Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
A Sermon Preached by the
Reverend Rob Lee
Bethesda Presbyterian
Church
October 9th,
2016 | The 21st Sunday after Pentecost
Won’t you pray with me?
Here I raise mine Ebenezer, hither by thy help I’m come.
And I hope by thy good pleasure safely to arrive at home. Jesus sought us when
a stranger wandering from the fold of God, he to rescue us from danger
interposed his precious blood. May I speak in the name of him who interposed
his blood for us. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
This past week, my fiancée’s company lost a co-worker to
addiction. The realities of this complex issue of dying to addiction have
played out in Stephanie’s life now twice, one in her place of business and the
other with her best friend’s brother, and Stephanie and I were sitting with one
another after the funeral and she asked me a question about the intricacies of
life, death, and God’s place in it all. I didn’t have an answer, and I was
ashamed that I didn’t. I mean, I’m a second year divinity school student at one
of the most prestigious universities in the county, shouldn’t they be teaching
these things? And I couldn’t even offer comfort to the person who I want to
spend the rest of my life with. I ask you to hold that image of me being
totally and completely lost when asked a question about faith as we move
through today’s lesson. We’ll get back to it, I promise.
I have two friends who I’ve gotten to know pretty well
over the past year. I have the privilege of officiating their wedding next
August. But if we had lived in the South before 1967 when the Supreme Court
struck down the laws barring interracial marriage, this couple could not get
married. In my counseling with them preparing for the marriage I asked some
initial questions and pondered with them if it would be hard today to be in an
interracial marriage in 2016. While we agreed that times have certainly changed
since the Jim Crow South, they still are the victim of comments and jokes that strike
at a very real reality: We live in dangerous, and unsettling times.
I don’t have to tell you about our presidential campaign,
where hate is being spewed and bigotry uplifted as a means to degrade an
opponent. I don’t have to tell you about police violence, I don’t have to tell
you about the streets of Chicago. I don’t have to tell you about how the
Presbyterian Church is still dealing with the fallout over the gay marriage
debate. Now before you tune me out as a rebel rouser who is just here to stir
the pot, let me offer you these words from Jeremiah and then I promise I will
be a good preacher and know when to sit down.
Nebuchadnezzar believes he is a god, much like some of
our politicians believe. He has taken the Israelites into exile in Babylon and
all hope is lost. In Psalm 137 when they talk about the exile by the
rivers of Babylon the Psalmist writes, “There we sat down and there
we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our
harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked
for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How could we sing
the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”
Perhaps
you’ve been in this situation, perhaps you’ve felt so far from the love of God
that you yourself could not love. This is precisely where we meet the Israelite
people today, and this is precisely where we find our country and Church today.
We are broken, we are in exile, and we are defeated. The great recession left
our nation broken economically, two of the longest wars this nation has seen
have left our nation’s spirit broken, and to compound all of that, racism is
rearing its head in the ugliest way since that of the Jim Crow laws. And we the
church have failed miserably in this exile. We are broken, bruised, and
bloodied from low attendance, poor financial planning, and failed church
polity. We have buried our heads in the sand and hoping this stuff will pass. So
where is the good news in all of this? Where is God in exile?
God is
in Babylon. I think the beautiful part if there is any beautiful part about the
exile story in Jeremiah is that though God’s Spirit may have rested in
Jerusalem, God was fully with the people by the waters in Babylon. God sent
Jeremiah as a prophet to remind the people to love where they are, and love the
people they are around, even if they don’t look like you, sound like you, and
act like you. You see people will tell you that Nebuchadnezzar is God when the
Israelites are in exile, and God has news for Babylon: God will restore the
fortunes of Zion. As one of my seminary professors said, “The Babylonians don’t
know the rest of the story.”
My
friends if the Babylonians have taken you into exile how are you responding? If
you are faced with crippling debt in an uncertain economy, if your son or
daughter has gone off to war, if your political party of choice has taken a
turn for hate how are you going to act? Jeremiah makes it clear: Pray for the
welfare of the city you have been exiled to. That doesn’t mean that you give up
what God has given you, it means simply and directly you live in this world and
you have to make the best of it.
If you
don’t believe me, look to the Apostle Paul. Paul makes it clear that our
citizenship is in heaven and not on earth, we’re exiled here and now. Though we
are here we are destined for something different. Now Paul took it to a new
level and warned people not to marry due to that impending citizenship of
heaven, but I think Paul, for all of his faults, does a good job of saying “Do
not be conformed to the image of this world, but be transformed by the renewing
of your minds.”
