Sometimes,
I get tired of preaching about the exile.  I get tired of thinking
about the exile.  I get tired of the fact that the exile metaphors
resonate with me, and I’d strongly prefer that they didn’t.

But
I’m ahead of myself, because we don’t talk enough about the exile to
assume that people can follow what I mean by it.  So, a quick
historical summary: After King David and King Solomon, the ancient
nation of Israel split into two.  The northern part had the name
Israel and the southern part the name
Judah.  That was stable for a few hundred years, then the northern
nation was subsumed by Assyria in 722 BCE.  The southern
kingdom held on for a while longer (mostly by paying tributes to
larger empires) but was destroyed in 586 BCE.  

At
that point the leaders, the literate, and the priests were forced
marched to Babylon, while the poor, illiterate majority were left in
the ruins of a destroyed Jerusalem without the protection of city
gates.

That’s
what we call “the exile.”  In 539 BCE (47 years later) the first
of the people who’d been exiled were freed to come back.  Meanwhile
the people who stayed had been decimated by famine, disease, and
attackers, and “home” wasn’t what people had remembered or been
told about.

The
reality of the exile is formative in the writing down of the Hebrew
Bible, and the questions that were being asked and answered in how
the stories got written down.  It is also one of the great narrative
arcs of the Bible, and I think that’s true because it was written
down when it was still so vibrant in people’s lives and memories.  I
also think it is true because the sensation of being displaced from
life as we know it and/or life as it should be is quite common, and
having the narrative of the exile helps us make sense of life as we
know it.

And
now we’re back to the beginning.  I appreciate the ways the stories
of the exile make sense of life, but I’m rather tired of identifying
with it.  I’d rather resonate with some stories of stability instead.

But,
here we are.

And
in the midst of this is Jeremiah’s profound, shocking, amazing,
unexpected communication on behalf of God.  He writes to those in
exile, the ones who have been torn from their homes, the ones who are
prevented from going home by exactly the people who tore up their
home and tore them from their homes and he says on behalf of God:

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.

I
can’t imagine that this is what the exiles wanted to hear.  

I
would imagine this was the opposite of what they expected.  Wouldn’t
they want to be ready to leave at any time?  Why settle in?  After
all, the passover celebrates God calling the people from Egypt so
quickly they had to cook unleavened bread!  Build houses and plant
gardens?  That sounds wrong.

Get
married?  Have kids?  Keep on living?  Keep on trying to thrive and
grow?  But, that doesn’t fit either.  They’re in a temporary place,
shouldn’t they wait until they get home and can be in the “Promised
Land” and connected to life as they know it, life as it is supposed
to be?  Why bring kids into the mess of the exile?  I mean, does an
exile marriage even COUNT?

And
then, then God gets INTO it.  This is one of the most shocking things
attributed to God in the Bible, and that’s saying a lot.  God says,
“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.”  Seek the welfare of…. Babylon?  Pray for Bablyon?
Work for the wellbeing of Babylon?  Our well being is correlated
with the well being of our oppressors?

We
aren’t trying to undermine them?  We aren’t trying to destroy them?
We aren’t trying to … at the very least just keep our heads down
until we get to leave?  We’re working for their WELFARE?  (It may be
helpful to know that I don’t think the exiles were slaves, but nor
were they free to leave.)

That’s
about how I think the exiles would have responded.  But maybe I’m
wrong, because while everything God says is counter-intuitive,
everything God says also sounds like God.  And they, too, knew God.
So maybe they knew to expect the unexpected, to know compassion for
others would come at the most annoying times, to experience God’s
reminders about loving everyone when they least wanted to hear it.

I
hear the echos of this message from God when Jesus heals the
senator’s daughter, when Paul has compassion for his jailers, and
when MLK reminded his listeners that the goal was not to harm the
oppressors but transform them so they too could live a more wonderful
life.

This
is a very, very Godly message, this “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.”

I’m
not sure when it gets easy.

Because,
right now, this feels like a message to settle into this
late-pandemic reality.  Let go of what was, and build houses HERE.
Plant gardens HERE.  Savor relationships and build up families HERE
and NOW.  And, seek the welfare of the city where we now are.

But
most of us still aren’t all the way here yet.  (Maybe the young are?)
We’re still remembering what was.  Maybe, even, we’re still letting
God know that we are ready to bake the bread – even the unleavened
bread – and walk away from this mess right now!  We don’t want to
settle into this reality.  We want to go HOME.  We don’t want to seek
the welfare of this time, we want this time to be different than it
is.

But
God meets us in the now.

Not
the past, the future, nor the time we wish it was.  The now.

That
pre-exilic time never returned.  But there was a vibrant post-exilic
time, which included things like the Bible being written, the Second
Temple being build, the walls of Jerusalem being restored, and as a
thing that is pretty relevant to us, the life of Jesus.

It
seems to me, from where I’m standing, that the temptation of the
exile is the yearning to return to how things used to be.  But God
urges the people to be present in their NOW, which prepares them for
the next things God is going to be up to with them.

I
guess, like the exiles, God is dragging us into the now – sometimes
while we kick and scream like toddlers.  And I think that’s the word
as I hear it today.  God is with us in the now, calling us into the
now, and preparing us for the future.  

And
this is where we meet God.

May
we be open to meeting God here.  Amen

October 9, 2022

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady