Weekly Word from the Interim Pastor

        Our Hebrew Bible lesson this Sunday from Jeremiah 29 is, honestly, a bit odd.  It is the prophet’s words to the captives dragged off to exile in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BCE, telling them to settle in for the long haul, to raise families, and to become part of the city’s life.  This is not exactly what either the Jews deported to Babylon nor the ones remaining in the ruins of Palestine wanted to hear.  They, of course, wanted to know that they would promptly be repatriated and that the nation could rebuild.  Nope, says the prophet, it will take time, maybe close to a generation.  Instead of being put in a time-out chair in the kitchen for five minutes, you are grounded for months.  This isn’t just POWs, this is wholesale resettlement, like the British Expulsion of the Acadians to Louisiana, the Trail of Tears of the forced removal of native Americans to Oklahoma in 1830, and, ironically, the relocation of Arabs at the founding of modern Israel in 1948.  Jeremiah is telling the exiles that they very well may never see home again.

        But his words are not that downbeat.  He tells them not to live on the edge, to settle down (at least kinda settled), to go about life as if it was normal (or at least normal enough), to raise families, make livings, become good expatriate citizens of Babylon.  Resume your lives, even if displaced from your beloved Jerusalem.  The big reason they can do this it that God is just as present in Babylon as Jerusalem, that they are chosen and covenanted and precious no matter where they happen to be.  And this becomes a key turning point in Judaism.  From being totally centered on the temple in Jerusalem, the nation and religion become, for lack of a better word, portable.  The primary interaction between human and divine is no longer on the rock of the Temple Mount but in keeping Torah, keeping to the word of God in Scriptures.  Even when Cyrus returned the exiles home (and it wasn’t the same place as before), Judaism continued to be about a people and a promise more than a place.  You can be faithful wherever you are.

        In Jesus’ time, that strain of Judaism picking up on keeping Torah was represented by the Pharisees even as the Sadducees represented the strain focused on the Temple.  The Christ Followers centered on the relationship between the believer and Jesus Christ.  Both the Pharisees and the Christians had the advantage of carrying their belief with them in scroll and community, and in the case of the Church, in sacrament.  Those became advantages as Judaism underwent the Diaspora, the Dispersion, and as Christianity became a world religion, too.  Jeremiah prophesied more than he knew: be faithful wherever you are, be it Jerusalem, Babylon, Rome, or Ithaca!

        Join us for worship Sunday and for the second of our all-church self-study lunches.  As the old song goes, “grow where you are planted!”


                                                                                       In Christ,
                                                                                     
                                                                                               David

Texts For Sunday Worship:
      From the Hebrew Bible        Jeremiah 29:4-7
      From the Epistles               2 Timothy 2:8-15
      From the Gospels               Luke 17:11-19