Welfare
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Click here for the video: Welfare
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. 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 what they 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.
A couple of months ago I had the opportunity to visit the local offices of Catholic Charities for an Interfaith Dialogue presentation about refugees and refugee relocation. The numbers are pretty staggering. Of the estimated 7.4 billion people currently living on this planet the United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that nearly 1% of the global population has been forcibly displaced from their homes, the highest level of displacement on record. Maybe 1% doesn’t sound like all that much until you realize that it adds up to 65.3 million people, 21.3 million of whom are officially classified as refugees- meaning that they are fleeing conflict or persecution. Like the family profiled recently on the radio program This American Life who are living in one of the many refugee camps that have been established in Greece. Greece, the poorest country in the European Union is playing host to tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the ongoing violence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Anyway, this family was talking about the psychological toll the experience was taking on their family, especially their three-year-old daughter whose twin died back in Syria when the apartment building they were living in was reduced to rubble by an artillery shell. Like thousands upon thousands of refugees they risked their lives making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean and now they are stuck. They clearly cannot go back, and the borders into the rest of Europe from Greece have been closed to the flood of refugees fleeing the violence, so there is no discernible way forward. The prospects are not good.
The UN and the Greek government are building camps for refugees that are expected to last for at least five years. But they could be there much longer. The Dadaab UN refugee complex near the Somali border in Kenya is the largest in the world and home to 345,000 people. It’s been there for twenty-five years and nearly a third of the people living there were born there. That’s no surprise once you discover that only about 1% of those 21 million refugees will ever be resettled somewhere in the world. In a word, they live in exile.
That is where God’s people found themselves after their homes in Jerusalem were also reduced to rubble by the machinery of war. Once the Babylonian army had laid waste to their city, they were forcibly relocated hundreds of miles away in Babylon. It didn’t just take a psychological toll on them, it took a spiritual toll. Their lives had been built on a particular understanding, maybe you’ll recognize it. They had believed that Yahweh had given them the land of Judah, and dwelt with them in the temple that stood in Jerusalem. As God’s covenant people they believed that they enjoyed God’s protection from the enemies that sought to do them harm. The Lord was their God, and they were God’s people. Wasn’t that the deal they had made? But something had broken down, starting with the city wall that was supposed to protect Jerusalem from invasion. Where was God when that happened? Had God abandoned them, left them for dead? Suddenly they found themselves in unfamiliar territory, both literally and figuratively, strangers in a strange land. The language was unfamiliar, the food, the smells, the customs, certainly the foreign gods that the people worshipped. All they wanted to do was to go home, and back to the way things were before. All they wanted was a Word from God, their God- the one who had led them out of slavery, across the wilderness, and into the land that had been promised to them. They wanted to know that they hadn’t been forsaken, that they would be forgiven and that God wasn’t going to let this stand. There were prophets who indeed said such things, prophets who told the people exactly what they wanted to hear, saying that Babylon would fall and they’d all return home. Jeremiah was never that kind of prophet. He wasn’t that kind of prophet before Jerusalem was destroyed, when all that people wanted to hear was how God would save them from destruction, and he wasn’t that kind of prophet after, when all they wanted to hear was how God was going to bring them back from exile. His chief responsibility was not to make people feel better about themselves or the circumstance they found themselves in. His chief responsibility was to speak the Word that God would have the people hear, even and maybe especially when it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Because sometimes it takes losing everything you’ve come to take for granted before you can begin to see it in a new way, a clearer way.
And essentially what God has to say to them is, get comfortable- you’re going to be there awhile. Not what they wanted to hear. Not anymore than the residents of the camps in Kenya, or Greece want to hear. But unlike today's refugees who are kept separate from the citizens of their host countries, and even kept separate from other refugee nationalities living in that same country, the exiles in Babylon lived with and among their captors. Their neighbors were the same ones who had carried them away from their homes. This is the lament we heard from the psalmist last week, “how could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Which makes what God says to them all the harder to take. Build, plant, multiply there and do not decrease. But more than all of that seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Okay, two things. First, it isn’t easy hearing that exile might be a sentence that God has imposed on the people, particularly people God has chosen as God’s own. So it needs to be made clear that this isn’t a, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” kind of thing. God didn’t destroy Jerusalem, the Babylonian army did. God didn’t carry the people off, again, that was the Babylonians. And while it’s true that God didn’t save them from it, neither did God allow them to be destroyed along with their city. By sending them into exile God saved the people from a worse fate. Second, now that they are there, the mission is the same as it has always been. In fact it’s a mission that many of them seemed to have forgotten all about in their former lives of privilege. They are to be a blessing to the people and the place in which they find themselves. They are to pray on its behalf. It doesn’t matter what came before. It doesn’t matter that they will be praying for the very people who brought them there in the first place. The direction is clear, and not all that different from the instructions that Jesus gave his own disciples, to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them.
