Exiles – 7 October 2016

The lectionary Old Testament reading for next Sunday takes us back to about 580 BCE, to Jerusalem, and to the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah.  Jerusalem has been conquered by the army of Nebuchadnezzar.  He has creamed off all the priests and intellectuals, the artisans and professionals, and has carted them away into exile in Babylon.  Jerusalem is a city largely destroyed, a way of life all but wiped out, families shattered, survivors wandering – we have exile, refugees, all the calamitous consequences of mindless violence. How familiar does that sound at present?  Jeremiah writes to the exiles in Babylon…

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 Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon…  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. 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.  [Jeremiah 29:1, 5-7]

So they were to live through this catastrophe, and not by becoming perennial victims.  Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives…  Jeremiah sets out for them what real faith is like.  It requires first that we have a sober awareness of reality.  The reality now was Babylon, being far from home and in a foreign culture; the reality entailed loss and sorrow.  To the victim it is not that.  The victim’s first reality is myself, what has happened to me, how much I am disabled by the events of my life.  I start to see everything through the sentimentalism of what could have been but wasn’t…. for me, or for my family or tribe.  It may be eminently understandable – and perhaps it’s all very well for me, since I am not a refugee or experiencing such things in my life – but victimhood shields us from God and from faith.  We have placed self in the place that belongs to God.

One stream of spiritual teaching says that we are all, in various ways, in exile.  Some of our protestant hymns reflect that teaching.  Another important stream remembers that we are all children or great-great-grandchildren of exiles, of people who for one reason or another left home and made a life in a new place.  The faith of Abraham, Jeremiah, Jesus or Francis the Pope, of countless exiles through the centuries, consists in taking the next step, trusting God, putting one foot in front of the other, being still, saying yes to life in both joy and pain.  What cannot be helpful is retreating into fantasies and regrets, blame and retribution, sentimental dreams of a former life where all was well.

Our prayer is the discipline in which we practise presence and reality.  This discipline is our growing familiarity with the space in which it becomes possible even to forgive our enemies – something Jesus taught, as we know, but nearly six centuries before that Jeremiah said: seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf…  That city was Babylon.