This sermon was delivered to the people of the Lutheran Church of the Nativity on November 24th, 2013. The scriptural text for the sermon is Jeremiah 29:1,4-14.
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.
For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.
- Jeremiah 29:7,11
You ever have one of those days when nothing seems to go right? When no matter what you do, it all feels like it’s for nothing? Your friends and family feel disconnected or distant? It feels like you’re all alone, that even God has abandoned you?
This is how the majority of people who suffer from depression go through every single day of their lives. They feel isolated and alone. They feel abandoned and cut off from the people they care about. They feel that even God has left them.
And this is how the people of Israel feel when we find them in the text from Jeremiah this morning. They have been conquered by the Babylonians, even though they have tried to fight and pray to God. And, to make matters worse, the Babylonians have taken the royal family, the priests, the prophets, and the entire upper class off into exile in Babylon. The people feel isolated. They feel alone. They feel abandoned by God.
And like many of us who have days where we feel abandoned or isolated, the Israelites have started to chase after false visions of the future. These visions of the future are ones that we can sympathize with, perhaps all too easily.
They are visions of a future that’s all about me - that I no longer have to worry about other people. Visions that tell me, that because I am isolated and lonely, other people do not actually exist and I don’t have to interact or deal with them. That whatever I do is fine, because I’m in such pain at this moment, that I can’t even begin to develop a concept of another person.
And these visions of individualism and loneliness in turn lead us to chase after other false visions of the future. Visions of the future that speak of monetary wealth, or physical health. Visions of lustful sexuality or escapism into the alternate reality provided by drugs. Or perhaps these visions cause us to just give up. We might find ourselves chasing after the delusion that we are incapable of making any lasting changes, or that we can mistreat the earth because, “it’s all going to end, eventually.” Our mantras in this loneliness are that “nothing really matters” or “nothing lasts forever.”
As the people in exile chase after their own versions of these false futures, Jeremiah writes to them encouraging them that “nothing lasts forever.” And when Jeremiah says this, he really means “This feeling of nothingness, this feeling of loneliness and isolation, this feeling of being abandoned by God will not last forever.” He offers these people in exile words of hope, words of comfort that even though this pain might last for a long time, the seventy years he mentions in the text, that seventy years is not eternity.
Jeremiah does not deny the pain and suffering that the people are going through. He does not pretend that life is going to be easier, that the feeling of nothingness will just fade away, as quickly as it overwhelmed them. He does not pretend to have all the answers to the questions that they have, questions that make them wonder about why they feel the way that they do.
Instead, Jeremiah offers them God’s vision for the future. Jeremiah reminds the people of the dream that God has been sharing with them since Adam and Eve were in the garden. God’s dream is that of the people’s welfare.
However, our word that is used in the translation isn’t quite accurate. The Hebrew word for welfare that we see used throughout this text is actually shalom. More often than not, when we come across shalom in the Bible, it gets translated as peace. And yet, the true definition of shalom lies somewhere in between these two definitions. Shalom conveys the emotional feelings and calm that come up out of being made whole in God. It’s being healed of physical and spiritual maladies. It’s being made new as part of the kingdom of God.
And so, as part of Jeremiah’s message of hope, this message of shalom, of God’s kingdom, he offers the people in exile some baby steps on their journey to healing and wholeness. He encourages them to build houses, to plan gardens, to marry, to have children, to live their lives in such a way that they start to recognize the fact that other people are in the world. More importantly, Jeremiah encourages the people to seek shalom for Babylon - to seek healing and wholeness with the very people that have taken them into exile in the first place.
Now our reaction to this is similar to how the Israelites reacted, I’m sure. We look at Jeremiah’s words and think, “You’re crazy. There’s no way that I can seek to be reconciled with the very people who have hurt me. I’m not going to be able to look at them and see them as part of God’s kingdom when they’ve brought me into exile. They’ve created these feelings of isolation and loneliness within me. I’m not going to be at shalom with those people.”
Even here in America, where we aren’t in exile, nor are we isolated or cut off from our loved ones or our communities, we share in this message with the Israelites. We live in a culture that is dominated by individualism, that very feeling that happens in depression - the uncanny feeling that no one else matters. We might let one or two people into our high walls that protect ourselves, but we tend to overlook or ignore people who are outside of those walls. We want to keep them out, because we think “nothing really matters” and “nothing lasts forever.”
And that’s true. “Nothing does last forever.” Well, it’s almost true. God lasts forever. God’s kingdom lasts forever. But these feelings of nothingness, that nothing matters - those things will not last forever.
They might not disappear overnight. They might take five years, ten years, seventy years, or a thousand years, but they will disappear eventually. These feelings will vanish in the presence of God’s light. There is no room for the anxiety that these thoughts and feelings produce in the kingdom of God. Instead, there is only room for shalom.
And like the Israeli people in exile that Jeremiah encourages in his letter, it is in bringing about shalom for those around us that we will find shalom for ourselves. It’s in building up, planting gardens, creating families, feeding the hungry around us, caring for those who are ill, spending time to understand one another, to really listen to one another, to be a presence of shalom for the people we come across day after day, that we will truly understand what Jesus talks about when he tells us that he leaves us with “Peace, but not as the world gives.”
Jesus’ peace is shalom. It’s being comforted and welcomed with our sisters and brothers around the world into the kingdom of God. It’s learning from one another and being made whole in what we learn. It’s feeding the hungry and then in turn being fed. It’s about losing that “It’s all about me” feeling and gaining a “We’re all in this together” feeling. It’s about imitating Christ’s love for us in all that we say and do. And I honestly cannot think of a better future than that. Amen.
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