I.There’s just something about the early part of November that codes our national mood, isn’t there? I’m speaking of election day, of course, and all that flows and follows from it. If you’re a voting adult, I bet you’ve experienced all manner of “morning after election day” feelings – elation and hope, disbelief and despair, or even a shrug. In these cool fall days, just before or after the time shifts, I suspect that many of us feel those score-keeping sensations in the body from elections gone by.
Take this year for example. No matter how or why you cast your vote last November, as citizens, I bet that all of us have felt varying degrees of disruption in this national project called the United States of America. And no matter how or why you cast your vote last November, as Christians, I feel certain you have felt some measure of grief or lament, fear or despair. Because you, beloved community, love and follow Jesus, you see. Because you love and follow Jesus, you have greeted the diminishing compassion in our national mood with grief. Because you love and follow Jesus, you long for love of neighbors, not estrangement from them; welcome of strangers, not removal of them; food for the hungry, not eradication of it; aid for the neglected, not ending of it. Because you love and follow Jesus, you ache for servanthood in our leaders, and fruits of the Spirit among our fellow citizens, and God’s new day to dawn right here, right now among us.
Indeed, as lovers and followers of Jesus, we’re not immune from despair, no matter its trigger. In these kinds of moments, perhaps for you, home doesn’t feel like home. The familiar trappings of relationships, rhythms, places, and values seem to dislocate in front of us, often to our utter surprise. This might happen communally, as I’ve described, or it might happen within the contours of each individual heart, when a change, a loss, a distance upends our sense of home at home. A kid goes off to college. A new job pulls away a spouse each night. A parent passes on from this life to the next. The landscape of our life is never the same, though it might appear on the surface to be so. Where is God, we ask, when home isn’t home anymore?
II.Of course, we’re not the first people of faith who have felt displaced from home as we’ve known it to be and wondered where hope might be found. This is precisely the space into which the prophet Jeremiah speaks.
Writing to the people of Israel in the midst of political change, he understood intimately the way that his people’s context directly affected their perspective. King Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian Empire had risen to power. They defeated Egypt, took over Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, kicked out its residents, and drove the people of Israel into exile. Imagine it: for a people whose entire way of being in the world and whose primary mode of relating to God was bound to a particular place with its particular rhythms and practices, their exile from their home to their enemy’s home was as much spiritual as it was physical. “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a distant land?,” they cried, their sense of hope a memory as distant as the others.
Surely their hearts longed for the ‘before times,’ yearning for all that was familiar and grounding. Surely their minds wandered toward revenge on the enemies who had already taken so much. Surely their lips begged for God to spare them, to bring them home, to put a stop to this nightmare. Surely they imagined a future where all would be made right.
Just a chapter before our text for today, another prophet, Hananiah, had told them so. “This won’t last long!,” he says. “Within two years, the Lord will break the yoke of the King of Babylon, and you’ll all be back home! Hold on – just a bit longer.” I can only imagine the wind in their sails the Israelites must have felt when hearing it.
“So says the God of Israel,” Jeremiah begins his letter to the exiles in Babylon, and you can imagine all their ears expected to hear further confirmation: a return home, a restored place, justice for enemies, and an end to exile. But instead, Jeremiah says this: “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Multiply your families and do not decrease. Seek the welfare, the shalom, the peace of the city where I have sent you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your own.”
Surely the people of Israel were stunned if not furious. Settle here? You’ve got to be kidding. Bring children into the world now? Absolutely not. Actually care about the land of our enemy, and pray – pray?! – for its well-being? Not a chance. Jeremiah continues, several verses later: “for the Lord says: only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I bring you back home.” Seventy years?! God, where are you?
Listen to what happens next: “for surely I know the plans I have for y’all,” says the Lord, “plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” The future would come, their welfare would come, their hope would come – but not on their terms or timeline. The road would be long, far longer than they’d imagined, but they would not be abandoned or forgotten. As the Lord said, “when you call upon me, I’ll hear you. When you seek for me, you’ll find me. I’ll restore you and gather you up from all the places where you live and will bring you home again.” The cycle of separation and exile will arc towards reunion and return. Someday, they will come home. But what of today? What of exile?
III.“By the rivers, we sat down and wept.” In the exiles of our lives, like the Psalmist, we’ve felt the pull to despair, to pulling inward, nursing our grief in isolation. “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a distant land?” In the exiles of our lives, like the Psalmist, we cry out, “O daughter Babylon, you devastator, happy shall they be who pay you back for what you’ve done to us.” In the exiles of our lives, like the Psalmist, our hot anger twists in our belly, revealing that neither calm or decorum can quiet the desire for retribution against our enemies.
