The People of God in the Land of America

I’ve really got just one thing to say this morning. It’s an important thing. I mean, I would even be so bold as to say that it is a message from God. But it’s really just one thing. And the one thing is: Be restless but stay put. That’s it. Be restless but stay put. So if you nod off this morning or forget where I’m headed over the next three hours, just remember this, because it’s what the sermon is all about. Be restless but stay put.

I know that sounds strange coming from a United Methodist minister. After all, John Wesley, the first Methodist, put restlessness into our DNA back in the 18th century and we Methodists have been on the move ever since. Our most celebrated figures are the circuit riding preachers who started churches like…well…this one. They took seriously Wesley’s admonition never to stay in any one place any longer than was strictly necessary. And so these preachers on horseback were constantly on the move, preaching the gospel, establishing new small groups and never settling down.

So you may think it’s strange to get a message like this from me: Be restless but stay put. You might think I’m not a very credible witness. I mean, we don’t move as much as we used to, but United Methodist preachers are still itinerant. We still move. So you might think, “O.K., you’re telling me to stay put, but when are you going to stay put?”

You also might think this is not a very biblical message. I mean didn’t Abraham and Sarah pack up everything they had and leave their home and their family and head off to follow God’s promise in the land of Canaan? Didn’t the people of Israel wander through the wilderness for forty years after they escaped slavery? Didn’t God take Ruth from her home and David from his sheep and Amos from his sycamore trees and Peter from his fishing nets and Matthew from his tax business and turn their lives around and turn the world upside down through their restlessness and refusal to stay put? Didn’t Jesus say that foxes have holes and birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head? [Mat. 8:20] Didn’t Paul make his first missionary journey and his second missionary journey and his third missionary journey and his fourth missionary journey so that when you look at the map in the back of your study bible that shows Paul’s travels it looks like some child has taken a Crayola pack to it? Aren’t we marching to Zion and walking on the heaven road? Haven’t we decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back? Don’t we want to walk in Jerusalem just like John? Don’t we sing that some glad morning I’ll fly away? Doesn’t 1 John say, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world”? [1 Jo. 2:15] Aren’t we in the world but not of it? How can you say, Alex, that God says, “Be restless but stay put.” We’re on a journey here. We’re heaven-bound. This train is bound for glory. This train.

All of which reminds me of monks. Monks are like the opposite of Wesley’s circuit-riding preachers. One of the things that makes them so different is that they take some pretty significant vows. Poverty, celibacy, obedience – these are typical vows in a monastic community. But they also take a vow of stabilitas. It is a vow of stability, which means that they enter a monastery with the intention of living their entire lives in that community. In some cases they vow never to leave the walls of the monastery again.

In medieval days there were elaborate ceremonies held for monks entering the monastery. In effect, they were funerals. You could go to your own funeral, because in a real way you were committing your life to this monastic order unto death.

This seems very extreme to us who live in a very different culture and time where stability is how we talk about our psychological state rather than how we live. We wonder how someone could do that. How could someone give their entire lives to one place or one order?

Dwight Longenecker, the chaplain at St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Greenville, South Carolina, says that “the vow of stability means the monk promises to remain in one community for life. He commits himself to one family of monks, one place, one set of buildings, one way of life. The whole point is to stop him doing 'a geographical'. He's not allowed to run away. Stability teaches us that God is not elsewhere. We'll find him here. We'll find him now, or we won't find him anyhow. Stability is a rock.”[i]

Stability is a rock. That’s how an oyster grows. It finds a place to root and that’s where it stays. An oyster rock is the place where it flourishes. Could the same be true for us?

Richmond Hill is an ecumenical retreat center on Church Hill in the city of Richmond. The community that runs the center is a residential city made up primarily of lay people who have committed themselves to living together under an order using a monastic model. It is different from traditional monastic communities, though. People come and go. They work in other jobs outside the community in Richmond.

