God Sends A Letter

 November 28 2021

Jeremiah 29:1-14

         Our oldest daughter Elizabeth just recently started a new job at Giant Eagle. Now, as many of us know all too well, those first days of a new job are really rough and it was this way for Elizabeth. She started out on midnights but that proved too hard on her sleep schedule so they then moved her to days which helped.  What proved to be the most difficult challenge was to just accept that what her manager told her to do was what she was in fact supposed to do even if it didn’t make much sense to her. She wanted to put the products on the shelf in a neat and tidy fashion but her boss wanted her to throw them on the shelf as fast as she could and get on to the next product. To be honest, her mother and I were not convinced she was going to make it as she had a lot to learn and a lot of adjustments to make so that she could do her work as fast as the company wanted things done. She even toyed with the idea of quitting or looking for another job which we knew would require her to just start all over. So, you can only imagine how thrilled we were when one day last week we got a text from her simply stating, “I found my groove now.” After we read those few simple words we left out a sigh of relief because that meant that she at last was no longer fighting the system but was into doing the best she could do.

         All of us, have probably had a similar experience that Elizabeth had where we had found ourselves in a new situation, overwhelmed by a new way of doing things, frustrated by the people who we answered to, struggling to make sense out of what we were supposed to do. Then there came a day when, like Elizabeth found out, that what had formerly been strange and confusing, now began to make sense, and in her words, we at last had found our groove. This is when we no longer had to think through every step but could do what we were supposed to do almost without thought.

         The people of Judaea, which our scripture speaks of today, were finding themselves in a very similar circumstance to having a new job in that God, as he had promised them he would do, sent them into exile. In this strangely new experience of having been ripped from their home, marched hundreds of miles so that they could now be residents in the enemy city of Babylon, they too would have felt disoriented, scared and confused, overwhelmed by the loss of any point of reference. They too would have had so many questions, the most important of these would have been what would now be their relationship with God? They had always, proudly, held themselves out to be the very people of God but now what would become of this relationship? The rest of the nations who knew of them had to surely have been amazed and appalled that the God of the people of Judaea would have allowed such a catastrophe to occur. To these neighbors, this God must have not have been a very great God if he could not have stopped the Babylonian army from swooping down upon Judaea and carrying the best and brightest of its citizens off to Babylon. What those apart from God could not have possibly understood is that the God of Judaea not only knew of Babylon’s army he was counting on it to carry his people into exile because God’s plan all along was to use the Babylonians to discipline his people. You see, just like in the workplace, the boss, which in this case is God, has a certain way that he wanted his people to be, a certain way that he wanted his people to do his work, yet they just refused to perform to the standards that God had for them. If God had been their actual employer he would have probably just have fired them but God could not just walk away from his people because he had made a promise to them, a covenant bond and if he was to be known as the God who could always be counted on to be faithful, then faithful is what he would have to be. What was really at stake was not God’s power or ability to rescue his people from an invading army but rather could this God form his people into those who could live drastically different from the world, to have them live so that they might be holy as he is holy? This was a far greater challenge. What this meant then was that God would have to take drastic measures in order to break his people of all their unholy ways, the common ways of being that mirrored how people lived in all the nations around them instead of living lives that reflected the holiness, the other worldly way of life that they found in God.

         This is why God had his people hauled off to live in the custody of the Babylonians so that there in those trying circumstances they might give his ways of living a try. Just so his people did not miss the reason as to why God had allowed Babylon to take them into exile, God instructs his prophet Jeremiah, to write his people a letter. Can you imagine opening up your mailbox and in there you find a letter from God, addressed to you?As unreal as it might sound this is what we are told in this twenty-ninth chapter of Jeremiah, that God is sending his people a note. 

