Luther Rice Memorial Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, August 26, 1979; with minor changes, Forest Heights Baptist Church, Oxon Hill, MD, Sept. 9, 1979; Howard University School of Religion Chapel, Washington, DC, Oct. 10, 1979; Twinbrook Baptist Church, Rockville, MD, retreat, Jan. 19, 1980; First Baptist Church, Rockville, MD, Nov. 16, 1980; Calverton Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, Jan. 17, 1982; Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC July 28, 1985
The headlines occasionally frighten us, informing us that some prisoners have escaped from some House of Corrections. That comes as no surprise to, I’m sure. People who are confined want out, of course. People who have been uprooted from their homes and family and friends, people who have been taken away from their normal pursuits, are angry and are hostile and are naturally quite anxious to get out. It doesn't matter whether they are in prison because of their willful breaking of the law, or whether they are in the hospital because their bodies have failed, them, or whether they are just trapped in a runaway Metro train. The result is much the same: people who are not where they want to be or think they ought to be get restless. Only with difficulty do they make their peace with the situation. They want out.
Now what about the sort of uprooting that takes you forcibly away not only from home and family and normal pursuits, but even takes you to a strange and alien land? What about what we call exile, the situation when you know that you cannot return to your homeland, that the sights and sounds with which you grew up are forever locked away for you? Some of our churches have dealt with refugees from Southeast Asia; we have watched thousands of people go into exile as a result of the political and military developments in that corner of the world. And it has not been easy for them. Some have prospered, to be sure; some have made their way into American life fairly well. But for many there has been the agonizing, wrenching knowledge that they cannot go home, they cannot rebuild life as they have known it, they will always be a little disoriented, a little out of place. They are in exile. Our city is impacted by Haitians, Cubans, Salvadorians, Ethiopians, all wanting, needing to leave home, but in exile.
My thesis is that God's people know what exile is. Always the people of God have had to deal with the reality that in a measure they are strangers and aliens, exiles, in a culture of which they can never be fully a part. But how they deal with that makes all the difference. In the seventh century before Christ, some 2600 years ago, the people of the southern kingdom, called Judah, found themselves drawn into exile. The background and the politics are quite complex, and we cannot go into that fully. Suffice it to recall that in the middle of the decline and fall of the Assyrian empire, and as a result of the power struggle between Egypt and Babylon, the little kingdom of Judah found itself subservient first to one, then to the other, and always in a bit of a rebellious mood. When King Jehoiakim asserted his independence, and then rather conveniently died without having to face the full consequences, the Babylonians moved against Judah. They deported the new king, the young Jehoiachin, the king's family, and all the nation's leadership. The cream of the crop were taken to Babylon, there to live in exile, far from the land they had ruled, far from the institutions they had developed, and, some of them would say, far from the God whom they had worshipped. "How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" they asked. What is the future? What do you do with yourself when you are an exile? In what do you invest your hope?
Then to this exile community there came the counsel of the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah is certainly one of the more fascinating personalities of the Old Testament: a man of intense emotions, a perennial champion of unpopular causes. Jeremiah counseled the rulers of Judah not to resist Babylon, but they had paid no attention to his counsel. And now in their exile and their misery, they were addressed again by this prophet whom they feared and hated. The Letter to the Exiles is contained in the 29th chapter of Jeremiah's book of prophecy, and it includes what must have been some more bitter pills to the exiles in Babylon.
Jeremiah's counsel to the exiles of Judah stuck away in alien Babylon is a word for us too. It speaks to us as contemporary Christians, it especially addresses us as we struggle to identify who we are and what we ought to become in this community.
For one thing, it helps us firm up our identity. It tells us who we are; it reminds us that we have a particular and precise identity. It puts us into the category of exiles. We are strangers here. As an old Gospel song puts it, rather more crudely than I would have preferred, but yet not without the truth, "This world is not my home.” As God's people, we know that our value system is not the same as the world's, our relationship to the things of the spirit is not the same as that of the secular world around us. We're different, we're out of sync, we're exiles, right?
Well, maybe so and maybe not. We can debate that one another time. Plenty of evidence suggests that Christians are not all that different from the rest of the world. But to examine our place as exiles from the perspective that Jeremiah brings us, we have to move on to a startling assertion ... that exile is God’s doing, and that He expects us to live in confidence despite it. Listen to his language: “To all the exiles whom I have sent into exile/” It is God's doing, He is involved in our being here in this world, in this context, it is no accident. And then, "Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, give your daughters in marriage, et cetera.” Affect all the trappings of normality, he says. Live in peace, live in confidence, don't be immobilized by your identity as exiles. Settle in, don't withdraw, but engage. Engage that world, that Babylon; hook up with it, embrace it, live in it, carry out your normal functions, but at the same time, never forget who you are. Never forget that you are in exile. You are God’s people, exiles; own that, affirm that. God put you here; you don’t belong to this city’s ways, but God put you here for a purpose.
