"Seek the welfare of the city"

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

1These 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. 4Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6Take 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. 7But 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. 

The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah as God’s people were being sent into exile in Babylon.  This tumultuous event - to which we turn our attention at Advent each year - not only shaped Jewish experience and identity, but also how Christians came to think about God’s relationship to God’s people, about the nature of deliverance, salvation, God’s purposes in the world.  

In the chapters immediately preceding the one we read from Jeremiah it is declared, in no uncertain terms, that this exile is God’s judgment upon his people, a fate they should not resist but accept.  They seemed to have assumed, or at least hoped, that this exile would be brief, that God would make his point and then they’d get to go home.  Apparently some so-called prophets proclaimed that very message, but God said to ignore them.  The exile will endure - for 70 years, as it turned out.  

Because the exile would endure for generations - for the entire lifetime of pretty much every adult - God commanded them to “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6Take 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.”

We should pause for a moment to consider how strange and unwelcome this command would’ve sounded in the ears of the exiles.  They’d be thinking, “These people are our enemies, not our neighbors.  This place is not our home, we don’t want to be here, and we’re not going to put down roots.  We’re out of here at the first opportunity.”  You can imagine that they’d want their captors to suffer, not to prosper, to experience the same kind of pain they’d inflicted.  It’s only human, after all.  

But the word of the Lord pointed in the opposite direction.  It continued: “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.”  This would’ve been most confusing to hear, more or less opposite of what they would’ve imagined God’s will to be.  Not only are they going to be here a while, they should unpack their bags, get comfortable, make their homes, raise children and grandchildren, build a life in this foreign land, and to find their good in the common good.  

Every Advent I say something - and I’m sure I will again this year - about how exile offers a paradigm for Christian existence, and this passage provides an especially compelling vision of what that might mean.  Exile names the reality that this world, while in a sense not the place from which we came or to which we will one day return, is nevertheless the place that God has put us, where God wants us, where we live our lives; it is our home.     

Rather than being called to a kind of otherworldliness, to separate from the world, to dissociate from our neighbors, Christians are to be those who make a home in the world, who plant gardens wherever they find themselves, who, rather than cursing and condemning their neighbors, seek to bless and lift up.  The model God presents to God’s people here is not one of resisting the world and their home in it, but of embracing it, of seeing their fate tied to the fate of others.  

But this did not mean (or, at least, wasn’t supposed to mean) that the exiles would simply assimilate, that they would unreflectively adopt the customs and habits of their new neighbors.  They were to maintain their distinctive identity, or - more to the point - they were to continue to worship and obey God, even as they also were good neighbors who found common cause with everyone else. 

This is a tricky position to maintain, and Christians have rarely managed it well, drawn either to downplay the difference that their worship of God might make and thus blend in, or to go the other way, withdrawing from the world and condemning it, seeing engagement with the world not as opportunity to bless but as a potential dangerous place of contamination and compromise.  But we are to be those who do not fear the world, but who trust that, however estranged from God and one another we may be, this is the place that God made and which God will redeem.  It is good to be here.  

I’ve never made it explicit, but this passage expresses a substantial part of the vision for this church, for it is my hope that we will be people who live together distinctively as Christians and who at the same time are entirely integrated into the community - that our presence wouldn’t merely be tolerated but who would be seen as especially good neighbors, who make outsized contributions to the common good.  We want to be those who bless, not those who curse.  And this, to be clear, is not the means to some evangelistic end, that we earn the right to speak or something like that, but rather this kind of faithful living, of loving all our neighbors as ourselves is not preamble to sharing the Gospel, it is the very embodiment of the Gospel.  When we say that we are Church of the Incarnation, part of what we mean is that we hope to be a people who together embody the Good News, that, in some sense, we are the Good News.

Doing this in Luxembourg presents a peculiar challenge.  Even if it feels to some people like being here is a kind of exile, the reality is that no one sent us here against our wills.  We came seeking something, probably a better life and/or higher salary.  But since so many of us are from elsewhere, we do know what it’s like to make your home in a place that in so many ways does’t feel like “home”.  And it’s quite cliche at this point - there was even a promotional campaign - that people come here without any intention of staying but then never leave.  So many of us arrived thinking that our time here would be relatively short, so we didn’t really try (maybe even avoided) putting down roots, “planting gardens”, as it were.  We have lived here like our residence was provisional even as it shows no signs of ending.  

I embody this ambivalence.  I’ve been here almost a decade and am finally enrolled in a Luxembourgish course.  We bought an apartment and I’m even part of our neighborhood council, and yet I’ve also never voted in local elections, though I can, nor do I have but the slightest awareness of local politics.  I feel both at home and like a stranger.  I’ll never resolve these tensions in this life, but I am convinced that, if I’m going to really live life to the fullest - which is to say, if I’m going to live in faithfully - then I, then we, need to work for the welfare of the place where we are.  And being outsiders, while a hindrance is some respects, could even prove beneficial in others.  As those whose true citizenship lies in heaven, we are meant to be those whose life together testifies to otherwise unimaginable possibilities.

In the earliest centuries Christians gained a reputation for being those who cared for the poor and sick, whether they were Christian or pagan, which led to begrudging respect even among those who rejected Christian worship.   What if again we were known as those who care for the poor and sick, for the least of these, regardless of their identity?  We should be grateful that we live in a country with significant social welfare and we should recognize this as the direct inheritance of a once Christian society, but it would be a mistake for us to assume that because the state makes provision that the church has no work to do.  In the first place we might be those who advocate for more generous, more dignified, more effective public policy, who engage in the political process as citizens who care.  

But even more to the point, we should desire to be a community that is able to meet the needs of our neighbors.  It can be hard to imagine what this looks like here and now, so I’ll present a potential idea.  In a few weeks we plan to have a children’s clothing exchange.  The origin for this idea arises from the simple reality that our little community has quite a few children, and we have things we no longer need that might be useful to others.  It’s a win-win situation.  But what if we - as I think Jana already has - saw this as opportunity to meet needs outside of our community, to provide clothing for those who lack it, to provide care and support for mothers (and fathers) who are anxious and afraid?  What if we contributed to the common good by clothing children and encouraging their parents?  We could do that.  And what if we understood that, not as a means to some end, but as the very goal of our faith, the very substance of faithfulness?