Now, what is interesting is that when God tells Jeremiah what to say he skips the little nicety of what we call the salutation. You know, it’s that part of the letter that reads, “Dear Sir or Madam”, or “To Whom it may Concern” or “Dear John”, you know, the polite way we were taught to begin a letter way back in grade school. Well, God totally skips that part and the reason most likely has to do with the fact that letters in Jeremiah’s day would begin with the phrase, “Peace or Shalom to you”. Even today in Israel, the way people say hello or goodby is by saying, “Shalom” which is the Hebrew word for peace. So, do you begin to understand that God is saying volumes when he begins by saying nothing. To these exiles he refuses to extend even the expected greeting that his peace might be with them. It is easy to figure out that the central issue that God is addressing with his people is that of how they might be people of peace.

         So, as we begin to get into the meat of this letter God has sent to his people we have to keep in mind that he is training his people in the way of peace. This helps us to understand just why it is that God begins by telling his people that while in Babylon that they were to build homes and live in them. They were to plant gardens and eat of the produce. They were to take wives and have sons and daughters. Then they were to take wives for their sons and give their daughters in marriage; they were to multiply there and not decrease. The point of this opening to-do list is God’s way of telling his people to get settled in because you’re going to be there awhile. In fact, as God further in the letter tells them they are going to be residents of Babylon for seventy years. Now, in the days of Jeremiah there were false prophets who countered the claim of Jeremiah by stating that God wasn’t going to leave them in Babylon for seventy years they would most assuredly be back in seven. God though was adamant that his people were going away for a long time and if we stop and think about it there is a very good reason why God was going to keep them in Babylon for seventy years and that is that the generation who went to Babylon would not be the generation that would be coming back. What God is doing with the exiles is not much different than what he did with their ancestors in the wilderness. When God’s people refused to trust him for their victory in conquering the Promised Land, he told them that they could wander in the desert for another forty years which was long enough that the rebellious generation would eventually die out and be replaced by a new generation who had come to trust in the ways and power of God. In a very similar matter, God is saying that he was willing to wait until a new generation had been raised up and then he would allow them to return to Judaea.

         You see, the reason why God was willing to wait it out for a new generation is that as it has often been said, its hard to teach old dogs new tricks. This new trick that God was hoping his people would learn is one that he had hoped that they would learn right from the beginning of their relationship and that was that his people would be people of peace. Over and over, down through the generations, the people of God refused to walk the path of peace that God had laid out for them and instead they had become terribly violent. In the seventh chapter of Jeremiah we read how the people of Judaea went to worship in the Temple, certain that they could act any way that they wanted as long as they gave God his due at the Temple but God was not impressed and he told them that he knew that his house, the Temple, had become nothing more than a den of thieves. In our day we might have said that the church had become a place for gangs and thugs to gather.  The imagery then suggests that God’s people were horribly violent toward each other and toward God.  Jeremiah told them that they refused to listen to God and instead they walked in their own counsel and the stubbornness of their evil hearts going ever backwards not forward. So they became a people, as Jeremiah describes in the ninth chapter, who had to beware of their neighbors, people who could put no trust in their brothers because every brother was a deceiver and every neighbor went about as a slanderer. They had become a people where everyone deceived his neighbor and no one spoke the truth. They were people who taught their tongues to speak lies and they wearied themselves with all of the iniquities they committed. Heaping oppression upon oppression, and deceit upon deceit, they were a people who refused to know the ways of God. Do you see how the violence of God’s people was tearing apart the very fabric of their society? How could God be one Lord over a people who no longer could have any hope of unity in his name? This is why God told Jeremiah that he was going to refine his people and test them because what else could God do for his people? This image of refining and testing was one where metal is put into the fire and melted so that the impurities could be drawn off so that the metal could be tested and found to at last be pure. This is  what God had done when he allowed Babylon to carry his people off to live in exile. If God’s people wanted to live by the ways of violence then God would allow the most horrible violence to come upon his people, the violence of losing home and country. At last they would feel the searing pain that violence inflicts so that they at last might be brought to a place where they would give the ways of peace a chance. God tells his people in his letter that they were to seek the peace of Babylon. Not only that but they were to pray to God on behalf of the citizens of Babylon because, as God told them, it is in the peace of the people of Babylon, this is where the people of Judaea would find their peace. So, God would not begin his letter with the expected “Peace be with you”, because the peace of God would only be theirs when they asked God to give his peace to the very people who had ripped them from their homes and sent them on a long march to live in utter humiliation. God had placed his people in a situation where their violence would be met with ever greater violence. This they learned the hard way because twice the people of Judaea rebelled against the Babylonian occupation, the first time resulted in the loss of Judaea being a country and the second time the Babylonian army destroyed Jerusalem and burnt the Temple to the ground. They simply were a people who refused to accept that the ways of peace were the only way they would survive the ordeal of their exile. God had to bring them to a place where they had to at last submit themselves to what he expected them to be, people of peace. Yet what God asked of his people was unbelievably hard. I mean, can you imagine in your daily prayer time having to speak the names of the very people who had invaded the place where you lived and who had forced you to leave your home so that you could become a slave to your captors? The very thought of having to ask God to do something for the very people who had harmed you in this way is quite naturally, repulsive but God always expects us to go beyond what we would naturally do because doing what comes naturally is the common thing to do but God is holy and so must we be.