And yet. To the people of Israel, Jeremiah calls them to “get busy living, right where they are.”1 Don’t drown in nostalgia for what once was. Don’t spin your wheels wondering how to get back to the way things were. Don’t get stuck longing for a future where all is made right. For when you’re running backwards or lunging forwards, your heart remains in exile. So instead, plant and root right here. Build houses. Plant gardens. Create families. Even when the ground seems to have shifted irrevocably. Even when home doesn’t feel like home. For God is with you always – even in exile.
It might be the pastor in me, but I can’t help but to call this “hope.”
This kind of hope is a farther-reaching hope, one that knows that wholeness and resurrection and life abundant and home have a longer horizon. Hope is like that long arc bending toward justice. It takes time and patience and attentiveness and care. Hope is tenacious, gritty, insistent, despite all evidence to the contrary. Or, as Reinhold Niebuhr says, “Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime…therefore we are saved by hope.”2
This is what a young woman named Codi experiences in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Animal Dreams. Codi’s father’s needs in his aging years drew her back home to her childhood home in Arizona for his care. It’s not what she would have chosen, but it’s where she finds herself. As she combs back through her home, she discovers some letters from her sister, Hallie, who has moved to Nicaragua and is living and working there, teaching sustainable agriculture. The family didn’t understand why she left, and she tried to explain. “The very least you can do in your life,” Hallie writes, “is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof.”
Let me be clear though: hope isn’t optimism. Optimism expects a fix in two years; hope takes the 70 year view. Of this distinction, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says this: “Optimism and hope are not the same. Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope. The Hebrew Bible is not an optimistic book. It is, however, one of the great literatures of hope.”4 To that, hear these words from pastor Sam Wells: “Community generates hope, because those committed to one another generate momentum and expectation of what God has in store; and hope generates community, since there is nothing more infectious than seeing beautiful things happen over and over again.”5
Home built. Gardens planted. Families created. Shalom sought.
IV.In 1789, just four days before George Washington became our first president, John Berry Meachum was born to an enslaver in Virginia. The son of an enslaved Baptist preacher, John knew about chains and freedom. When he was but 21 living in Kentucky, John purchased his freedom and then walked 700 miles back to Virginia to free his father. Not long after, John met and fell in love with Mary who was also enslaved, and they married and began a family. When Mary’s enslavers moved her and their children to St. Louis, John followed along with just $3 in his pocket: $2 to pay the fare to cross the river, and that final dollar got John to work on their freedom.
He operated small businesses to help others pay for their freedom, and John and Mary’s home became a stop on the underground railroad for the many on the long road to freedom. In 1827, John became the pastor of the First African Baptist Church in St. Louis, the oldest Black congregation west of the Mississippi. And in the basement of that church, John and Mary started the Tallow Candle School to educate Black children, named for the candlelight by which they studied. Twenty years later, when the state of Missouri outlawed any education of Black children, anywhere, free or enslaved, that could have been the end of the story.
But not for John. Because when the school closed, he looked to the nearby Mississippi River and remembered that the river was under federal jurisdiction, not the state. And so John bought himself a steamboat, filling it with desks and books and anchored it just offshore in the river. The Floating Freedom School, it was called, a sanctuary of education and belonging for hundreds of Black children. Their story spread across the nation. Teachers came from all over to teach the kids. Where optimism had died, a community-generated hope took root. In exile, John and Mary Meachum sought shalom and built a home.6
V.Friends, Ecclesiastes tells us there’s a time for everything. A time to plant, a time to pluck up; a time to kill, a time to heal; a time to tear down, a time to build. And I have to believe that all the destruction of this age, in all the rips of the frayed fabric of our common life together, in all that is torn down, there will be time to rebuild.
Within our beloved community, we may not be building a new sanctuary this year, like our foremothers and fathers did 100 years ago right here. We may not be building a steamboat school on the river like John and Mary Meachum. But with God’s help, we are building. Oh yes, we’re building sanctuary, that is. Sanctuary for the tired and weary. Sanctuary for the oppressed and overlooked. Sanctuary for the dislocated and displaced. Sanctuary for all of us whose hope feels mangled in the chaos of despair. Sanctuary for all who need the reminder, that yes, the world is changing, but we are not to long for the familiar past. We are not to only yearn for an optimistic future. Rather, we are to live right here in the hope of today. So don’t wait. Life is not on hold. This is the given life, not the planned life7 – but by the grace of God, it’s a life worth living, even sometimes in Babylon.