A Sermon I preached at Sharon Baptist Church, Smithfield, NC on January 29, 2012. Based on a sermon preached in 1966 by the late Rev. Dr. Blake Smith, and updated for today's generation.
On the Boundary between Jerusalem and Babylon
Pastoral Prayer
Almighty God, fount of every blessing, Your generous goodness comes to us anew every day, and the hand of Your loving kindness powerfully, yet gently, guides all the moments of our lives. May Your Spirit lead us to acknowledge Your goodness, to give thanks for Your benefits, and to serve You in willing obedience.
Our Father, we confess that often we are impatient. We do not always understand or appreciate Your ways. We want prompt results for all our efforts; we demand immediate perfection from ourselves and from others; we pray for instant judgments and quick fixes; we look for gratification now and fail to see how we will be filled in the time that is yet to come.
Forgive us, O Lord, for how we ignore the testimony of the seasons that You have made, and try to rush the events that You have planned since the beginning. Forgive us Father for how we forget the way of Your mercy and love. Teach us anew how to wait upon You. Show us the path of patience and tenderness. Help us to see Your plan for us and for those around us. Help us, Father, to live by the Spirit rather than by the flesh, trusting in You to fulfill all Your promises, and to bring to pass the fullness of all your words to us. O Lord, speak in this place, in the calming of our minds and in the longing of our hearts, by the words of my lips and in the thoughts that all of us form. Speak, O Lord, for we, your servants, are listening. Amen.
Psalm 139:
1 O Yahweh, You have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
You discern my thoughts from far away.
3 You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
4 Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Yahweh, You know it completely.
5 You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay Your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it.
7 Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your Presence?
8 If I ascend to Heaven, You are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, You are there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10 even there Your hand shall lead me,
and Your right hand shall hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
12 even the darkness is not dark to You;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to You.
13 For it was You Who formed my inward parts;
You knit me together in my mother's womb.
14 I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are Your works; that I know very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from You,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In Your book were written all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
17 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 I try to count them – they are more than the sand;
I come to the end – I am still with You. . . .
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my thoughts.
24 See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
First, a personal word: Almost exactly three months ago, on Wednesday, the ninth of November 2011, I was privileged to find myself standing before the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, what is commonly called the Kotel, or “the Wailing Wall,” inside the old Walled City of Jerusalem. There I joined with other Christians from various faith traditions, along with Jews across the spectrum from very liberal to ultra-orthodox, to pray for the “shalom,” the peace, the welfare, the prosperity, the wholeness, the completeness, of Jerusalem, and of the inhabitants of Israel and Palestine. And I also prayed the same for my many Christian, Jewish, and Muslim friends, and others from various world religious traditions. Likewise I prayed for my many friends around the world who belong to the Baptist expression of the Christian faith. I had hoped to go also upon the Temple Mount, the Haram es Sharif, the “Noble Sanctuary,” to see the “Dome of the Rock” and to pray there for my Muslim friends, but they were observing the Muslim Feast of Eid al Adhah, the commemoration of Abraham’s offering of his son on Mount Moriah, so only Muslims were allowed to go there that week.
Nevertheless, it was a very intense personal religious experience for me to be there, and now I long to return, while knowing that probably I never will get to go there again. I guess you could say now that I am “in Exile” from our spiritual homeland. While I was there I shared the following message with my fellow travelers on our Israel Pilgrimage, and now I will share it with you.
In Marc Connally’s play, Green Pastures, when “De Lawd” looked on the world during the great flood of Noah, He remarked, “Everything nailed down is coming loose!” Do you ever feel that way? Did you feel that way at the beginning of this 21st century when the Twin Towers fell? Sure you did. We all did. What happened to the safe old “good old days” when, seemingly, all we had to worry about was Communism and nuclear annihilation?
Our world certainly has been changing. This fact is thrown at us by all of our means of communication. When we experience radical change, what does it do to our souls? When all of our values and our assumptions are in turmoil, and when our civilization seems as if it is being shaken to its foundations, can we maintain a strong faith in God? Is there anything meaningful we can do, or is it beyond our control and out of reach of our understanding? Is there any guidance for us who are forced in our time to ask soul-sized questions about the things we once took for granted?
One thing is clear. Our faith as Christians and Jews and Muslims is grounded in history. Most of us have come to believe that God has somehow acted in our history. Perhaps God has acted meaningfully and redemptively in all of history, but our three faiths assert that God has indeed acted in the history that began with a man named Abraham and a woman named Sarah. We look back to the stories that have been handed down about Abraham and Sarah and their descendants, and we see that in many ways it was not really different from our own histories in this day and age. So it may be that one way to answer the questions, “What is God doing now?” and What can we do?” would be to select a particular time in Biblical history as nearly like ours as possible, and to put our questions in the middle of that situation, and see what answers we get.