         It is only a holy God who would expect his people to seek the peace of those who have done violence to us. This peace that God asks us to ask him for is not just the end to war or violence as we normally think of it being. No, in the Hebrew, shalom, their word for peace, means wholeness, completeness or harmony. The point is that when one seeks peace they should not only stop the hostilities but they should seek to bring healing and wholeness where they had brought damage. Where relationships had been strained and broken, God expected his people to be the builders of bridges, the mender of fences, so that where there was discord there might at last be harmonious relations between people. This is what God, in his letter, was telling his people was to be their sole work while in exile. Yet, he did not expect that they could find the wherewithal to be such peaceful people on their own; no, God told his people to pray. You see, God was and is always at work bringing peace upon the earth all he asks is that we might be united with him in his efforts.Through prayer we are to seek to know this God who expects his people to be people who will find ways of bringing harmony and wholeness into the situations that they find themselves in. Sure, to learn to be a person who is attuned to God in such a way of course will take time, that’s why God insisted on this training to last seventy years.

         When those seventy years would at last end, God tells his people that he would fulfill his promise that he made and return them at last to their home. It is here, in this letter of God, that we come to what might be one of the most beloved scriptures from the book of Jeremiah. This phrase, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for peace and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” can be found on everything fromT-shirts to stationary. Most of the time, this scripture is used to bolster the belief that God has a plan for each person’s life which unfortunately is not a belief that is found in scripture. What is found in scripture is that God indeed does have a plan, his will that he desires to have done, and what we are called to do is to conform our life to the plan that God has. The plan God has for his people and for us, this plan for peace and not for evil, this is what God had been training his people to accept their seventy years in exile. God’s plan is always for peace and never for evil, evil that is found in violence toward each other and toward God. When we align ourselves with God’s plan for peace, this is when we have the certainty that when we call upon God, he will most assuredly hear us. When we seek God with our whole heart then we can know that we will find him.

         While history will prove that God did fulfill his promise in bringing his people back to Judaea, sadly they remained in exile because they never did learn the ways of peace that God longed for them to know. We hear in the nineteenth chapter of Luke, the anguish of Jesus who as he drew to Jerusalem wept over the city, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things  that make for peace!” Jesus knew that the way of peace was the way of the cross this is why he told Pontious Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world otherwise his followers would fight. Jesus went to the cross so that he might be our peace, to make us one, to break down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility and hatred.

         On this first Sunday of Advent, as we await once again the arrival of Jesus, we must ask ourselves if we are living out this peace that Jesus shed his blood to establish? We must search our hearts for all of the places where we have begun to rebuild the wall of hostility and hatred that Jesus through his suffering and death has torn down. Now, is the time for forgiveness and mercy, for the praying for our enemies, for the seeking of peace, for this is the plan of God to give us a future and a hope. Amen!