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.
The
word of God for the people of God. Thanks
be to God.
---
There
is a verse, just a few lines down from the one that was read this morning, that
is far more popular a verse than “Seek the welfare of the city to which I have
sent you, for in its welfare, you will find your welfare.” And they don’t keep
statistics on this kind of thing, I don’t think, but if they did, I would wager
that it would be in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most popular
verse to grace the back of junior high youth retreat t-shirts. The verse, of
course, is Jeremiah 29:11, “For surely I know the
plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your
welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”
Isn’t that lovely! The God of the Israelites has a plan for you,
for me, for us. Nobody is left out, for God has a plan. It is just lovely,
especially when you take it totally out of context, which we usually do, for
the verse is actually not about us, but about the Israelites, and not the
Israelites all the time, but in a very specific time.
Here
is the context. Jeremiah is writing to people whose very lives have been
ravaged by the Babylonians. Jeremiah is
not writing to just anybody. These are
people who have lost everything—their homes, their families, their
livelihoods—and they have lost them to the people on whose lands they now
wither in exile. Praying for your
enemies is one thing, but praying for those who torment you to thrive is
something else entirely!
We
forget, when we talk about God’s plans for our lives, that this whole business
about a future with hope is about being sent into exile, about doing the work
of taking your community out into a hostile world. God’s plan for you isn’t all
cupcakes and unicorns. A future with hope is good, but it doesn’t mean you get
to bypass the hard bits. It is hard work, planting, pulling up, building and
serving.
We
forget that the Israelites have been sent into exile, and in the midst of such
heartbreak, the message from Jeremiah is not so much “be more faithful” as it
is “get used to it,” and it stings a little, you know? Only a couple of verses after the one read
this morning, before we reach anything about any kind of plan to prosper and
not harm, God says not to even bother trying to get out of exile, because it’s
going to last seventy years, which is like forty days or forgiving seventy
times seven in that what it really means is that nobody is going home for the
foreseeable future, so you might as well get comfortable. If anybody tells you different, they are
false prophets, thus says the Lord.
In
the midst of all that heartbreak, we look for a word of hope: any kind of out
that means the exile will end, the suffering will end.
We
are looking for hope, and instead, we get this: 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.
So
we try. We think, wouldn’t it be lovely to do the pumpkin patch again this
year, to have folks onto our campus, to invite them to church, to share a smile
with them, and besides, the proceeds go to pay our mission giving and will help
support the preschool that the pastor keeps talking about. Wouldn’t it be
lovely?
And
then there’s a tragedy, or a storm, or both, and you know what they say about
the best-laid plans. Here you are, just trying to be faithful, and you get sent
into exile.
A
few years ago, I went on a mission trip to Henderson Settlement up in Kentucky.
It’s a home repair ministry in Appalachia that helps folks who desperately need
it. You know, we think about poverty a lot of times as an urban issue, but
rural Appalachia is probably the closest thing to the developing world I’ve
been to in the United States. Folks just don’t have anything, in some of these
places, other than rotting homes, black lung from working the mines, and the
church.
And
so we went up there to help, a big group of my minister friends, actually, and
we climbed on top of the roof and got to work. The roof over double wide that
served as the woman’s home was leaking like a sieve, and the considerable
number of people living inside were just getting soaked. So our plan was to
screw a tin roof on top of her shingled roof, just to keep out the water and so
as to not have to replace it down the road.
We
spent a couple of days baking on the roof, cutting the furring strips and doing
the repair, until I was standing with several of the rest of us on top of the
part of the roof that covered the porch and wouldn’t you know that we heard a
crack and then we rode that roof all the way to the ground.
Now,
thank God nobody was underneath at the time, or this story would have a
different ending, and we climbed off that roof and just stared at for what
seemed like an hour, nothing to say but to silently mourn the fact that here
we’d come to help this poor woman stay dry and we’d ended up giving her one
heck of a skylight.
