A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on October 9, 2022 by Revd Sally Hitchiner

Reading for address: Jeremiah 29

There’s a line that we are told in our youth that says life is going to get better and better. We ask children what they hope to do when they grow up. We ask teenagers what type of person they hope they will marry. We ask pregnant people in their 20s what they hope for the lives of their children. We construct our lives as if we can hope something and it will happen. But what do we do when one or more of these is not as we would like and there’s no way to fix it?

We find ourselves in a dead-end job, that we are unable to leave as jobs are not plentiful in our field. Perhaps you have caring responsibilities that mean you can’t go for that promotion, or you have no time outside of work and looking after others for the pursuits that made you who you were as a younger man or woman. Perhaps you find yourself with a life debilitating illness or disability, or mental health challenges that are not going to get better. It dawns on you that time is running out. “You may never fulfil your potential.”

Jeremiah is a book in two halves. The first half is warning about the first stages of the siege of Jerusalem, the ransacking of the treasures of the nation of Judah and the forced migration of thousands of the elite aristocracy, religious leaders and academics (the people used to achieving their potential) for a four month march to Babylon, in modern day Iraq. Here they will be held as captives in migrant camps, a few like Daniel learn the language and may find opportunities to progress in Babylonian society, but for the most part they are expected to simply hang about not going home. Babylon at this point is the largest city in the world. It was the first city to reach 200,000 and they have captives from everywhere. Whoever you were back home you have to start again here.

Our Old Testament passage is at the start of the second period in the book of Jeremiah. We have scooted forward a few years. It begins to dawn that there is no prospect of escape or rescue. The months of existing in the migrant camp have turned into years. Political envoys are now going back and forth between Jerusalem and Babylon trying to negotiate. They also carry news of what it’s like to the other group. One of the first envoys is given a letter to take to the leaders of the captive community from Jeremiah and those who are left in Jerusalem. Our Old Testament reading is the start of that letter.

It’s the opposite of a “Wish You Were Here” postcard. They encourage the migrants to put down roots in Babylon, to unpack their suitcases. Are you the type of person who briskly unpacks your suitcase the minute you arrive in a hotel room, even if you are only staying one night? Or are you the type of person who leaves everything packed away and at the end of a two week vacation find yourself rummaging in the corner of your case for the last pair of clean socks.

The easiest way to get through loss is to tell yourself it’s only temporary. Perhaps this isn’t always a bad strategy but the letter to them in this situation tells them to do the opposite. This is not going to end anytime soon. The prophesies expected this captivity would last 70 years – the Biblical definition of a life span – three score years and ten. They were going to live and die here. Their grandchildren are going to grow up in this world. They might as well get used to it.

The letter tells them they are to build houses and to farm the land. Move out of tent city.

This was more complicated than it sounds. Their very definition was as people who God had rescued from slavery and brought to a Promised Land. A particular place that they could call their own and worship their God, living exactly as they chose. More than this their God resided in the Temple in the great city of Jerusalem. Their faith rested on making an annual pilgrimage to confess sins, make a sacrifice and reconnect with the God who lived in their land with them. How could they get anything good from any other piece of land? How could they find fruitfulness and family love in a place so far away from God?

There is a resistance in refusing to move on from tents and take away food. Obviously sometimes people have to do this out of necessity but the letter seems to imply that there’s a choice here. People who choose to live in temporary accommodation are holding themselves as separate to the world around them. “Don’t worry about me, I’m not really from here. My rescuers will be along any minute and I’ll be back to my real life so don’t bother including me in life here.”

It’s understandable that they would feel like this. Who would want to participate in a culture that has killed your neighbours, stolen all that you hold dear and taken you to a new world. Back home they had been the elite but here they are an impoverished and deskilled and foreign. I’m sure some in our community have experienced this first hand.

The human reaction to a life where we are held by force, especially to something that has taken so much from us, is to run a mile. If I can’t leave, I’m going to have my bags packed so I’m ready to go as soon as I can.

But this letter tells them to leave their tents and build houses, to farm and make some nice food for themselves. To marry and have children and to arrange marriages for those children when the time comes. It is time to stop the intense period of mourning their life of blessing before and let the small mercies of a new life get through the crack in their armour.

This all sounds great in theory but imagine how hard it was to do in practice… And then there’s an “ALSO”. It’s as if in the postscript the author throws in the most difficult thing of all. They have to think of those around them.

Also, pray for and seek the peace and prosperity of the city where they find themselves. They were used to praying for the peace of Jerusalem but now they are to pray for the Shalom – the Hebrew concept of deep welfare and contentment, of soul and body and community – of Babylon, the city where they are held captive… did they read that right?

How are they to do that?

Right now, they have three options:

1. Refuse to move out of the temporary accommodation, waiting for a rescue that isn’t going to come anytime soon.

2. Refuse to multiply. Shrink into yourself so they never see the real you: no fulfilment, no love, no children, no laughter, dress only in black for the rest of whatever life you have left, accept your fate and wait for death.

