Found Faithful

Found Faithful
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-12; Luke 17:11-19

I am attracted to the passage from Jeremiah. Maybe its because I’ve always been told that property is worth having but I’ve never owned any. In several public capacities, I have bought and sold property or been involved with the purchase and mortgaging of property. When we sell property, we are generally happy with what we get, although we always think it is worth more. (I have that same feeling whenever I trade cars.) And sometimes we are glad to have the property out of our hands. When we buy property, we often think that we paid more than we should have, but were afraid of not getting it at all. Once in a while we get something at a steal. And once in a while we buy a money pit.

So Jeremiah, with all the clairvoyance of Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve Board or Jamie Dimond of JPMorgan Chase, sends the quarterly investment advice to the exiles in Babylon. In spite of the numbers, it’s a bull market: buy property, build houses, put in landscaping, plot out gardens, can and freeze the harvest, raise a family, get to know the neighbors, join the PTA, sock away your 401ks and 403bs.

I wonder how Jeremiah’s prognostications were received. Given the reality of the exile of the political, social and artistic elite from Jerusalem to metropolitan Babylon, I can imagine two kinds of responses.

The first is one of total disgust and abandonment:

God has turned his back on the people whom he said were his own. How else can one explain the fact that Jerusalem fell and the people deported. God is two-faced. God sold the nation down the river. God doesn’t care. God has gone on vacation. God is a sham. God is no God at all because the Babylonian god handily bested him. 

Don’t you sense the anger and the disgust which flows out of that viewpoint? The people really felt betrayed.

It’s all God’s fault. If God had paid attention and done what God was supposed to do, this would never have happened. We would not be in this mess.

The second response would be very different, very self-deprecating:

It’s our fault, Lord. If only we had listened to you. If only our parents had listened to you. If only they had taught us right. If we had done what you told us. If only we had paid attention to your prophets instead of going along with the crowd. If only the learned people hadn’t gotten above themselves. If they had spent more time reading and reciting your words than polishing their prayers and straightening their priest’s vests. Lord, we are sinners. We are bad, bad, bad. Lord, we deserved everything you have given us. And even then you have been merciful. But we don’t deserve mercy. We have ground you under our feet, we have ignored you. We don’t deserve anything good from you. It’s all our fault.

Those two responses are very opposite. The one blames everything on God and accepts no personal lame. The other absolves God of all responsibility and takes all the blame on themselves.  Whichever attitude an exile chose to take, it didn’t bode well for them.

The one would be so enmeshed in anger that they would be an overseer’s nightmare slave, no matter how competent they might be. They would be of little use to anyone, because their anger, either pent up or aboil, would prevent them from doing anything that might smack of helping the community celebrate God.

The other would be so self-flagellating that they would be next to useless because they had no get up and go, no oomph to do anything creative. They couldn’t do anything that would get them beyond their total despair about being the cause of the communities exile and hardship.

I don’t think that any of us have ever been in the kind of exile that was experienced in Babylon. But I suspect that most of us have been through harrowing situations that felt to us every bit as bleak and hopeless. And I suspect that our feelings about those situations ran the gamut from blaming any- and everyone else, including God, to so totally blaming ourselves that we were rendered incapable to accomplishing anything of value in our jobs or our family life. Either way, we were of little value to anyone, ourselves, or God.

Psalm 137 comes from the exile period.

Alongside Babylon’s streams,
there we sat down,
crying because we remembered Zion.
We hung our lyres up in the trees there
because that’s where our captors asked us to sing;
our tormentors requested songs of joy:
“Sing us a song about Zion!” they said.
But how could we possibly sing the Lord’s song on foreign soil? (Psalm 137:1-4)

In many ways, we can identify with the anguish of those predecessors in faith. We don’t recognize where we are. It is a foreign land, if not geography, then culture. As someone once quipped, if 1950 ever came back, we would be ready for it. But 1950 isn’t coming back and it never will. We are exiles from the time and place that we once knew. We are exiles from the physical health and mental acuity that once enabled us to burn the candle at both ends. Our bodies as well as the world and all its accessories seem to be at war with us, an ‘us’ we thought we knew and understood. And we are not happy.

Sometimes we want to rail against the world, the economy, the next generation, the government, God. And sometimes we feel like we are an utter failure, that we have messed up everything that we have come into contact with. We can’t sing the old songs, the light airy songs of joy and freedom that lifted us into faith and through the early days of our lives. It’s all so very discouraging. We feel hopeless, useless, wasted.

We are exiles. Our exile is not Babylon, but it is a Babylonian exile — powerless, worthless, hopeless.

Jeremiah’s words to the down and out Judeans and Jerusalemites are given to us, as well as to the
generations that connect us to his time, and to generations yet to come.

Jeremiah tells the people — tells us — to make peace with the here and now. The important thing is that God has not abandoned us in our illnesses and wearing out, in our despair and disappointment, in our ennui and enervation. Make peace with the world and the life that we find ourselves in. Settle down. Step back from the elusive grand vision of life that never really was, and look at the advantages of the present. There are some. And when fully engaged, they will actually benefit us and the community around us. Don’t hole up in our self-pity, but reflect on the needs of the community. As slaves, as prisoners, as exiles in a world which seems foreign to our upbringing and our comfort, we still have gifts to offer individuals and groups around us. We still bear God’s image and still inhale and exhale the power of the Holy Spirit.

Lots of things happen that we can’t explain. Those are good things as well as not so good. But because we are God’s people, called by name, blessed by the baptismal waters, we can recognize God’s handy work. We can pick up the forgotten instruments of joy and praise. We can sing in foreign lands and to unbelieving masters. Jesus calls us to be the single healed person, out-of-step with the world, who suddenly realizes how awesome, how life-affirming, how precious is the grace lavished on him through the redeeming Christ, sanctifying Spirit, and eternally loving God.

And we will be found faithful. “Get up and go. Your faith has healed you.”


Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.