creation-community - thoughts on jeremiah 29.5-7

Living Creation-Community in God's World Today

Ruth Padilla DeBorst

Putting Down Roots in a Broken Land Scene I. The city is under siege. No reprieve in sight. With

access to their fields blocked, their supplies are running out, as is the hope of the people trapped inside the walls. The empty promises of deliverance uttered by the false prophets are wearing thin. The end is near. So Jeremiah, instructed by God, proceeds to do what anyone in his right mind would do before it all goes up in flames and is taken over entirely by invading troops: he buys a plot of land! Yes. That is what he does: he weighs out the money, signs the deed, gets witnesses, and seals the deal. Was he being foolish? Rash? Naively hopeful? Jeremiah matter-of-factly proceeds to store the deed in an earthen pot and, while the enemy armies batter down the walls, he publicly-and against all obvious reason for hope-declares: "Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land" (Jer 32:15).

Scene IL They received a letter from home. They had been torn away from their families, their houses, and their land and dragged off by Nebuchadnezzar's army. They were nobodies in the foreign land of Babylon, forced to work for strange people whose language was unintelligible to them and whose customs often affronted their Jewish sensibilities.

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They dreamed of the day they would return home to their kin and their own place. Imagine their shock when they received the words of Jeremiah:1

Thus says...the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: God sent us here? This is God's doing! Incredible. We are here because Nebuchadnezzar is powerful. God had nothing to do with this: he forgot us long ago!

But the letter continues: Build houses and live in them-,

Well, our tents are plenty fine, thank you very much. We do not intend to stay that long, you know! We are counting the months till we go home!

Plant gardens and eat their produce.

Plant gardens and wait for them to yield! You mean put down roots in this foreign land? You mean we're here to stay for quite some time? You mean we're supposed to make this place our home?

The letter is not over: Take wives and have sons and daughters.

Looks like we will be here for quite some time...

Take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters,

But this means generations! V\ grandchildren in this land?!

Multiply there and do not decrease.

But this means generations! We are to expect grandchildren in this land?!

1 Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references in this article are from the

English Standard Version. The passages in this section are from Jeremiah 29:4-7.

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Well, okay; at least that means God wants us to be strong, like our ancestors in Egypt. That way we will gain power and leave these Babylonians in the dust, where they deserve to be after such oppression!

But God's word gets yet more threatening to their pre-conceived ideas:

Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf. The welfare of Babylon! The well-being of our enemies, the people who are enslaving us? The health of this land we never chose to live in? Pray! Why, yes! We're surely to pray: to get out of here! It's good to know God is near enough to hear our petitions. But God surely cannot expect us to pray for these people!

The punch line left them dumbfounded: For in its welfare you will find your welfare.

For all their illusion of separateness, of uniqueness and privileged status as God's special nation, the Israelites had to learn that they were inextricably bound not only to those within their inner circle and to the God they had so blatantly disobeyed but also to these "others" and to the land where God had put them. And among those strangers and in that land, they were to proactively seek life and establish homes. They were to put down deep roots in that soil. Only then would their lives be plenteous and would they honor their Creator God. Their dreams and hopes were not to hinge on a future escape. Their condition was intertwined with that of the people and place where God had situated them. In its welfare you will find your welfare.


ChristopherLLHighlight


Growing into Hopeful Home-Builders The biblical narrator who relates Jeremiah's symbolic

action and the challenge issued to the exiled Israelites was not driven by postmodern ecological concerns. Nowhere in the text do we read about environmentalism, cycling or recycling, reducing consumption and C02 emissions, growing organically or researching alternative energy sources. Even so, God speaks to us today through the stories of Jeremiah.

Both Jeremiah and the exiled Israelites, like Noah of old, were being schooled in the ABCs of creation-community. They needed to learn to value the life-granting connections within which the God-community had designed them to live: God, God's people, God's land. When any one of these relationships was broken, all three shattered. In their self-sufficiency and idolatry, they had wandered far from God. That had made them incapable of caring properly for one another. The powerful among them had used the land as their private property to be exploited for their own advantage, with no regard for its health or the plight of those deprived of it. They had grown incapable of caring for God's earth. God would only gather them again as a people in the land he was entrusting to them once they had learned afresh where they fit in the creation-community.

We too sorely need this school. We also need to learn to live as restfully responsible We too are called members of the creation-community. We to buy land, build too are called to buy land, build houses, houses, plant gardens, plant gardens, have children, and look have children, and forward to grandchildren in this, God's look forward to good earth. Far from envisioning salvation grandchildren in this, as an escape from our broken world, we God s good earth' are commanded to pray for its welfare and

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put down roots deep in its soil in full confidence that God is with us and that God's good purposes for the entire creation will be fulfilled.

