Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
October 12, 2025
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.
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So, picture this. All of this happens over the space of two to
three generations.
Things get even weirder
than they are now, and Brazil starts to expand north. They take over the countries along the
Caribbean coast of South America, then Panama announces that they won’t fight
them. They settle into an uneasy peace
with Central America and the people there decide it would be a good idea to
start learning Portuguese. About a
decade later, the U.S. government opens quiet talks with Buenos Aires and when
the Brazilians move on the smaller Central American countries, they give them
permission to move straight on through into southern Mexico while the U.S.
attacks through Texas and Arizona. The
Mexicans hold onto the north, while losing the south.
Ten years later, it looks
like war again and about half of the political and cultural leaders throughout
the states, but especially from the northeast, pack up and move to Canada. Without many experienced hands left, the
Brazilian coalition has no problem spreading across the Midwest, then turning
east all the way to the Atlantic as far north as New York. In D.C., they take as many congresspeople as
they can find and ship them and their families back to Buenos Aires. They do the same with stockbrokers in New
York. In Philadelphia and Baltimore,
they aren’t sure who the influencers are, so they just kill random people and
burn the cities.
The
Brazilians miss at least one important person, though. He’s someone who’s been around a long time,
who has advised U.S. governments for decades, with almost everything he’s ever
said being ignored. Nevertheless, he has
always refused to be quiet or to give up hope.
He’s they type who buys up land in occupied territory, saying that the
occupation will be over someday and that he wants to establish clear ownership
to it now, when he can buy it cheap.
The
Yankees down in Buenos Aires write to him and ask what to do. He writes back and says, “Settle in. Your grandchildren may return but you
yourselves aren’t coming back.”
“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.” [Jeremiah 29:5-7]
That’s
basically what happened when the Babylonian Empire overran the whole Middle
East for decades and under Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 B.C. captured Jerusalem and
took the leaders of Judah as prisoners to Babylon, hostages for the “good
behavior” of those left behind. The
exiles were bitter.
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down, and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing
the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.
Remember, O Lord,
against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!”
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock! [Psalm 137]
And Jeremiah the prophet of God was telling them to
learn to live among these people? He
wanted them to pray for its welfare? Really?
Yes.
In
the midst of catastrophic events a lot of things happen. One is that people’s faith in God is severed
from the culture in which they learned that faith. Times of massive change force us to make
distinctions that might not have been needed in other times. We discover that Christmas is about Jesus, not
Rudolph and Frosty. That is a good
thing. In the long run it is also a good
thing for us to realize that we cannot rely on the culture to do our work for
us. We have to realize that if we don’t
teach the children to pray, they aren’t going to pick it up anywhere else. We discover that if the Ten Commandments
aren’t written on their hearts (and on our own), putting them on a poster at the
back of a classroom isn’t going to make a bit of difference.
I
admit I have jumped from Jeremiah’s time to ours pretty quickly, but it’s hard
not to do that. The circumstances
differ, but not his witness to God’s will for his people.
What
absolutely must happen in such times is that the mindset of individuals and even
of institutions that have undergone deep loss absolutely has to turn to the
future. Admittedly, grief is real and doesn’t simply go away with time. It needs to be expressed and owned, even
honored. Yet dwelling solely on the past
is the way to lose sight of the future, and of missing out on what must be done
in the present to secure the spiritual life of those who never knew the former
reality. That’s why Jeremiah told
“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” [Jeremiah 29:1]
to pick up and move on within the new situation. Even the name “Jeremiah” means “God raises
up”. God does raise up.
The life of God’s people
has never been about going back to an ideal time or place. It has always been about hearing God’s call
to faithfulness and mercy here and now.
It has always been about how God led the Israelites through the desert
when they wanted to turn back to Egypt.
It has been about remaining faithful witnesses to the one, almighty God
in a land whose inhabitants invited God’s people to join in the worship of
idols. It has been about trusting God while
in exile, finding ways to sing his song in a strange land, even if some days
you just want to hang your harp on a tree and forget it.
Those days do come. Part of what’s going through my mind in this
sermon has to do with an interchange with one of my friends, a colleague and a
brother in faith who lives in Appalachia in an area that has been struggling in
many ways for a long, long time but is just feeling the first brunt of the kind
of secularism that we’ve been dealing with for a generation. He wrote,
“It’s almost Brunswick Stew making time,
man. You know this is important to our
mission. Without it we’d have to eat
that store-bought stuff. Hey, I’ve given
up on confirmation class. [I had
mentioned confirmation earlier in the discussion.] I don’t think there’ll be another generation
of Christians. We’re a dead sect.”
That hit like a lightning bolt. If he had stopped there, I would have jumped
into the car and driven two days into the mountains to find him, but he went
on,
“But things are ok.
We’re expecting a fourth grandchild in January.”
That’s how I know he’ll come through. He’s looking ahead, the way that Jeremiah
said to do. What’s more, I also know one
of this guy’s favorite hymns says,
“How sweet to hold a newborn baby
and feel the pride and joy he gives,
but better still the calm assurance ,
this child can face uncertain times because he
lives.
Because he lives, I can face tomorrow.
Because he lives, all fear is gone.
Because I know he holds the future
and life is worth the living just because he lives.”
Faith grows with
challenge. Faith hears the voice of Jesus, risen from the dead, telling his
disciples to leave Jerusalem and Judea, to see the journey not as exile but as
seeking new horizons, telling them to take good news to the whole world, loving
that world as they go, seeking the good of everyone in it, friend or foe or stranger.
“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All
authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and
make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey
everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to
the end of the age.’” [Matthew 28:18-20]
