The Lord of heavenly forces, the God of Israel, proclaims to all the exiles I have carried off from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 Build houses and settle down; cultivate gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Get married and have children; then help your sons find wives and your daughters find husbands in order that they too may have children. Increase in number there so that you don’t dwindle away. 7 Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because your future depends on its welfare.
8 The Lord of heavenly forces, the God of Israel, proclaims: Don’t let the prophets and diviners in your midst mislead you. Don’t pay attention to your dreams. 9 They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I didn’t send them, declares the Lord.
10 The Lord proclaims: When Babylon’s seventy years are up, I will come and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. 11 I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope. 12 When you call me and come and pray to me, I will listen to you. 13 When you search for me, yes, search for me with all your heart, you will find me. 14 I will be present for you, declares the Lord, and I will end your captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have scattered you, and I will bring you home after your long exile, declares the Lord. (Common English Bible)
“Contextual
Chaos: How to Stop Taking the Bible Out of Context,” Week One
In most every church I visited in Scotland, there
was a monument or memorial of some kind to the Scots from that area who were
killed in “the Great War,” or World War I. The big grandpappy of these
memorials is the shrine in Edinburgh castle, with the names of all the dead,
all the tens of thousands of them, inscribed for eternity in massive tomes
along a solemn stone hallway. And cast throughout Scotland, there are memorials
in its image, giving honor and dignity to those who died in both world wars in
the fights against reactionary ideology and fascism.
But perhaps the most profound, most moving, and,
really, most disturbing memorial—of a sort—to the First World War’s western front
that I have ever heard of is the front itself, the Zone Rouge, or Red Zone, in
France that covers some 460 square miles of battlefield. Those 460 miles got
their Red Zone label by having been rendered completely unfit for human
habitation as a direct result of the war’s privations and consequences. As the
French government documented, verbatim, in its assessment of the Zone Rouge
after the war, “Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to
Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible.”
Tens of thousands of pounds of unexploded shells,
grenades, and ammunition are recovered from the Zone Rouge annually, but even
at that rate, it is estimated that it will be another 700 years before the Zone
Rouge is returned to its pre-1914 state.
In four years of war, humanity turned a swath of
land larger than from here to Portland and out to Clatskanie and back
uninhabitable for a length of time so great that if the war had taken place
when Robert the Bruce won Scotland’s independence against Edward II of England
at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the land would only just now be habitable
again.
That is the sort of dimensions we are forced to
talk about, required to talk about, and need to talk about when we discuss the
overcoming of strife on a truly grand scale. It is a dimension that we fail to
take into account, I think, when we approach the prophet Jeremiah in the Hebrew
Bible, and especially with his famous pronouncement in 29:11 that God has a
plan to prosper us, a verse that we take out of its context and, in so doing,
completely ignore the dimensions of strife that Jeremiah is prophesying all
around that singular verse that we so frequently cite and cherish.
This is a new sermon series for a new season—summer
is at long last giving way to autumn, and after an entire summer devoted to a
verse-by-verse series (our exploration of the life and reign of Solomon), we
will be returning to three thematic sermon series, one after the other, to get
us from here to—believe it or not—Christmas! And the first of these thematic
sermon series concerns a habit that I often see, whether in everyday
conversation, or on social media, or even by other pastors that I see in the
papers or on the telly: taking verses of Scripture out of context.
(The best—and funniest instance—of this I’ve seen
is a cartoon of a fellow trying to remove the lid of a pickle jar and in
between grunts of effort, recites Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things
through Christ who strengthens me,” to which his wife says, “Twist the lid,
Tom, not Scripture.”)
It is a mightily tempting vice to engage in—after
all, you’re citing Scripture, what could be wrong about that? Well, first of
all, Satan cited Scripture to Jesus in the wilderness, so it is possible to use
Scripture for ill just as surely as we use it for good. But by taking chapter
and verse out of the remaining chapter—or chapters—that surround it, we treat
the Bible less like a book (or a collection of books, really) and more like a
collection of fortune cookie wisdom: eat a cookie, or a communion wafer for
that matter, get a verse.
And that is simply never how Scripture was
intended to be used. The original manuscripts of the New Testament do not come
with chapter and verse annotated into them—all of that came from later
compilers. So let us, if we are to remain true to the original spirit of the
authors of our sacred texts, try so far as we are able to set aside the taking
of a single verse and instead look at some of the most famous verses from
Scripture and (a) actually see from whence they came, and (b) understand how we
can move away from taking such verses out of context and start taking such verses
to heart!
We begin this series, then, as I said, with one
of the most famous pronouncements of the prophet Jeremiah: that God knows the
plans that God has for you, and they are plans for peace, not disaster, and of
a future filled with hope. So of course we’re apt to take something like that
out of context for the sole reason that it reassures us, it makes us feel good.
