“The Welfare of the City”

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

“Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles 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 daughter 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 hard for us to comprehend how strange these words must have sounded to their original hearers.

Consider the context.  A short time before Jeremiah delivered these prophetic words, the Babylonian army had conquered Jerusalem.  So many of God’s chosen people had been removed from their beloved land, and from the Temple in Jerusalem, which they had believed to be God’s special dwelling place on earth.  They were in exile in the city of Babylon.

For the people, this was a profound spiritual crisis.  God’s covenant with them seemed to be in disarray.  They had trusted in the covenant promises – that they would dwell in the land that had been promised to their ancestors in exchange for obedience to the Law – but all of those promises seemed to be broken.  Had God betrayed them?  Or had they betrayed God?  Psalm 137, which is set in the Babylonian exile, mournfully states that the exiles were being asked to sing the songs of Zion as they sat and wept by the rivers of Babylon.  How could they sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? 

But then a letter came from Jeremiah.  Jeremiah, that troublesome prophet, who had, they realized, been proven correct in stating that the Babylonians would prevail, had sent a letter by envoy, and had addressed it to the exiles in Babylon.

Perhaps Jeremiah was going to predict that God was about to bring the exile to an end.  Perhaps Jeremiah was going to tell them that there would be a new exodus – this time, not from slavery in Egypt, but from exile in Babylon.  Some of their other spiritual leaders had been predicting that the exile would soon be over.  Perhaps Jeremiah’s prophetic message was going to be the same.

But Jeremiah had a very different message for the exiled community.  Settle in, folks, because the exile is not going to be over soon.  Do not rebel.  Do not look for liberation.  Do not wait for a new Moses.  Instead, build houses.  Plant gardens.  Let your kids get married.  You are going to be in Babylon for a while.

And then, just to add insult to injury, Jeremiah made another startling declaration.  In verse 7, we read, “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 was suggesting that it was God who had sent them into exile – and that they were to pray for the welfare of the city of Babylon, the city of their oppressors, the culture of their enemies. 

Stranger words could hardly have been imagined. 

The wider context for this passage is important.  In the verses which immediately follow today’s text, the prophet encouraged the people to continue to seek God, even in Babylon.  Just because they were now separated from their beloved land did not mean that their faith needed to be any less vibrant or vital.  “When you search for me, you will find me, if you seek me with all of your heart,” said God, through the prophet.  The incredible solo that we just heard, from Mendelsohn’s ‘Elijah’, was directly drawn from the 29^th chapter of Jeremiah.  Even in exile, those who sought the Lord with all their hearts would find God.  

And this is where it gets interesting, in hindsight.  That is, we now know that the exile, which was so challenging for Jeremiah’s contemporaries, was in fact one of the most significant periods of development in the entire spiritual and religious history of the Jewish people.

During that time of exile, the people compiled the stories of their people and their history into many of the texts that form what we, today, call our Hebrew Scriptures.  It was during the exile that the genius of their visions of God crystallized; that they connected the inseparable poles of the pursuit of holiness and of the demands of social justice; and that they began to realize that their God was not confined to one Temple in Jerusalem, but was the one God of all lands and peoples.  The exile, which was such a difficult reality at the time, became a pivotal time in their spiritual history – and a pivotal time in the spiritual history of humanity.  When one considers the subsequent influence of the prophetic writings from that period – an influence that was not confined to religion, but which had a powerful effect on the entire history of political, philosophical, cultural and spiritual thought – it is hard to find another period in human history with a comparable level of intellectual ferment and spiritual genius to that which took place during the Babylonian exile.

For Christians, the exile was profoundly important.  Even though the exile took place more than five hundred years before the birth of Christ, it was during the exile that certain individuals began to write about their expectation that God would send a Messiah to restore the fortunes and the dynasty of the kingdom of David, and to usher in an era of peace.  And, as a strange foreshadowing of the theology of the cross and resurrection, the exile and restoration set the stage for a theology that was rooted in a conviction that God’s power could not be overcome by the powers of this world.  Just as the exile was prelude to restoration, the cross was prelude to the resurrection.  Even in the most difficult moments, God was still at work.

