Learning to Live in Babylon

Learning to Live in Babylon

Jeremiah 29:1-14

I’ve learned a lot from my dog over the last eight years. I’ve learned how to smell a deer long before I see it. I’ve learned that listening really matters. (Trust me…Karma listens to me every day.) I’ve learned that it’s important to get excited when you see your friends—jump up and down a bit, wiggle a time or two, wag that tail. (I do draw the line, though, at sniffing my friends. Imagine the receiving line at the end of worship if that were not the case!)

This morning, I want to put one image of Karma in front of you to start our thinking. I’ve told some of you this story before. I was walking her in our favorite spot in Open Lands. You could tell by the bounce in her step that everything was just the way it should be. The sun was warm. She had just taken a dip through a puddle and had a little drink, to boot. All was well…until “it” happened.

What happened? On a random patch of old asphalt, left over from when that spot was part of someone’s private property, the folks who mark the utilities had spray painted a blue circle. I could piece that together. What I saw made sense. No big deal, right? Not for Karma. Her tail stopped wagging. She gently placed the stick she was carrying on the ground. She walked over to the blue circle (which you or I would not have even noticed, nine times out of ten.) She sniffed the circle. She stared the circle down. She became horribly stuck, incapable of continuing our walk for what seemed like an eternity. The worst possible thing that could happen in Karma’s world had happened: something was different!

Karma hates change. It took a lot of coaxing to get her to move on, to get back to the business of enjoying our walk. I had to reassure her that things would be okay, that there would still be things to enjoy on our walk, despite the appearance of the blue circle. Eventually, she walked on, but not without looking over her shoulder, just to make sure that the blue circle wasn’t following us.

The truth is that change is hard, even if you are not an 8 year old Lab. My favorite holiday is coming soon—no, not Christmas— Thanksgiving. (I know…that’s problematic for a pastor, right. I’m just being honest, here.) For years, Thanksgiving has been the same. It’s always been at our friend’s house. Each year might be a slightly different group of people. One year, I might play Scrabble. The next year, I might spend more time chatting. All in all, though, those differences were somehow within the margins of acceptable change. Those were the kind of changes that we choose, the choices we make that help us feel free to enjoy the day.

This year, Thanksgiving has moved to my friend’s son’s house. Now, upfront, I want to tell you that this move makes a ton of sense. His children have reached an age when this will be easier. It’s a lovely home. The day will be lots of fun. The food will be fantastic. Thanksgiving will be delightful. However, Thanksgiving will also be different. And, though I plan to be right in the midst of the flow of things, making things work, there is that little “Karma” part of me that wants to just stand there and stare at the blue circle and think, “Why do things have to change?”

Of course, there will be plenty of people for whom the holidays will be marked by far more serious changes. For them, the “difference” between Thanksgiving last year and Thanksgiving this year will be far harder to just dismiss. A beloved family member or friend may have died and grief is coming to the table instead of that beloved person. Who wants to set a place at the table for grief? People lose jobs and change jobs. People move into new homes and feel displaced. There are any number of reasons—some of which can be very powerful—that can lead us to conclude, “This is not the way that things should be! This is different and I don’t like it!”

If we are really honest, life really doesn’t lend itself to creating 
“Kodak moments,” right. (Oh my gosh, does anyone under 50 even know what a “Kodak moment” is? “There was this stuff. It was called ‘film.’ You put it in a camera and a week later you got your pictures back.”) Maybe as a child we were naive enough to believe that we were experiencing the perfect Christmas but what we didn’t know was the complicated set of feelings that the adults in the room were containing or managing so that we could live with that illusion. Life is complicated. We can almost always imagine how things could be better. We can almost always construct a vision of the way things used to be and want to go back, even if things were really never that way at all.

Lots of people say that life is a journey. I think that image works as long as the map of that journey would look like a “Bugs Bunny” journey, where the line runs in every direction across the map. Life is full of twists and turns and surprises. The truth, though, is that one of the core experiences in an adult, complicated journey is the experience of exile.

