Making a New Home in Exile

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Scripture: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

You don’t have to be here this morning. You could be sleeping in on what might be a precious day off from your job. You could be sipping coffee and reading a book. You could be catching up on laundry or cleaning up the yard. You could be out at brunch with friends.

But you’re not. You’re here. And don’t get me wrong, I am so glad you’re here. But I do wonder: What makes you come to St. Luke’s on Sunday mornings?

It used to be that going to church is what “good” people were “supposed” to do. If you weren’t a churchgoer, people whispered to one another about your character. If you were a politician running for office, going to church, being seen at a church, was essential to getting votes. Tithing to the church was just part of the social contract, like paying taxes.

Now this is obviously a generalization. I know many people, many of you, who have attended church for decades because your faith is deeply important to you.

But there is something to be said about what has often been called “the great dechurching,” the exodus of nearly 40 million Americans from church over the past 25 years. Every denomination from conservative evangelicals to the progressive United Church of Christ has been impacted.

I don’t think that exodus was necessarily that people stopped believing. Honestly, I think a lot of it was about people not feeling very strongly tied to believing in the first place. As the world has changed over the past 25, 30 years, the social expectation to go to church has faded.

I’m going to be honest with you: I think this is a good thing. Because I don’t want to look out while I’m leading worship and see people glancing down at their phones to check football scores. I don’t want to see empty faces checked out, waiting for the final benediction so that they can get back to whatever they actually want to be doing.

What I want for St. Luke’s is a community of people who want to be here, who are excited to be here.

So that brings me to my original question: What makes you come to St. Luke’s on Sunday mornings? And maybe also to yard days on Saturdays and Bible Reflections on Tuesdays?

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Since August, the lectionary has been moving us through the book of Jeremiah, and I keep coming back to it in my preaching because it feels so relevant, so timely right now.

You already know the broad strokes: Jeremiah has been warning the people of Judea and Jerusalem that the Babylonians will soon overpower them, that many of them will be torn away from their homes and exiled to Babylon. It’s not prophecy that the king or anyone else wants to hear, but by the time of the scripture we hear today, that prophecy has come true. Jerusalem has been destroyed, and many Judeans have been forcibly moved to Babylonia, the city of the people who destroyed it.

At Bible Reflection on Tuesday, Jeremiah dominated our discussion, particularly the question: what does it mean to be in exile?

The answer I heard in different ways around that table was this: Exile is the experience of being torn away from what you thought your life would be. The Judeans thought that their city of Jerusalem, ordained as sacred by God, would always be their home.

Maybe you thought that your spouse would always be your home, until they were suddenly taken away from you, maybe by death, maybe by divorce. Maybe you’d been raised in a church that felt like home for so long…until they told you that your sexuality or gender, or the sexuality or gender of your child, was sinful. Maybe you lost a job you loved or the health you thought you’d always have or, most crushingly, a child.

These are all forms of exile, all ways that you were torn away from what you thought your life would be, what you thought home was.

From what I could tell from the Bible Reflection discussion, from what I can tell from so many of my individual conversations with you, it’s exile that brought so many of us to St. Luke’s—looking for meaning when the events of our lives seemed meaningless, looking for comfort when we no longer had the home we thought we had, looking for belonging when it was torn away from us in some way.

Now I’ve been reading a book that many of you have already read thanks to a gathering about trauma that Shauna Signorini has offered to our community a few times. The book is called What Happened to You? And the other night I read this line: “Connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.”

Which I think gets me back to my original question: What makes you come to St. Luke’s on Sunday mornings?

And I think the answer is: Connectedness, or in our faith what we understand to be the Body of Christ, has the power to counterbalance adversity.

It is my belief as a Christian who prioritizes Jesus’ teaching to love my neighbor, to proclaim good news to the poor, to invite the stranger in, that we are in a way now living in exile in our own country, where neighbors are attacked for their different political views, where healthcare and food subsidies are being taken away from the poor, and where strangers are being kidnapped off the streets and sent to faraway and often appalling detention facilities.

It feels so heavy, so enormous. I know I’m not alone in this feeling of exile.

Today’s reading is a letter from Jeremiah to the exiled Judeans. Actually, it’s a response to another so-called prophet, Hananiah, who has been telling the exiles that they would be home in no time. Two years, tops.

I am positive that is exactly what the exiles wanted to hear. They would go home soon. Things would get back to normal soon. This is just a bump in the road.

No, Jeremiah says. You have been forced off the familiar road and down a path you didn’t even know existed. Life as you know it has changed. I know it’s not what you want. I know it’s scary.

But do you know what God is calling you to do in exile?

Build houses in Babylon 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.

Now we could take this literally, and the exiled Judeans needed to in order to survive, but to plant gardens and to build families even in scary, uncertain times of exile is to embody hope. Not just with your thoughts and prayers, but with your actions, with your lives.

And then Jeremiah tells them something else: 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 need you to understand that this is an ENORMOUS paradigm shift for the Judeans. Whenever anyone referred to “the city” it always meant Jerusalem, the sacred place where God lived in the temple, the heartbeat of their faith, of their people.

But now God was telling them to pray for Babylonia, to seek its welfare. I am no longer confined to one place, one home, God is telling them. In exile, you are called to invest in the place where you find yourself, to build a new idea of home.

I believe, and in many cases I know, that this is the reason so many of you are at St. Luke’s. Exile sent you here, and now you are building a new idea of home. A home where you belong in all your difference and quirks, in all your gifts and limitations. A home where you’re expected to let yourself receive as much as you give. A home where no is always as good an answer as yes.

This is the month we make a commitment to this church home, we pledge our resources to this church home, we invest in this church home. To plant seeds of hope, and to look around and see the promise of family all around us.

You don’t have to be here. But here you are, thank God. Maybe building a new idea of home in the midst of exile. I know that’s what I’ve been doing ever since I came back to Christianity.

So I am asking you on behalf of this St. Luke’s family: Will you seek the welfare of the community where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf?

Amen.