Jeremiah 29: 1-11

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. This was after King Jeconiah and the queen mother, the court officials, the leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the artisans, and the smiths had departed from Jerusalem. The letter was sent by the hand of Elasah son of Shaphan and Gemariah son of Hilkiah, whom King Zedekiah of Judah sent to Babylon to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. It said: 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. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to your dreams that you dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the Lord.

For thus says the Lord: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.

Sermon Text

Jeremiah 29:11is probably one of the most quoted scriptures in American Christianity. The promise of God’s foreknowledge in our lives is comforting. That the plans God lays out ahead of us are good, all the better. It is on walls of churches and house decorations and many a twitter bio… The problem is that it is not a very good verse to style your life around.

If you look at it, it’s a specific verse for a specific people. God is not making a sweeping statement about plans for everyone’s life, though I am sure God has them. It is a promise to God’s people in exile, to trust that while things are currently bad for them, keeping to the counterintuitive instructions God has given them will be for their own good. The promise of the “plans,” being good is given not as a vague allusion to God having influence over their lives, but as a specific message about something God has already told them to do.

While I do not disagree with people’s desires to use this verse to reassure themselves that God cares about their wellbeing, I also believe that we do ourselves a disservice in ignoring what specific plans God is laying out for the people. As we have seen on other Sundays, Jeremiah is a book that consists largely of horrible news for the people of God – that this section takes such a sharp turn toward something positive should tell us that every word of it matters. We cannot just take Jeremiah 29:11, or any part of scripture, out of its fuller context and expect to really understand what it is telling us. Most of us, I have to say, have been skipping the best part of this chapter.

As a reminder of our Biblical History, the book of Jeremiah takes place during the Babylonian Conquest. Israel existed as a sovereign nation for a relatively short time during the reigns of King Saul, and then David and Solomon. After Solomon’s death, the country split in half between the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Israel would later fall to the Assyrian Empire, with Judah becoming a vassal-state. In time, Assyria would fall to the Neo-Babylonian empire, who would take over all their land.

The Babylonians first made a vassal-state of Judah, then destroyed it entirely after a failed coup. Jeremiah 29 captures the moment after the initial conquest and deportation of many Judahites to Babylon, but before the complete destruction of Jerusalem and the larger second deportation. Jeremiah has two goals – firstly to reassure the now scattered people of God that God is still caring for them, and secondly to chastise the leaders of the people and their prophets. The latter part of the chapter captures the prophecies against the kings and false prophets and spells out the destruction of the city and the removal of its people. The first section, however, the one we are talking about today, lays out something of how God works within a broken world.

The deportees in Babylon are living in a mixture of situations. Some, those who are literate or artisans, have been placed into jobs within the imperial machine. Those who make specific goods are now making them for Babylon, those who recorded legal matters are now doing it for the empire. These folks are not “free,” but they are granted certain benefits that come from their skills. They are being used by empire and have been inserted into the existing middle and ruling classes as the empire sees fit. Poorer folk were sent in as slaves and field workers, feeding the empire with their labor. Both faced troubles, both were uprooted from their home and their religious life, their unique circumstances only changed the severity and flavor of their torment.

To these people, Jeremiah writes the words we have plastered all over our lives. The plan of God to redeem them after their time in Babylon comes with specific instructions for how to live in the meantime. The instructions are revolutionary, they change the way God’s people are to live forever, and yet they are something that, within a few generations, God’s people would throw away for their own purposes.

God gives them the instruction to marry and give in marriage. The people are to put down roots! More than this, the implication comes that they are to marry into the people of Babylon.

At different stages in its history, Judah had different concepts of how intermarriage between ethnic groups could be done, but here we see a full endorsement of it. God also asks that the people support the cities that they have found themselves in, to labor for the good of their neighbors, for doing so will ultimately help them as well.

For we today, as American Christians, we do not suffer from displacement. Many people in this world do, and for them these teachings are immediately relevant. However, as citizens of Heaven who sojourn on the earth, as we all hope to be, then we must see a parallel. We are not called as Christians to distance ourselves from other people, to see them as something apart from ourselves. While I do think Christianity makes unique demands upon our lives, those demands are open to all people. Racial divides, for example, have no place in the Church. Despite our long history of segregation and our contribution to anti-miscegenation and integration throughout history, the Church is meant to be a place where all people become part of the same family.

Likewise, we are not truly citizens of this world, and yet we are meant to contribute to the good of the place where we live. I think Jeremiah is intentional in saying the people are to support the “city,” in which they live and not Babylon as a larger entity. The delicate support of upholding the laws and welfare of the place you live, while not absorbing the evils practiced within, is a tale as old as time within the Church. Christians lived, worked, and paid taxes to Rome while Rome was hunting and killing them. Today, our culture commits many evils, targets many vulnerable people, and often times with the sanction of those in power. We can support Keyser, West Virginia, even the United States, without blindly aligning ourselves to any evil which society perpetrates through them.

The biblical ethic of seeing all people as our “neighbor,” demands that we do some literal work for our literal neighbors. We are commanded to care for each other, because our mutual welfare is part of God’s plan.

We cannot despise the people around us and expect that any good will come of that. So many cities, towns, even smaller communities like churches, become lost in a deep sense of distrust with each other. We lose sight of the idea that we are meant to love one another, because it is far easier to fear each other. Everyone is seen as a potential threat, an obstacle to be overcome, and not as fellow human beings walking this earth together.

God does indeed have plans to prosper people, but that plan includes the simple act of working together for the general welfare. Today in our hyper partisan world, that is hard to imagine being possible. We have people who legitimately hate each other. Every problem is sourced to people groups – the republicans, the democrats, immigrants, trans people, gay people – anyone really, as long as the label can stick to an accusation. It is harder than ever to live a full life – costs are up, companies are getting record profits, jobs are down as AI and automation replaces humans – in a world where more and more people are suffering, more and more will be looking for people to blame.

There is blame of course. Tools of industry, businesses founded on stochastic incitement, and rampant consumption are just a few sources of our troubles. Nation uses each trouble against nation, and none have clean hands in the fight. However, the most powerful thing we can do to counter these forces, those who benefit from division and who want us to distrust one another, is to do the radical thing that sits in front of us at all times. Embrace God’s plan, see those around you as a neighbor, and live accordingly. That sort of plan, that can truly be for our good. – Amen.