But Richmond Hill has kept a vow of stabilitas. This is how they interpret that: We will live in this community as if it will be the place where we die. We will live here as if it will be the place where we will die. It is their way of saying, “I am not giving this community only a part of myself. I am giving everything I have to it. When I see something that needs to be fixed I will fix it. If I have a personality conflict with someone I won’t just wait them out. I will treat this community as if it is the last one I will be in, because it may be. Who knows if I will move again or if Christ will come again? But I will work to pass it along to the next generation and to preserve what is good about it.” Now that’s a good message for Methodist ministers and for all of us who find ourselves moving. Live in a place as if it’s the last place we’ll ever live.

There’s a similar message in Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a prophet, not a bullfrog. Even though we haven’t been following it in recent weeks, Jeremiah has been running through the lectionary. The story it tells is about how his ministry unfolded. The early part of the book tells of Jeremiah’s realization that he was born with a purpose, which was to proclaim God’s word to a people who were not always ready to hear it. Jeremiah spoke to the people of his nation, the nation of Judah, God’s chosen people, and told them that their land would be devastated by the Babylonians and their people carried off into exile. Not exactly a popular thing to say. As you might expect it didn’t win friends and influence people. Jeremiah was thrown into a pit, held under house arrest—but even then, he was looking to the future. Jeremiah bought a piece of land at ground zero as a symbol of hope in the midst of trial.

Well, today, I find Jeremiah speaking to us once again, because Jeremiah knew what it was like to be restless and yet to stay put. I think he also has something to tell us about what it means to be one of the people of God living in a foreign land, and we could say that America, much as we love it and much as it is our home, is in some ways like a foreign land for Christians. He might help us understand what it means to be the people of God in the land of America.

Today’s passage from Jeremiah comes much later in the story. About 597 BC, (which is a good, long time ago), what Jeremiah the prophet had been warning about happens. Jerusalem is overrun by the Babylonians. The city is plundered. The king and rulers and all of the skilled people in the nation are carted off to Babylon as exiles. The people who are left are defenseless and weak. The economy is in ruins. Unemployment has skyrocketed. CNN has begun special news reports titled “Jerusalem Under Attack.” The stock market has crashed and pork belly futures are looking mighty dim. But I guess in a Jewish land pork belly futures are always looking mighty dim, aren’t they? It’s not a pretty scene.

But even in the midst of all of this tragedy, some of the people, including the religious leaders, are starting to crow about the fact that they hadn’t been carried off to Babylon, so that must mean that they weren’t as bad as the ones who had been. Maybe God had some sort of special protection for them!

Other folks were talking about getting up an army to go and take on the Babylonians and bring their people back, which is a little like Luxembourg deciding to declare war on the United States. It’s not very realistic. So Jeremiah must be shaking his head and thinking, “What have I got to do to get through to these people? Wake up and smell the falafel, Jerusalem! You have not been faithful to God and you are still not able to understand what is happening. There is no special protection. There is no divine favor for Jerusalem. The Babylonians have come.” And Jeremiah knows that they will come again and this time there will be nothing left of the great city.

Then Jeremiah does an interesting thing. He writes a letter to the exiles, to the people who have been carried off to Babylon. And what do you think he tells them? Does he tell them to start forming a Resistance Underground movement to overthrow the Babylonians? Does he tell them to grin and bear the punishment they are receiving but to separate themselves from the Babylonians so that the Jews are always seen in opposition to the government? Does he send them a cake with a file in it and say, “Good luck!”? No, what Jeremiah tells them is to pray for the Babylonians.

Actually what he tells them is this: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. (This is because you are going to be in Babylon for quite awhile. This is not a short-term stint. In fact, the exiles stayed in Babylon for seventy years.) 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. (That language should be familiar. That’s just what God told Adam and Eve to do at the beginning of creation—be fruitful and multiply. It’s just what the Hebrew slaves did in Egypt – they were fruitful and multiplied. Even though they were no longer connected to the land that was also a part of that original promise, they were still to multiply.)

