The Welfare of the City (20th Sunday after Pentecost)

We three kings of Orient are.
Bearing gifts we travel afar.
Field and fountain, moor and mountain
Following yonder star...

Remember the magi? They appear in Matthew's Christmas story. Astrologers, holy men, possibly ruling class. This morning we heard Jeremiah bringing God's word to the Jewish exiles in Babylon in roughly 500 B.C. Five hundred years later, these non-Jewish holy men from Babylon will come looking for the Jewish Messiah. Exactly how did that happen, I wonder?

Last week we talked about the rapid changes we have experienced in our world in recent years. Without a doubt, these are the most rapidly changing times in the history of humankind. Our culture and its moral compass seems to be swinging wildly in all directions.

If we are getting a sense that the culture around us is more and more distant from us, it is I believe a great opportunity to rediscover our true purpose and mission. There's of course the old line we often hear that we need to accommodate the culture more thoroughly, and we see preachers doing that right and left, with some success, or might I say, some institutional success, that is, more people and more money. And we have those superficial Christians who identity their faith with a set of Victorian morals that really don't have anything to do with the bible, the so-called old-time religionists, who manifest themselves in the conservative churches. They are somewhat popular too.

But I think the good news is that neither of these strategies are working anymore. Both of them are failing. Why am I happy about this? Because at last we might really turn to scripture and really attempt to understand who God really is and what God really is working toward.

It seems to me that the word from God today directly addresses us in our present situation. It encourages us to continue to understand ourselves as a separate people, or if we haven't understood this, to rediscover our separateness. It encourages us to figure out what it is that makes us separate. Is it a particular family structure? Is it a set of morals? Is it only rules for living? Is it a particular kind of etiquette? Is it just about being nice?

It's worth noting today that when the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom and carried off its people, we never heard from them again. The remnant left behind in what was then called Israel eventually became the hated Samaritans, a kind of hybrid ethnic group that retained a portion of the Jewish tradition but was also seriously influenced by and racially intermingled with Assyrian culture.

Of course, Samaritans become for Jesus a kind or object lesson for the dissolving boundaries around the kingdom of God. The Good Samaritan is one of his most famous parables, so much so that the word Samaritan, which then meant "hated foreigner and heretic," now means "someone who helps his neighbor." In today's story, the only leper that shows gratitude for his healing is the Samaritan. The meaning in those days was "an ethnically inferior and heretical foreigner has more gratitude than nine Jews."

So the Northern Kingdom disappeared into the mists of time, but the southern Kingdom of Judah did not. It retained its identity even as it went into exile, even as it lost all its national and religious trappings. No land, no palace, no army, no temple, no king, but strangely, still God's people. Stuck in a hostile land, filled with violence and false religion, and under their conqueror's rule, but strangely, still God's people.

Jeremiah, who up until this morning seems to have had nothing positive to say about anything, encourages the Jews in exile in Babylon to marry each other and have children, to setting in and settle down, to dig in for the long haul. You'd think maybe he'd have a word about how God was going to come and smite those darn Babylonians and get everyone back home quickly. But no, he says, we're here for the foreseeable future and we might as well get used to it.

What he says next shocks us even more. Imagine for a moment that your homeland has been decimated by a foreign invader, your friends murdered, your family separated from you, perhaps forever, you've been dragged in chains to the foreigner's homeland and forced to work for him. Now your minister comes along and says, "Well, the word from God is we're not going anywhere." Certainly that's bad enough. But then he goes on to say, "And by the way, God wants you to pray for the foreigner. Remember, his welfare is your welfare."

So many of us think that Jesus was some kind of revolutionary prophet that departed from Jewish tradition. But here we see the roots of his teaching.

It's in loving the enemy that our light shines the brightest in this dark world. It is the practice Jesus commanded that I think separates the real Christians from the false, to use the old somewhat sexist saying, it's what separates the men from the boys.

We tend to have a scattershot approach to ministry which came about as the result of having churches packed full of everyone in town, a situation that pertained in the 60's and has been long over, never to return. And so it is that we always remind ourselves that we should keep on doing everything we have always done, and keep on adding new things too, because if we don't we might leave something out.

But all this effort amounts merely to the endless pining for those big steeple days of yore. If the Jews in Babylon had acted as we act, they would never have unpacked their bags. They would have got up every morning and expected to go home. They would have spent their days miserably remembering how good it once was, and how everything would be fine if they could just go back.

Of course, if they had done that, they would have been fooling themselves. The fact was, as Jeremiah had so clearly said, the seeds of their exile had been in their faithlessness and sin. In our current situation, we do not do well to imagine that all we have to do is go back to something that we once were, to pine for a past that we have dressed up in fine clothes, but which in fact was the very cause of our current exile. In that very past are the seeds of the chaos in which we now suffer.

The great mystery, the wonder and beauty and awe-inspiring majesty of God's love, is that even as we have turned our backs on God, even as we have set ourselves up for exile, God was nevertheless faithful, nevertheless loving us, even as he brought us to ruin, even as he threw us into a terrifying future. Even as we turned our backs on him, he was preparing us to do as he has done for us. Just as he has loved us as we fought against him, so we are now called to love the world as it fights against us.

The news machines of the demonic forces in our world today are extremely powerful. Compared to God's little church, they are like those Babylonian armies, thousands of highly trained, well-fed soldiers clad in glittering armor, armed with razor sharp steel and bristling with arrows, riding the latest, fastest chariots, all against our ragtag few with our tiny slingshots.

And so it seems to me that we need to pick up the one thing that makes us greater, the one thing that cannot be defeated, the one little pebble that is enough to crush the skull of Goliath. And that one pebble, that one amazing difference, is loving our enemy.

And so, church, there is your chief mission. How do you come to love those you believe are destroying your way of life?

Today is your deciding place. Maybe you need to leave the church. Maybe you can't accept such a mission.

Or maybe you'd like to be free. Maybe you'd like to join the little ragtag, outnumbered gang standing up to the mighty empire of hate, with a few pebbles of love.

And so it was that five hundred years after the Jews went into exile, Babylon had been so affected by their presence among them, that three non-Jewish holy men of their religion traveled hundreds of miles to find the Jewish Messiah.

Amen.