And that was surely part of the prophet’s original intent as well when he
preached those words on behalf of God.
But we are not Jeremiah’s original, or even
likely intended, audience. Jeremiah is what we call an “exilic” prophet,
meaning that his career coincided at least in part with the exile into Babylon
of the Israelites after Nebuchadnezzar II sacks Jerusalem in 586 BCE and, per
Babylonian wartime policy, takes Jerusalem’s religious and political leaders into
exile in Babylon, and it is to those leaders that Jeremiah writes this passage
from chapter 29—it’s a letter to them, written from Jeremiah. Babylon’s exilic
policy had the twofold effect of both decapitating a conquered peoples of its
leadership while also centralizing the best and brightest of Babylon’s
conquered subjects all in one capital city.
And that circumstance is simply not our own. How
could it be? This church and this town are our home, we are as far from being
exile as we possibly can be. So we have no way of knowing from our experience
what Jeremiah is really talking about, instead we have to learn it for
ourselves.
This verse and passage from Jeremiah 29 really
begins two chapters earlier, in chapter 27, as the themes of a God who is in
ultimate control of the peoples’ destiny in spite of the terrible lot they find
themselves in really begins to take shape as a driving force of Jeremiah’s
theology. For Jeremiah, God is still in charge, even as God’s people face
defeat, humiliation, and ruin. His bottom line is that God is still active,
still reigning, and still seeks real change from Israel—and from us—towards good.
In chapter 28, this message comes to a head in a
back-and-forth with a priestly opponent of Jeremiah, a man named Hananiah. As
for the contrast between the two, I’ll borrow here from the Hebrew Bible
scholar Louis Stulman, in his Order Amid
Chaos commentary on Jeremiah:
Hananiah
represents a belief system of a hopeful future without the dissolution of the
old world order…His “ideology of continuity” accepts the old ways…(For)
Jeremiah, such a view is misinformed and in stark opposition to long-standing
prophetic tradition. Hananiah is out of touch with the historical moment and
with the sovereign claims of YHWH which demands definitional transformation as
prerequisite to new world constructions. Jeremiah sees “transformative
discontinuity” as a necessary component for fresh networks of hope.
What does all that mean? It means that a person
like Hananiah, who is trying to shut Jeremiah up for a fool, represents the
mode of thought in a crisis that if only we could get back to the old way of
doing things, everything would be okay. Except, well, a saying about the
definition of insanity comes to mind. You don’t do something over and over and
rationally expect a different result. But that is precisely what Hananiah does,
which is what spurs Jeremiah’s rejoinder, which at least thematically, does carry
over from chapter 28 into 29.
And that rejoinder boils down to one simple
truth, one immutable reality in which we must live our lives: hope must arise
out of an encounter with suffering.
Hope cannot arise out of a vacuum, otherwise,
what would you know what to have hope in, or to hope for? No, hope, true hope,
can only come once we realize and understand the full scope and scale of just
how deep the strife in this world really is. Only until we can grasp the true
depth and profundity of the existence of something like the Zone Rouge, a
wasteland so deep and so barren that for hundreds of years it can only ever be
a wasteland, only when we arrive at that level of knowing, can we even begin to
reach for hope.
Because yes, the Zone Rouge is still a wasteland
now. But hundreds and hundreds of years from now, the hope is, it may not be.
Yes, Israel is in exile now. But the hope is that
decades and decades from this prophecy from Jeremiah, they will no longer be.
And that hope is borne out. Only about fifty years after Nebuchadnezzar II
sacks Jerusalem, the Persian monarch Cyrus the Great in turn sacks Babylon,
liberates the Hebrews, and allows them to return to their homeland to worship
God as God has called them to do.
And until we can empathize with the sheer depth
of Israel’s desire, of Jeremiah’s desire, to be loosed of the shackles of
imprisonment and exile, only then can Jeremiah’s words of God having plans to
prosper us, to give us peace and a future filled with hope, only then can those
words really mean to us what they were meant to mean when Jeremiah spoke them,
and not a microsecond before.
Put a different way: Jeremiah 28 and 29 are
written for and to the people who lost a loved one on September 11, 2001. It is
written to those experiencing that magnitude of suffering, and are in need of
hope equal to their suffering.
We do not get to claim a stricken peoples’ need
for hope as our own. We have not earned that right and that privilege. We do
not get to push the fast-forward button towards hope when we have not immersed
ourselves in the pain and hurt of the people who gave us this verse-long
expression of hope that we have co-opted and claimed as our own.
We do not get to treat Scripture, or our own
theology, so haphazardly and recklessly.
So rather, let us be patient with ourselves, and
with God, that what we need to know, in this life at least, will indeed be
revealed to us, whether today, or tomorrow, or years later…in God’s good time.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
September 11, 2016
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