The time is probably about 595 BCE. About two years earlier, in March of 597, Nebuchadrezzar and his Babylonian forces had conquered Judah and plundered the city of Jerusalem on the first of three occasions in a 15-year period. The Biblical depiction of this event, in 2 Kings 24:10-17 indicates that the Temple and the royal treasuries were confiscated, and that most of the nation’s leading citizens, including the young King Jehoiachin, and probably also the prophet Ezekiel, were deported to exile in Babylon. Surely many of Judah’s citizens died in battle. The Babylonians, no doubt, executed some leaders. Some fled to Egypt and elsewhere. Others were left to endure within a ravished land. The chastening effects of historical adversity could not be avoided.
The Book of Lamentations gives us an accurate picture of their thoughts and feelings. It is easy to understand how shock, depression and inability to function would have been the dominant experiences. And it is out of the experience of exile that we hear in Psalm 137 perhaps a consensus expression of feeling from the former inhabitants of Judah living in Babylon at that time:
Psalm 137:
1 By the rivers of Babylon
we sit down and weep when we remember Zion.
2 On the poplars in her midst we hang our harps,
3 for there our captors ask us to compose songs;
those who mock us demand that we be happy, saying:
“Sing for us a song about Zion!”
4 How can we sing a song to Yahweh in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand be crippled!
6 May my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you,
and if I do not give Jerusalem priority over whatever gives me the most joy.
7 Remember, O Yahweh, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell.
They said, “Tear it down, tear it down, right to its very foundation!”
8 O Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
how happy will be those who repay you according to what you have inflicted on us!
9 How blessed will be the one who grabs your babies and smashes them on a rock!
Exile can come from a sin that shatters our lives. Exile can come in addictive behavior that alienates even those closest to us and slowly destroys us. It can come tragically in the death of a loved one from disease, or of a child by a drunken driver, perhaps even caused by a person’s own carelessness. It can come in divorce and the loss of a family. It can come with the failure of a business or the loss of a job. It can come simply from growing old and realizing that some things are now only in the past. What kind of things does a preacher need to say when he and his people experience exile?
Now about the time of the Judean exile, the prophet Jeremiah, in Jerusalem, wrote a letter (found in chapter 29 of his book) to those exiles in Babylon in which he reports these oracles:
Jeremiah 29:
1 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 Nebuchadrezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. . . .
4 Thus says Yahweh of Hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:
5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 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. 7 But seek the shalom [the peace, the welfare, the prosperity, the wholeness, the completeness] of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to Yahweh on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom. 8 For thus says Yahweh of hosts, the God of Israel:
Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, 9 for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in My Name; I did not send them, says Yahweh.
10 For thus says Yahweh:
When Babylon's seventy years are completed I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you My promise and bring you back to this place. 11 For surely I know the plans I have for you, says Yahweh, plans for your shalom and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. 12 Then when you call upon Me and come and pray to Me, I will hear you, 13 And when you search for Me, you will find Me; if you seek Me with all your heart, 14 I will let you find Me, says Yahweh, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says Yahweh, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
There is a time to rail against sin, to proclaim the judgment of God against sinners. But not to exiles. Exiles need something different. Exiles need two things. They need to come to terms with the reality of where they are. And they need to have hope that there is a future.
Jeremiah reminds these exiles that, no matter the sort of situation in which we find ourselves, there are always some things that must be done. Refusal to do those things is a violation of God’s will for His creation. Jeremiah understands that God wants the Judean exiles to put down roots where they have found themselves planted, and there to bloom. And Jeremiah tells them that God will be there with those exiles, no less in Babylon than back in the Temple in comfortable, familiar Jerusalem.
The City of God for them must now be Babylon, and not Jerusalem. As long as they confined God to Mount Zion and to the Temple Mount and to the land around it that they formerly called their home, their God was too small. So, in a time of grave uncertainty, when the future was unpredictable, Jeremiah gave them this down-to-earth counsel.
These words speak powerfully. Yet they may not be the first step in dealing with exile. Before these words can be heard, we may first have to deal with the anger and pain of exile, as Israel did in lament psalms like Psalm 137. But Jeremiah’s proclamation provides the theological basis for coming to terms with the reality of where we are in exile, of realizing that we cannot go back. That is an important step in turning toward the future.
This is not a word for all time and in all circumstances. But if it is indeed God’s word for this particular situation, then the message is that we cannot continue trying to change what cannot be changed. If we try, we may only be directing limited energy to a futile effort to construct our world the way that is most comfortable for us, rather than allowing God to bring us through the pain of change for something better. This does not mean that God directly brings the exile only to make us better. That is questionable theology at best. But it does affirm that exiles have possibilities that people who have never been in exile cannot have and cannot even dream!
