Make Your Home Here: An Exile Survival Guide

Jeremiah describes how progressive Christians can live faithfully in today's world where we feel such grief.  Read Jeremiah 29

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

September 7, 2025

“Written on My Heart”

Jeremiah 29: 1a, 5-7, 10-14 – Common English Bible

The prophet Jeremiah sent a letter from Jerusalem to the few surviving elders among the exiles, 

5 Build houses and settle down; cultivate gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Get married and have children; then help your sons find wives and your daughters find husbands in order that they too may have children. Increase in number there so that you don’t dwindle away. 7 Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because your future depends on its welfare.

10 The Lord proclaims: When Babylon’s seventy years are up, I will come and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. 11 I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope. 12 When you call me and come and pray to me, I will listen to you. 13 When you search for me, yes, search for me with all your heart, you will find me. 14 I will be present for you, declares the Lord, and I will end your captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have scattered you, and I will bring you home after your long exile,[a] declares the Lord.

Jeremiah was young when God called him to be a prophet – a spokesman for God.  His response?  “I’m just a boy, but I am willing.” God promised to help by putting the words in Jeremiah’s mouth.  For thirty years now, he has been saying the same thing.  He kept nagging:  Stop crushing the poor.  Stop hoarding wealth.  Stop pretending worship can cover injustice.  But you know what’s worse than a nag?  He was a doomsayer.  One of those street corner preachers:  If you don’t change your ways, expect the worst.

Well finally, in 597 BCE, the worst began.  An invasion by the Babylonians.  But it only just the beginning.  At first, Babylon didn’t destroy the city; they emptied it.  The young king was marched out in chains.  They carried off the educated and the elite — metalworkers, masons, carpenters, scribes, teachers.  They loaded temple treasures onto carts: bowls, basins, lampstands that had once shone in holy light.  The Temple still stood, doors open to prayer.  But everyone could see the vessels were gone.  Worship went on — of course it did — but it sounded thinner.  Life was much quieter – fewer voices, looms silent, pottery wheels still.  One question whispered through every street and market stall:  How long?

Prophets like Hananiah stepped in with comforting promises.  “Two years.  Two years and this national nightmare will end.”  Other prophets chimed in:  “Soon.  It will all be over very soon.  God will bring us home.”  People loved these prophets for saying that.  All except one cranky guy.  Think of the old man who yells, “Get off my lawn!”  To make his point, Jeremiah walked around with a yoke strapped to his shoulders – the kind used on horses and oxen to steer them.  He kept saying, “We are under Babylon’s rule.  This is not going away.”

He wrote the same thing in a letter to the exiles:  “Make your home there.  Build houses.  Plant gardens.”  Which means, this will not be a quick trip out of town.  He told them to “marry.  Have children.  Teach them songs that will not be forgotten.  Seek the wellbeing of the city where you live, for your flourishing is bound up with their flourishing.”

Beautiful, right?  His letter landed like a cup of cold water in the face.  It wasn’t what anyone wanted to hear.  Shemaiah even wrote to the leaders in Jerusalem demanding that Jeremiah be punished for opposing “hope.”  Jeremiah told them to build houses and seek the welfare of the city where you live.

And history shows they did.  Archaeologists found records that they dug irrigation canals, planted date palms, and in that slow work of surviving, something new began to grow.  Cut off from the Temple, they discovered that God was not limited to one place.  They gathered in homes to pray, and those gatherings became the seeds of the synagogue.

They told and retold the stories of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses leading the people through the sea, of Ruth choosing loyalty in a foreign land, of David rising from shepherd boy to king — stories of God’s faithfulness, stories of liberation, stories that reminded them they were more than victims.  They wrote those stories down and wove them together, until the scattered scrolls became the scriptures we hold today.  

They lifted up the psalms — songs of lament and songs of freedom — and found they still rang true by the rivers of Babylon – where they no longer wept but lived. 

