Transcript
Jeremiah’s Letter to Exiles
First Baptist Richmond, November 23, 2025
The Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-14
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.
Last week we talked about the Prophet Isaiah, and how he begged the people of eighth-century Jerusalem to repent from their idolatry and unfaithfulness and turn back to the Lord. But they didn’t do it, and even though God showed remarkable patience with them, in the sixth century BC he followed through on his promise to punish. In a sermon I preached nearly five years ago I asked you to put yourself in their place. I said:
Imagine that you are living in Jerusalem in 587 BC when the entire Babylonian army comes up against the city, surrounds it, and lays siege to it. Imagine the soldiers beginning to build earthworks against the walls, as a way of getting up over the top to loot, kill, and destroy. And imagine that all of this goes on for a full year—a year when no one goes out of the city and no one comes in, when no garbage is disposed and no groceries are delivered, when those who are still alive within the walls are barely alive, and the earthworks on the outside are getting higher every day.
It would be almost a relief when the soldiers finally started coming over the wall. You might expect the worst—to be killed—praying that it would be quick and painless until you realized there was something worse than death, and that was being left alive to watch. In his paraphrase of 2
Chronicles 36, Eugene Peterson describes it like this: “Nebuchadnezzar, the King of the Babylonians, came in and killed indiscriminately—it was a ruthless massacre: young men and virgins, the elderly and weak—they were all the same to him. And then he plundered The Temple of everything valuable, cleaned it out completely; he burned The Temple of God to the ground, knocked down the wall of Jerusalem, and set fire to all the buildings—everything valuable was burned up (2 Chr. 36:14-19).
He took the leading citizens of the city captive, and imagine being one of those—rounded up with all the others like cattle, roped together, and dragged out of the rubble of Jerusalem; having to walk hundreds of miles, up and around the Fertile Crescent, through the burning sands of the desert, until you arrived finally at the great walled city of Babylon, more impressive than anything you had ever seen. And while you were standing there on the banks of the Euphrates—gawking at the high walls of the city, its magnificent hanging gardens, its 300-foot tall monument to Marduk, god of the Babylonians—your captors might have taunted you by asking you to sing some of those Jerusalem songs you had been singing along the way, back when you thought your little city was still something special.
And that would have been the last straw.
The author of Psalm 137, who must have been in that group, wrote: “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!’ [But] how could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” And then he writes, “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.”
That was how it felt for God’s people, who had been so proud and privileged, so favored and fortunate, to find themselves suddenly in exile. Back in the 1990’s some Christians in this country began to feel that way, and suggested that the American church was in exile. It started with a book called Resident Aliens, written by Will Willimon and Stan Hauerwas in the late 1980’s. They argued that the church in America had found itself in a kind of cultural exile. It wasn’t literal captivity, as it was for the Jews, but it was a significant change of status.
In the 1950’s the church sat at the center of the American experience. Sanctuaries were full, Sunday school classrooms were packed, pastors were respected in the marketplace, and the church steeple was often the tallest thing in town. But then things began to change. The fifties gave way to the sixties. All those babies who had been born during the Baby Boom began to grow up, to go away to college or to fight in the Vietnam War. Church sanctuaries began to empty out and church leaders began to panic. When Willimon and Hauerwas talked about the collapse of Christendom it resonated. Others began to talk about “the church in exile.”
By the 2000’s nearly everyone had realized that the church was no longer at the center of American life. We weren’t exactly in Babylon, but we were faced with declining attendance, diminished cultural influence, political polarization, a growing distrust of institutions, and generational shifts that did not include the habit of getting up and going to church on Sunday morning. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann was one of
the first to suggest that the experience of the American church at the end of the 20th century was not unlike the experience of Israel in exile. But he was also one of the first to suggest that when you’re in exile there’s something you can do.
Maybe you begin by weeping. That’s what God’s people did. “By the rivers of Babylon,” they said, “there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” There have been a lot of tears shed over the state of the American church in the last few decades. I started my ministry in the late eighties, and in every church I’ve served I’ve heard people tell stories about the good old days, not always with tears but certainly with some heavy sighs. They miss those days. Of course they do.
But you can’t cry forever. One of the ways those exiles in Babylon got over their grief was to believe that their circumstances were temporary. As you heard in today’s text there were false prophets and fortune tellers among them who began to say that their punishment wouldn’t last, that they would be back in Jerusalem before they knew it. I’ve known of too many churches in America that tried to ignore what was happening and pretend that if they just went on with business as usual their sanctuaries would start filling up again. Some of those are still waiting. Many of them have had to close. But the message God gives Jeremiah is a different kind of message, one that hardly makes sense to us. He says:
1. When you’re in exile you shouldn’t spend too much time weeping, or wishing things were different, or looking back to the good old days.