You
set out to change the world, and you find yourself in exile. And, you know,
when I find myself in exile, when I am so full of sorrow that I can do nothing
but let my cries crawl up my throat and escape my mouth, that is when I need
escape from suffering. To this, God does
not say, “be healed,” but rather, “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
may not seem terribly helpful, but it is there in the Bible in Jeremiah when I
am having good days, when the nice lady in the church class brings me a pie, it
is there on the bad days, when everyone is still reeling from the suicide
that’s just tearing one family apart, it is there when I forget my brain and
when I remember to bring it with me. No matter what we face, no matter
where, God says, through Jeremiah, 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.
We know this already, of course, as a church whose reputation is
built on serving others. We serve because God calls us to do it. But what I
would say to you this day—and what I think Jeremiah would say as well, to speak
nothing of the Lord God—is that we don’t serve others merely because we should
help the less fortunate, or because it looks good, or because we feel guilt
about our stations in life. We serve others because when we do this, when we
serve even those whose lives look very different from our own, when we serve
those who are difficult to get along with, we find our own welfare.
I don’t know what good will come of this pumpkin business,
although I know that whenever a group of people gets together to pray, good
will come. But I do know that it is through serving, even serving through
disappointment, that you will find your welfare, that we will find it together.
I spent three years working for United Methodist Volunteers in
Mission, the short-term mission agency of the United Methodist Church. As part
of my time there, I wrote the team leader handbook, the book that we used to
train people to lead their own mission trips. And so I have had the occasion to
train a lot of mission team leaders. And at these trainings, I would share the
two traits of a potential mission team member that, just about above all
others, guaranteed whether the trip would be smooth sailing. The more trips I
have led, the more sure I am about these traits.
The first trait was a well-developed sense of humor. Mission
trips are funny. Cultural faux pas are part of the deal, and you end up talking
about personal habits you wouldn’t otherwise. If you can’t laugh at your silly
mistakes, you aren’t going to get along well in the mission field.
The second trait is related, and it is probably even more
important. The best, most well-adjusted mission team members with whom I have
ever served are really good at failing. They fail well. They realize—and this
is my experience—it is incredibly rare to set out on a mission trip and
accomplish everything you set out to accomplish. I’ve been involved with plenty
of these kinds of experiences, and never once have I done all I set out to do.
In a way, each of these trips was an utter failure.
I think back on that mission trip to Kentucky, and how it was a
colossal failure. But, of course, we did not leave the roof laying on the
ground. We got out the reciprocating saw and we cut the roof over the porch
into manageable chunks, we carried it out piece by piece, and we built a new
roof, stronger, with no leaks.
And not only did we build that woman a new roof: we gave her
hope, we modeled the kingdom of God, we met people who blessed us and though the
week did not go as we planned, we found our welfare.
It has been this way on every mission trip, on every service
project I’ve ever been involved with. I have NEVER ended up doing everything I
set out to do. I have never served and felt like I accomplished everything that
needed to be done, but of course, the business of serving is not about me so
much as it about others, about God, and it is helpful to be reminded now and
again that God accepts our offerings of service, even when they seem like utter
failures.
It is this way for those who are serving today at Trinity Table.
They will not solve the problem of homelessness today. They will see familiar
faces, those who were there months before, the last time they shared a sandwich
and a smile with that group of folks. But we do not serve in order to fix, for
in the final analysis it is God that does the fixing. We serve to share a deep
part of ourselves with others, and with God.
And In serving others, we discover something deep within
ourselves that springs from God’s own self, and we are reminded that we are
here on earth for a purpose, that our existence is not an accident, that to
know Christ is to serve others, for truly, God has a plan for us, a plan to
prosper and not to harm, to give us a future with hope. On days when the exile
almost seems to be too much, let us hold on to this great hope, for even if it
doesn’t seem like it, people are watching us, all around, people see us walk
out the doors of this church and want to know if we are who we say we are.
If we are who we say we are, of course, we’ll find ourselves
working for the welfare of all those around us, working for the good of the
place in which we find ourselves in exile, for in working for the good of all
those around us, we’ll find ourselves blessed. That is a promise I can get
behind. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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