I want
to caution you though, in this Pauline reading of scripture sometimes we get so
heavenly minded that we do no earthly good. I think that God of the whole of
creation, the God revealed in Jesus Christ in the incarnation and sustained by
the Holy Spirit at Pentecost wants Christians, you and me to pray for the
welfare of the city in which we have been planted. We must be lovers in
dangerous times.
Now you
may ask what does that mean? Well that line, lovers in a dangerous time comes
from a song that has lyrics such as these, “You’ve got to kick at the darkness
until it bleeds daylight.” You’ve got to plant yourself here, at Bethesda
Presbyterian Church and pray for the welfare of your city. You’ve got to plant
gardens, and take husbands and wives. God wants you to thrive.
In my
own denomination, the United Methodist Church we are going through a debate
that the Presbyterian Church had a few years back surrounding human sexuality. And
in the midst of the debate, not speaking to the merits of either side, I just
wish both sides would pray for the welfare of our city, pray for the welfare of
our denomination. I wish we would break bread with one another, and drink wine.
I wish we would gather at a table and instead of throwing insults we would pray
and plant gardens.
Don’t
hear me wrong, we have real issues in our time, this is a dangerous time with
real problems. But we must be lovers, we must be people who love in fellowship,
friendship, policy and understanding. I promise you, if you pray for the
welfare of another person who may torment your very soul, your reality will
change. For God redeemed us through Jesus Christ, so that we might plant
gardens in exile. To be a lover in a dangerous time is to be lost in wonder,
love, and praise as that old hymn goes. This is true, even as our churches are
failing and dying in mass numbers.
I have
a book coming out here in a month or so, it’s a book on Millennials, people my
age who are investing their lives in the institutional church like I am. I
don’t know about Bethesda Presbyterian but many of the churches I have encountered
are nervous about their future and whether the church will be committed to
posterity. Well I want to offer you this: don’t be nervous.
In my book I
interview a friend named Rhody, and in our interview I asked Rhody why she is
giving her life to a dying organization like the Church. She said something
profound, she said, “There are some holy things, quite simply, that one cannot get outside of
the Church. While I can drink wine in community with friends and call it
fellowship, I cannot access the sanctified blood of Christ at any ole’
vineyard. While I can bake bread with my grandmother and feel that these
moments with her are sacred, I cannot partake of the body of Jesus in her
kitchen. And while I can marvel at how clean and renewed I feel as I step out
of the shower and call the sensation a moment of grace, I cannot baptize
myself. There are moments of fellowship, sacredness, and grace throughout our
daily lives, and for these moments, thanks be to God. But I do not believe that
these moments are substitutionary for Church and the ways we are blessed
specifically through it. And if it is indeed, as you say, a dying organization,
then I will sit by her bedside as she moans in pain. I will wear my Easter
dress to her funeral and attend with wet, braided hair so that I will feel in
all of her looming dampness what she has done for me.”
Friends, these are dangerous and unsettling times for
the church. To borrow from an old song of Americana, the old gray mare, she
ain’t what she used to be. We are in exile, and we’ve done it to ourselves much
like the Israelites did. But take heart, because what you don’t get in today’s
lectionary text is the verse that follows immediately after that.
God says through Jeremiah, “Only when
Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to
you my promise and bring you back to [Zion].[1] For surely I know the
plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm,
to give you a future with hope.” If I can offer anything to you today, to you
who are lovers in dangerous times, “kick at the darkness until bleeds
daylight.” God has not brought us this far to leave the Church here alone. And
that is the greatest and fullest hope we have.
Back to that theological question Stephanie asked me that I
couldn’t answer about the realities of life, death, and God’s place in it all. I
won’t bother you with the intricacies of the question or theological platitudes
that seek to explain away our exile here on earth or why bad things happen to
good people, why my friends have to worry about the comments made due to their marriage, or why addiction is even a word in our vocabulary.
But what I do know is this: we are lovers in exile, we are
people whom God will visit and bring to the land that God has promised. Take
God for God’s word. Keep the faith, and be lovers in dangerous times. Because
in our love, in our time, in our sacred space, we will find the welfare of the
city we are exiled to, this, our island home. All glory, honor, and power be to
the one who was, who is, and who is to come. AMEN.
