Sermon: Seek the Welfare of the City
Text: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Date: October 10, 2004


When last we saw the prophet Jeremiah, a couple of weeks ago, he was in jail for treason, making a deal to buy a piece of property deemed worthless by most folk because of its location under the jack-boots of an invading army.  His investment was a prophecy of hope.

This week's lesson finds Jeremiah writing to the exiles who have been bundled off to Babylon by the invaders.  It's prophecy by mail.  It seems that there is a competing prophet, Hananiah, who has been telling people that the exile is going to be extremely temporary, that God is going to bring everyone home within two years, so don't worry, folks, and keep those bags packed.  Jeremiah is writing to the exiles to set the record straight.  He is making a case that Hananiah is a false prophet, and they shouldn't listen to him no matter how much they all wish his prophecy of a short and painless exile would come true.

Friends, he says, go ahead and unpack.  Build a house.  Plant a garden.  Get married.  Have some kids.  Let your kids get married.  You're going to be there a while-say, 70 years.  A lifetime, give or take.

One can only imagine what disappointing news that would have been for the exiles.  That word alone would have been painful enough to absorb.  But then Jeremiah goes all prophet-y on them again, asking them to do something extremely difficult.  "[Thus says the Lord of hosts:] 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." [Jeremiah 29:7]

The Israelites are quite used to praying for the peace of Jerusalem, a practice commended to them in Psalm 122.  Psalm 122 gives the flavor of a prayer for the city: "May they prosper who love you.  Peace be within your walls, and security within your towers."  To pray such a prayer for Babylon would have been unheard of in the exile community; to pray for the enemy's deliverance from threats and dangers was counter-intuitive, to say the least.  And Jeremiah's directive went way beyond the realm of prayer.  They were to seek the welfare of the city, seek the peace and prosperity of the place where they had been sent into exile.  "Seek" here is an active verb, implying working for the welfare of that community.  Jeremiah, speaking on God's behalf, is asking those who have been forcibly carried off by the enemy to work for the general welfare, peace and prosperity of the neighbors they didn't choose.  Thus the prophet adds insult to injury, you might say.

I suspect that the people might have preferred, even given the prospect of a lifetime in that strange land, to keep themselves separate and uninvolved with the community as much as possible.  They probably would have preferred to live all together in one part of the city, and eventually open their own markets and their own restaurants and keep to themselves.  They would liked to have kept their identity as strangers sharp and wanted to steer clear of Babylonian society as much as they could.  And why not?  They were God's people marooned away from home, away from the Holy Land.  Why not act like a mournful, marooned people for the duration of their stay, be it short or long?

Why not?  Because as long as they have existed, God's people have had a mission.  The simplest way to describe it is "blessed to be a blessing."  God's people are to be a blessing to all the world, a light to the nations, a force for healing in this lifetime.  And you can't very well do that if you've withdrawn into a hostile enclave, refusing to engage with those "evil" Babylonians.  In seeking the welfare of their captors, they will fulfill their calling as God's people and will have allowed God to work through them in that strange place.
Plus there's the simple logic that since they live in that city, whether they like it or not, improving the welfare of the city will improve their welfare.  It's what our LDS neighbor Ross Boundy calls "the tide that raises all the boats," when he enthuses about the faith communities working together for the benefit of all the faith groups, rather than competing.  The exiled Israelite's welfare and the welfare of their unchosen Babylonian neighbors was inextricably tied up with each other.  There's some common sense there, and yet in real life that lesson is easy to forget or ignore. 

Kathleen Norris, writing about her home in rural South Dakota, wrote that "where I am is a place where Native Americans and whites live alone together…many small towns are Indian or white, and in general there is a deafening silence between the two worlds, a silence exacerbated by ignorance and intolerance on both sides.  Many in the dominant white culture seem content with an indifference that amounts to 'live and let die,' given the drastic unemployment and low life expectancy in the impoverished Indian community."   I don't think her experience in that place is all that unusual; somehow where different ethnic groups or social classes live together they tend to forget that their welfare is bound up together.

Friends, do you think the directive the prophet wrote to the exiled people has any bearing on us, thousands of years later?  I don't mean the "settle down, plant a garden, get married, watch your kids get married and make grandkids for you" part of the letter.  I mean the part where he says, "Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you…and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."  Does that directive still apply? 

I think it is still a good and active word for us, and I'd like very much to say it is a real no-brainer.  But I think that we, like the exiled Israelites in Babylon, may still be tempted to withdraw rather than taking our identity as people of God out on an active quest to improve the welfare of the community or nation or world in which we live. 
As we explore this further, we could start by asking whether we identify with the experience of being exiled.  Do we feel like exiles?  Like strangers in a strange land?  I think most of us have had times in our lives when we have experienced being suddenly uprooted from all that is familiar.  A husband or wife dies, for example, and we are exiled into widowhood.  A divorce occurs, and we are exiled from the family.  A job is lost, and we're wandering in the wilderness of fear and self-doubt. 