So where do we begin? How we can become home-planters in God's world? How are we to go about living creation-community here and now? The challenge issued by God to the exiled Israelites provides us with some pointers. On-going, Radical Conversion Engenders Hope and Bold Advocacy

In evangelical circles, much stress is placed on accepting Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. Many can even mention the date of their conversion. Let's expand that

concept. Conversionimplies radical change, a total shift of direction, of orientation.

As broken people, And as broken people, we stand in need of we stand in need of not one but many conversions. Conversion not one but many from individualism to community, from conversions. autonomy to interdependence, from

idolatry to true worship, from grasping to receiving, from oppressive dominion over

creation to loving care of it, from indifference to passionate, prayerful action, from Western definitions of "development" to loving participation, from competition to collaboration, from protagonism to service.

One essential conversion demands a little elaboration. Imagine his neighbors' reaction when Jeremiah buys land in the crumbling city. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the exiled Israelites. They had all grown accustomed to believing that what was was what should be. They were bound by the tyranny of a hopeless "presentism" and had become resigned conspirators in destruction. I dare say God's people today are often living under the same oppression.





Things are so big and so bad that we despair and fling our arms up in helplessness. But a political and economic realism that denies people the freedom to imagine other scenarios denies the power of Christ's resurrection, simply reinforces the status quo, and deprives women and men of the necessary responsibility for change. As Christians, we cannot allow our hope to be co-opted by such pessimism. The stark reality we grapple with must be named, but the story of God's ongoing, loving involvement with his Caring, faithful, truthful creation is grounds enough for hope. relationships are at the core With sober, tempered optimism, of any hope for a better we can, by God's grace, engage in world. And these are gifts restored relations with one another of grace, granted by the and fight against whatever hinders God-who-is-community. those relationships, be it unequal opportunity, racial prejudice, unjust business practices, ethnocentrism, or abuse of creation. Caring, faithful, truthful relationships are at the core of any hope for a better world. And these are gifts of grace, granted by the God-who-is-community.

The first step toward living as the creation community is conversion. We, like the Israelites of old, need to be liberated from hopelessness, indifference, and impassive contribution to the degradation of God's earth. We need to see things as they are and remember God's covenant with creation. We also need to look forward in hopeful yearning to God's complete renewal of all things.

In addition, hope provides the grounds for bold advocacy. In Globalization challenged - Conviction, Conflict, Community, George Rupp calls people to bring their social visions and commitments, their underlying convictions, to the table of respectful conversation for a "comparative appraisal,"

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which is "unavoidably critical" and "self-critical." People need to be "prepared to be public advocates for what their convictions imply for society as a whole."2 Christians need not shy away from contributing from the stores of their faith

and experience. Rather, we are called to step out respectfully and offer the

We need an ongoing resources and gifts we have received conversion of hopefulness f

r0m God for the common good of before we can even begin humanity and the world as a whole. to imagine and advocate

TA7 . r r .. . ., We need an ongoing conversion 01 for alternatives to the i_ r u r i~ J , . , hopefulness before we can even begin mess we re im

to imagine and advocate for alternatives to the mess we're in!

Let's go back now to the exiled Israelites and how the recovery of God's image in us has economic and ecological implications. "Build Houses and Live in Them": A Living Proclamation of God's Sovereignty Over All the Earth

When as God's people we are tempted to allow our expectations of the world-to-come make us indifferent to the world today, when like the Israelites of old we see our present place as so temporary that we need not be concerned about its welfare, the God-community calls us to build houses and live in them. We are called to a rooted commitment. We are not just "a passing by," as the old song rings. Instead, we are called to proclaim in bold word and consistent lifestyle that the entire earth belongs to God.

2 George Rupp, Globalization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community,

University Seminars/Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures (New York: Columbia UP, 2006), 7.


ChristopherLLComment on TextThis would be a great quote to include in the talk.


My heart: Christ's Home has been a best-selling title for decades. Guided on a symbolic walk through each room in their house, readers are encouraged to submit every last corner of their individual lives to Christ's authority. Personal discipleship is clearly a core dimension of the Christian life. Jesus sent his followers to make disciples wherever life took them. But he did not stop there. "All authority," he said, "in heaven and on earth has been given to me" (Matt 28:18). Christ owns and holds authority over more than just our personal lives. Christ owns the entire earth and all that is in it. God's earth is Christ's home. No land is my land; no land is your land. No land, for that matter, belongs to any nation state. These are modern constructs that society expects us to defend patriotically at A key question is: all cost, to the detriment of the life of "Does Christ's dwelling in their inhabitants and of the very land our hearts affect the way we they claim as a sovereign possession. dwell on God's earth?" All land belongs to God. And we, as God's children, must proclaim it and live in light of that proclamation. A key question is: "Does Christ's dwelling in our hearts affect the way we dwell on God's earth?"

