Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.  Pray to the LORD for it, for if it prospers, you too will prosper (Jeremiah 29:7).

Have you noticed?  Churches in the United States, and elsewhere throughout the Western world, are finding ourselves more and more in the position of exiles.  There’s another Real ID marker that we may not be in a hurry to embrace!

Exiled: pushed out, banished, homeless, migrant, aliens, strangers.  Exiled: displaced, disrupted, disoriented, discouraged.

When God brought his people Israel into a covenant at Mount Sinai, there were promised blessings for covenant faithfulness, and curses (disciplinary judgments) for covenant unfaithfulness.  The ultimate curse was exile, removal from the Promised Land, being handed over to, and lorded over by, a society that neither knew nor loved nor obeyed the Lord: Babylon.  After centuries of prophetic warning, admonition and rebuke: Nebuchadnezzar.  Jerusalem sacked, the temple razed, the people exiled.

Jeremiah 29 addresses God’s people in exile.  The people’s first question may very likely have been, “When do we get to go home?”  The answer: not for a long time.  Not during your lifetime.  Seventy years.

So the next question may well have been, “Now what?”  A seventy-year pity party, develop a finely-honed “martyr complex”?  Two generations’ worth of shaming and self-loathing?  Retreat into a ghetto?  Begin a resistance movement?  Just fit in and “go full Babylonian”?

Here’s what Jeremiah draws their attention to: first, he reminds them that the God who rightfully sent them into exile has accompanied them on the long journey to Babylon, and is with them there.  Yes, they are experiencing judgment upon their accumulated national unfaithfulness—and yet they have not been abandoned by their God.

Secondly, they are to settle down and settle in for the long haul.  Build houses, plant gardens, marry, have children—it’s Genesis language!  “Be fruitful (in exile) and multiply (in Babylon), fill the earth (well, the Babylon part of it for now) and bring it (Babylon!) into alignment with the God who creates and sustains it.

Next, seek the shalom of Babylon. Do what you can, and all that you can, to seed God’s shalom into the soil of Babylon.  Work faithfully and diligently to demonstrate some of God’s holiness and wholeness, justice and reconciliation, righteousness and mercy—in Babylon.  Pray for Babylon.  Why? Because if Babylon prospers, prospers in the ways God understands prosperity, you, too, will prosper.  

Finally, don’t listen to voices who tell you that exile will be easy, or that it will be over soon.  Yes, God promises to bring you back to the Promised Land.  But the when and how of that isn’t in your hands; what is in your hands—our hands—is the work of serving the shalom of Babylon.

What is one way you could help Chatham Church develop as a seeker of the peace and prosperity of Chatham County?  What’s the next step God is inviting you to take