It would be easier to just give up. Maybe that’s what makes this such a hard Word to hear. We would prefer easy. We would prefer to hear that God has a quick fix for us and will make it all better. That would be much easier, and this is hard. Hard to build when you’ve just witnessed how easily it can all be destroyed. Hard to plant, when you’re afraid that others will reap what you’ve sown and there won’t be enough to go around. Hard to multiply when all you feel like doing is hunkering down and protecting what little is left of what you have, when you can’t be certain what kind of future your children stand to inherit. That’s what makes this Word to a people in exile so challenging. Whether that exile is a war, or an illness, or a divorce, or a bankruptcy, or pink slip, or any number of things that carry us off from all that is familiar and have us navigating unfamiliar territory. Whether the disaster is natural, or of our own making, either way it means losing what we often have taken for granted and learning to see in new and clearer ways. Or not. That’s a possibility too. We can listen to this Word and do what God says and be the better for it by making the place we find ourselves better. Or we can be bitter, cursing God or whoever else we can find to blame and falling into despair. Or to quote the famous line from The Shawshank Redemption, “you either get busy living, or you get busy dying.”
Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Imperial Army- which had been occupying the Chinese mainland for two years already- showed up at a boarding school in the Chinese city of Chefoo that educated mostly British and American children of missionaries. About 150 children in all were rounded up with their teacher (there were no parents), and sent to live in the Japanese concentration camp called Weihsien. The teachers gathered up books, games, anything they could carry that would keep the children occupied, including Brownie and Girl Guide uniforms (what we would call Girl Scouts). The Japanese camps had little food and prisoners often died of starvation. Eggs were smuggled in and shared among the prisoners and the shells were even ground up and given to the children to get them extra calcium. The leaders of the girls’ troop in the camp were called the Brown Owls, who ran it like any other troop, whether they were in a concentration camp or not. According to Janie Hampton, who discovered a log book of their time in the camp, they were all told it doesn't matter how disgusting the food is, we still want good table manners. It doesn't matter how hungry you are, you're not going to steal. You're still going to do a good deed every day and help other people. And while the fate of being in a concentration camp could have been overpowering, the girl guides exert a positive influence on the adults who were with them. Again in the words of Janie Hampton, “It made a difference to all the adults in this camp and kept them going. The whole atmosphere was better because they had this very strong promise that they wouldn't stop smiling. They wouldn't give up. They would carry on singing songs. They would insist on everybody washing.” Mary Previte was one of those girls and she remembers very vividly a Brown Owl named Miss Stark who insisted on good manners, “So you're eating some kind of glop out of a maybe boiled animal grain,” she recalls, “and you're eating it out of a soap dish or a tin can. And here comes Miss Stark up behind us-- one of our teachers. ’Mary Taylor, do not slouch over your food while you are eating. Do not talk while you have food in your mouth. And there are not two sets of manners, one set of manners for the princesses in Buckingham Palace and another set of manners for the Weihsien concentration camp.’ They turned the hard work of gathering enough coal dust to recycle and use to heat their dormitory stoves in the winter into a game, all while the usual atrocities of war were going on in the background. Mary Previte also remembers the songs they sang. “It was like you weren't going to be afraid if you could sing about it,” she says. “We would sing, Day is done. Gone the sun from the sea, from the hills, from the sky. All is well, safely rest. God is nigh. “How could you be afraid when you're singing about all is well, safely rest, God is nigh?” she asked, years later. “How could you be afraid of that?”
Maybe that sounds like make believe, but it’s how 82-year-old Mary Previte and her Girl Guide troop survived for four years in that camp. It’s how anyone survives exile. By building and planting. Multiplying and not decreasing. By seeking the welfare of the place where you find yourself. Not just your own welfare, not just your own prospering, but the entire city of people who are your neighbors. Understanding that salvation is never, NEVER, and individual promise. Just like baptism is not a private sacrament. It belongs to the entire community of faith and beyond because it recognizes that my salvation is caught up in your salvation, and his and hers, and theirs. As Benjamin Franklin so famously said, “we must hang together, or we will most assuredly hang separately.”
This is the Word God has for us, in whatever exile we might find ourselves in our own lives, in our life as a church, or in our identity as those who follow Jesus in a world whose actions and values often feel contrary to our own. We aren’t called to retreat and we certainly aren’t called to wage some kind of culture war. We are called to seek the welfare of those around us, knowing that in their thriving, in their prosperity, in their peace we will find our own. We will find the very realm of God’s presence with us- the kingdom of God.