This last week I had lunch with one of our general presbyters and two other pastors here in the Presbytery of the Cascades. One of the other three is new to the presbytery, and so I assumed it was largely for his benefit that our host asked each of us to tell a little bit about ourselves. As the stories of the others unfolded, I realized that the three of them already knew each other quite well. Each had spent all or much of his professional career in this part of the country and there was plenty of laughter as they reminisced about shared adventures and experiences. They were long-time friends and “insiders.” When it came my turn to speak, one of the others looked at me and, with just a hint of a smile on his lips, asked: “And what are you doing here?” The question was asked in good humor, but I already felt a little like an immigrant not long off the boat or a bastard child at a family reunion. (I need to tell you, though, just so there is no misunderstanding—Mary and I feel as much or more at home in First Church and Portland as any place we have ever lived.) The experience, though, did help sensitize me a bit more to how a true stranger in our midst must feel. I thought about it again when, a few days later, I stopped for gasoline at a service station on Barbur Boulevard. The attendant who filled the car was a dark skinned man who spoke with a heavy accent. My guess is that he was Sudanese, and as I waited for the tank to fill I thought about some of the things that have been happening in Sudan. I wondered how he got to be here. Did he have family still there in the Sudan? Were they well? Had they, like thousands of others, been killed in the violence that has wracked that land? What was it like for him as an exile in a foreign land? Our reading from Jeremiah is a portion of a letter from the prophet to those among his people who had been taken into exile in Babylon. They had left behind families, friends, communities, homes, businesses, farms and fields, all that made life familiar. A totally foreign culture and a language they could not speak surrounded them. Of course, in some respects, they may have considered themselves fortunate. At least they were still alive. They had not been sold into slavery and dispersed across the Empire, as had been done with other captured people. They were even allowed to live in rather close-knit communities and to stay in touch with those left behind in the homeland. That, however, was not so much an act of mercy on the part of their Babylonian captors as it was a carefully calculated foreign policy. These exiles could still be sold into slavery and dispersed across the empire. These exiles could still be killed, but as long as Zedekiah, the vassal King in Israel, continued loyal to his Babylonian overlords and regular in his tribute payments they were left unharmed. They were not only exiles, you see, they were also hostages and hostages not only to Nebuchadnezzar but hostages to their own fears and longing. Exile is never merely a matter of geography. It can be, and often is, as much or more a state of mind as place. Exile is the longing for something to which you would return, if you could—a place, a time, a circumstance, a relationship, a fantasy—and which keeps you from being fully at home and fully yourself wherever you happen to be. You can be an exile in the most familiar surroundings, even in your own home. The man or woman you married is not at all the man or woman you thought you were marrying on your wedding day. Your marriage has become more of an empty shell or even a prison than the warm and nurturing haven you anticipated that it would be. The career you pursued and for which you may have even sacrificed has not turned out to be as fulfilling or financially lucrative as you thought when you embarked upon it. If you were younger you might try something else, but you are too old now or have too many responsibilities even to consider the possibility of doing something different with your life. The future has not unfolded as you expected it would, and, if the truth were known, you feel just a bit bitter about it. And though you may have every right to feel bitter, it is the bitterness that holds you hostage. Bitterness is self-consuming. It eats away at you from within, a little bit at a time, leaving only a skeleton of the person that was and barely more than a whisper of the person that could have been. For others of us it is resignation to the status quo that holds us hostage in exile. You give something your all and then some, but after awhile it’s becomes like beating your head against the proverbial wall. Nothing changes, and you figure that it never will. “Why try? Nothing is going to change anyway,” and you settle—settle for something less than what God wills and wants for you. You exist, but do not live. The exiles in Babylon longed for home and seized upon every hint of political instability in the Babylonian power structure as a sign that their exile was ending and that they would be going home again. There were prophets among them who fed that hope by pronouncing the imminent fall of Babylon and the return of the exiles to the homeland. But Jeremiah wrote to them with a different message. “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel . . . Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may multiply there, and do not decrease. But 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.” Make yourself at home. Put down roots. Let go of the anger, the bitterness, the defeatism, the unrealistic longing. Invest yourself in the place where your are. Bloom where you are planted. Do more than make the best of things. Flourish. Babylon might not be where you would choose to be if you had a choice, but it is where you are, at least for the time begin. Make a place for yourself there. If you are always looking back or straining to see ahead, you miss the blessings of the moment, the joys of today and the foe or circumstance that has placed you where you are wins. Ruth Blandford, a member of our church family who died last week at the age of 102, had been afflicted by a neuro-muscular malady that affected her speech, her movement, and the use of her hands for a full century of her life. The physical and social challenges she faced were mountainous. A high school teacher urged her not to waste her widowed mother’s money by seeking a college education. “You will never succeed,” she was told. Ruth not only graduated from college but succeeded in a multitude of ways in her life. She worked a decade as a social worker for Multnomah County, which was one of her most satisfying accomplishments. She joined the Mazamas and climbed Mt. Hood as well as several other high peaks. She was a poet, a wonderful conversationalist, an eager student of life, and a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. Ruth invested herself in the life she had. Would she have been happy to be free of her limitations, her pain, her illness? You bet! Ruth, though, lived, really lived in spite of it. Such success stems not merely from one’s own effort and determination, but also from one’s faith both in God’s enabling grace and in God’s good purpose in and through and beyond life’s most joyful and sorrowful, challenging and comfortable, liberating and confining experiences and circumstances. God is with you. God will help you be all that you can be and then some. St. Paul, in writing to encourage his timid, younger protégé Timothy, admonished him: “do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed.” That’s all that God expects of any of us—our best, not more, not less—wherever we may be and whatever the shape of our lives. And the rest we can leave to God. While we may not choose the experience of exile, it may well be that by the grace of God we emerge from it better people that we would have been had we not experienced it. The children of Israel did not choose life in Babylon, but it was that experience in Babylon in which many more of their fellow countrymen would share that forged a faith that would endure wherever they might be dispersed and whatever holocaust they might yet endure in succeeding centuries. Israel’s faith had been inextricably bound to Jerusalem, the temple, and the sacrifice. In exile they had neither Jerusalem, the temple, nor sacrifice. They had, however, the Torah, the Law, and that would become the defining principle of identity for them. There have been places along the way of my journey that I would never again choose to visit—places of exile—but the time spent there became for me some of the most formative time for the good in my life. The time spent there has shaped the person I am today and shaped me, I pray, for the better. A few verses beyond where our reading from Jeremiah ends this morning is this promise: “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.” The deliverance for which we long may or may not come—but what we do know is this: the future that lies before us—whatever it may be—is one that is filled with hope because God is faithful and God’s promises can be relied upon. Put down your roots. Bloom where you are planted. J. Dudley Weaver |