The Long View

by Guest Sandi Mull

Our reading is from Jeremiah 29 verses 1 and 2 and 10 through 14.

These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles and the priest, the prophets, and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. This was after King Draconia and the Queen Mother, the eunuchs, the officials of Judah and Jerusalem, the craftsmen, and the metal workers had departed from Jerusalem. For thus says the Lord, when 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will visit, I will visit my promise, I will fulfill my promise and bring you back to this place.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans for welfare and not for evil to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you.

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortune and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from whom, from which I sent you into exile.

May God add his blessing as we seek to understand his word.

Taking the long view, sometimes that's hard in an impatient culture, and I think probably most of you realize we live in an impatient culture. It's easy to be bewildered, distracted by our phones and other things, and questioning some of the complex issues that we have. This might be something in our work or our retirement or wondering if we have enough to meet expenses, especially if we're working without a paycheck or we're not getting some benefits that we were promised.

This makes it difficult. We struggle.

We struggle as parents. We struggle as single people. We struggle some as wanting to be parents or we struggle as grandparents, as young, old, and we want to fit in. We want to make a contribution, but then we wonder do we have the time or the financial means to do so.

Several people suggested that today you could only get a response from people, a response that brings action, when you give them an enemy, and that's really sad. We need encouragement. We need light for the journey, and so did the people that Jeremiah wrote to.

Sometimes we may think that the people that lived at the time that scripture was written, the writers or the people, were living in calmer times, and it may have looked calmer to us. We didn't have the technology and some of those things, but it was usually in a chaotic time that was difficult for people and for the leaders. The prophets had difficulties also.

They were not the educated clergy. The clergy very likely looked down upon them, and they didn't give a message to the people that some of them liked. Prophets, I think, were probably the people that had a gift for seeing the long view, but then they were given wisdom and the spirit of God to also help them, but one of the things is when prophets were called, often the first thing they did was run.

You know, some of you may know the story of Jonah. Well, that's a picture of running from God, and other prophets did the same thing in different ways because it wasn't really that great being a prophet. You might get killed. You might have to run for your life. You might have your life threatened. You might have much more difficulty than if you turn down God's call to be a prophet.

The prophets were not speaking their own message. They were speaking a message that God had given them, but sometimes the people didn't want to hear it, and we find that today. Sometimes we just don't want to hear what someone has to say that may actually help us.

Taking the long view is hard. When we deal with situations that seem to have constant emergencies or crisis in them, and there's always this thing, I have this that I'm supposed to do, and then we don't get any of it done because of the emergency and the crisis.

Parents face this. Youth do, and often people that work with youth see situations and behaviors, talents in the lives of the youth, and they may also have this gift of taking the long view. They sort of envision, not the specifics, but some of what may occur in the life of that child because of what is going on right now. It may be something going on in the family. It may be their behavior. It may be a lot of different things, and they see this, and they sometimes are disturbed by it, and we are sometimes disturbed by many of the things in our life.

One of the things on social media, we have contact with people, but we may not have that much of an in-person relationship, and in some of what I read, it tells us that that kind of contact without fellowship, without getting together, it's much easier to make that other person a monster or imagine that they hate you or you hate them or whatever, and this is some of what happens in some of the wild stuff that happens on social media.

The prophets proclaimed a message, but sometimes it wasn't something that people wanted, and their response often made it difficult for the prophet. Taking the long view, we can look not just at ourselves, but at the people of Jeremiah's time. Think of what it was like to be a person, a leader in the city or in Judah or a clergy person, a worker, at least somewhat educated person, and be sent to a city far away.

At that time, there was a concept among people that if you were 50 miles, and I'm sure they didn't do it in miles, from where the center of your worship was, then God may not be with you. You may not be able to contact your God, and so I think here again, God is trying to establish, I'm still with you, even in Babylon, and I think sometimes we feel like if we're someplace that maybe God isn't with me, and yet God is still there, and then if you were one of the people left behind, think about it. All the leaders, all the workers, all the people trained in crafts and things that made society run had left, had been taken away, and who was left? The poor people, the invisible, the uneducated, and they were left to more or less fend for themselves for the next 70 years.

Jeremiah said, though, that I bring home an encouragement in verse 11 that some of you may have seen on somebody's Facebook page, often given to people when they're going through stress, for I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. It's not an individual plan as sometimes we take it to be. It was for the Israelites, the Hebrew people, and I think God has a plan for us as a congregation, as a community of faith, as people of faith.

It's not just for us individually, but it's for us as a community, and then he says in verse 4 and 5, before what I read, he says, you're going to Babylon, plant gardens, build homes, marry and have kids, do what works and what is best for the city, don't get into the poor me, I've been shipped off to Babylon, make it work, live your life, and have some joy in the process, even though you want to come back to Jerusalem.

