is rebuking the exiles for squandering their lives, for refusing to explore what faithful living in Babylon looks like. But in the core of his message is also invitation and promise. The core of God’s promise to the Israelites in exile was this: “I’ll show up and take care of you as I promised and bring you back home. I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for. When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen. When you come looking for me you’ll find me.” (The Message)
Jeremiah 29:11 is one of the most quoted scripture verses: “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.” I also think Jeremiah 29:11 is arguably the most misquoted verse in scripture. This promise of God is usually taken and twisted into supporting a Christian fantasy life, one that is supposed to be perfect and blessed and beautiful all the time. This verse is used too often to encourage people to just wait and hang on until your life is blessed again. It won’t be long, because God’s plan for you can’t possibly involve exile. However, in context, this message is a promise to the people that God will be with them even and especially in their exile! Exile is not outside of the bounds of God’s grace or God’s plan. This promise is an encouragement to us that the exile experiences in our lives are not a waste. They are not beside the point. God has promised that all of it will be redeemed; all of it will be used in God’s masterplan for the restoration and renewal of our lives.
Now, I want to make it clear that I do not believe God relishes in our exile experiences; I believe God weeps with us when we weep and hurts with us when we hurt. But Jeremiah invites us into a new way of living in exile. A new way of facing these next few weeks and possibly months of exile in such a way that we can find depth, richness and texture even in the face of undesirable circumstances. We have a choice to be faithful with the life we’ve been given, no matter the circumstances, or we can waste it away, waiting for it to get better.
And amazingly, this period of Babylonian exile was the most creative period in Israelite history. It was in exile that the Old Testament Scriptures we have in our Bibles were compiled, edited and embraced. The Israelites did not lose their identity in exile. They found it. They learned to pray and engage God in more profound and deeply meaningful ways than ever before.
Exile has this way of peeling back our false ways of living that are revealed to be lazy, busy and pretty self-absorbed. Exile jars us from our false dreams, our false ways of trying to be human. And it is in exile that we encounter the Living God and are invited into a new way of life –an abundant life that is able to be faithful and courageously human in all circumstances of life.
To be human is not run away from exile, but it is to seek God in the midst of it. To be human is to be fully alive, to live intentionally and faithfully with all of our life – not just the good parts.
The very strangeness of exile can open up new reality to us. Exile, if we let it, has this ability to peel back the many layers, comforts and routines we build into our life and that we often mistake for being a true and genuine life. Exile, if we let it, can reveal to us what really matters and frees us to pursue what really matters. Because it is in exile that we most clearly encounter the Living God and are invited into a new way of life – an abundant life that is faithful and courageously human. Amen.