Readings: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, Luke 17:11-19
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the mediations
of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our
redeemer. Amen.
You will be
familiar I think with the popular song ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ based on Ps
137 where we have the line “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange
land?” The Jews, a people set apart,
God’s chosen people are ripped from their promised land, exiled into a strange
land with an uncertain future, control over their lives pretty much gone and
subject to a bit of goading we might say by their captors – go on, play us some
songs, entertain us why don’t you.
Imagine
it. Put ourselves into that
position. Helpless, hopeless, separated
from all that they held dear. “By the
rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept as we remembered Zion.”
The lepers too
were in that same place – wrenched from all that they held dear: family, home,
work because they, quite
indiscriminately perhaps, suddenly found themselves with a contagious
skin disease that outlawed them from their society. And this disease was no respecter of class or
status although I suspect it was more prevalent in the places of poverty.
These stories
and many more of painful exile in our own time, of marginalised and
dispossessed people everywhere, make us question just how we can live in any
meaningful way when we are separated from all we hold dear, see no way to
reclaim our heritage, our purpose, our way that we thought was ours by
right.
One could
quite easily place the church today in this place of exile – where what we
thought was our future, our surety, our way is being challenged on all
fronts. The world where respect for
church and faith was a given is long gone, long held traditions no longer
stretch out with impunity in front of us, and our future is uncertain and
unseen.
So how do we
respond? We put our hope and trust in
God to deliver us – and we believe it – but the question is to deliver us to
what. The people of Judah were lapping
up the preaching that encouraged them to hold on to who they were, sit tight
and they would get to go back to where they had come from. God would break the yoke of the King of
Babylon, said the prophet Hananiah, within two years, and you can go home – all
fixed. What a reassuring message for the
people – just sit and wait and all would be well – God didn’t really mean it. But Jeremiah (being Jeremiah) argued the
point - no he said, the word I have from
God says become part of the community, settle down, build houses, marry, have
children, live as you would normally live in this community far from home, be
engaged and involved, learn the ways of peace with those you see as enemies and
recognise that in the power of prayer and of community great things can happen
for the whole people of God. This time
of exile will change you, grow you in faith and works.
And I wonder
if this is not something that we can need to think about quite seriously – not
to dismiss the pain, not at all, but to understand that in the pain, God speaks
to us in life changing ways. Did you
pick up that the one leper who came back praising God and thanking Jesus was a
Samaritan? Was he the only one who returned
to his home transformed in some way by his experiences in exile? Might the others have thought it was their
right to be cured, to be made well and restored to what was and this one leper
understood that he would be forever different because of this experience? Would he see that the enmities, for instance,
that he had held close faded into insignificance in the face of living in
exile? Would he have realised in that
time of separation that he was contributing to and communicating with those who
he would normally have kept apart from or despised. Nothing would be the same again, even when he
was able to return to his former community, but not only that - he was able to
praise God for the change.
Some hope
therefore for us as church. This might
not be a comfortable, predictable time for the church, we might feel isolated
and separate from all that we know and felt sure of – but we have a choice of
response. We can relate to the prophet
Hananiah and hunker down, trust in God to strike down the infidels and restore
us to all that was before or we can do as Jeremiah encouraged, as God spoke to
the people – to seek the welfare of the
strange city – and in doing so find our place in this new unasked for situation
we find ourselves in.
What might
that look like? How might we take encouragement in the midst of some very real
displacement. Well firstly prayer. Pray to the Lord on behalf of the city says
Jeremiah. Holding not just our concerns
up in prayer but praying for others, for those we know and do not know,
trusting God to speak to us and through us in prayer. Not just listing a bunch of things we
identify but listening to God speaking into our hearts the things we do not see
and the situations we are not aware of.
Secondly – and
this often comes from prayer – in the listening we find there are new ways,
unexpected pathways, alternate approaches.
We do not know what the future holds but we mustn’t be too anxious about
it. We are to trust that by walking that
path that Christ takes, we will be effectively and powerfully seeking the
welfare of the city in which we live, possibly in ways we could never
imagine. It might be a new and different
city, a city where we often feel up against it, but it is still, perhaps even
more so, a place of living and loving and caring community.
Thirdly be
open to the ways in which we can engage in this new place. Don’t let traditions or institutional power
stop us doing what is right, what Christ would have us do. That doesn’t mean that every new way is to be
embraced, every established way discontinued, but always it does mean
discerning if it is a Hananiah or a Jeremiah response, a shutting out or a
stepping out?
In that story
I shared earlier of the young girl killed by neglect and starvation, – in a
strange country, at the mercy of a cruel mistress and with little hope of
finding a way out. Death for her might
have been just that – a way out. Where
were those seeking her welfare, those who saw her as more than ‘just a
servant’? Were people too busy with sorting their own fears and uncertainties
in the new world to give her a helping hand?
Did the conventions of the time prevent them from interfering, give the
mistress power of life and, in the end, death over another person because she
was a servant?
You know –
that girl back in the 1870’s – Margaret – would never in a million years have
imagined that 150 years later her story of exile and suffering would have moved
her namesake to tears, been the foundation of a sermon at Opoho Church and
caused us to question, deeply question how we treat each other in community.
How do we sing
the Lord’s song in a new land – loudly, with love and compassion, praising and
thanking God, listening to what is going on around us, where we are needed and
stepping into our community, trusting that even in our uncertainties and fears,
especially in our uncertainties and fears God is with us, Christ is guiding us
and the Spirit is transforming our lives and the world around us in ways we
can’t imagine. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Margaret Garland
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