Here’s the most interesting part: 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. The God of Israel, who had chosen this people out of all the nations of the earth, who had guided them as they carved out a place for themselves in the land of Canaan, who had warned them about the influence of foreign gods and foreign leaders, who had set them apart—this God is now commanding the people to pray for their enemy, to pray for their persecutors, to pray for the very people who had taken away everything they had ever loved. And why? “Because in its welfare you will find your welfare.” They were still to be separate peoples. They were still to maintain their identity and to do the things that were appropriate to the people of God. But they were to recognize that they were now connected to the nation in which they found themselves. They were to pray for the good things about Babylon that could help them be faithful to God.

You know, there have always been groups within the Christian tradition that have felt that the most faithful way to follow Jesus is to separate themselves from the world. These groups develop their own societies that strive for a kind of purity. The Anabaptists of the Reformation period rejected all civil authority and refused to participate in public service of any kind. Part of that was a refusal to take up arms on behalf of the state. Menonnites and the Amish are direct descendents of this branch of the Reformation.

There is something very attractive about this. With all the biblical warnings about being tempted by the world and of the dangers of loving the world too much, it is easy to see why Christians have tried to keep their distance. Knowing how easily we can be seduced and deluded…knowing how many times Christians have compromised their allegiance to Christ by falling under the spell of the latest political theory or an intricate philosophical construct or materialism or something else…knowing all this, it seems right, doesn’t it?, that we should be separate from the world.

Our ultimate allegiance does not belong to America but to Jesus Christ. It is our worship of the God of Jesus Christ that tells us who we are and how we are to live. But it is because of this…because we love God and because we follow Jesus that we do care about this land. It’s because of our journey to the land that is yet to come that we care enough to stay put. As Jeremiah reminds us—we are to pray for this land of America and that is what we do each week. We pray for its leaders and its military, because they are our leaders and our military. We pray for the welfare of this land and we pray that our witness to the love of Christ may build it up and not tear it down. We pray for America, not only because we’re Americans, not even primarily because we’re Americans. We pray for America because we are the people of God, and as wanderers in this weary land, we are always seeking the good and pointing the way to the source of that good. We are always pointing the way to God.

I got to spend some time this week with Pete over at Terry Brothers in Willis Wharf. Pete and Tom have donated a lot of seed clams for the beds that the youth are planting as their new fund-raising project. But what you discover if you talk to Pete for any length of time is that he really cares about what he does and about this place. He talks very passionately about water quality and aquaculture and economic development and oysters. I learned more about oysters in an hour with him than I have in my whole life. Did you know that they can change genders in their life cycle? Fascinating.

But Pete also cares about passing along the knowledge and heritage of the Shore. He talked about how important it is that young people learn the ways of the water and how to be stewards of it. It’s obvious he loves this place, but not for its own sake. He also wants to pass it along.

That is what it means to be restless and to stay put. To know that we are all transient, even if we live our whole lives between Kiptopeke and Kegotank, and yet to love this world for God’s sake. To be responsible for its care, to be fruitful and to multiply, and to spread the knowledge of God’s holiness throughout. We may be passing through but God has given us work to do as we pass through. It may all come to an end tomorrow. The kingdom may come. Christ may return. But what shall we offer him as people who have been entrusted with the care of others and of the land?

Sometimes the most radical thing we can do as Christians is not to go around the world, but to simply stay put, giving our lives to the place where we are because God is here. We say that. But do we believe that in this place we will find the one who is closer to us than we are to ourselves? And will we help this world around us, that we so wrongly call God-forsaken…will we help the world understand that the word became flesh and dwelt among us? And the promise is that he is still with us to the end of the age. Thanks be to God.

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7 (NRSV)
These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon…Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:

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.

[i] Fr Dwight Longenecker, “The Benedictine Way -1”, Standing on My Head, June 2007, http://gkupsidedown.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html