2. You shouldn’t imagine that if you just hold your breath long enough the tide will turn, and things will get better. No one can hold their breath that long.
3. God tells his people to, “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 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.”
That last line is huge. It’s like a strategy for the church in exile: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
Two footnotes before I move on: 1. God sent his people to Babylon. They were not there by accident any more than we are here by accident. God has placed us at the corner of Monument Avenue and Arthur Ashe Boulevard for a reason—to bless this city—to seek Richmond’s peace and, in doing so, to experience our own; and 2. A better word than “welfare” is shalom, the original Hebrew word. “Seek the shalom of the city,” God says, that is, “seek its wholeness, mercy, justice, and peace, and as you do its shalom will come right back to you.” Want to know how to thrive in a time of exile? I’ll put it simply:
“Bloom where you are planted.”
Back in the 1990’s Walter Brueggemann began to preach and lecture regularly on exile as a model of hope. Diana Butler Bass wrote on how decline was forcing congregations to reimagine their role in the community. Craig Van Gelder pioneered something he called the “missional” church
movement. Darrell Guder, building on his work, redefined the church as “sent” rather than “centered.” And three pastors—Will Willimon, Martin Copenhaver, and Anthony Robinson—got together and wrote a book called Good News in Exile that I still have on my shelves.i Here are some quotes that I have found especially helpful:
§ “Exile is not a place of despair but a place of discovery.” It’s where God’s people are re-formed.
§ “The church in exile is free from having to manage the culture. It is free to be the church again.”
§ One of those pastors wrote: “Churches are losing members not because we are too Christian, but because we have not been Christian enough.”
§ Another one recognized, “We are being pushed out of the center, and perhaps that is exactly where we belong—on the margins, where God does some of his best work.”
§ Another one noted that, “One of our tasks as pastors is to give people a new vocabulary so they can name their world in Christian ways again.”
And then they got excited:
§ “What if the real crisis is not that the world has changed, but that the church has not changed enough?” they wondered, and then added:
§ “Exile is where we rediscover the difference between the church and the world.”
So, what should the church be doing in a world like this? A modern-day Jeremiah might say: “Instead of lamenting your loss of prominence, instead of trying to go back to the fifties, instead of trying to re-claim your place in the center of culture, do this: Settle into the experience of exile with some hope. Serve the city, don’t dominate it. Bless your neighbors. Invest in the community. Seek the welfare of Richmond. And trust God’s long plan, because you don’t know how all this is going to turn out.” And this is where the last lines of today’s reading really hit home: “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.”
How do we move toward a future with hope? We live in the present with hope. We seek the welfare of the city to which God has sent us, believing that in its welfare we will find our welfare. We articulate our mission not around returning to the good old days, not about going back to Jerusalem, but about bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to Richmond, Virginia. And then we do whatever we can to bring heaven to earth in this place that we live, this place that we love.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that’s what we’ve been doing. Instead of responding to our exile with tears or wishful thinking we have understood it as a season that calls for extraordinary faithfulness. We have rejected the quick fix and settled in for the long haul. We have built houses and lived in them, planted gardens and eaten their produce. We believe with all our hearts that God has not abandoned his people.
And so we seek the welfare of the city to which God has sent us. We provide hot showers for those who need them, a food pantry, a clothes
closet, a community garden. We house a preschool where hundreds of Richmonders find loving nurture for their children. We host orchestras, AA meetings, Boy Scouts, blood drives, Upward Basketball, Wednesday night suppers, community meetings, and neighborhood gatherings. We invite people to walk their dogs on our grounds, or just sit for a while in the prayer garden. We believe that as this city prospers, we will prosper. Maybe what someone told me is true, that “The best way to live in exile is not to escape the world or control it, but to bless it until it begins to look a little more like heaven.”ii
In studying today’s text I was struck by that place where God says he will bring his people back to Jerusalem after “seventy years.” It’s probably just a coincidence, but if you assumed that the high-water mark for American Christianity was 1955, and this is 2025, then we are right at the 70-year mark. And that made me think: What if our time of exile is drawing to an end? That same day I read an article about how the Orthodox Church in America has experienced phenomenal growth, mostly among young men who are looking for something more demanding than singing praise choruses. I’m not sure that’s the answer, but it made me wonder: What if it’s a sign? What if God is about to “bring us home,” so to speak: not to Jerusalem, and not to the 1950’s, but to that day we’ve been praying for for the last 2,000 years, the day when God’s kingdom comes and his will is done, on earth as it is in heaven?
What if we could pray that prayer today with a new kind of expectancy, believing that maybe, just maybe, the seventy years of our exile are coming to an end, and God is getting ready to have his way, and
we, along with everyone else in our city, are about to be blessed in ways we could have never imagined. Can you do that? And shall we pray?
Our Father
Who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those Who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil,
For thine is the kingdom, the power,
And the glory, forever.
Amen.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
