Jeremiah 29: 1, 4-7 - Jeremiah’s Letter to
the Exiles in Babylon
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.
Psalm 137 - Lament over the
Destruction of Jerusalem
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat
down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth,
saying,
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How could we sing the Lord’s song in
a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand
wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you,
if
I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.
Remember, O Lord, against the
Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear
it down!
Down to its foundations!’
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy
shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little
ones and dash them against the rock!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
How Do We
Find Happiness? Don’t Be Afraid to Be Bummed, By The Rev. Connie Frierson
We
continue on with our sermon series on “How Do We Find Happiness.” One of the things that really inspired
this sermon series was an article in Psychology Today entitled, What Do Happy
People Do Differently. As Graham
and I read this article we were struck by how much of this research sounded
like spiritual wisdom. So much of this happiness seeking business is
counterintuitive. So many of these insights reveal a biblically based paradox.
So many of the things we think will make us happy do not. Perhaps the core paradox is that the
more you seek happiness the less happiness you find. The more frantic, the more
frenzied, the more demanding, the more insistent that you must be happy, the
more you will experience unhappiness. Happy people know one very important
thing. There is a time for everything. So if we paraphrased Ecclesiastes
chapter three, “There is a time for every feeling under heaven.” So don’t be
afraid to be bummed.
This
whole sermon reminds me of dog stories, perhaps because dogs bring me so much
happiness and so much grief. But
this crazy paradox about happiness reminds me of my dog, Anna. Anna was a Hungarian Kuvasz. She was 115 pounds of determination and
muscle and white fur. The Kuvasz is a livestock protection breed. Bred to work
independently on a hilltop herding and protecting without a shepherd. So they
use their own judgment and take human direction as a mere suggestion. They
can’t be bribed by food or affection or play. They are single-minded dogs on a
mission. So Kuvasz management can be elusive, kind of like happiness. I worked
and worked with this dog. We went
to puppy school five times. I
don’t mean five sessions. I mean five sets of nine sessions each of
classes. We socialized Anna as
much as we could. And much of that
training worked. Anna was wonderful with children and people and other dogs.
She behaved well on a leash. She was house trained in about two weeks. But the
one huge failure was that we could not get Anna to come reliably to the recall. If Anna was off leash in our fields,
God only knows if she would come when called. I would become frustrated and I would chase and chase
her. Do you know how fast a Kuvasz
can run? I do. I tried everything including rubbing
myself with bacon grease. But the only way I could get Anna to come to me was
to run the other way. The more I chased Anna the farther away she would go.
Actually I wasn’t chasing her as much as I was pushing her. Once I realized this I started running
the other way. Then she would come to me.
If there was an emergency and I needed her to come immediately. I would
run frantically away and fall over dead.
This would get Anna to my side immediately. This is the way of
happiness. Happiness is like a Kuvasz, as long as we chase, push, demand, yell,
lure, and the farther away goes happiness. The more we stop chasing and turn our lives to the deeper
stuff of life, and then we can be surprised by joy.
One
of the ways we push happiness away is when we run from unhappiness. Happy people feel and acknowledge every
emotion. Happy people don’t run, they don’t hide, and they don’t deny negative
emotions. Dealing with our
negative emotions, of sadness, disappointment, grief and anger are important
pieces to this happiness puzzle. Happy people don’t practice denial. They
practice acceptance and through acceptance of whatever emotions come, happy
people experience transformation. Perhaps this is a law of spiritual
alchemy. If we allow the crucible
of hard, hot and sad emotions then we can become flexible and strong enough to
openly receive the joy and peace of God.
