Settling Into Babylon

October 13, 2019

Jeremiah 29:1-7

Last week we had Psalm 137.  A song of lament by people that have been exiled from their home land: “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion.”

And this week, the people are still sitting by the waters of Babylon weeping in our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah.  They are still waiting for God to change their circumstances, to bring them home out of exile in a foreign land.  They are still frozen in mourning, stuck in the face of a completely uncertain future.

God had set them apart as Chosen People. And now they are strangers in a strange land.

God had given them the Promised Land.  And now they had lost it.

And so just like last week, they must have been wondering: "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"

When they asked God how they could possibly live like this, they had a certain kind of answer in mind.  They were expecting God to come and save them -- maybe with pillars of clouds by day and fire by night, or with a parting of waters, or with some strong personality that would demand that the foreign leader who had captured them “Let my people go!”

But instead of a promise of that kind of dramatic deliverance, today God answers them, in the form of a letter from the prophet Jeremiah: “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.”

In other words: Settle in.  This is your life now.

This must have been fairly shocking and unappreciated news for the people, who were hoping for a promise of imminent return to their homeland.  

This was not at all what they wanted to hear -- They would be here for generations!?

But this was definitely what they needed to hear.  They would be here for generations, so they might as well get used to it and make the best of their circumstances.

Their situation was disheartening, to say the least.  And this advice from God wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

But underlying it all was a message of hope that changed not just their self-understanding but their theology.  God wasn’t just present with them when they were on top. And God wasn’t just present with them in a certain place -- the temple, or the Promised Land.  God was present with them even here, in this foreign land, when they were completely at the mercy of their enemies. Their God was a universal God who ruled over all the earth and all the people.  They might be far from home, but they would never be far from God.  

And, God tells them, not only should they settle in for the long haul, but they should also “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.” 

God wanted the people to pray for the welfare of the people that had captured them.  And the word used repeatedly here as “welfare” is actually the Hebrew word shalom.  Shalom meaning peace and wholeness and harmony and well-being in every aspect of one’s life.  Shalom sums up the dream of God that “all of creation is one, every creature in community with every other, living in harmony."  The people of God were called by the prophet Jeremiah not to sit and bemoan their fate, not to burn up in anger and negativity, but to seek the shalom of the whole creation.

When I got to this part of the reading, I had a sensation of familiarity.  “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you.” Where had I seen that recently?  After my brain spun in circles for a few days, it finally came to me. This is the quote inscribed over the front doors of Richmond Hill, an ecumenical intentional community where I go every month for a spiritual guidance program.  I’m there each month to learn about how to do spiritual direction with people, to experiment with different kinds of prayer, to practice deep listening. But the community itself is there to pray and work for the city of Richmond.  

Richmond Hill is an intentional community where about 15 people have made this place their home for a period of years.  Each person in the community has agreed to live on site in small apartments without kitchens; to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in together; to pray together morning, noon and night; and to do the work of providing hospitality — not just for folks like me in the spiritual guidance program, but also for churches on retreat, and people seeking a get-away from their busy lives, and at-risk high school students in their leadership program, and community leaders working for peace and healing in the city.  There is always a diverse group of visitors gathered at Richmond Hill, and the people that live there cook and clean and lead retreats and welcome us in.  

This stability of living, eating, praying, and hospitality is part of the rule of life the community agrees to when they enter into life at Richmond Hill.  It is a beautiful thing. And yet, to be honest, every time I go I think to myself, “I cannot imagine living in this place.” They have very little privacy.  They can’t decide to sleep late and skip 7 am prayers, or to eat in their room rather than in the common dining room. They can’t decide who they will be friends with or what to have for lunch.  I would feel completely claustrophobic after about a week, I’m sure of it.

At lunch one day I sat with a resident and heard more detail about what this commitment to the community entailed.  And I couldn’t help remarking about how hard it must be and how I couldn’t quite imagine doing it. The resident laughed.  And she admitted that she’d been pretty weepy and miserable for the whole first year she was there. After about a year of resentment, it hit her in prayer one morning that the stability that was part of the rule of life that she’d taken on didn’t mean just being at Richmond Hill and going through the motions of life in community; true stability meant being there whole-heartedly.  Finally she decided it was time to get over the loss of her previous home and her expectations of privacy and her control over so many aspects of life -- it was time to say yes and enter fully in.  And when she did, she said she could finally see God at work all over the place. Finally the community felt like home, the diverse group of residents felt like family, the work she was doing there felt like vocation.  Nothing had changed, not really; and yet everything had changed.

I’m betting it isn’t so different for us.  We live our mundane, helter-skelter lives. And we need that same reminder to enter in, to say yes with our whole hearts.  To build our houses and live in them; to plant our gardens and eat what they produce. To work for shalom right here, right now.

Esther de Waal, a lay person who wrote about Benedictine spirituality, explained the idea of stability this way:  “So many people find themselves in the situation of enclosure, in a marriage or a career, [and] by their refusal to accept it, it has become a trap from which they long to escape, perhaps by actually running away, perhaps by resorting to the daydreaming which begins with that insidious little phrase ‘if only….’  Family life which is boring, a marriage which has grown stale, an office job which has become deadening are only too familiar. Our difficulty lies in the way in which we fail to meet those demands with anything more than the mere grudging minimum which will never allow them to become creative.” What if instead, de Waal challenges, we see ourselves as “inserted into the mystery of Christ through this particular family, this particular community, this particular place.” Then, this life in which we find ourselves becomes the way to God.

I wonder what it might look like for each of us to settle wholeheartedly into our lives?  How might working and praying for the shalom of the people and places that surround us open us to the holy mystery of the presence of God, right here, right now?