3. Refuse to seek the Shalom of Babylon. To be filled with bitterness and anger towards your captors and spend every waking minute plotting to destroy the society around you.

The thing that marks all three of these ways of living is that they each revolve around the oppressive society.

1. Refusing to move out of the tents says over and over – “I’m not you. I’m not you. You can’t make me you.” Constant speaking to the oppression.

2. Shrinking into yourself is saying nothing out loud but eyeballs the society intensely, waiting for more and more destruction. Constant looking at the oppression.

3. The third is filling every waking moment with rage at the society using force to highlight all the ways they are wrong. Constant fighting the oppression.

Which way of life would you pick?

No joy can get in, no satisfaction, no peace. We need a ray of light to come down into the intensity of the victim/oppressor paradigm. We need another point of reference in the mix not just you and them.

As well as the wakeup call, this letter gives another way to live.

This fourth way is to base life, not on Babylon and its destructive actions, but around something else. It says there is them and their destruction and you and your shattered life, but there is another element in this mix.

This different way to live refuses to repay destruction with destruction not of others nor yourself. It receives an act of treachery and responds with an act of kindness. It receives the stripping of all it holds dear and in that moment discovers it’s true vocation. It receives an act of oppression and response with an invitation to partnership. This is gentle, but it’s not weak. It is strong but it is not hard. This new way of life presupposes a fearlessness, an indestructability that creates new possibilities where there seems to be a dead end.

It speaks to society rather than at it and says “I revolve my life around another reality that is even greater than the reality of oppression and scarcity. I will play life by the rules of this reality and nothing, nothing, you can do can make me play life by anything else.”

Only those who refuse to be defined by their enemies can bless them.

There are a few people who have a stubborn streak and are naturally more stoic, but this letter was written to an entire community. How does a whole people group, faced with so many war crimes and oppression, live this strong commitment to gentle love?

If we look back to the start of the passage we see a shift. The introduction to the letter says it’s written to “the surviving elders among the exiles and to the priests, the prophets and all the other people Nebuchadnezzar has taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.” On paper they are at the mercy of the great King of Babylon who can influence and destroy everything they hold dear on a whim.

But then, as the letter starts it says “This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I sent [it is often translated “carried”] into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon”

The most significant person in their world may seem to be king Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar’s version of reality seems to win. But this letter reminds them that the most significant being in the cosmos is God. And God isn’t just Almighty. Nebuchadnezzar may have taken them off into exile but God’s hands never left them. God was always underneath them. God carried them.

Not only that, this means that God isn’t just in Jerusalem living in the Temple or gone back to heaven as the Temple is ransacked. God is with his people into the foreign land. So if God’s presence is now in Babylon, of course they should expect to see good things emerge. They should expect personal blessings like harvest and love and marriages and grandchildren. And they should expect the miracles of the peace and blessing of God can also happen in the lives of their captors.

The ethics of this are too much for anyone unless you have a very different view of the power at the centre of the universe. God is more generous than they could have possibly imagined. God is so committed to working in partnership with humanity that God is willing to work even in the lives of Babylonians who are for the most part oppressing and committing acts of evil. He shines on their crops so they grow and they enjoy eating them. They find love and enjoy marriages, having children and multiplying. Where do blessings come from if not from God? Much as we would like to recruit God to our world view, God never stops giving moments wisdom and joy and peace to all people, however resistant they are to his way of life.

Which is a good thing for Judah too as Judah has not been living consistently by God’s world order. And yet God invites them now to work with him, consciously and gently bringing a new world into being. They don’t need a fancy job for this. This can be done anywhere.

The name Babylon means “gate of the gods” and Babylon becomes their gateway to rediscover what it really means to have God with them on earth. They rediscover who they are as the chosen people of God and finally start to fulfil their calling to be a blessing to the nations.

If you find yourself in a situation like those in Jeremiah, don’t forget to make space for the simple natural graces in life. Let yourself be taught how to laugh again by a child. Let yourself discover wonder afresh as you taste the sweetness of a tomato that you planted as a seed and God worked in partnership with you to grow. Build a home where you are and seek the good of everyone linked to where you find yourself. In this you will find your peace.

But there’s more. This isn’t just a journey God asks his people to walk on with him cheering them on, not even just undergirding them as they go. God, godself journeys to exile on earth and lives and dies in exile. The creator is stripped of all prestige and power and suffers at the hands of the creation. Jesus refuses the escape pod, Jesus refuses to shrink and withdraw, Jesus refuses to respond with bitterness and force. Jesus was bound and taken by force out of the city of Jerusalem to a place of death that we discover the potential meaning of Babylon.

Babylon, the place of oppression and lack of hope is taken up in the cross. The most godforsaken place becomes the place where God is most commonly associated. Babylon, the furthest point from the Temple for them, taken up in the cross is now used as the focal points in churches.

And as we orientate our lives and fill our lives with thoughts of this we find the power to live by a new reality. And finally we can bloom where we are planted.