12

Oct

“Build and Live, Plant and Eat”

Sunday at 10:30 am Atlantic

  • Sermon Text

    (Jer 24:1, 4-7; Lk 17:11-19) JG White

    10:30 am, Thanksgiving Sun, Oct 12, 2025, FBC Amherst

    I must admit, the famous story of Jesus healing ten men gets me thinking of skits and cartoons. Cartoons about a healed beggar, who now has no job, because he has no illness, and no excuse to beg, so what is he going to do now? So why be thankful? ‘My livelihood is gone! No one will pity me now.’

    There is far more to these real healing moments in the ancient world, of course. And the point is well taken here, as we see the one who comes back to thank the Master. And that one particular fellow is not even a pure Jew, but a foreigner, in homeland and religion.

    We have our thankfulness focused, this weekend, upon the harvest and the food and family we enjoy. If we do indeed have these in abundance. Perhaps we have just enough. Thanks be to God. 

    From hundreds of years earlier in Jewish history comes the letter of Jeremiah to his fellow Jews in exile. The disaster struck, their life in their holy city and holy land is wrecked. It’s the worst moment. 

    There is a natural human desire to want to be somewhere else, or sometimes, be at some other moment in life. ‘The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,’ it seems. As we have been hearing in other readings this month, the people of God were crying out - with prayers and tears, about their national failure. How can they go on? What can they do now?

    To ‘be where you are’ is significant. It’s a change of attitude. Jonathan Swift said, ‘May you live all the days of your life.”

    Today from Jeremiah we read part of a letter he prepared for the many Jews who had been taken away into exile by a foreign power, Babylon. Build houses: live. Plant gardens: eat. Marry: have children. Marry off your children: have grandchildren. (They will return to your homeland, not you.) Multiply in this foreign land: don’t decrease. Seek the well being of the city where you are now. Pray, not against, but for the city. Live, Eat, Pray, Love… STAY. 

    At the next moment in this letter, the people are delivered this message from God, by Jeremiah: “I know the plans I have for you, says, the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope.” (29:11) So, we might say, ‘bloom where you are planted. Even when it feels like disaster.’ And it was.

    We could find many other examples in scripture of blooming where you are planted. Ruth, a woman from Moab, joins her Jewish mother-in-law, Naomi, in Israel. “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” (R 1:16)

    Paul and Silas, singing in prison one night. (Acts 16)

    Or advice from that same time period, to the little Church in a town called Thessalonika, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (1 T 5:16-18)

    When you end up somewhere you’d rather escape, ask if you should bloom where you’re planted. There are moments to escape, yes. There is a time to move on, yes, and journey. In the case of Ruth and Orpah with their mother-in-law Naomi; one stayed in Moab, one joined Naomi in Israel. When Paul and Silas were in prison, that night there was an earthquake, and the door to freedom opened. 

    So we might think of settling in and living in our individual circumstances. Four our situation changes, sometimes unpredictably, and as we don’t want it. The road we are headed down closes. Completely. We have to find a new way. 

    Some friends of ours, who spend the summers at Northport, served as Baptist mission staff for CBM, fifty years ago. How did they end up doing that? Well, they heard the call to serve, they were young and prepared. They got ready , and went through training to go to India. (We Baptists had a lot of mission staff in India in the 20th century.) This Nova Scotian couple underwent language training. For India. 

    At last, they were getting ready to fly out to India as missionaries. The bags were all packed. Then, suddenly, they were prevented from going. From going there. So plans changed. How about… South America? Bolivia? (We have a long history of mission work in Bolivia also.) So the plan changed. This couple learned to live in a totally new direction. They had to learn another language - this time Spanish - and the culture of the Bolivian people. So, Mary and Rev. Hedley Hopkins did go south, they served there, and had children in Bolivia. Not India. 

    How quickly plans sometimes change. And we pivot. 

    Back to those ancient Hebrew people who had Jeremiah preach to them, and write letters. They were being told by other ‘prophets’ that the time of exile in Babylon would be brief: no more than two years. The LORD will return you to your Promised Land. 