And it was because of the insights that the prophets of the exile articulated that a small group of Jewish believers, a few centuries later, realized that a humble carpenter from Nazareth was the One who the world was waiting for.

The exile, therefore, which was so difficult at the time, was one of the most creative, influential and decisive periods in human history – not only for the Jewish people themselves, but for many of the subsequent spiritual traditions of our world, including our own Christian faith.

What Jeremiah was encouraging his readers to do was to free themselves from the fear and anxiety about the new culture in which they found themselves; not to look to the past as some glorious age to which they should long to return.  God was still at work. So settle down, said Jeremiah; establish yourself; and seek the welfare of the place that God has placed you, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.  Pray for the welfare of the city of Babylon.

So what message might today’s reading from Jeremiah be seeking to convey to us in this modern age?

A number of recent theologians have proposed that we, in the modern church, would do well to ponder the story of the Babylonian exile.  They suggest that the church needs to wake up to the fact that, like the Jewish exiles in Babylon, we are no longer living in a culture in which the assumptions of our faith can be taken for granted in the society that surrounds us. We may not have been physically dragged into exile, but the culture around us has certainly changed. 

There are different ways that this journey into spiritual and cultural exile has been described.  Some speak of a form of exile that has been created as a result of our society’s shift towards the arrogant secularism that surrounds us. Other commentators speak about this cultural shift as the end of Christendom, or the death of the Constantinian age. 

What do they mean by this? In 313, the Emperor Constantine issued a document which has come to be known as the Edict of Milan, in which religious persecution was prohibited in the Roman Empire.  That Edict, coupled with Constantine’s eventual conversion to Christianity, set the stage for Christianity to become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire.  Ever since, the Christian faith has been, in many ways, closely linked with the dominant cultures of the Western world.  First, in the time of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, and then through the rise of the other major European empires – including the Spanish, Portuguese, French and the vast British Empire – the church occupied a place of prominence in all of those Empires. 

But, in many ways, those days seem to be drawing to a close.  One can no longer assume that the Church and the culture share the same assumptions about the world.  Some lament this change; some welcome it.  But, regardless of whether one sees this as a positive or a negative development, there can be little doubt that things are changing. 

This week’s provincial election campaign offered us an interesting example of this massive cultural shift. The most controversial issue, of course, concerned whether government funds should be used to fund faith-based educational systems.  What was completely overlooked, in most of those debates, was that the public school system was not – historically or constitutionally – established or intended to be a secular, pluralistic and, at best, agnostic setting for the education of children.

Rather, for those individuals who established the public education system – men such as Egerton Ryerson -- the importance of religious freedom was to be honoured in the schools.  But this did not mean freedom from religion altogether.  Ryerson was a Methodist clergyman as well as a passionate educational reformer.  The idea that government should resist offering public funds to a system which would include religious education would have been bizarre at the time.  Moreover, when Canada was established, the British North America Act of 1867 included explicit, agreements to ensure that, in both Ontario and Quebec, public funds would go to faith-based school systems, and provision for Protestant and Catholic school systems were written into our constitution. 

Without a doubt, this reflected the dominant place of the Church in the culture. Over the course of time, and as we have been blessed by the arrival of new Canadians from other lands and other faith traditions, the once-Protestant school system became increasingly pluralistic, while the Catholic school system, though inclusive towards others, continued to have a specific connection to one denominational tradition. But now, in the once-Protestant public school system, the rising secularism of our society has created a tendency to avoid any discussion of the place of faith in life.  Prayer is now excluded from the daily routines, and many, if not most things which seemed to have a religious dimension are treated with suspicion. 

An example. The principal of the school that my daughter attended for junior kindergarten, last year, gained some unwanted media attention when it became known that she had challenged a teacher about why, on one of the school hallway displays containing students’ artwork for Remembrance Day, there were only crosses in the pictures.  She thought that this seemed too Christian, and wanted more religious symbols to be present – even though the children had been asked to draw pictures based on the poem “in Flanders’ Fields”, with its references to the poppies blowing under crosses row on row.  I was chatting with her, a few months after that uproar, and she expressed her own desire for an inclusive understanding of the place of religious symbols in the school.  But she felt pressure to challenge why one faith’s symbols would be displayed without others displayed as well – regardless of the fact that “In Flander’s Fields” makes no mention of other religious symbols whatsoever.  The public school system, which was originally intended to be a place of religious freedom is now a place where the Bible, religious symbols and religious thought in general, are rarely discussed.

