Once upon a time there were identical twins. They were alike in every way but one - one was a hope-filled optimist who only ever saw the bright side of life. The other was a gloomy pessimist, who could only see the downside of every situation.
Their parents were so worried about their extremes they sought advice from a psychologist who suggested a plan to develop each child’s shadow side. Their birthday was coming up and the psychologist suggested they give the pessimist a shiny new bike, but the optimist a pile of manure.
Well the parents agreed. So, it’s the twins’ birthday and here comes the pessimist to unwrap the shiniest, sleekest, brilliantest bike a child has ever owned. But when he sees it he says, "Thank you, that is very generous of you and I appreciate the love behind the gift, but I'll probably ride it into a tree and break my leg. So please take it back to the shop."
Now it’s the optimist’s turn. He closes his eyes, and his parents lead him into the backyard, where stands a ten-foot pile of manure. He opens his eyes and squeals with delight. He rushes to the pile and leaps onto it and starts digging with his hands, giggling and whooping. “Yay”, he shouts, “I just know there’s a pony in here somewhere.”
Wise people, godly people, people like Jeremiah in today’s OT lesson know that how they feel about life – be it hopeful or hopeless, optimistic or pessimistic, calm or anxious, peaceful or worried, bitter or accepting – is rooted in how they interpret the bad things that happen to them.
In a letter to his nation in exile, Jeremiah delivers this word from the Lord: “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 bear sons and daughters; 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.”
You might think that sounds like a ‘shiny bike’ kind of word from the Lord. Settle down, enjoy your situation, marry, celebrate, grow crops, eat your fill, prosper, thrive, grow. But it’s not the shiny bike kind, but the other kind. You see, Jeremiah’s nation, Judah, has been overpowered by the school bully, Babylon. The Jewish people had been disgraced, humiliated. Many of them – the ones who could be of use - were taken into exile in Babylon. The skilled workers, the artisans, intellectuals, and leaders, were hauled away into captivity - not to just rot in a prison, awful though that would have been, but even worse - to be put to work for the good of the empire that
had just crushed them. Imagine after the fall of Paris in WWII the best minds and talents in France being taken to Germany to work for the good of the Third Reich. God’s people were exiles in a foreign land. Gone were the glory years of ancient heroes. Gone the days of sowing and reaping, of planting and harvesting, of singing and dancing. Gone the land flowing with
milk and honey. No Israel. No Judah. No nothing.
So what do you do when you’re in the devastation of exile. Well, you fight, don’t you? That’s the natural thing to do – the human thing to do. You plot to sabotage the empire, undermine its power, secretly chew at its foundations from the inside. You mount a Resistance. Perhaps you even plan an escape. Maybe if enough of you can make it out of Babylon, and get back home, you can rebuild the homeland.
But to the seething Resistance, aching to overthrow the empire and return home, Jeremiah writes something horribly shocking. The Hebrews are in exile because God put them there. And so the word of the Lord is: Stay where you are. Build houses; plant gardens. Get married and have kids. And ... here’s the fishbone that must have really stuck in the throat of the exiles – “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
Human beings waste a lot of time and energy resisting the inevitable – aging, sadness, loss, death. The gift of accepting things you cannot change is one of the greatest yet most elusive of God’s gifts. When we have it, we truly are free. When we lack it, we shrivel.
Psychologist Dr. Karyn Hall says, “Acceptance is the appropriate response to everything that happens. It is the holy grail of peace, because circumstance no longer has the power to make your sky go dark. Sometimes people behave as if not accepting something will change the
situation. It’s like accepting painful situations or emotions is giving in. That’s not it. It’s allowing reality to be as it is. It’s exhausting to fight reality, and it doesn’t work. Refusing to accept that you were fired, or that your friend cheated you, or that you weren’t accepted into your chosen college doesn’t change the situation, and it adds to the pain you experience.”
How counter-intuitive this is. We tend to think that whenever something undesirable happens, acceptance is the second option – after trying all we can to change things, even things that are totally outside our power to influence. As Americans, we celebrate resistance. It is in our DNA. If there is something that is fundamentally wrong, we tend to challenge it. The brightest lights in US history are when citizens resisted oppression and injustice, when people refused to tolerate the intolerable or accept the unacceptable.
But that deep instinct can lead us, in our personal lives, to believe that we are able to resist things that truly are irresistible; like death, illness, disappointment, loss, or what other people think of us, how systems outside our control treat us. Alexander Solzhenitsyn knew it. When he was in a Soviet prison, he noticed that whenever he tried to keep some power over his own life by making deals with prison guards to get food or clothing, he was actually placing himself at the mercy of the guards. But when he accepted his vulnerability, his jailers had no power over him. He became the powerful one, and they the powerless. He was unable to change the reality of living under a tyrannical government, but he could change his own actions and thoughts.
Or, if musicians are more your cup of tea than Soviet dissidents, how about the example of Beethoven. When his hearing finally left him totally and eternally Beethoven slid into despair. How he must have tried to hold on. But cling on is only a language in Star Trek, not real life. We can try to cling on all we want, but it is useless. And when Beethoven accepted what he could not resist, and received the gift of deafness he composed some of his best work. With all distractions shut out, melodies flooded his mind. If he had become bitter with God, if he’d clung on to his hearing, long after it had gone, if he’d resented his loss the world would have been deprived of some great music.
How does it feel to live in exile? How is to wake every morning and look out of the window at a foreign landscape? Well, you know how it feels, because you do it. I know when I’m losing my edge spiritually. It’s when this world with its twisted values, it’s misguided priorities, its violence, its hate, its fear – it’s when all that feels normal. I’m losing my edge when the values of Babylon no longer shock me, when they don’t even sadden me; and when the values of God’s kingdom seem weird or extreme or too other-worldly to be any use. That’s when I know I’m losing my edge. Because we are in exile and there’s nothing we can do about it. I know you feel it. You look at the world and think “I’m not sure I really belong here – with all the conflict and the malice, the greed and the cruelty, the harshness and the lies. I don’t think I can cope with this, I don’t have the resilience, I want to just hide because like a fish on the beach I was just not made for this
environment.” If you do feel that – good. Yes, good. Because in that sense of alienation lies the truth. We were not made for this, and woe to us when we get too cozy. That alienation you feel is homesickness. It’s the memory of Eden. It’s the deep, deep knowledge that you were intended for something better than this and you are heading there.
But for a little while longer we are called, in Jeremiah’s words, to make the most of living in Babylon, to settle as far as we can, and to pray for the welfare of the city of our exile. Don’t take up arms against Babylon, don’t try to overpower it. We can’t. We engage with Baylon. And we pray for the good of Babylon, we play our part in its prosperity. Of course the events of last Saturday night in downtown Montgomery are on our minds. We’ve been thinking all week about the violence and the deaths and the life-altering injuries to bodies and minds that occurred just 500 yards west of here. Many years ago, when the people who decided what our Bible readings were going to be today did their work, God inspired them to pick this passage from Jeremiah; because God knew that in 2025 on this Sunday we’d read them and he’d use them to speak comfort into our in our grieving hearts and peace into our horrified minds. And he’d use this to call us to make the most of our exile, to love our fellow-citizens in exile, and to pray for the city of our exile. And so we will. St John’s is a beacon in downtown. And so we will pray.
I’ve decided to call the parish plus anyone from other churches and people form the wider community who wish to join us, to a special service of prayer on Sunday November 2 nd at 4pm. So please set aside an hour to gather together and pray for Montgomery. This is us being the beacon downtown, bringing hope and helping God change our culture of violence. “So 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.