In our text for this morning, our ancestors in faith are in exile. The central story of their lives had been the experience of their ancestors in faith. God brought them out of slavery in Egypt. God fed them and led them through the wilderness. God assured them that God would be their God and they would be God’s people. God brought them into the promised land. The people were sure that all of this would last forever.

Our ancestors in faith took things for granted—which makes them human and just like us. When times were good, they pretty much forgot God. When times were bad, they did whatever it took to get a leg up. The covenant that they shared with God to uphold the law, to live faithfully, was a thing of the distant past. They were a nation. They had a king. They had a temple. All will be well…

However, all was not well. Of course, the prophets had warned them. Yet, the people’s conclusion upon hearing those prophets speak was that the real problem was the prophets: “Why do they always have to be so negative?” The people blew through warning after warning that there would be consequences for their choices and that God would not be ignored.

Jeremiah had the unenviable task of being a prophet when those consequences came to a head. The corruption had gone on so long that the people were about to lose their land. Even when everything was falling apart around them, the people were merciless to Jeremiah when he tried to point this out. One day, though, the truth arrived not in some prophet’s words but in the form of the invading Babylonians. The jig was up. The people were dragged away from the promised land and carried into exile.

The unthinkable was now reality. 9/11 was unimaginable until 9/11 happened. If you’ve lost someone you loved, you know what it’s like to stand there and think, “This cannot be real!” If you’ve lost the love that you thought was always going to be there, you know what it’s like to shake your head and think, “No…this cannot be happening?” If you’ve been through serious change, you know the difference between the moments when you are standing and fretting the little stuff—the fact that the pie doesn’t taste quite right or that someone said something wrong or that there was a blue circle painted on the pavement that wasn’t there before—and the moments you realize that life, itself, just changed.

Exile left our ancestors in faith feeling like the world had ended. In some ways, this was true. In our text, Jeremiah is still in Jerusalem. He sends the people a letter. Now, pause and ask yourself, who would have wanted to pop that letter open? “The prophet who told us this was going to happen is now our pen pal. What? Is he writing to gloat? Is he writing just to rub this all in?”

At a human level, no one would have really blamed Jeremiah for an “I told you so!” moment. However, if you’ve been around a while then you know that this thought is never well received and really only feels good when you’re thinking about saying it, not actually saying it. Jeremiah is better than that, though. Most of us are better than that, too…most of the time. The truth that Jeremiah has to speak is God’s message of grace in terrible circumstances.

Essentially, the letter says that even though nothing is the way it was, even though everything has changed, the people still need to live. Even in Babylon, they need to build houses. They need to plant gardens. People need to fall in love and get married. People need to have children. Then, those children need to marry and have children of their own. He even tells the people that they should pray for Babylon and work so that Babylon thrives.

This is the hard truth that comes up every time we are faced with unwelcome change. We feel like strangers in a strange land. Nothing is as it should be. It is tempting…so very tempting…to just throw up our hands and say, “I’m done!” The choice we face is whether the loss will mark the day when essentially our life ended or whether we will stand our ground and choose, instead, to live, to live with the pain and to live with meaning, even though nothing is the same. Sooner or later, we have to face what we need to face and accept the changes that have happened and declare, “I am not done living!”

Then, there is a promise. God’s promise is that even in the midst of heartbreak, God will listen to our prayers. Even in your version of “Babylon,” whatever that might be, if you stay open, you will feel the presence of God—in an act of kindness, in the concerned glance of someone whom you know cares, in the words that make you feel a little less alone. Ultimately, the time in exile will end. Things won’t feel fragmented forever.

Change is hard, even the little changes. It’s easy to get stuck on what’s different. The challenge is to learn how to live in Babylon: how to accept what needs to be accepted; how to let go of all the things that don’t matter that much; how to recognize and embrace and celebrate the things that matter now, more than ever. We don’t quit living. We don’t stop making meaning. We don’t give up the faith. Life goes on.