October 10, 2004
By Jack Price

Imagination is filled with hope.  This is why Walter Brueggemann’s book about the prophet Jeremiah is called Hopeful Imagination:  Voices in Exile.  Brueggemann is a widely respected Old Testament scholar who, some twenty years ago, opened my eyes and ears to the powerful message of the Old Testament prophets.  Suddenly the words of these ancient truth tellers came alive in my mind, and gradually in my life.

Jeremiah’s was a voice in exile and a voice to those in exile.  He was a prophet from the tribe of Benjamin who reluctantly began his career as a prophet about forty years before Jerusalem fell to the forces of the Babylonian empire.  Jeremiah understood the harsh implications of his office, that it was dangerous to challenge authority and difficult to change entrenched beliefs.  But Jeremiah understood the implications of the events unfolding in his generation.

He believed Judah was under God’s judgment.  Despite a national “revival” under the previous monarch, despite their best efforts to appease God and avoid the consequences of their faithlessness, those consequences were inevitable.  Jeremiah encourages the people to endure the consequence, to learn and grow through them, and look forward to God’s promised redemption.  Today’s passage is a portion of that message.  

To whom was Jeremiah writing?  Many Jewish leaders were executed or sent into exile before the destruction of Jerusalem.  Jeremiah’s countrymen were being deported and also exiled in their own country.  It was a situation of domination by the Babylonians.  Occasional Jewish uprisings led to repression.  Some Jewish leaders in exile in Babylon were still expecting “early release.”  Jeremiah speaks a message from God with words that were not exactly welcome:  it’s going to be a long haul in exile.

Jeremiah confronts the exiles with two challenging tasks, according to Brueggemann.  The first task is reliquishment, letting go of their known world.  Jeremiah’s understood his calling to “help his community face the loss of the old world of king and temple in order to receive a new world defined by Yahweh.”  He interprets reality theologically, that the “known world is under judgment, is ending.  God’s people are to be given over into hands of the Babylonian empire.”  So, make yourselves at home.

Jeremiah understood the gravity of the situation.  This was no short-term imprisonment.  And the worst was yet to come.  So, seek the welfare of the city.  Seek the welfare of the country, the welfare of the community where God has sent us into exile.  Pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare.  There, you will find your own welfare.”  The first task is relinquishment.

The second task is reception, embracing God’s new world that is being introduced by the poetic prophets:  Jeremiah, 2^nd Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Micah.  These voices in exile speak to enable the relinquishment of the old and familiar, and to cast a vision of God’s new world, what God is bringing to pass.

Jeremiah knows the deep truth that “only grief permits newness”.  Reception can only take place through the very real experience of grief.  The psalmist wrote of such grief (Ps. 137):  

By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down

and there we wept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?

And yet

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!

Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.

Isaiah spoke God’s promise, echoed in the New Testament book of Revelation:     “Behold, I am making all things new”.  To the exiled people, there would be a new paradigm in life, a new paradigm in faith.  The task they faced was a radical revisioning of life.  The prophets helped this happen through the language of poetry:  porous, impressionistic, poetic language.  This is open language, not exhausted at first hearing.  Its truth is a reality open to the experience of the listener, similar to the way Jesus’ parables would open their meaning only to those willing to experience them as truth for their own lives. 

God was offering real newness, not just recycled reality.  The tasks were relinquishment and reception.  Perhaps the tasks are still relinquishment and reception.  We cannot hold on to what we have and receive God’s new gifts.

Does Jeremiah’s message find us in exile?  Few of us have had the experience of living for an extended time in a foreign country.  It can be a lonely experience, being cut off from the familiar, with our world out of balance.  In such a situation, we may live in the hope of coming home.  A more familiar state of exile comes from living a life that is not “your own”.  This is a state of being an exile in your own home, in your own life.  It is also a lonely experience, with your world out of balance.  Such people may despair of ever going home.

To the extent we live in “exile,” and theologian Paul Tillich suggests this is a universal human condition, our part of the bargain with God is to live fully where we live.  It is to seek the welfare of the “city or country where we are in exile,” and to grow where we are planted. 

Do we have a promise to keep to God?  The Jewish people had bargain, a promise to keep.  It was to         be a blessing to the nations, a sign through which God’s true nature, God’s hopes and dreams for humanity and all creation are revealed.  It is a promise not invalidated by exile.

            For people, we hold the same bargain, the same promise to keep:  to be a blessing to all people, a sign revealed in words and deeds of God’s true nature, of God’s hopes and dreams for humanity and all creation.

            How do we keep our promise?  We keep it by how we talk about God and how we talk about our understanding of God.  We keep our promise by how we talk with each other and how we don’t talk at each other.

            We also keep our promise to God by how we embody God’s nature.  We keep it through living acts of true love in real time.  We keep it in the gift of listening well, in the gift of growing ourselves, and in the gift of “truth speaking” in love.  We keep our promise by following the example of Jesus and cultivating the presence of the Holy Spirit.

            Jesus’ message through the gospels is all about God’s newness, discovered through life and through death.  The quality of new life only comes through resurrection. 

If Jeremiah’s message is that “only grief permits newness,” we can embrace our own experiences of grief in that hope.  Many of you have experienced deep grief, especially in the loss of a loved one.  A profound experience of grief came for me in the death of my mother.  Through the stress and anxiety of those days after her death, I was only able to let go seated at the graveside.  The voice of a dear friend and pastor provided the sacred space for me to experience my grief fully with tears.  Newness as gift was given right then.  I received it in part at that time and have received it little by little over twenty years of hard work.  In truth, it is a gift I am still receiving.

The gift of healing grief lets us embrace life and loss honestly and fully.  It is the nexus of transformation.  Through it, we can relinquish our familiar world of king and temple, of power-seeking and tightly controlling, and receive God’s new world of grace freely given, of forgiveness right up front.  It is a world of freedom from earned salvation.  We receive life as gift and dare to embrace the poets’ vision of heaven right here and now, even in the midst of a broken world.  It is the reality of evil transformed, of hatred reversed, of death resurrected, and eternity begun.  God is with us in our exile.  God is at home in us

Poet Leonardo Boff, in The Path of Hope, reminds us:

God does not explain why there is suffering.  God suffers alongside us.  God does not explain why there is sorrow.  God became the sorrowful one.  God does not explain why there is humiliation.  God practices self-emptying love.  We are no longer alone in our vast loneliness.  God is with us.  We are no longer in solitude, but rather in solidarity.  The arguments from reason are silenced.  It is the heart that speaks.  It tells of a God who does not ask questions, but who acts; who does not offer explanations, but lives out an answer.

We promise, O God, to live so as to receive this new way you give to us and all creation, knowing that to receive it means to relinquish so much that is familiar, so much in which we have tended to place our faith.  We promise to seek the welfare of the place we are now, of the people with whom we share life; to grow where we are planted.  We trust you, O God.  Help us in our doubt.  Help us in our fear.  You alone have the words of life.  Amen.