We
see this emotional flexibility displayed in two pieces of scripture that deal
with the very same event. Both
Jeremiah 29 and Psalm 137 deal with the heartbreak of the Babylonian exile. In
these two scriptures we will see some ways not to chase happiness but to
experience happiness when it comes our way and to experience every other
emotion also when other emotions come our way. The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah sends a letter to
the homesick and heartsick Jewish exiles in Babylon. The northern kingdom of
Israel had disappeared at the hands of the Assyrians 200 years earlier, and now
Babylon has successfully subjugated the smaller kingdom of Judea. Many of
Jerusalem's best and brightest have been carried off to Babylon, where the new
Jewish population isn't quite sure what to do. Should they fight? Should they
die? Should they sow insurrection? How could they be God’s people in this
place, without a temple, without a country? Prior to this exile the way to be
happy was to worship in the temple, follow the law, be a good citizen of God’s
promised land. All happiness and
righteousness was tied to temple, nation and land. God through Jeremiah tells
the Jews what they should do. Thus
saith the Lord, they should build, plant, marry, pray and seek the welfare of
place they are, this enemy territory, this exile. This advise is so unexpected,
so radical. Do you mean Lord we
should work and live and love?
So how do we apply this word of the Lord
to us? First we may need to name
the exile. What is your
exile? Were you healthy and now
your ill? Were you young and now your old? Did you have a good job and now your unemployed? Were you
married and now your widowed or divorced? Were your kids successful and now
they struggle? These are
some of the exiled places in our lives. We better call them by name so we know
what to do next. It doesn’t help
to pretend to go to the office when you have been fired. It doesn’t help to refuse medical
treatment when you are sick. Understanding what “is” right now is
important. Unhappy people hide,
pretend, deny and run. They spend lots of time and energy denying the exile.
They deny. They get stuck in a place that is not real and then they can’t take
real steps to move forward into transformation.
Jeremiah
29’s text is good advice. Even if
you are in heartbreak, go build a house for your family. Even if you are
downhearted, give your children in marriage. Go to the wedding. Give a
blessing. Even if you are in a land of enemies, work for their welfare. Don’t
repay evil for evil, but good for evil. There is a lot of just getting on with
life, tough love, in this passage.
But
at the same time the bible has lots to say about naming all the emotions that
we feel, the good ones and the bad ones, and the rotten ones too. The Psalms are full of prayer with no
off limits emotions. Here is a
paraphrase of Psalm 137. This lament isn’t in God’s voice. The speaker is a Jew
of Jerusalem now in exile. Here is
what this person prays in the Holy Scripture “I am weeping by the rivers of
Babylon. I have to hang my harp on the willows here because I will never play
or sing again. My tormentors, my enemies, say, ‘Give us a song of Zion.’ But my
tongue can’t find any words of joy. My tongue is so swollen with suffering and
sadness I can’t speak or sing. I
hate my enemies. I remember them chanting ‘Tear it down; Tear it down when my
home, Jerusalem was ripped apart.
Happy are the people who will pay you back. Happy are the people who can
dash your innocent babies heads against rocks.” WOW, Talk about not knowing what will make us happy! This seems to be an example. It is a
known fact that baby killing produces very little happiness and oodles and
oodles of misery. But how telling that this completely horrible out of control
emotion, the ugliest outcry to despair and hatred is allowed to be expressed,
repeated and reprinted for thousands of years. Does this prove that the God of
love is really advocating infanticide?
Or is this passage telling us that everything, absolutely everything, is
a subject of expression and prayer.
Is God saying that the ugliest parts of us get to be expressed, released
and ultimately transformed?
Lots
of people don’t know what to do with this kind of vehement hatred, this passion
and pain that has broken all the rules of being nice, If the bible was about
denying our feelings, then this passage would have been edited out centuries
ago. But evidently there is one safe place to say the unspeakable and the
undoable, that place is prayer.
A
healthy pattern repeats itself again and again in the Psalms, first a cry of
the heart, then a plea for help and finally a declaration of God’s steadfast
love. This is an emotional flexibility that God is trying to teach us. Feel everything. Don’t deny, run or
hide, but then move on. Don’t get stuck. This is the same lesson to the exiles
in Babylon. Psalm 137 speaks of crying by the rivers of Babylon, hanging up
harps by the willows because the exiles cannot rejoice anymore. But then God
speaks through Jeremiah 29 saying build, plant, marry, pray and seek the
welfare to that foreign place.
