Building Houses

This is a meditation given on October 13th based on Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7.

They were homesick and heartsick, the Jews in Babylon. They had been taken from Jerusalem. They could not go home. They were in exile. And we can hear their lament echoing in the Hebrew Bible – particularly the Psalms. “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” And “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” They asked.
It wasn’t an idle question. For the Jews of the time, God lived in the temple built by Solomon in Jerusalem. But now in exile, the temple destroyed, and without even the ark of the covenant that their nomadic ancestors had carried so they would know God had a home with them, where was God? How could they sing? How could they worship? It just wasn’t right. It wasn’t like it used to be.
They were surrounded by people who weren’t their people, who didn’t believe as they did, who didn’t talk like they did, who didn’t worship their God.
So they camped out in Babylon and waited for God to save them, to answer their prayers and put things back the way they were. Their God was a powerful God – it could happen. And they loved to listen to those who told them soon, “anytime now,” they would be going home.
Time passed, but the lament went on. Long enough for Jeremiah, who was back in the land of Judah, to hear. Now Jeremiah wasn’t the most popular prophet with the Jews. He kept telling them things they did not want to hear. But he also kept being right.
So Jeremiah writes a letter to these homesick exiles. And his letter contained God’s words of salvation – just not the words the exiles longed to hear. Shockingly blunt, the prophet told them that God said, “Your old life is gone. Your new life is in Babylon. Suck it up. Deal with it. Stop living out of your suitcases and camping out in tents. Build houses to live in, grow your own food, marry, raise families. Work for the welfare of the city and all who live in it, because their welfare is your welfare. Stop living in the past. You’re going to be here a while. Settle in. This is your home now – act like it.” Harsh, right?
And yet, these were words of salvation and hope in more ways than one.
As I read this passage, I keep coming back to that moment in seminary where I learned about the Greek word for “tradition.” I’ve mentioned this before. What I learned that struck me so forcibly, and which I’ve been trying to process ever since, is that depending on the context, the same Greek word can mean either “tradition” or “betrayal.” And so the question that keeps running through my mind – and my life – is when does holding onto what was, to something from the past, cross the line and become a betrayal?
This text provides some clues. Perhaps the line is crossed when holding onto the past keeps us from living as God’s people in the present. The exiles were in a holding pattern. Stuck in a kind of warp bubble – neither in the Jerusalem of the past nor a part of Babylon in the present. They were surviving – but their lives were on hold – less like living and more like the living dead.
But mere survival isn’t enough. God wants us to thrive – to build homes for ourselves in the present where we and our families can grow. To plant gardens to provide nourishment for today and for the future. To live with love and create new life. And through our lives to witness to God’s greatness and God’s love.
But when the Israelites remained stuck in survival mode, the God seen through their lives looked small and ineffectual, and maybe a little bitter.
Tradition – betrayal. Perhaps that line is also crossed when we spend so much time and energy focusing on what the present situation lacks – comparing it to what used to be in the past – that we miss or reject the abundant gifts God gives us today. All the Jews could see was that Babylon was not Jerusalem, it’s people were not Jews, their ways were not their ways, things were not the way they used to be, not the way they wanted. But God, through Jeremiah, told them they had all they needed to live and live abundantly – what they needed to build houses, what they needed to plant gardens, what they needed to grow families. But they couldn’t see it because their eyes were trained on the past, on what they lacked, not what they had.
The reason we remember the past, the reason for tradition, is not so we can look at the present and judge it wanting, but so we can know that the God who provided in the past will also provide for us today and tomorrow. God was with the Israelites back in Jerusalem, but God was also with them in Babylon – as God is with us today.
The text also suggests that perhaps the line is also crossed when our yearning for what used to be leads us to pray only for what we want, a return to the past, instead of praying for what is needed not only by us but by our neighbors here and now.
       The Israelites had expectations, assumptions of what their lives were supposed to be. Led by the false prophets, they prayed and prayed for God to send them back to Jerusalem, and waited for it to happen – like ordering something on-line and waiting for it to arrive in the mail. And when you don’t get it you assume there’s something wrong – something wrong with you, like you didn’t have enough money in your account – something wrong with the method of communication, like your order got lost (maybe you didn’t pray enough) – or worse, in your disappointment your come to feel there’s something wrong with God. The store is closed; there’s no one there.
But God doesn’t work like that – and prayer doesn’t work like that. Prayer is about connection – opening ourselves up to God and to those we pray for – and trusting God. Prayer is one way we train our eyes to see God working in us and our world now – today. So even when we find ourselves in a place we didn’t want to be – like Babylon – if we can let go of our expectations and learn to thrive in surprising places – we may learn what those who have come before us have learned over and over again – that we can count on God never to forsake us, to see us through whatever comes our way. No matter where we are – we belong to God – and God is with us.