In addition, the exiled Israelites needed to learn that God was sovereign over them not only in the physical territory of Judah but anywhere he led them. As the owner of every last corner of the earth, God is not bound by humanly constructed borders. God can take his people to other places and enlist them to serve his good purposes in strange lands and among "other" people because those lands and those people also belong to him.

Recognizing the entire earth as Christ's home has radical implications for our use of natural resources. We cannot

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continue as agents of or indifferent accomplices to the earth's destruction. We must denounce all actions that make any part of the world an inhospitable place for God's creatures, human and non-human, and, hence, for the divine owner of the home. But loving what God loves and caring for Christ's property can be risky business. The long-lasting struggle of the indigenous people, of our Nazarene brothers and sisters in Amazonian Peru, and of priests in the tropical forests of Honduras and Brazil attests to the fact that confronting the powers of rampant exploitation may well cost us dearly. But proclaim we must.

So what does it mean for God's people today to build houses and live in them and so proclaim the earth as God's property? Are we willing to address the tough questions related to the millions of people who today are deprived of land on which to build and live-refugees, immigrants, the rural and urban poor? Who do we build houses for in today's global economy? Where do we build them? What do we build them with? Who actually lives in them? Who do we make room for in our houses, in our inner sanctums? Can we conceive of new ways of owning? All these are economic questions we cannot avoid if we desire to live as a creation-community that openly proclaims that the entire world belongs to God. Plant Gardens and Eat Their Produce: Recovering Our Relationship to the Earth in the Creation-Community

When the Israelites were dragged into exile by the Babylonians, forced away from their people and their place, they were at risk of losing an essential dimension of their identity: their relationship with the land. So early on they are exhorted to plant gardens and eat their produce,



not only because they need sustenance but also because they need to ensure restored relations with God's earth. Created in the image of the God-community, we only live out our full humanity when we relate in a healthy manner to our Creator, to other human beings, and to the earth. These three relationships are so intricately interwoven that Christopher Wright affirms in The Mission of God that our relationship to the earth is a gauge of the quality of the other two fundamental relationships.3 And in Colossians Remixed, Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat affirm:

Our renewal as image-bearing caretakers of the earth must be rooted in a renewed relationship with the Creator through receiving forgiveness for our covenant-breaking idolatry, and perhaps there is a sense in which we must also seek forgiveness from creation itself... Ecological renewal and restoration require a spirituality of repentance for our blasphemous destruction of this good earth.4

Care of the earth is a spiritual matter, and rampant destruction of it is blasphemy, an offense to our Creator.

So what might it look like for God's people today to plant gardens, eat their produce, and so restore our broken relationship with God's earth? How do we engage in this ecological dimension of life on our planet? How do we stop "murdering creation," as Wendell Berry puts it? Land reform, agriculture, food security, and water conservation all are significant parts of the picture. So are all endeavors to educate urbanits that eggs don't grow in cartons, nor milk in plastic or vegetables on trays. Plant gardens! And

3 Christopher Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand

Narrative (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2006), 76-79. 4 Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the

Empire (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004), 195-96.

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ask: Who eats their produce? Who is most affected by agro-industry's monopoly of seed generation? What alternatives are we fostering? These questions are at the core of restoring the creation-community. Take Wives, Bear Sons and Daughters: Family and Church as Fertile Ground for Converted Covenantal Relations

God's call to the exiled Israelites pointed to economic and ecological concerns, things having to do with the broader oikos/home. Yet the call also included the smaller scale but enormously significant realm of family life, marriage, children, and grandchildren. In the intimacy of this community, values and attitudes, priorities and lifestyles are molded. Here seeds are planted, of consumption or simplicity, of greed or sufficiency and hospitality, of competition or collaboration, of inclusion or exclusion. Families-nuclear and extended, biological or not-are central actors in the economic and ecological scene. Ron Sider rightly challenges:

When Christian leaders go to government to call for sweeping structural change, we have more integrity and power when we can say: "We are part of Christian communities that are already beginning to live out what we are calling you to legislate." Our call for costly changes in foreign policy toward the Two-Thirds World designed to implement greater global economic justice has integrity only if we are a part of Christian congregations that are already beginning to incarnate a more simple lifestyle that points toward a more just, ecologically sustainable planet. Our call for nuclear disarmament and international peace has




integrity only if there is growing peace and wholeness in our families and churches.5

We can add: When we advocate at Copenhagen, when we pray for a change of heart in world leaders, when we demand budget commitments from our governments for research into alternative sources of energy, when we boycott a food monopoly or recommend adaptation measures, our call for justice will have integrity if, at the same time, those of us who are counted among the rich and powerful of our world think twice before using another piece of paper, taking long hot showers, driving gas-guzzling cars, purchasing packaged food, tossing recyclable items in the trash, and so on. None of these measures is too small.

