Our Lives Are Intertwined--April 15, 2020

Our Lives Are Intertwined--April 15, 2020

"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. For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the LORD." [Jeremiah 29:7-9]

Just when we think that God is our pet or mascot, only here to help out "us" (however we want to draw the lines around "us"), the actual living God speaks up, clears the divine throat, and says, "Ahem, your well-being is bound up with the well-being of everybody.  Your life is inextricably tied to the lives of all."

And that's just the thing.  Over and over again, the message from the Scriptures comes through that God is at work bringing us to life--but we have a way of hearing that as "only us, and NOT the others around you, who don't belong," when we really just needed to zoom out and see that God has been working to bring all of us to life.  Yes, including the people we don't think are worthy of it, or don't belong in our group, or even the ones we regard as enemies.

This is the really stunning move that Jeremiah makes as the exile in Babylon unfolded more than 2,500 years ago.  And it's a mindset we need to remember for this time and place, too.  When Jeremiah wrote, a large number of people from Judah had just lived through seeing their Temple destroyed, their king taken away, and their own lives turned upside down as they were carried away from everything familiar into exile.  They were separated from family, from friends, from work, and from the rhythms of normal life, too.  And all of it came at the hands of the arrogant and powerful Babylonian empire.  

Naturally, folks wanted to find any reason to believe that it would all be over soon.  In fact, there was a sort of shifting form of denial that you can see unfolding in writings from this time period. At first, there were folks in Judah who denied the Babylonians would ever get close:  "We're God's chosen people--we're different!  And God won't let anything that bad happen to us!"  And then when the Babylonians did come and burn the temple and the Jerusalem city walls to the ground, the conventional wisdom was, "Ok, but God wouldn't allow any of us to be taken captive into Babylon, right?  That's the capital of the enemy empire!"  But then exactly that happened.  So the conventional wisdom then became, "Ok, maybe some of us will go into exile, but it can't possibly last too long.  Just you wait and see--before you know it, we'll be on our way back to life as usual, and our old home country of Judah will be open for business once again!"

And Jeremiah had to be one of those few voices who said, "No.  That's not how this will work.  This is going to be a while.  God will bring us through it, to be sure.  But it's going to be longer than you think, and longer than you want it to be."  And then, most scandalously (but importantly) of all, Jeremiah said, "God is still committed to the big picture work of bringing life for the whole world, and even though you may not be able to see it yet, that means your well-being is caught up with the well-being of everybody else."

That's where these verses for today come from.  (And as a side note, it's also where the passage that starts, "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans to give you a future and a hope," comes from--so even that well-worn bit of scripture has to be understood as coming THROUGH exile, not INSTEAD of it!)  The message God sent through Jeremiah was that his fellow Judeans in exile could not just look out for their own well-being, but that they had to live their lives while also seeking the well-being of the city, and indeed the whole empire, around them.  As Jeremiah says it, "In its welfare you will find your welfare."  Yes, even though the city to which they were sent was in some ways "the enemy."  Yes, even though the city of Babylon didn't believe in Judah and Israel's God.  Yes, even though they Babylonians had just knocked down God's temple and ransacked the Ark of the Covenant.  The message from Jeremiah is that God is at work for good for all of them.

In other words, the logic of "Judah first!" was not only futile, but it ran against God's design to bring life for the people in exile and for the Babylonians, too!  And all of the wishful thinking that this exile thing was going to be just a short pause was wrongheaded, too--God was telling the people that it was going to take along time for the descendants of the exiles to come home (and yes, it would most likely not be the generation who went into exile who came home, but their children or grandchildren!).  Jeremiah was given the unenviable task of teaching people who were used to thinking in terms of "It's US against THEM" that God's directive to them was, "Pray for the ones you call 'THEM' because your life and theirs are entangled together."

It seems these are words we need to hear in this moment, too.  And I have to admit that I was well into adulthood myself before I ever remember learning this part of the Bible's story or the meaning of these verses, so we're probably all late to the party here.  But this moment of our lives can feel a lot like our own exile, as so many of us have had our normal routines up-ended, and people we care about are separated from us because of quarantine orders.  In days like these, of course, we would all love for it to be over as soon as possible.  Of course we would like to have some semblance of "normal" again, and we would like businesses to be able to get back to doing their work, kids to be back in schools, and the fear of contagion (or toilet paper shortages) to go away.  Of course we all wish those wishes.  But the dangerous temptation is for us to assume then, that our wish must be granted by God, on our timetable.  The dangerous jump of logic is to assume that "Me and my family are all probably safe from getting sick, and therefore, we should be allowed to jump back into things, because we're probably going to be just fine!" Or then it becomes, "The lives of other people who are already old and sick just aren't as important as me getting my stock portfolio back up to where it was!"  And the idolatrous leap follows: "God is surely going to protect Me-and-My-Group because we are believers--who cares about other people? They aren't necessarily believers like WE are!"

And to all of that, Jeremiah says, "No!  Your lives are bound up with the lives of others!  There is no Me-and-My-Group First--that damns us all!" At first, that will sound only like bad news--it sounds like saying he's just smashing our hopes for a quick recovery, and crushing our spirits in the process.  But Jeremiah would remind us that false hope isn't really hope--it's wishful thinking. And the only way to hold onto genuine hope is to clear away the false hopes and magical thinking that gets in the way.

Surely there were people in Jeremiah's day who thought he didn't have faith because he didn't believe the exile would be over shortly.  Surely there were those who said, "You must not really want good things for our people because you're telling us to get used to exile!"  Certainly there were people who accused him of not believing hard enough.  And Jeremiah knew he had to bear all that.  Instead his response was simply, "God wants us to see in this moment that our life is caught up with the lives of others--we aren't separate after all, even for all our differences."  Jeremiah sees the big picture view that the well-being of the people in exile is intertwined with the well-being of the foreigners whose land they live in.

And in this moment, perhaps we need to hear from Jeremiah again. As hard as it is, getting through this moment is going to take a while--longer than any of us would have wished for.  And beyond that, we are not given a religious exemption from suffering--Jeremiah reminded his people that even though they all believed in God, he and his fellow Judeans would have to go through the hardship of exile, and their lives were not really separate from the lives of the people they lived alongside.  It is time to be done with any thinking that we can seek the well-being of "just us religious people," or "Christians like us," or even just of our county, our state, or our country--our lives and our well-being are tied up with one another's.  Sometimes, maybe, we can pretend we don't see it--but times like a pandemic remind us that we can only find our welfare in the welfare of those around us... because God is committed to bringing life to this whole hurting world.

Today's calling, then, the difficult tasking of dismantling all the places in our hearts and minds we have built on the wrongheaded assumption that our good is separable from the good of others, or that my first quarter profits are more important than someone else's life.  Today's calling is to hear that God is indeed calling us to life--by calling all of us to life in connection with one another.

Lord God, help us to seek the well-being of all around us, and to see that you love all around us.