Planning For Justice & Joy
September 22, 2024 - Jeremiah 29: 10-14
You may be familiar with Jeremiah 29: 11 from myriad t-shirts, coffee mugs, and conference slogans: “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.” You have probably seen fewer coffee mugs emblazoned with the verse just before: Jeremiah 29: 10 that speaks of the long wait for that future with hope – 70 years in the case of Jeremiah’s people. Much has been made of the pervasiveness of our societal impatience. Our attention spans are shrinking. Delayed gratification is a muscle we have to learn and relearn. We want what we want, and we want it now.
It’s not just waiting for the new iPhone to drop either. Many of us are impatient to learn about our health diagnoses. Many of us are impatient to change our housing situation. Many of us are impatient to heal from emotionally harmful situations. Many of us are impatient to see the climate corrected and the needs of our neighbors nearby and across the world cared for well. I suspect humans’ struggle with impatience is not new.
In fact, Jeremiah’s message about the long wait for the promised prosperous future was not a popular one. Like many biblical prophets, Jeremiah lived in a time of political and social upheaval. Jeremiah’s people, having already lived under the military control of the Assyrian empire, now faced occupation by the Babylonians and the King Nebuchadnezzar-led exile that carried off many of the ancient Israelite elite to the land of Babylon.[1]
Those in exile wanted to hear that it wouldn’t last long. They wanted to be told that they didn’t have to care about the land they lived on or the neighbors next door because, after all, they wouldn’t be there very long. Other false prophets offered promises of a quick return to Judah. Jeremiah said, it’s going to be awhile. So, while we’re here, God wants us to seek the welfare of this city where we are now, for in its welfare we find our own (29:7).
This was entirely unwelcome news. Seek the welfare of your neighbors in this land that conquered yours. Get comfortable in this place – the last place you’d rather be – a place that is in between the home you were exiled from and the no doubt somewhat changed home you hope to return to one day. One understanding of stress that I have come to appreciate is the space between the way things are and the way we want things to be. In that space between how things are now and how we wish they were is where we so often find the stress, the pain, the uncertainty. I really don’t want to make my home there. I want to keep moving on to the place I want to go.
But sometimes I find if I can notice and accept that what I’m experiencing is that kind of in-between place stress, then I can make a kind of home there. It’s not a home that lets me remain complacent or resign myself to the things that hurt always being that way. It’s a home that helps me understand my feelings better and to see better what I want to change and who can help me make that happen.
Like Naomi Shihab Nye making a kind of community with strangers at an airport gate in the poem I read to the children, my prayer for all of us would be that in whatever uncertain, stress-filled place we find ourselves, we could experience that kind of communion. We could hear God in the words of Jeremiah we read today:
12 “When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen.
13-14 “When you come looking for me, you’ll find me.
“Yes, when you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, I’ll make sure you won’t be disappointed.” God’s Decree.
Some of you know that my father-in-law is an elected official on the national stage. He and I don’t always see eye-to-eye on politics or biblical interpretation. That doesn’t stop me from admiring a whole lot about him. In particular, I carry a certain memory in my heart of sitting with him in Elgin’s own Festival Park, watching his then much younger grandchildren run through the splash pad. He was delighted by the development of our city’s downtown even then, and he began to ask why couldn’t something like this be done in his own small town. He began to see it in his mind’s eye: the splash pad, the park, and a thriving commercial district in little Howard, Pennsylvania. Grants and community partnerships could lead the way. He knew just the ones. Just because it wasn’t like that now, didn’t mean it couldn’t be so in the future. And this is the line he uttered then that stuck with me so strongly. After proclaiming there was no reason his little town could have this beauty, too, he concluded, “All it takes is leadership.”
12 “When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen.
13-14 “When you come looking for me, you’ll find me.
“Yes, when you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, I’ll make sure you won’t be disappointed.” God’s Decree.
It was the leaders in Jeremiah’s time who were called to the in-between place. It was the leaders who made their home there and persevered until it was time to claim that future for which they long hoped. What is leadership if not calling forth help from our community and from the holy Source of all life, too, to make real the dream of our hearts? What is leadership at its best if not just that kind of prayer? What is leadership at its best if not prayer that gives way to planning and working each day to make the dream of a future full of justice and joy real?
I have marveled at the leadership of this congregation over the years. I’m talking about the years since I’ve been here and about the past 125 years of this congregation’s history. Leaders from this congregation were involved in the starting of nearly all the social service agencies in this town in the later part of the twentieth century. Leaders from this congregation have touched each other's hearts in choir and Sunday School and wider church leadership, knitting us closer to each other and making opportunities to feel how closely we are knit to the heart of God.
Just a few years ago, leaders from this congregation were part of saying “Yes in my backyard” and providing community organizing support to make the way for an affordable and supportive housing development at 1212 Larkin. And today, we need everyone to take a part in the leadership – to be an active member of the crew, not just a passenger – as we navigate with hope toward a future church that draws on its heritage to embody a fresh expression of Christianity for the time and place in which we live. I’ve never been very taken with the idea that God has an inerrant plan for us – that every incident is preordained. I find myself more convinced that despite the unpredictability, challenge, and suffering we face, God goes with us and nudges us toward our welfare, toward justice and joy for all.
“I’ll show up and take care of you as I promised and bring you back home. I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for...
I’ll turn things around for you. I’ll bring you back from all the countries into which I drove you”—God’s Decree—“bring you home to the place from which I sent you off into exile. You can count on it.[2]”
We are planning together in a Congregational Business Meeting and in filing out pledge cards and in sharing time in Sunday School and over plates of treats during fellowship time and while holding each other in prayer and serving at the Soup Kettle. We are investing with hope in the future and the community and the world we want to build. We are sustaining each other and making a home here in our blessed and broken world, trusting that there is yet more beauty, justice, welfare, prosperity, and joy to come, if you and I and God have anything to say about it.
May it be so. Amen.
[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/jeremiahs-letter-to-exiles/commentary-on-jeremiah-291-4-14-4
[2] MSG