Escaping the City

Text: Jeremiah 29:1-9

Going to the city excited me. My grandparents had just moved from their farmhouse on the hill to a house in Saskatoon. The thrill of going to seeing them and visiting a ‘real’ city made the journey seem especially long. I was a young child and I had lots of questions to ask of my mum and dad. “What is a city? What does it look like? It must be fun?” I imagined that a city was a busy place with tall buildings everywhere. When we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa’s I couldn’t hide my disappointment. I didn’t see any skyscrapers. It wasn’t until later when I was taken into the city centre that I felt more satisfied. But even then, the buildings weren’t as high as in the Spiderman episodes on the TV.
 

You see I was a country boy. Vast stretches of prairie were interrupted by shrubs and farm yards. Most of my childhood was spent on the farm though our family did live in the town of Melfort for a time - town of less than 6000 people promoted to city status in the early 80s. Even in the smallest city in Saskatchewan we were never far from a open space or field.
 

My last five years before leaving home were lived back on the farm. I had a basement room with no window – silent and without light. I left that room to go to the capital city, Regina where my parents helped me unpack my stuff into my room in the college campus dormitory. The college was on a busy intersection and was the main route to the hospital. Street lights shone through the curtains. Sirens blared as ambulances sped patients to A&E. To top it off my room mate worked through the night with his lamp on! I didn’t sleep properly for weeks. I was homesick. I wanted to escape from the city back to my country home.
 

After finishing my degree in Regina I flew to Manchester and discovered a different kind of city: a city of villages sprawling around the Mersey, a city of many different cultures and colours, a city where wealth and poverty co-existed, a city which was safe in some parts and violent in others.
 

During my year in Manchester I had the opportunity to go to London. That took city to another level of meaning. I found it hard to navigate the tube. The air had a foul smell. People were cramped into such small spaces. Streets were jammed with houses wall to wall. No one looked at me. No one spoke to me. It was a hectic crush of humanity together and yet alone.
 

Witney is a country town. Wherever you are you are not far from a road or path that will take you out into fields and woodlands. But for those who live in cities teeming with humanity there is a common desire to escape the city and escape into the countryside. Though many love the city there is an ideal: to live in the city and have a cottage in the countryside.
 

The most loved passages of the Bible notably do not feature cities. We gravitate towards the shepherd of Psalm 23 who leads us by still waters and green pastures. Of course there is the city, the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. This is not a city of concrete skyscrapers with glittering panels of glass. This is a city where God takes up residence with us and tears of grief will be dried because there will be no death in her streets.
 

It’s easy to find hymns about the beauty of creation. “All things bright and beautiful” and “Morning has broken” head a long list. Cities featuring in hymns include “Once in Royal David’s City”, “Jerusalem” (and did those feet), or the Moody and Sanky sounds of “We marching to Zion”. We are startled by modern hymn writers such as the American, Catherine Cameron who, in the second verse of her hymn, “God who stretched the spangled heavens” writes:

Proudly rise our modern cities, stately buildings, row on row;
yet their windows, blank, unfeeling, stare on canyoned streets below
where the lonely drift unnoticed in the city’s ebb and flow.
(Tune - Ode to Joy)

This bleak description resonates with reality but sits uneasily in our worship.
 

Faith in the city is the concern of Jeremiah’s letter and sent from Jerusalem to the first wave of Judeans exiled to Babylon. How does an uprooted people living in a foreign city.
 

Jeremiah is a book that is far from easy to make sense of because it appears to have grown into existence - a many layered construction with several voices speaking. The confusion that marks Jeremiah’s parallels the tumultuous political times in Judah. They faced the onslaught of a foreign power and were slowly but surely being dismantled.
 

Jeremiah was often in conflict with prophets who told lies. He’d had a showdown with the prophet Hananiah who claimed the exile would be short lived. Babylon would crumble and all the vessels removed from the temple along with King Jeconiah. Jeremiah was wearing a wooden yoke as a sign of the power of Babylon over Judah. Hananiah dramatically grabs the wooden yoke and breaks it in two. Jeremiah ominously announces that the wooden yoke will be replaced by iron. The lie of the prophet Hananiah would be proved by his death within the year.
 