The Israelites wanted and prayed to go home. Through Jeremiah, God tells them they are home – and tells them how to live there. Their prayer was answered – they were home – just not in the way they wanted.
So then Jeremiah refocuses the Israelites’ prayer life not on themselves but on the world around them – on the city of Babylon, their new home. “Seek the welfare of the city where you are in exile,” he says, “and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”  Welfare. When we hear the same word repeated over and over, we need to sit up and take notice.
The word translated here as “welfare” is the Hebrew word shalom. It’s a word often translated “peace.” It’s a word of healing, of wholeness, of thriving and flourishing in God. If the Israelites were existing like the living dead, what God, through Jeremiah, was offering them was nothing less than resurrection. But – and this is a big “but” – their salvation, their welfare, their shalom, was integrally connected to the salvation, the welfare, the shalom of those foreigners and that foreign city. The Israelites needed not only to build their own houses, but to work for the benefit of the whole neighborhood – the whole city that was now their home. To be blessed with shalom they needed to be a blessing. And the more they are involved and connected to the wider community, the more it will feel like home.
This is a powerful scripture for our times. We live in a country full of exiles. If you think about it, our country was built by exiles. And then we took the native people who were already at home here, and made them exiles in their own land. And over and over again each group of exiles has eventually learned to build houses in this foreign land, to find nourishment, to make connections, to find their place and work together with their new neighbors to make it better.
But today, there are many in our country who feel like exiles – they didn’t move, but the world has changed and shifted around them leaving them alienated, strangers in a strange land – longing to return home – but don’t know where it is. So they band together, listen to false prophets trashing the “Babylonians” all around them, and promising them that soon, “anytime now,” they will be able to return to the way it was before – if they just hold on to tradition, stand firm, keep their eyes on the past. And they want and they pray so hard for that dream, that when it doesn’t come to pass in the way they want and expect their anger and bitterness spills over and scorches everyone and everything. We can see it in our society, we can see it in our country’s politics, we can see it in modern Christianity. The modern church in the West is, after all, really a church in exile.
But there is a way forward; there is the possibility of healing, of wholeness, of shalom. And it begins, says Jeremiah, by recognizing that we are already home, and begin to act that way. To build houses in which God can be seen here and now, and God’s family can thrive.
I read a story in the Dallas Morning News this year (August 5, 2013; Dinesh Ramde, AP) about two men building such a house. Arno Michaelis is a 42-year-old white male from Wisconsin who came of age in the white supremacist movement. He was the lead singer in the white power band called Centurion. He tattooed his body with hate messages and swastikas. Like most white supremacists, he likely longed to return to a time when white men reigned supreme. And he hated – all those who were not white, Christian by his definition, hated all that was foreign to him.
And that hating was exhausting, and kept him isolated and alienated from the community around him. He couldn’t watch pro football games, including the local Green Bay Packers, because blacks and whites were playing together. He couldn’t watch TV because Hollywood was a Jewish conspiracy. He loved Seinfeld but he had to record it on a videotape labeled “Amber’s second birthday party” so his white-supremacist friends wouldn’t know he liked a Jewish comedian.
Then a couple of things happened to him. A friend of his died in a street fight, bringing the cost of hate close to home. And his daughter was born, and that new life, his new role as father, opened his eyes, and he knew he had to change his life. And he took steps to make it that way, including getting new tattoos to cover the old racist messages.
In 2012, he heard about how a gunman walked into a Sikh temple in Milwaukee and killed six people. He saw how the gunman’s white supremacist background was nearly identical to his own, and he lay awake agonizing that the gunman might have been someone he’d recruited into the white power movement or inspired when he was the lead singer of a hate band.
So with love for his daughter in his heart, Arno reached out to a different child, a son whose father died in the Sikh temple that day, and Arno invited him to dinner. Pardeep Kaleka is a 37-year-old, clean-cut American of Indian heritage who teaches high school social studies.  And yet, he was part from mainstream America, separated by his ethnicity, his religion, the color of his skin. It wasn’t easy for Pardeep to meet Arno, but he wanted his father’s death to be a catalyst for peace, and he saw in Arno someone who could help him carry a message that it’s possible to turn hate into love.
They formed an organization, serve2Unite, a community group that forges relationships, that seeks the welfare of the city, that works to counter violence with peace, and hate by sowing seeds of understanding and love.
       Singer Martina McBride has a song with the line, “Love’s the only house big enough for all the pain in the world.” Arno and Pardeep are building a big house. A big house indeed.
And in the building, and the planting, and the raising and remembering of family, and the forging of relationships – there is healing, there is wholeness, there is shalom – and there is God. And the exile white man and the exile Indian man are exiles no longer – but neighbors and brothers.
      “And thus says the Lord . . . to all the exiles . . . Build houses and live in them,” thrive and help those around you to thrive. Build houses of love, not hate – of hope, not bitterness – of life, not death. Houses of love – that’s our real tradition. Build houses – and come home. Amen.