October 14, 2007

by The Rev. Constance Jones

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

When I was in graduate school the first time,
I had to show that I could read two foreign languages.
French I actually knew pretty well,
but my exposure to German was like drinking fast from a fire-hose.
I learned it too fast and not much stuck.
But there is one German word
that just seeped into my vocabulary and sensibility, unheimlich.
There really isn’t any equivalent word in English.
Heim in German means “home”
and so heimlich would be homey, familiar, comfortable, and reassuring.
Unheimlich is the opposite.
It’s the unhappy state of mind where you know things just aren’t right
and you aren’t at home in your own skin. Things are perilously unfamiliar.
Dorothy looks around and says to her little dog Toto,
“I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
The emotion Unheimlichkeit produces is more than apprehension or fear.
The best word for it is “dread.”
Sigmund Freud even wrote a treatise about it,
and some movie-makers are adept at giving you that creepy feeling
that something out of kilter is about to happen.

The great prophet Jeremiah, so famous for his lamentations
and his complaints about how ill-treated he was
by the people God had sent him to address,
wrote to a people in exile.
Every last one of them except the poorest beggars –
were carted off to Babylon by their enemy Nebuchadnezzar.
As the Psalm says, by the river of Babylon they just sat down and wept.

Now, we all know that the ancient Hebrews, like Jews today,
understood God’s promise to them in terms of a homeland,
full of promise and rightful ownership.
The covenant was a matter of LAND, both then and now.
God promised it to Abraham.
After Moses’ death it was conquered and occupied.
On it they build a temple under Solomon.
And in Jeremiah’s time, they were dispossessed of it.
In exile they became “displaced persons”
who because of their sins, Jeremiah says, lost the promised land.

But try shifting the focus from homeLAND to HOME LAND.
Jeremiah says to the people in exile, to the priests and prophets and just everybody. Don’t just sit there holding your breath.
Build houses in your place of exile.
Plant gardens (which of course means you’re going to be around long enough
to hoe and water, and reap the harvest).
Go further still – have children,
and see your grandchildren born.

Surprisingly, Jeremiah says that God says,
In Babylon, make yourselves at home.
Don’t just clench your teeth and wait to be delivered, make a home.
And more shockingly still, he says,
“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.”

This is to say, make peace with this strange place you are in
to the point that you love it, and that you bless it.
What you take to be unheimlich, make your own home.
Never forget Jerusalem or why you were exiled from it,
but bloom where you are planted.

Well, many of the Jews of Jeremiah’s time returned to Jerusalem for a while
and even rebuilt their temple before its final destruction in 70 A.D.
But Jeremiah’s words were a preparation for the great diaspora,
when Jews spent centuries in other countries not their homeland,
when they had to grapple with what it meant to be Jewish,
and a minority, in foreign lands.

By the time of Jesus,
and the writing of the New Testament in the century after Jesus,
the idea that true religion could be found only in one place
was necessarily crumbling.
Early Christianity too decided the Gospel would be preached “to the nations” –
which meant Gentiles who didn’t have to become Jews.
Christianity was for everyone –
at first Gentiles in Galatia and Corinth and Rome.
Later Africa and China and Virginia.

So for both Jews and Christians, Jeremiah’s words carry great weight.
Go to foreign places.
Plant and have families and keep the faith.
Seek the welfare of your new home, even pray to the Lord on its behalf.

But if we stop here,
we are missing a certain nuance or overtone in Jeremiah.
And isn’t that the way?
I always figure if I find a passage in the Bible that looks simple to me,
I’m usually missing something.

The nuance is that yearning to be home,
that remembrance of the promise.
I think there’s a name for it, Unheimlichkeit.
And here’s the paradox.
You are to make yourself truly at home in a place that is only temporary.
Bless your current existence, but don’t think it’s your final destination.

And this may not be only about place.
Yes, people do get homesick, and they are attached to homesteads
But even those who never leave home may know that unheimlich feeling
that all that is familiar is lost.
It may happen when you retire,
or when you send your kids off to college.
Believe me, it happens when you bury the love of your life.
It ambushes you when a cherished certainty gets taken from you.
Or it occurs for apparently no reason at all.
One day you look around in a room where not a single object has moved,
and you shudder for being a stranger in this world.

There’s an old tune I remember hearing once.
I’d say it’s in the interesting genre of “cowboy Gospel.” It goes:

I don’t want to get adjusted, to this world, to this world;
I’ve got a home that’s so much better I’m going to go to sooner or later,
I don’t want to get adjusted to this world.

It has a sort of theology, doesn’t it?
Don’t get too comfortable in this world, because you can’t keep it,
can’t hold onto any of it.
Your home is in heaven, hold onto that.
You are a citizen of heaven.

But to say only that, I think, is to lose Jeremiah’s nuance.
We do make a home in this world,
and God wants us to plant and propagate -- such generative and rooted words.
We are to fully invest our hearts in our home here on earth
and bless it – seeing in its welfare our welfare.
We are to pray to God on its behalf.

You see, if we were just passing through, it would be OK not to care –
about this earth and its climate,
about politics and who is elected to the White House or the General Assembly,
about who we marry and have children with.

But we know deep inside that God made this world and called it good.
He set Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden
and had them name the plants and animals.
He sent Jesus to this earth to redeem it.
It isn’t disposable or of no account.

There is a baptism today here at Grace Church.
A precious little baby has been born into this beautiful world – for a time.
He is claimed as Christ’s own forever by his Baptism,
and so his home, both here and in the hereafter, is in God.
But he is also invited, as all of us are,
to be in the place where we are planted.
To be fruitful and productive,
to plant and rejoice and grow into the full likeness of Christ
under circumstances that are sometimes glorious,
but that sometimes feel unheimlich,
that remind us in moments of chilling clarity
that we are wayfarers and not permanent residents.

We are called to seek not only our own welfare in this world,
but the welfare of the world itself.
We are to pray for it, and treat it tenderly.
For paradoxically, even as we are wayfarers, its welfare is ours.
We may not want to get adjusted to this sweet and perishable world,
but it’s our job, and by God, it is also our delight!

Yet continue to hear that overtone.
Our true home, wherever we are and at whatever stage of the journey,
our true home is always in God.
We have dual citizenship, to be sure.
but we are claimed as Christ’s own forever,
here and now, and to the ages of ages. Amen.

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