Seek the Shalom of the city where I have sent you
A sermon by Jamie Howison on Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7 and Luke 17:11-19
It is perhaps most fitting on this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend to read the gospel story of the healing of the ten lepers, in which “one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.” This thankful one was a Samaritan, and he threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him for this miraculous delivery from a disease that had made him an outcast.
“Were not ten made clean?” Jesus asks rather rhetorically. “But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” This, however, does not mean that the other nine were suddenly inflicted with the return of their leprous state, so the wellness or wholeness that the Samaritan received must have somehow gone deeper than simply the physical and bodily. And maybe that’s something worth pondering on a weekend in which we are invited to pause, perhaps gather with family and friends, share a bit of a feast, and express gratitude. Pausing long enough to be truly thankful has the potential to change us or shape us or fashion us more deeply as a people of gratitude, and that’s not a bad thing at all.
This gospel reading is paired with this teaching of Jeremiah, addressed to the Judean exiles who were in captivity in Babylon, and in it Jeremiah offers words meant to cultivate a most striking way of being Jews in a strange land. Call it, if you will, an almost proto-Thanksgiving teaching, in that the people he is addressing don’t yet have much for which to be thankful, but he’s working to cultivate a kind of Jewish culture there in Babylon that will come to be grateful.
Remember, Jeremiah writes to a defeated and heartbroken people. In 597 BCE a deportation of many of Jerusalem’s leading citizens had been undertaken by the Babylonian Empire, as a way of breaking the back of that city. It would be just another eleven years until the Babylonians captured and destroyed much of the fabric of that once great city, including its grand temple of Solomon, but even at this earlier point when the time of exile had just begun, most of those folks knew that they’d probably never see their beloved city again.
Recall Psalm 137, that great lament for all that had been lost:
By the waters 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!’
Entertain us with one of your folk songs, the captors had goaded them. Give us a little taste of your quaint little culture. But they can’t—or won’t—do it, for “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
Now interestingly, part of what the prophet Jeremiah is suggesting here that it is indeed time to begin to sing the Lord’s song right there, in the midst of all that had been lost.
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.
It is that final line about seeking the welfare of the city that is most striking. And here Walter Brueggemann comments,
Jews in exile are to work for the well-being (shalom) of the empire and its capital city. The well-being (shalom) of Judah is dependent upon and derivative from that of Babylon.
The imperative bestows upon this vulnerable, small community a large missional responsibility. In this way, the community is invited into the larger public process of the empire. Such a horizon prevents the exilic community from withdrawing into its own safe, sectarian existence, and gives it work to do and responsibility for the larger community.
This is an audacious sort of instruction that Jeremiah is offering, this working for the shalom of Babylon, and it might have been tempting to do one of two things in that time of captivity.
Go underground as Jews, practice whatever religious rituals were possible, cheat the system as best they could, and remain hurt, embittered, and hostile, or…
Capitulate, accept defeat, let themselves be absorbed into Babylonian culture, which is sure what their captors would have hoped for and expected.
But no, for as Melissa Ramos says,
[T]he letter from Jeremiah that brings a prophetic word from YHWH to the exiles offers a word of hope, encouragement, and a call to take agency in ways that were possible during the time of exile.
And that is precisely what they do. They do work for the welfare—the shalom—of the city in which they find themselves. But—and this is a very significant but—as a community they don’t enfold themselves fully into the life of Babylon, but rather remain Jews—resident aliens in Babylon—cutting a new and distinctive identity. It is largely the scholarly consensus that the first collection of the book of Psalms was probably forged during this time, to keep the Jewish mother tongue of faith alive, and it also quite likely that Sabbath practice was moved to a central role in Jewish life during this time. Far from home and cut off from the temple, the familiar landscape, foods, and practices, such things became defining for their common life. Oddly, in other words, Jewish identity was deeply reforged in a time of utter displacement.
And here I wonder if we aren’t in the midst of a time and experience that has at least some parallels to Israel’s exilic experience.
In his landmark essay, “Rethinking Church Models through Scripture,” Walter Brueggmann suggests that there are powerful parallels between Israel’s exilic experience and the current place of the church in an increasing secular and post-Christian society. He notes three facets that make this connection. In Babylon,
The community of faith had to live in a context where it exercised little influence over public policy.
The temptations to cultural syncretism and the disappearance of a distinct identity were acute, and
In the face of political irrelevance and social syncretism, a main task of the community was to work very hard and intentionally at the cultural-linguistic infrastructure of community.
All three of these facets are increasingly present now in a social and cultural context that isn’t much interested in what we have to say about public policy, and in which many who had once seen the church as an anchor are now more interested in all manner of things “spiritual” (but maybe not religious…) that are served up on the media and in the marketplace.
In response, what did the Israelite exiles do?
They worked hard “at the recovery of memory and rootage and connectedness.”
As “a community at the brink of despair,” came “the intense practice of hope. The rhetoric of the community filled its imagination with the quite concrete promises of God.”
They became “an intensely textual community,” meaning that they soaked themselves in text and story, including those psalms and the deep histories carried in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings.
Oh, and the writings of people like Jeremiah too, of course, who was able to first name the disaster that that the old Jerusalem and its corrupt monarchy had become, and then dare to envision a new beginning. In Jeremiah’s initial calling be was told he would see God “pluck up and pull down, destroy and overthrow, build and plant,” and while so much of the book that bears his name is about the pulling down, here today we have that golden glimpse of instructions meant “to build and to plant.”
“Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile,” which should resonate as much with us here today as it did with those Israelite exiles all those years ago, “for in that city’s welfare you will find your welfare.”
That’s why we should care about the person who lives next door or across the hall. That’s why it is worth picking up the garbage that has landed on our sidewalk. That’s why people living on riverbanks and in bus shelters should make us think about long term solutions, not just quick “move along” answers. That’s why we should vote in the upcoming election. And that’s why we should keep seeking ways to serve our God, not only in our churches on Sundays but in our homes, on our streets, and in our city, day by day by day.
This is good and challenging news for a people who affirm the glory of God even in a world that seems to have forgotten the depths of glory.