    Jeremiah here told them ‘No.’ He had been telling them all their lives this was going to be bad. He had been lamenting publicly. We’ve been reading this, eh? Jeremiah had even not got married nor had children because of the disaster to befall the nation. 

    How remarkable, at last, for Jeremiah to declare to the people, now exiled up north in Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. And so on. Life fell apart. It will be like this for a while. Live with it. Do life here. God is with you here, to bless.

    One of the great spiritual writers of the twentieth century was Thomas Kelly.  (1893-1941) He eloquently describes the stress and anxiety many people still feel today, in the final chapter of his spiritual classic, A Testament of Devotion. He writes, "The problem we face today needs very little introduction. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk, and before we know it we are bowed down with burdens, crushed under committees, strained, breathless, and hurried, panting through a never-ending program of appointments."

    Sounds like today. When do you suppose this was published? 1941. Just after the death of the author, actually.

    Thomas Kelley knew well the life of ambition and pressure, and the escape from it. He was a scholar but sought more and more. With one PhD in philosophy, he sought a prestigious job in the great universities in the eastern US. He so wanted to make a name for himself. He worked on a second PhD - from Harvard. But struggles and stresses were wearing him down. Climbing the academic ladder had broken his health and his bank account.

    Then the very moment that would validate all of his hard work came: the oral exam for his doctoral thesis. But tragedy struck. He had a panic attack; his mind went blank. The committee, which included the incredible philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, failed Kelly, partly out of concern for his health, and informed him he would not be given a second chance to defend his dissertation. Kelly was devastated and sank to such a low place his wife worried that he might try to take his own life.

    But within a few months, he was awakened by a Presence, a Power that was gentle, loving and awesome. As time went on, he found a simpler life, a life of less striving. Relying beautifully upon God. Kelly describes that his feverish existence was transformed into a life of "peace and joy and serenity." His writings became a classic of Christian mysticism and devotional literature. “I seem at last to be given peace,” he wrote. “It is amazing.”

    He was given peace. And it was a gift. Not an achievement. Not a skill. Not an award. Peace as a gift from our loving, almighty God. 

    Together, as a Faith community, we must rely upon such peace, and find thankfulness, now at the end of Christendom. We have lived into the end of the time that Christianity was the normal way in Canada and the West. The glory days of grand Church buildings filled with people and activities are over. Our time as the majority, with influence and power is finished. And though the voice goes up from some Christian groups to take back the nation (whatever nation we live in), to prepare and to plead with God for revival, I side with the Jeremiah’s of today. The collapse of Christianity will not be short. It will be long. But it is not the end. We must live in the new normal, as a spiritual minority. Once again as salt, a pinch of salt in our world. A little group that has goodness and blessings to give out.

    You may not have noticed that I try never ever to say, ‘let’s do this or that to get more people here.’ Of course I like more people here. But I believe this needs to be about us having something wonderful to offer to our neighbours. What do those around us need from God, and can we help them? When it becomes about First Baptist keeping attendance up and finding younger people to serve as volunteers, we are pointed in the wrong direction. We are holding onto the past, which is over. We still know a God who loves and saves and rules.

    Thanks be to God for the grace given us to live where we are, in the moment, even in the struggle. The grace to bloom where we are planted. Even to bloom where we get uprooted and planted. Like those Hebrew people of 2,600 years ago, carted away to Babylon. ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ they had cried. Sing. Sing anyway, was Jeremiah's word, at last. Because this trouble would last. They needed to survive. They even needed to thrive in a bad situation. That was their new calling. 

    In our lives, in our time, this may be our calling too. Build homes and live in this new chapter. Plant and grow things to eat, here in this new world you were not quite expecting. And in it all, bless where you are and bless those who surround you. Pray for the well being of this city. This different, wild, mixed up place. And we shall be better, when we want better for our world. Give thanks whatever happens, for this is what God in Christ wills for you

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