"Home Is Where the Heart Is"
by Janice M. Tiedeck,
Assoc. Pastor
Scripture Reading: Jeremiah
29: 1-14
Preached
at Beckley Presbyterian Church on October 14, 2007
Jeremiah is my buddy. I think the book of Jeremiah is one of the most hopeful books in the Bible.
That may sound strange in light of our scripture reading today, but I believe the story Jeremiah tells us is so much
bigger. It journeys with the people into the exile…where God is right there
saying, we are in this together. God is showing the people what the exile will
be like and encourages them to make it home. For if, their hearts are there it
is home, for God is with them.
As we begin this journey, we need to understand
the viewpoint of those going into exile. This guy Jeremiah who was not very well
liked was a pest. He had this history of saying all of these extreme things and
walking around in a loincloth, and well we will just say the town did not like him very much.
Now this guy who was socially unaccepted was telling his entire community that they needed to leave their homes and
leave everything they have ever known and that they would be settling down in the land of their enemies.
Imagine it, if I were to stand
here and tell you that we would all be packing up everything that we own, and traveling to another country, some place like
Iraq, or Afghanistan. Moreover, that we would be there
for a full generation. I do not think very many of you would like me very much
either if I said that to you. Think about everything you would be giving up,
you would be giving up everything but your families.
Jeremiah was not very well liked. He was prophesying in a time of great confusion. It was a time in which everyone was scared and so uncertain
about what was going on around them and what the future was going to hold. Then
this crazy guy who is usually laughed at tells you, that you are to leave your homes and go to the land of your enemies and
that you are to settle there, build your families and participate in the economy. This
would go against everything in their very fibers. They would be leaving their
temple, their place of worship, the centrality of their existence, and this is what God was telling them to do.
Wow, how does that make any sense? I mean, you are there in your homeland, and everything seems right and yet God, is
telling you to leave and to do everything differently than what you thought was being asked of you before this point. Sometimes it seems like we can never do the right thing. However, when we get to that point, we need to ask ourselves if we are truly trying to change or if we
just keep doing things the way we want to do them and not the way God is leading us.
Working through this text it became
very real to me that God really did want the best for his people. God was not trying to take away the livelihoods of the people
of Judah; instead, he was trying to give them a new life.
A new life, what does that look like? As Jeremiah said to his neighbors, a new life looks like a life given to God. A life with hope and a future, and a heart geared towards God. That is what God wants from us; God wants us to love God. God
wants what is best for us. However, so often we put what we think is best for
us before we even ask God what he thinks.
Jeremiah is in such a tough place. He has been living alongside these people his whole life and now he is trying to deliver
this message of hope, and no one wants to hear it. How heart breaking, it must
be what God experiences all the time. God wants the best for us, and we do not
want to hear it, we have our own ideas, and we put them before God.
I want to switch keys a little here; I want
us to hear this word of hope today. In order to do that, we need to understand
what a period of exile would look like today, in our own contexts.
Try to imagine if you will, a time of exile
in your own life. Now, what do I mean when I say in exile? I am talking about a time in your life when you felt like you were not in your homeland, in this case it
could mean a time when you moved, when you went away to school, when you got married, when you had kids, when everyone else
seemed to move away. Being in exile literally means being away from your native
land, but I would like to encourage us to think about our native land as our norm, as what we hold to be our own standard
for what we consider our own, our own time, our own place, our own idea.
I give you an example of what
I mean by our own personal exile of which I think Jeremiah refers too indirectly. The
character Eliza Doolittle from the movie/musical My Fair Lady, was a very poor flower girl, who made a living for herself
on the streets of London selling small bunches of flowers to the well to do, she
has a ghastly accent and rash demeanor. Then she encounters Professor Henry Higgins,
a master of languages, dialects, and phonetics, who brashly says that with a change of her dialect she could become a lady. She realizes that that is what she wants (at least what she thinks she wants) to be
a lady, so she goes to Professor Higgins and he works with her to get her phonetics down right, through a process of rain
instead of ryne, and Spain instead of spyine, eat instead of aight, and then one day, she gets it. It clicks, she begins to speak eloquently and carry herself as a true lady.
She is taken to a ball and deemed royalty, and instead of treating her with respect, the Professor takes all the credit
and does not treat her like a person.
She pulls herself together and then she
is torn between the person she is now and the person she was before. She is no
longer the flower girl from the street, she is now a lady, and she has been surrounded by the nicest things. It is at this point that I would place her in an exilic state. She
is no longer on home turf; she is in a sense in a foreign land even though she has not gone anywhere. Now she is not accepted by her former friends and family, and she does not find acceptance in this world
of class either. In a sense, she is on her own.
As I think through this idea, I see God
so clearly working in her life, but I also have the advantage of knowing how the story ends.
She and the professor eventually realize that they need the other and they both mature and grow in ways that they are
right for the other. Without even knowing they are changing, instead they feel
the loneliness and solitude of their own exile. When in reality they are growing
closer to the other and closer to what I would say for this purpose, closer to being the people that God has called them to
be.
Ok I want you to think of a time when you
were in exile. Whether truly in a foreign land, or in a situation that might
of well have been foreign. Think about the moment when you first felt the pains
of exile. Whether you were alone, or scared, or you just woke up one day and
asked yourself how in the world did I get here? Think about all the emotions
that were going through you. Think about your relationship with God during this
experience. Were you close, or very distant?
Did you wonder where God was? Or why he was not responding in the
way, you would have liked. It so often happens that when we turn our backs on
God, we blame God for turning his back on us. When in reality God is standing
there trying to get us to turn around the whole time.
I believe Jeremiah was delivering that message
for us from God. All through the Babylonian wars the people had been calling
on God to make everything better, but they were not doing anything differently themselves.
And sometimes for our best good God needs to do something dramatic to get our attention. I am sure the parents out there could testify to that idea that sometimes you need to lean on the extremes
to get your child’s attention so that they can see the harm in what they were doing.
That is what God was doing through the exile, and that is what God continues to do in our lives now.
The exile was meant to help and further
the people of God, it was not meant to harm them. In fact, it was meant to bring
them into a closer relationship with God, and it could serve the purpose of bringing them into relationship with their new
neighbors, those they had been at war with, for reasons they might not even remember.
God was giving both groups a fresh start, a chance to reconcile and to be at peace when all they knew before was war. God provided an opportunity for them to experience the community that comes from a
truly God-centered community, and that is why the people must devote their lives more fully to God. By simply following the path that God had placed before them, they were living a more Godly life, they
were leaning on God, and trusting that God would make things right, and they were also putting aside their differences in
order to live in community with one another.
This is what God wants from us; God wants
us to love God and to love one another. God wants us to be happy, God wants us
to have hope and a future, God wants us to experience the richness of life, but sometimes we need to travel through the exile
to get there.
It should be our joy to hear Jeremiah’s
message of exile, not as a message of doom and gloom but instead one that offers hope.
Instead of being imprisoned or slaughtered by their enemies, they were encouraged to live happily among them, and to
make them a part of their family and their neighborhoods. What a message of reconciliation
and good will, what would normally be a no win situation becomes a community built on a foundation of prayer and hope.
God has nothing but their best interests
and ours in mind when he sends us down certain paths. It is our task to trust
God all along the way. And that through that trust we can see that, where our
heart is there is our home. That no matter what situation we are in, or where
we are, God is with us, providing for our happiness. So I leave you with this,
the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “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. Then when you call upon me,
come, and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find
me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord.”
Rev. Janice M.
Tiedeck