We
are in training to be happy. But to be happy requires us to go through each
step, to keep stepping up to God’s call. This both teaches and requires
emotional flexibility. You are in an emotional Triathlon. Feel the emotions you
have. Hear God’s call to your
life. Do what you are called to do, build, plant, marry, pray and seek the
welfare of others. Each of these
things builds happiness, Building leads to satisfaction. Planting leads to the
wonders of nature. Marriage is a
connection of relationships, kinship, family and community. Prayer invites God
into each of these activities. Working for the welfare of the large community
of exile or Babylon lead to inviting God into everything we do in the
world. That final line that the
NRVS translates as welfare is really the more transcendent word; “shalom”
Shalom is completeness, wholeness, harmony, wellness and contentment at the
deepest level. Shalom is happiness
transcended.
Perhaps
I need to give an example of this emotional flexibility that God calls us to.
This is on the small scale but still it will serve. So listen to this story for feeling all the emotions we feel
and yet still doing what we are called to do in life. Finally look for God’s blessings in the midst of happiness
and sadness. As some of you know I have a beloved old collie named Major. This dog was a gift from God. About six
months after my husband Allen died, I had to put down my old stubborn Kuvasz,
Anna. Her hips had given out. And
in March of 2008 for the first time in 20 years I lived in a house without a
dog. It was strange and odd. A
part of me wondered if I would ever get a dog again. The end of Anna’s life was so sad. I don’t want to do that
again. There also was never a dog that I have gotten as mad at as Anna. Nor would there ever be a dog as
beautiful.
Well
every spring, my friend Mary Worstell would come to pick daffodils for her mom,
June. Mary would bring her two
labs. But this April, three dogs
jumped out of Mary’s SUV, her two labs and a beautiful collie named Major. Mary
mentioned somewhat slyly that she was looking for a home for Major. I told her
I would think about it, but that we needed to go to Tennessee in a few days for
Easter and I couldn’t get a new dog till after that. On the way back from Tennessee the boys and I decided to get
Major. I called Mary once we turned onto the last leg of our journey and made
arrangements to pick him up the next day. When we got home, Nate suggested that
we unwind from our long drive with an old movie on TCM (Turner Classic
Movies). So we popped popcorn and
settled down to watch whatever might be on. The movie was Home
From the Hills, it was a 1948 movie about a collie, Lassie, who is damaged
and fearful but is taken in by good doctor, Edmund Gwenn, (who played Santa
Claus in Miracle on 34th St.) That movie was like a blessing. We would take in this Lassie dog that
needed a home and he would help us heal. Taking in a new dog was like building
and planting and making new relationships. Major was seven when he came to us
and in the next seven years he was a blessing. But at 14 his arthritis was very
bad and it was time for him not to suffer. In the week before the bonfire he
had started to have spells where he could not move at all. I knew he would be
distressed if he couldn’t move among the guests. So Friday night before the
bonfire I had a vet come over to the house. The boys and I spent a lot of time
with him through that week saying goodbye. And we cried an ocean of tears. There is no denying that
saying goodbye is painful. We
buried him Saturday morning and prayed and cried some more. But it was the day of the bonfire. We
had so much to do. Life required us to build and plant some fun to bring people
together. The
next afternoon after lots of blessed volunteers had come and cleaned and
cleared away after the bonfire. I lay on the couch exhausted and decided to
watch an old movie. And what just
happened to be showing on TCM that Sunday afternoon? The movie was the 1943
classic, Lassie Come Home. With
Elizabeth Taylor and Rodney McDowell and my favorite Edmund Gwenn and of course
a big beautiful Collie, like my Major.
It was a benediction and a blessing. This is way we work through painful emotions. We mourn, and
then we dance. We know how we feel, but then we put aside those things for a
bit to join in life. When we do
this God has a way of blessing us with the happiness that transcends our own
little pleasant emotion of happiness into the blessing of God’s Shalom. Amen