And so, during this past week’s election, and having forgotten the history of the public school system, the mere suggestion that the government might extend public funding to a school system in which faith plays a role is enough to guarantee a stunning political defeat.  I, personally, am not opposed to the public school system.  Unlike our premier, my own children will be educated in that system.  But I find it troubling that the once-honoured and accepted place of faith and the church in the intellectual, cultural and social development of children and our culture has so radically changed.  Like the Jews in Babylon, there are times when it seems increasingly difficult to sing the Lord’s song in the public squares of this land.

So what are we to do?  There are different ways to respond to this social and cultural change. Some pretend that nothing has changed, and that the church and the culture are still really the same – in other words, that Christendom still exists.  Others act as if the church should simply take the lead from culture, and adapt to whatever modern culture suggests – that tolerance is the preeminent Gospel virtue, and that the Church’s main role is to support whatever the culture dictates. Still others act as if the true pathway of faithfulness is to militantly resist any modern ideas, and oppose anything which seems to display a liberality towards the insights of others.  Still others act as if faith has no place in any public conversation in our hallowed secular age, regardless of the fact that almost every modern issue – from the funding of the Ontario school system, to the national discussions regarding the definition of marriage, to the conflicts in the Middle East, to the bestselling authors who question the existence of God – are all conversations, taking place in the public square, that are completely intertwined with questions of faith.  This last option, that faith has no place in any public discussions in a secular society, concerns me the most since, in the recent political debates, as well as in most public discussions of faith, the unquestioned assumption seems to be that faith is not a tool for the common good, but rather a tool of dissension, division, and segregation.  Secularism is held up as the great unifying force in our society, which is a debatable and historically problematic assumption.  No one seems to pay much attention to the fact that rigidly secular ideologies and political systems have been responsible for some of the worst atrocities in recent human history.

So what do we do?  We know that the world is changing; we know that the place of faith, in culture, has shifted; we know that we – and certainly our children and grandchildren – are increasingly having to struggle to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. 

Should we long for a time that is past, and for a culture that no longer exists?  Should we sit down and weep that it is sometimes difficult to sing the Lord’s songs in this increasingly secularized, ever changing, skeptical and cynical culture?  Should we, instead, give up, and simply assimilate to the new culture in which we find ourselves – tolerating anything and everything that is proposed, and in so doing compromise our moral, intellectual and spiritual integrity? 

Or is it a good time to listen to these strange words from Jeremiah once again? 

Is it a time to stop longing for what is no more, and rather make the decision to settle in, to build and to plant, to free ourselves from fear and anxiety, and to pray for the welfare of the city and culture in which we find ourselves as we simply serve Christ in our time?  Is it a time to realize, as Jeremiah was encouraging the people to do, that God is still at work, even in our times of cultural dislocation, and that God is still able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine?  Is it a time to accept the end of Christendom and the possibility of a new exile – and perhaps even to find inspiration in the possibility that the Church, if it does find itself experiencing a sense of exile might, like the Jews in Babylon, be entering into one of the most creative, progressive and incredible chapters in its history?  Is it possible that the best days of the church are not behind us, but are yet to come – since, as we become free from supporting the empires of this world, we might be better prepared to build the kingdom of God? 

Regardless of the way that we choose to react to this new cultural situation in which we find ourselves, Jeremiah has some powerful advice – advice which Mendelsohn so beautifully set to music.  If we seek the Lord with all our hearts, both in our times of peace and in our times of trouble, we will find God.  God was with the people in Babylon.  God is with us, even now.  And God will be with us for, as the exile and the cross remind us, there is nothing in all creation that can ever separate us from the love of God, in Jesus Christ our Lord.

We need not sing sad songs about a time that is past; but rather songs of praise for what is yet to be.  Even now, God is at work.  The kingdom of God is drawing near.

Thanks be to God.