Jesus then came and the disciples had this idea that Jesus, the Messiah, was coming to bring in a military victory to free them from the empire, which at that time would have been the Roman Empire, but it could be any empire, that God was operating with armies, power, dominion, might, and you know, I think part of the reason people at that time had trouble with accepting Jesus as Messiah was their expectations, and how often does that happen to us? We have certain expectations of someone or a leader, and they're not really trying to fool us, but they're just not who we've decided they should be or might be, and so we are trying to put on them something that they are not, and this is what was happening with the disciples, but Jesus didn't just tell them, my kingdom is not of this world, I'm not in that world system of dominion and power. He demonstrated it with his life while he was teaching.

You may remember the story of the children coming to him and the disciples trying to shoo them away, and he said, no, let the children come. Well, at that time, children were some of the invisible people. They were the people that you don't let kids come and sit on the knee of a teacher.

You just don't do that, and yet Jesus, we don't know if anyone sat on his knee, we see pictures of that, but Jesus said, let them come unto me, and then also he said, when you do it to the least of these, you've done it to me, and this isn't the way of the systems of this world. This is the way of a kingdom that is different, and Jesus continually demonstrated that. He washed the disciples' feet.

He died showing love for us and for all people, and now we are commissioned with this same thing. How do we demonstrate the kingdom, the kingdom that is not of this world, in life today? We have the food pantry. That would be one option, but not everybody can work at the food pantry.

There are other things, just recognizing people that you meet that may not be greeted by other people. That's something, and just caring for people in whatever way without other people knowing that, and sometimes doing those things might make life more difficult, but Jesus didn't say a life of faith was easy. He invited us to live it in his presence, and how we face the things in the culture make a difference. I thought about some ways in which people do this.

I have a friend that does this by, she has a TV thing where she can just choose certain programs. She has a limit of the number, and she doesn't have any news programs. She doesn't have any sports or anything that might challenge her thinking or upset her in any way, and she said, I'm just happier that way, and what I don't know, that's okay, and maybe that is okay for her, and then a pastor I read about, he was feeling discouraged, and he wanted to, I don't know whether he's on vacation or what, but he was in another city, and he decided he wanted to go to a church like one that he went to in his youth that seemed very high energy and very enthusiastic, and he said, I went in, and the enthusiasm was such that it could have lit the power grid in the city, and he said, but then I was sad.

I was sad because people weren't real. It seemed to all be an act. It was like I was going to a show, not to a worship.

He said, I realized there was no room for weakness, fear, no room for questions or differences of opinion for anything that didn't fit into that enthusiastic high that they had with smoke machines and, I don't know, all kinds of technology, and so he said, I went away sad, and then as I left, I sort of sat there, and he said, I wondered if anyone would speak to me, and he had had one person come up to him during the service to welcome him, but then when he started to talk to her, by then, she was turned around and going a different direction, so he felt like, well, she did her duty now. That's all she has to do, and so he sat there, see, and said no one talked to me.

No one spoke to him, and he said it was like leaving a theater or a show because, and he said, sometimes they speak to you more than I was spoken to in that church, and so that actually made him more depressed than he'd been before, and then there was a lady that I read sometimes, and I think her point is she knows people are reading a lot of things, and they get hyped up, and her point is to try to bring people back down to reality.

Well, in this one, she said she felt like she was being led to a prayer. It was a prayer to increase her bewilderment, to increase praying, to increase your bewilderment. Now, she felt the same thing I would feel about that. I'd like for God to take care of my bewilderment, but I don't necessarily want to pray for more bewilderment.

But what she said is that as she reflected on that thought, she realized that bewilderment meant she didn't have the answers, and therefore, it helped her understand that in situations in life, her answers might or might not be the right ones. There was room for people with different thoughts, and that we don't have certainty. You know, we don't have certainty that what we say or what we think is right, is always correct, and so she said it helped her understand others and also helped her understand herself, even though she wasn't real crazy about the idea of more bewilderment.

And finally, there is the promise of hope, not just to the people of Jeremiah's time, but also to the people to us today, but there's good news and bad news, and that's often the case.

The good news is that God wants to give us hope to inspire us, to take care of us, but the bad news is that it probably won't all get fixed tomorrow. I don't think we need to take the 70 years seriously for our situations, but I think it's us saying, hey, these things take time. It has to work itself out in time, and so I don't know what Jeremiah would say to us today, but I think when things are too heavy, we need to find somebody to share with.

We need to share it with God. God can handle our anger or fear or whatever, and if we have some trusted mentors, they can help, and I gave some possibilities, but those are only possibilities, not prescriptions. One thing I can be sure of that we shouldn't do is what was done at the high energy church that the pastor said he went to. We shouldn't leave no room for weakness, grief, being real, questions, differences of opinion, and those things.

We all, as a part of the human experience, have questions that we need to struggle with and things we need to struggle with, and usually there's not instant answers or solutions. I'd like for us to come in a prayerful way and pray that God will lead us to find solutions, but also to find ways to have that relationship and that fellowship that gives us hope and grace, and recommit ourselves to following Jesus.