And this proclamation calls us to our mission as people of God who are willing to allow God to work in whatever exile in which we find ourselves. From our perspective, we do not want exile. Yet when exile comes, there is a sense in which exile becomes the arena in which God does some of His best work!
So I am coming to believe that Jeremiah’s advice is the kind of advice a prophet might give us today as well: There is no going back to the past century. “You can’t go home again.” No “Crusade for Christ” will turn our world or our nation backward to those so-called “good old days” of black and white TV, and black and white morals, even if they ever existed. Our involvements must be in today’s world, and they must be practical and realistic, confronting the joys and the agonies, and the difficult choices, of today’s world. If we are to meet the Living God, it will be in terms of this age, in terms of its demands. In this new age God will speak to us, or He will not speak to us at all. And God says to us, “I will visit you in Babylon!” God’s loving and saving Presence is not like some rare orchid that will bloom only in some special place in special soil. It is like a hollyhock that will bloom anywhere!
So Jeremiah tells the exiles to get themselves involved in life where they are, and in the most natural sort of way:
. . . 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.
The pagan values of our current era and the pressures of life in this twenty-first century will demand deeper insights and sharper tools than we have used in the past. But our God in His wisdom has provided us with the knowledge and the skills that we need to live in this new situation. Our job is to use what God has given us of our native instincts, and opportunities for learning and for service, and then to teach others to use these in ways that will honor God and make life good for all people.
But to move from conflict with our changing world to a mission to our changing world demands a new kind of spirit. Those exiles in Babylon held on to their contempt for the Edomites who had betrayed them, and they were consumed with hate for their Babylonian oppressors. They said,
. . . How blessed will be the one who grabs your babies and smashes them on a rock!
But Jeremiah warned them that such a spirit closes the door to any experience of the Presence of God. Instead of clinging to a vengeful spirit, He urged the exiles,
. . . But seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to Yahweh on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.
All of our feverish efforts to make for ourselves a better world will be in vain unless we can bring to it a different quality of spirit. Our age’s spirit of violence must be met with the spirit of reason, tolerance, and unfailing good will. Our age’s spirit of greed must be met with the spirit of servanthood. Its anxiety must be met with confidence and trust. Its fear must be met with strong faith. And its despair must be met with a “hope that does not disappoint us,” as Paul said (Romans 5:5). The times demand, and God asks of us, nothing less.
It may be ironic to suggest that Israel just may have been in danger of losing God in Jerusalem. The people had perhaps tried to “imprison” God in a Temple, in a City, and in a Nation. (Indeed in our own day many of our own Baptist brothers and sisters have often tried to imprison God in a sacred Book!) In any case, God sent these exiles to Babylon, and there He would meet them in judgment and in grace.
And out of Babylon their faith rose to heights they never had imagined. Out of Babylon came the strong impulse to preserve Jewish identity by observance of the Torah. Out of Babylon came the strong emphases on observing the Sabbath, on participating weekly in prayer and worship in a synagogue, on circumcision as a sign of a Jewish man’s covenant with His God. Out of Babylon came the compilation of the books of the Torah, and the compilation of the writings of the prophets (the Nevi’im), the psalmists, and the wisdom teachers (the Kethubim). It was in Babylon, that pagan city of many Gods, that Jews once and for all abandoned the worship of all other deities but the One Living God, Whose national Name had been Yahweh, but Who would henceforth be called ‘adonai, the LORD of all!
In Babylon those Judean exiles received a new and larger understanding of the greatness and the goodness of God. There they cried in despair, “How can we sing a song to Yahweh in a foreign land?” and it was there that they learned just how wrong they were. Even as they recited those very words they were already singing “the LORD’s song in a foreign land”! After Babylon, and only after Babylon could they exclaim, “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your Presence?”
Those Judean exiles learned in their Babylonian darkness that God is greater than the darkness. Likewise, this age and place in which we find ourselves planted is God’s gift to us. The very things that perplex us are part of the mission to which our God calls us. We are called to bloom where we find ourselves planted. And God will visit us where we are, and God will give us a future with hope.
Benediction
Go, love and care for one another in the Name of Christ Jesus,
– and may the LORD bless you and keep you,
– may He make His Face shine upon and be gracious unto you,
– may He lift up His countenance upon you, and give you shalom,
– and may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and God our Father, Who love us and in His grace give us unfailing courage and a firm hope,
– encourage you and strengthen you by the power of the Holy Spirit, granting to you the joy of your salvation and the compassion and the tenderness of your Savior, now and forevermore. Amen.
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