Jeremiah puts pen to paper to counter any illusions that the exiles would escape the city of Babylon any time soon. He may have dealt with Hananiah but there were plenty more prophets of his ilk ready to peddle delusions.
 

The political situation was bleak. King Jeconiah, the queen mother, the court officials, the leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the artisans, the smiths had been exiled to the city of Babylon. Essentially Nebuchadnezzar had dismantled the government and exiled the elite. He ensures that there is no one left to organise rebellion and, at the same time, ensures that he has the upper echelons to draw upon for his own purposes. Nebuchadnezzar puts in place a puppet king in place: Zedekiah. Jeremiah sends his letter through king Zedekiah’s couriers, Elasah and Gemariah, to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar may have allowed this kind of correspondence because, as scholar R. E. Clements suggests, he didn’t want the puppet king to forget the exiles who were, in effect, hostages. King Zedekiah had better behave or else...
 

Jeremiah’s message is stark. Settle in the city. This is not going to be a short stay. Put down roots. Build your homes and live in them. Landscape your gardens and plant them out. Eat the produce. Get married and reproduce. Have a family so that they can have families.
 

Make sure the city you live in prospers. Seek its welfare – its shalom – its peace. Don’t seek to undermine Babylon. The welfare of the city is your welfare. Is this merely a lesson in citizenship? Is Jeremiah outlining the Big Society long before David Cameron got to it? It’s these things and more. The more is that they are called to pray to the LORD on behalf of the city. How hard is that? To pray for the city that holds you captive.
 

Jeremiah knew that the message of his letter might not be welcome. It’s far more attractive to believe that everything’s going to be OK soon. Humans have a huge capacity for buying into deceptions. People see an offer that’s too good to be true and hand over money to fraudsters. We want to think that there’s an easy way to get rich and be happy.
 

Jeremiah’s message is from the LORD of hosts. The power of the LORD of the armies of heaven exceed that of any earthly king – including Babylon. This is a message from the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel. The God of Israel has a special relationship with his people. This message is not to be dismissed in favour of the messages of prophets and diviners who dream dreams and tell lies that you’ll be going home soon (v. 10). These have not been sent by the LORD.
 

The people were in exile because they had ignored God’s word. Exile in the city was a time to turn to God in trust. The certain evidence of God’s presence with them was no longer there. The temple had been emptied and eventually destroyed. Jerusalem had been captured and demolished. The exiles were told to put down roots and pray for the peace of the city instead of being trapped in false fantasies about going home. Be at home and work and pray for the peace of the city. Even if it’s a place of exile...of punishment...of spiritual crisis. It is this place of aloneness that creates the conditions for trusting God and prepares us for the return home. There would be no escape from the city to the countryside of Judah. This was a time to embrace the Big Society in Babylon, to work and pray for its peace and in doing so find peace.
 

Are we prayerfully working for the peace of Witney, our country and world? Or do we detach ourselves with hopes of some day when we get to heaven? Do we build our homes, landscape our gardens and watch our families grow as full participants in our society? Or do we retreat into fantasies of early release from the dreadful complexities and painful realities of our world?
The exiles probably wondered how they could endure living so far from home never mind embracing it. Do you ever wonder how long the agonies of our world will last? How can we embrace life when we would rather that God would bring an end to it all – justice in one fell swoop?
 

Anthony de Mello tells the story of “The clock master [who] was about to fix the pendulum of a clock when, to his surprise, he heard the pendulum speak.
 

‘Please, sir, leave me alone,’ the pendulum pleaded. ‘It will be an act of kindness on your part. Think of the number of times I will have to tick day and night. So many times each minute, sixty minutes an hour, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. For year upon year...millions of ticks. I could never do it.’
But the clock master answered wisely, ‘Don’t think of the future. Just do one tick at a time and you will enjoy every tick for the rest of your life.’
And that is exactly what the pendulum decided to do. It is still ticking merrily away.”
 

Live in the city. Work for its welfare. Pray for its peace.