You see, I think that Jeremiah sensed that there is always in the religious community the temptation to withdraw into a safe little box where we can do our religious thing in our own private way, and fail to engage in any but the most superficial ways with the world around us. This is a particularly acute tendency for those of us who come from an evangelical heritage. Most of us in this congregation who are over thirty-five, and maybe some who are younger, had it pounded into us as young Christians, "Love not the world." We were told in many ways, some direct and some subtle, that we were to avoid contact with the great unwashed out there, or else we would be contaminated. And so I for one grew up in a religious culture in which it was stressed that good Baptist boys played with other good Baptist boys and dated only similarly good and protected Baptist girls and cultivated friendships with the church crowd.
And all of that has its merits, but it comes off rather more on the negative than Jeremiah would let us. As exiles in a 20th century Babylon, surely there must be more for us to do than to sit around and keep ourselves unspotted and untried. I think that's what the prophet is getting at in his letter to the leaders of Judah: you're in exile, true; but it need not be a bondage, it need not be bound up with rules and legalities, and more important yet, it need not be a miserable and hopeless scene. Embrace life and live it to the full, he says.
But the prophet is not finished with his counsel, and it is here that he gets down to business in a shocking way. This is where I'm really heading with my treatment of this letter. It is, he says, not only that God has made you exiles – no accident, but God's doing – and it is not only that as exiles you are to affirm and live your lives on a confident basis. But – and this can only have been shocking and distasteful to the recipients of his message – “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. “
Now it must have been one thing to hear that God made you an outcast. And it must have been a bit frightening to be told not to kick over the traces, but to settle in to the patterns of human life. But to be told to pollute your prayers with the name of Babylon, to be urged to seek out the good of your captors, to imagine that God would want these heathen to prosper in any fashion, that must have been hard indeed to hear. In fact, we have ample evidence that the exiles in Babylon did not hear Jeremiah, and went about setting themselves up as an alternative community, in but not of Babylon, waiting and wailing and pressing for their release, but concerned only about themselves. And thus those whom God had chosen as a light to the nations pass from the scene of history, marked as spiritual failures, failures because, against the counsel of Jeremiah, they did not seek the welfare of the city where God sent them.
Seek the welfare of the city; actively search out the shalom of the city – the shalom, the peace of the city, that's what the text says literally. To get the full force of it in English you have to say something like, "Press for peace and justice in the city." Does that carry a word from the Lord for us?
I am convinced that it does. I am convinced that in church after church we need to hear the message, "Seek the shalom of the city; press for the welfare, the peace and justice of this community." Lots of folks who are church members here and other places think their churches are in trouble. They feel that the masses are not responding, the crowds have stopped coming, and growth is not occurring. Therefore trouble. But they/we have forgotten something: that we are not operators of popularity contests, we are exiles, strangers, outcasts. To a degree we’ll always be misfits. And as exiles it is our role to seek the welfare of the city.
I am saying that a church like ours is on the wrong track when it asks, "How can we get more members?" and fails to ask, “What are the human needs which we can serve?” I am saying that we are off target, Biblically speaking, when our budgets, our rhetoric, our programs reflect only our care for one another if, and not our seeking the welfare of the city. I am arguing that when a church is primarily interested in its own survival, it has missed the mark, it is not seeking the shalom of the city.
A few years ago I heard Joe Mathews, then director of the Ecumenical Institute in Chicago, describe his group's strategy for Christian ministry. He said, what we have done is to draw on the map a square mile of Chicago turf, just marked off exactly one square mile, with our own ministry center right in the middle of it, and we determined to meet every human need we could identify within that square mile. He went on to describe how that meant that if there were hungry people there, they were fed; if there were the cold, they were sheltered. If there were those for whom justice had been denied, then it was off to the courthouse or the precinct house to take care of that. Every human need: the shalom of the city. An expansive dream? A visionary idea? Yes, of course, but the proper theme of God’s people in exile.
Can you see us seeking the welfare of our community’s youth, often bored, sometimes driven by impossible and unreflective demands, victimized by their own peers and by the cynical who push drugs and peddle alcoholic escapes? We could involve ourselves with their needs and thus develop the peace of the community.
Can you think of the internationals here, right here, people themselves in one form of exile or another, but perhaps lonely, needing affirmation? And who better to help an exile than another exile who seeks the shalom, the peace, that God would give?
And there is the brokenness of family life. Can it not be that God would want us to turn our own experiences in brokenness around and use them in such a way that something positive would emerge? Can it not be that there is something more to be done beyond bemoaning what is happening with families, so that out of the pain and frustration that some of us exiles feel God could work new healing for those around us?
I could go on; I could catalog the complex of issues that arise out of the world of work: men caught in dead-end jobs, women unable to find challenging work, older people left with energy to burn.
Or I might toss about the questions related to the affluent lifestyle, the sort of materialism that leads to, the energy and ecology questions it brings forward.
Or we could together ponder this community's difficulties in housing and education and law enforcement and on and on. But I think it might be sufficient to capsule it all: "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.” And hear the promise the Lord makes if we are faithful exiles, if we truly own our exile: “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope."
At the bottom line we discover that in expending our church instead of protecting it, we have in fact made at a part of God's future. We are exiles, but we own that, we acknowledge that, and in losing ourselves we find our real identity, our own shalom, the peace God gives us.