Most of us have had our days of exile, and there are probably those among us who are wandering in the wilderness now whether we know it or not. 
We might also experience a sense of being a stranger in a strange land in regard to the society in which we live.  A fragment of a poem I saw at the Marge Williams Center sticks in my head; the poet felt as though America had moved somewhere while he had stayed put.  There was a sense of exile in the poem.  Maybe you've had that experience under one group of leaders or another. 

It's spiritually healthy to have at least some sense of homelessness while we wait for God's realm to be fully realized.  We wouldn't want to be too content, too at home with our world the way it is while there are old people without adequate health care and children who are hungry and too much violence in the streets.  It's good to retain a sense of being strangers in a strange land, citizens of another kin-dom that doesn't quite resemble this place.  Yet.     

But even if we do identify ourselves as exiles to some degree, we cannot withdraw into an enclave, hostile to our neighbors, waiting history out and hoping to be rescued.  We have inherited the calling of all God's people, blessed to be a blessing, a light to the nations, an active force of healing.  We are to seek the welfare of the place to which we have been sent.  Seek the peace and prosperity of this place.  And not, of course, just Bainbridge Island, whose island-ness subjects us to the temptation to be an enclave separate from our urban and rural neighbors, not to mention our global neighbors.  

We have one of our big opportunities to seek the welfare of the community coming up in a few weeks as we go out to vote.  The Interfaith Alliance has called voting a "Civic Sacrament."  Interesting terminology.  It's a little jarring, perhaps, to think of voting that way, as a civic sacrament.  We are so committed in our country to the important principle of the separation of church and state that we are not used to thinking about how our faith impacts how we vote-although more conservative faith groups are less reticent about connecting the dots between faith and ballot.    We should learn from our evangelical brothers and sisters the practice of looking at ballots through a lens of faith. 

Our general goal as people of faith, I hope, is to have a seven-day-a-week, 12-month-a-year faith, not just an occasional Sunday faith.  It's a good discipline to think through how faith will inform our voting, so that voting can be a civic sacrament.  You may remember the classic definition of a sacrament: "a visible form of an invisible grace."  Voting is one of the opportunities we have to make God's invisible grace more visible in our community life.

The Church Council of Greater Seattle gave their newspaper The Source an election theme for their October issue.  They didn't offer direct advice about how to vote on various candidates, which would be inappropriate.  They did reprint and expand on a publication of the National Council of Churches, which has developed a list of Christian principles to help guide our decisions at the polls.  I found the principles very thought-provoking and want to share them with you. 

ü Each human being is created in the image of God and is of infinite worth.  We look for political leaders who actively promote racial justice and equal opportunity for everyone.

ü God calls us to live in communities shaped by peace and cooperation.  We reject policies that abandon large segments of our inner city and rural population to hopelessness.  We look for political leaders who will rebuild our communities and bring an end to the cycles of violence and killing.

ü All humans are called to be in right relationship with each other.  We look for political leaders who seek a restorative, not retributive, approach to the criminal justice system and the individuals within it.

ü War is contrary to the will of God.  While the use of violent force may, at times, be a necessity of last resort, Christ pronounces his blessing on the peacemakers.  We look for political leaders who will make peace with justice a top priority and who will actively seek nonviolent solutions to conflict.

ü God created us for each other-our security depends on the well being our global neighbors.  We look for leaders for whom a foreign policy based on cooperation and global justice is an urgent concern.

ü The earth belongs to God and is intrinsically good.  We look for political leaders who recognize the earth's goodness, champion environmental justice, and uphold our responsibility to be stewards of God's creation.

ü Christians have a biblical mandate to welcome strangers.  We look for political leaders who will pursue fair immigration policies and speak out against xenophobia.

ü Those who follow Christ are called to heal the sick.  We look for political leaders who will support adequate, affordable and accessible health care for all.

I offer these for your consideration.  If these principles are not how you understand Christian faith and your practice of it, fine.  This is one perspective offered by a national ecumenical body of which our denomination is a member, and not the definitive description of what constitutes a Christian.  If you have arguments with these principles, I hope your disagreement will lead you to articulate your Christian principles and think about how your faith will shape your voting next month.  Think about how you are blessed to be a blessing, and vote your conscience on the best way to seek the welfare of the larger community with your ballot.

One of the things the bold articulation of these principles from the National Council of Churches does for me is revive my sense of hope about what is possible.  We are so fortunate to live in a nation where the will of the people actually makes a difference in how we are governed.  It's thrilling to think about the ways in which our love for our neighbors, expressed in our votes on issues and honorable candidates for leadership, could end up shaping policy that makes a big difference in people's lives.  The ballot box is a door to future possibilities. 

If voting is a civic sacrament for us it will be a sacrament that makes hope visible.  Rubem Alves offered these stirring words on "What is hope?"

"Hope is: the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks; the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress is not the last word; the suspicion that reality is more complex than realism wants us to believe, that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual; and that in a miraculous and unexpected way life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and resurrection."    "Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you…for in its welfare you will find your welfare." [Jeremiah 29:7, selected]  The God of hosts, the God of hope, sends us.