On the subject of small, in Small is Beautiful, E. E Schumacher challenges the assumption that progress consists of "ever-greater size, ever-higher speeds, and ever-increased violence, in defiance of the laws of We must strive, he natural harmony." We must strive, he continues, to redirect continues, to redirect technological technological development development "back to the real needs "back to the real needs of of man..., to the actual size of man. man...to the actual size Man is small, and therefore, small is of man. Man is small... To beautiful. To go for giantism is to go go for giantism is to go for for self-destruction."6 self-destruction. "

He also states, The chance of mitigating the rate of resource depletion or of bringing harmony into the relationships between those in possession of wealth and power and those without is non-existent as long as there is no idea

Ronald Sider, in Sojourners' Voice of the Day, September 25,2006. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 169.

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anywhere of enough being good and more-than-enough being evil.7

Families and local faith communities are ideal spaces for new generations to learn to distinguish between needs and wants and between enough and too much, hopefully before they acquire the disease of consumerism that is slowly killing us all. Seek the Welfare of the City: Sabbath and Jubilee

The last command to the Israelites had to do not just with their families, their plots of land, or their homes but with the welfare of the entire city and the land with which it was intermeshed. God's law, the norms established for the life of God's people, made provision for the welfare of all those whom commerce and war, migration and marriage would bring together and for the very land they inhabited and which offered them sustenance. Conditions were

stipulated to ensure the livelihood and restoration of the weakest among them:

These were widows, orphans, strangers, and even socioeconomic and criminals. In the year of Jubilee, those ecological measures who had fallen into slavery were to be designed by God to freed and lost land was to be returned guarantee right, just to its original owner. Likewise, every relations not only seventh year was a Sabbath year, a year between people but also of rest, during which the Israelites were between God's people and not supposed to sow or reap the land his earth. but allow it to be renewed. These were

socioeconomic and ecological measures designed by God to guarantee right, just

relations not only between people but also between God's people and his earth.

Ibid., 315, italics added.



ChristopherLLSticky Notewhat is above can begin to take place at a macrolevel if it is flourishing at the micro level, the family.



In our precipitous race to produce and consume, to prove and improve, to sell and excel-even as Christian leaders, development workers, and advocates for environmental care-, Jubilee and Sabbath are both practices that more than ever today can contribute to living out our calling of creation-community. Jubilee: the year of reckoning, of wrongs being set right, of redistribution, of release on the part of those who have too much (imagine: there is such a thing as having too much!) and of receiving on the part of those who have too little (too many in our world know what that is like!). And Sabbath: Times of quiet recollection during which we allow our striving hearts to stop, to listen, to receive, to tune in to the song of nature, to the stirrings of God's Spirit. Sabbath: Our gift of rest for the earth so it, too, can be renewed. They are times of waiting-like Noah and all the inhabitants of the ark, like the exiled Israelites-for God's work to be completed.

In the Beginning and in the End: God-With Us We have heard powerfully the Genesis story revealed

to Moses, the story that explained who we are as part of creation and who God is. And we were reminded that in the beginning, even before the beginning, God. We have heard the Noah story of a second beginning, where again God was there. We joined Isaiah in the confident awareness of another beginning, of the new heavens and the new earth which have already come yet will only be fulfilled in good time, again by God. And we will close our biblical reflection with the final words of Jeremiah's letter, again centered on God:8

For thus says the Lord: When seventy years are completed for Babylon...

The passages in this section are from Jeremiah 29:10-14.

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Strikingly, God counts the years not from the perspective of the exiles but in terms of the years in which the land and people of Babylon will count on the presence of God's people among them! .../ will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. And here is God's overflowing grace and love: For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare... Plans for welfare, for wholeness where all had been broken, of community where it had been torn apart! .. .plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Alienation, estrangement-this entire mess-is not the final story! And the best is yet to come: Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me... Remember how God sought humanity in the garden: "Where are you?" ...when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you...and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. Again we see the theme of exile, of banishment from the garden, of that natural consequence of humanity's rebellion. But God yearns to bring his people back home!

And as it was in the first beginning, so, too, in all new beginnings: God. God. God!



Do we want to live creation-community in the midst of the ravages of human greed and deprivation, environmental degradation and climate change? Let us continue to be profoundly perplexed but not paralyzed. Let us remain restfully responsible. In summation, let us first seek God, his kingdom, his justice, and allow the rest to be granted tous.

I close with a prayer: It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long

view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is

God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the kingdom always lies

beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church's mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. It may be incomplete; but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the

rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder

and the worker. 71

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9

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own. This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our

capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.9

These reflections have been attributed to the martyred Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, although they were written by Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw and shared in a homily by Cardinal John Dearden in November of 1979.


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creation-community - thoughts on jeremiah 29.5-7

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