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. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 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. 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.
Everyone is an expert these days. If a baseball team loses a game, there is no shortage of self-proclaimed experts who will immediately begin to broadcast their vast knowledge of what went wrong and how it would have been different if everyone had just listened to them. When a natural catastrophe hits, the air is suddenly filled with experts expounding on what should have been done to prevent it.
Social issues abound in experts. Take homelessness, for instance. The loudest experts will almost always turn out to be A) people who have never been unemployed; B) people who have never been economically insecure; C) people who don’t actually even know any homeless people; and D) people who get all of their information regarding a wider world from one source.
And the angrier a person can make themselves feel – about nearly anything – the more of an expert they become.
All of this relates to our reading today because Jeremiah was attempting to deal with the same problem of too many experts. Our current reading comes from a letter that Jeremiah wrote to those who had been taken into exile in Babylon when the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar attacked and conquered Judah. What we refer to as the exile was actually a series of staged removals – about three of them. The 3rd group removal took place in about 581 BCE, the first about 16 years earlier.
While we today may get confused by the multiplicity of “exiles” here – which gets even more confusing when we add in the destruction of the northern kingdom, Israel, about 120 years prior in 722 BCE, and the exile which followed there – we can be sure that the Hebrew people knew it well and were not confused by it. Like the grieving we discussed last week, this would have been part of the history which helped to shape the Jesus we follow.
Jeremiah’s letter was written to the first wave exiles, around 597 BCE. This group included not only ordinary people, but the king himself, priests, most of the skilled artisans, and prophets (the prophet Ezekiel, for instance, was taken but Jeremiah was left behind in Jerusalem).
Apparently the Jerusalem that was left behind was filled with ”experts,” especially the false prophets, who were telling those in exile just what they should do – fight and resist – or maybe repent really hard because God is mad at them personally for something they have done – or maybe just go with the flow because God is going to destroy the Babylonians any minute now and the whole thing will be over with and you can come home again soon.
It was the advice of these false experts that moved Jeremiah to write and send the exiles the true word of God. And this true word was to settle where you are taken and – this is the important and difficult part – continue to know that God is with you there and that God is shaping you for what you will need to be when you return. Don’t fight, don’t resist, but settle in and make your homes there.
We know that conditions in Babylon were actually not as bad as we might imagine. This was not abject slavery as we think of it here. The Judahites were allowed to marry and live together as families. They had their own homes. They could even worship as they pleased with – of course – the exception that they had no Temple here. This time of exile was quite possibly the time when they developed the concept of synagogues – giving them a place to gather and pray together when they didn’t have the temple to be the center of their lives.
The point which Jeremiah makes so strongly here is that God knows what God is doing. Just a couple of verses beyond today’s reading is one of the loveliest promises anywhere in scripture: 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. The Judahites are to accept – even in the midst of what seemed to them like utter failure and despair -- that God has brought them to this place and God is – and will remain – here with them. Trust God.
We, like those ancestors from so long ago, still have to learn this lesson. We still love to blame someone, something else whenever things go wrong for us. We want to be able to point our fingers and say, “it’s all their fault -- I would have done it better.” We really want to be our own experts.
Many things went wrong in Jesus’ life. It would have been nicer, I’m sure if things had worked out more smoothly for him. If things had only gone the way he wanted then to go. But in the scriptures he had learned a harder lesson: Whether things went his way or not, he trusted his God and, except for one fleeting, oh-so-human moment at the very end, he knew his God was with him, always.
Sometimes we just have to, in the words of St. John of the Cross, "Go out into the darkness and put our hand into the hand of God. That shall be a better light, and safer than any known way."
Social issues abound in experts. Take homelessness, for instance. The loudest experts will almost always turn out to be A) people who have never been unemployed; B) people who have never been economically insecure; C) people who don’t actually even know any homeless people; and D) people who get all of their information regarding a wider world from one source.
And the angrier a person can make themselves feel – about nearly anything – the more of an expert they become.
All of this relates to our reading today because Jeremiah was attempting to deal with the same problem of too many experts. Our current reading comes from a letter that Jeremiah wrote to those who had been taken into exile in Babylon when the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar attacked and conquered Judah. What we refer to as the exile was actually a series of staged removals – about three of them. The 3rd group removal took place in about 581 BCE, the first about 16 years earlier.
While we today may get confused by the multiplicity of “exiles” here – which gets even more confusing when we add in the destruction of the northern kingdom, Israel, about 120 years prior in 722 BCE, and the exile which followed there – we can be sure that the Hebrew people knew it well and were not confused by it. Like the grieving we discussed last week, this would have been part of the history which helped to shape the Jesus we follow.
Jeremiah’s letter was written to the first wave exiles, around 597 BCE. This group included not only ordinary people, but the king himself, priests, most of the skilled artisans, and prophets (the prophet Ezekiel, for instance, was taken but Jeremiah was left behind in Jerusalem).
Apparently the Jerusalem that was left behind was filled with ”experts,” especially the false prophets, who were telling those in exile just what they should do – fight and resist – or maybe repent really hard because God is mad at them personally for something they have done – or maybe just go with the flow because God is going to destroy the Babylonians any minute now and the whole thing will be over with and you can come home again soon.
It was the advice of these false experts that moved Jeremiah to write and send the exiles the true word of God. And this true word was to settle where you are taken and – this is the important and difficult part – continue to know that God is with you there and that God is shaping you for what you will need to be when you return. Don’t fight, don’t resist, but settle in and make your homes there.
We know that conditions in Babylon were actually not as bad as we might imagine. This was not abject slavery as we think of it here. The Judahites were allowed to marry and live together as families. They had their own homes. They could even worship as they pleased with – of course – the exception that they had no Temple here. This time of exile was quite possibly the time when they developed the concept of synagogues – giving them a place to gather and pray together when they didn’t have the temple to be the center of their lives.
The point which Jeremiah makes so strongly here is that God knows what God is doing. Just a couple of verses beyond today’s reading is one of the loveliest promises anywhere in scripture: 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. The Judahites are to accept – even in the midst of what seemed to them like utter failure and despair -- that God has brought them to this place and God is – and will remain – here with them. Trust God.
We, like those ancestors from so long ago, still have to learn this lesson. We still love to blame someone, something else whenever things go wrong for us. We want to be able to point our fingers and say, “it’s all their fault -- I would have done it better.” We really want to be our own experts.
Many things went wrong in Jesus’ life. It would have been nicer, I’m sure if things had worked out more smoothly for him. If things had only gone the way he wanted then to go. But in the scriptures he had learned a harder lesson: Whether things went his way or not, he trusted his God and, except for one fleeting, oh-so-human moment at the very end, he knew his God was with him, always.
Sometimes we just have to, in the words of St. John of the Cross, "Go out into the darkness and put our hand into the hand of God. That shall be a better light, and safer than any known way."
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