| Date | Speaker | Passage | Printable Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 Oct 2007 - 00:00 | Dan Plasman | Jeremiah 29:1-7 | Not Available |
Exile, a dictionary definition: “the absence or expulsion from home or country; the act of expelling a person from one’s native land.
The 137th Psalm expresses the angst of exile like this: “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and there we wept as we remembered Zion (Jerusalem).”
For seven hundred miles they were marched with fish hooks through their noses from their Jerusalem home across the desert to their Babylonian exile: the political leaders, skilled laborers, the artisans, the educated, the aristocracy.
The Hebrews, God’s chosen ones, the descendants of Sarah and Rebekah and Rachael, the people of Moses, find themselves in a strange land. Prisoners against their will.
Everything about the land of their Babylonian captors makes them homesick. The customs are strange. The food isn’t kosher. The language is incomprehensible. The schools are substandard. The street signs are impossible to figure out. They can’t figure out the currency. The gods of the Babylonians bear no resemblance to the God of the Hebrews.
Everything familiar has been stripped away. There is no temple, no worship, no home. This is exile, and exile is a place where they don’t want to be, with people they know they don’t want to be with. Their lives have taken a sudden detour and now they are stuck . . . stuck . . . stuck.
Though the Hebrews had their Babylon, and the New Testament writer John had his Patmos and Napoleon Bonaparte had his Elba, I don’t presume that any of us have known the ordeal of exile, carried off against our wills to a place we don’t want to be.
But I do presume that all of us from time to time have been confronted with an occasional detour, and have known that terrible and awful sense of being trapped and stuck. The place where we’re not in control. That period when nothing seems normal. When the props and scaffolding that make our lives secure are pulled away. Times when we feel in the wrong place, with the wrong people. Exile.
Craig Barnes, a Presbyterian minister and seminary professor, muses: Maybe your career has taken some strange turns, or maybe it is about to this week. Maybe a very special relationship has taken a strange turn into a hard place, or maybe the strange turn is that there is not a special relationship in your life. Who can anticipates the hard detours into poor health, unemployment, or divorce. How can you ever be prepared for the day of standing beside an open grave? No one plans grief. Sometimes you get exactly what you did plan in life only to discover that it has overwhelmed your life and taken you to places you did not plan.Maybe we do know something about detours and exiles.
What’s the good word from Jeremiah? What does the prophet/counselor/therapist say to those in a place they don’t want be? He could have said, “Sit back in your Lazy Boy chairs and get nostalgic, pine away for the good olds day.” But he doesn’t. He could have said, “Get stoic. Stuff your emotions. Put up a good front.” But he doesn’t. He could have said, “Get defiant. Nurse your grudges. Harden yourselves. Look out for number one and don’t worry about anyone else but yourself.” But he doesn’t.
He tells them, rather, to settle in, to build houses and live in them; to plant gardens and eat what they produce. To marry and create loving communities. And then he tells them to seek the welfare of the city of their exile, the city in which they are captive and to pray for its welfare, its shalom, its peace.
And there it is. That was their calling. It would be their salve, their balm, their cure for the exile blues. And ours too. Living in the past, doesn’t solve anything. Fearing the future is a waste of time because tomorrow belongs to God. Jeremiah tells them to live in the present. In the here and now. Involve ourselves in creating a more beautiful, more just, more civil world.
Frederick Buechner, in his book Longing for Home, writes: "We carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home that beckons us." But, he adds, "woe to us if we forget the homeless ones who have no vote, no power, nobody to lobby for them, who might as
well have no faces. Woe to us if we forget our own homelessness. To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not really to be home in any of them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intrinsically interwoven that there can be no peace for any of us until there is real peace for all of us."It’s what Tim Robbins playing the character of Andy said to Morgan Freeman playing the character of Red in the movie, The Shawshank Redemption. – “Either you get busy living, or you get busy dying.”
When you get busy living, you need from time to time some nourishment, some food and drink, some loaf and cup to remind you of what it’s all about. It’s not about us, our wills, our ways. It’s about God. It’s about Christ. It’s about the Spirit that lives within and among us.