Sunday,
October 28, 2012
Ordinary
30/Pentecost 22B
Reformation
Sunday
Jerusalem
Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA
Text: Jeremiah 31:10-14
10Hear the word of
the Lord, O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, “He who
scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.” 11For
the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for
him. 12They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and
they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine,
and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall
become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again. 13Then
shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall
be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give
them gladness for sorrow. 14I will give the priests their fill of
fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty, says the Lord.
How would we go about identifying with an
exiled people? How can we,
citizens of this nation, in the 21st century, living in relative
ease (compared to too many people across the globe), hope to gain an
understanding of what it means to be involuntarily removed from everything you
know and HAVE known as your home for as long as you can remember and as
long as your oldest relatives
can remember and be transported hundreds if not thousands of miles away to be
forever, as far as you know, separated from your homeland?
In one very straightforward sense, we can’t. It is
not within the scope of our life experience to understand what that does to
you. To my knowledge, none of us in this room this morning have suffered
through that experience.
However, on other levels, in other ways, there are
plenty of confluences of experience and emotions that approximate the feeling
of living in exile.
There is not simply the physical experience of
exile. There is the emotional one as well.
How many of us have felt the exile of a broken
relationship, whether with a family member or a friend, someone we care deeply
about suddenly separated from us – whether by disagreement or death – that
sends us into a bleak territory of the heart, unfamiliar and strange? Where we
once were surrounded by familiar green pastures of flourishing friendship and
loving relationship, we seemingly overnight find ourselves in a much more
barren inner landscape, characterized by loneliness and even despair in the
absence of that person?
How many of us have felt the exile of the loss of
identity that is associated with the loss of employment – again either by
voluntary or involuntary separation or retirement? One day we are held together
by an integrated awareness of who we are in our relationships and in our daily
labor and have become accustomed to an almost unconscious ‘wholeness’ that
comes from having the different parts of our life prop each other up like the
proverbial three-legged stool, only to have that sense of security and
stability that informs who we are so well come crashing down when that one leg
disappears?
How many of us have felt the exile of depression,
brought on through life events or chemical imbalances, that devastates as
nothing else can … that makes it a struggle to get out of bed in the morning,
and pulls us into an existence that resembles the driest of deserts – far from
any nourishing spring of life-giving relational water? That inner exile that
isolates us from each other, that sucks the marrow out of our bones and leaves
us husks of who we once were, seriously considering why anyone would miss us if
we were to simply disappear?
There are many more forms of exile than those that
have been recorded in the histories of nations and peoples, leaders and
individuals condemned for actions taken and reprisals of one country on
another, or against a given leader. But the sentiment – the emotion – can be
very similar in all of them: isolation, sorrow, grief, mourning, a struggle to
regain a sense of identity after you have been separated from that from which you
DREW your understanding of who you WERE, and the sometimes overwhelming
challenge of finding out who you are APART
from that.
Jeremiah was communicating God’s promises to a
people who were in exile – in every sense of the word – physically, emotionally,
spiritually to a degree – a people who were overwhelmed with questions that
they were not prepared to ask and even less prepared to answer – Why did God
let this happen to us? Are we still the chosen people? Has God abandoned us?
Will God receive us back as his children if we do ‘X’ or ‘Y’?
Questions like that will come with any form of exile
we may experience: Physical, emotional or spiritual. They are not unique to any
one of the different forms of exilic existence.
What Jeremiah was communicating to the people of
Israel were the promises of a God who had not abandoned them, who had not
forgotten them, who in fact, still loved them as much as God ever had. If we
back up a few verses to the third verse of chapter 31, the description of the
relationship is not in political or even spiritual terms, but in familial terms
- I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I
have continued my faithfulness to you. Love …
faithfulness … those are terms used in describing a bride and groom, aren’t
they?
What God was communicating to the people in exile
was not something having to do with the political and military causes of their
current situation, it had everything to do with how God was expressing his
desire to be in relationship – in a familial relationship – with
his chosen people.
He didn’t excuse or explain away their choices or
how those choices resulted in their exile, he didn’t tell them it wasn’t their
fault. There is an understanding that it is a given – their situation of exile
is as a direct result of the choices made and decisions taken.
Sometimes those are the harsh realities of life that
we would rather not acknowledge. We want the blame to be diffused, to spread it
around and consider that to one degree or another, there is blame to go around
– certainly if not blame, then
at least responsibility. That makes it easier to bear … or even
easier to shirk, to discard, to slide out from under, if it is shared by all
the participants.
The reality is, while there may be shared
responsibility, there is more often than not a point at which a choice WAS
made, a decision WAS arrived at which, if it had been different, could very
well have led to a significantly different outcome. And the truth is that blame
CAN be assigned. Responsibility DOES lie with one more than with another or
both.
But the fact that blame MAY be assigned, that
responsibility MIGHT be weighted more with one than another does not change a
critical fact – that apportionment of blame or that understanding of
responsibility does not diminish the fact and the reality of God’s love for any
given individual in ANY given situation.
Let me repeat that: in ANY given
situation.
If we were to take that to heart, it might take us a
LONG way, a REALLY REALLY LONG way, towards understanding what grace, forgiveness
and love really mean.
What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at
Emmerton?
A question: when I went through the examples of
alternative exiles, did one of those resonate with you? Did one of those
descriptions strike a cord inside you that then triggered the thought that
identified that feeling you’ve been wrestling with putting into words as
‘exile’?
If it did, or if it has, then hear the words of
Jeremiah for what they are – a call of a loving God who more than anything
wants to remain in relationship with you – who wants you to know that his love
for you has not changed one iota – whether it’s been a week, a month, a year or
a decade – maybe even several decades – He is still there, waiting to infuse
you with such joy that you will find yourself wanting to dance just like those
young women – to break out in song like those young men and their elders … who
even in their old age could appreciate when it was appropriate to set aside
decorum and just belt it out from the bottom of their hearts and the top of
their heads – however that sound came out, on key or not, it was infused with
such a profound sense of joy that there was no question about the place from
which it was originating – the joy of a reconciled child of God coming back
into relationship with him.
May we be that joyful and that limber – no matter
what our age!
Let’s pray.
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