History says they stayed in Babylon more than fifty years.  Scripture says seventy — but that was less about a number on a calendar and more a way of naming “a full lifetime, a generation upon generation.”  They stayed until Babylon was conquered by Persia, under King Cyrus – remember his name.

By that time, the people weren’t simply exiles.  They had established themselves enough to decide:  should we return to Jerusalem with Ezra and Nehemiah to rebuild the ruins, or remain in Babylon where their children had been born and their gardens had taken root.  

But first, here’s an aside worth mentioning.  The obscure figure of King Cyrus.  Believe it or not, King Cyrus plays a very important role in country right now.  In scripture, this pagan king is hailed as “God’s anointed” — the word that also means Messiah — not because he worshiped Israel’s God, but because he allowed the exiles to return and rebuild Jerusalem.  Since at least 2016, some Christian Zionist and evangelical groups have cast Donald Trump as a modern-day Cyrus.  In 2018, evangelical leaders even gave Trump a “Cyrus Award.”  Coins were minted with his profile next to Cyrus’s when the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem.  

The message is that, like Cyrus, Trump’s behavior doesn’t matter because he is the unlikely outsider chosen by God to end the “exile” of evangelical Christians and restore their place in a “godly order.”  The first time I heard that, suddenly it made sense.  It helped me understand why some see him not as a politician, but as a figure of destiny — even a messiah figure.

But Jeremiah would not have been impressed.  His word from God spoken for decades was painfully clear:

• Stop crushing the poor.
 • Stop hoarding wealth.
 • Stop covering over injustice with worship.

That is the test by which to measure.  And by that test, the story of a messianic outsider, a pagan king, collapses.  That’s not faith — it’s idolatry.  In fact, so many of the goals of Christian nationalism are the very idol Jeremiah warned against.

• When power is the goal, the poor get crushed.
 • When wealth is the proof of blessing, hoarding feels holy.
 • When worship is used to cover harm, cruelty looks righteous – even godly.

And when those idols take hold, it leaves behind a trail of sorrow.  No wonder so many feel the weight of sadness pressing on our hearts.  Because this is not about policies or politicians.  It cuts deeper than that.  It is about who we thought we were as a people and the loss of values we believed we shared:  honesty, fairness, a shared responsibility for our communities.  That we are better when we are better together.  The Bible says our flourishing is tied up with one another.  The ache we carry over this has a name.  It is grief.

Think of the ways that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross taught us about grief.  Not a straight line to get through but the many stages.  Stages that circle back on each other, such as:  

• Denial:  Surely this cannot be happening here.  
• Anger:  How dare this be happening here.  
• Bargaining:  If only this court case or that person would speak up, the tide will turn.  
• Depression:  It’s too late and too much damage is done.  There’s nothing I can do.  
• And sometimes, when we can catch our breath, there is acceptance:  not surrender, but the holy clarity that says, This is our life now.  Make your home here. 

Acceptance does not mean we approve.  It means we tell the truth about where we are, so we can decide how to live faithfully within it.  Jeremiah told the exiles:  build houses, plant gardens, raise children, seek the good of the city.  That is not giving up — it is digging in.  It is finding hope not in illusions of “soon” or “someday,” but in the God who meets us here, even in this strange and getting stranger land.  That’s what the exiles discovered.  And so can we.

Here is where the church matters.  In the face of grief, we do not scatter — we gather.  We make our home here.  God gives us ways to bear it together.  We lament — crying out the truth of our sorrow.  We sing — lifting voices of hope until our lungs remember what our hearts forget.  We break bread — gathering at this table where Christ turns even betrayal and death into mercy and life.  And we stand shoulder to shoulder to remember:  God declares that another way is possible.  

Jeremiah does not tell his people to pin their hopes on a ruler who will march them home.  He says:  settle down and seek the good of the city where you live, even if it is not the city you would have chosen.  He gave them a plan not for escaping exile, but for living in it with courage and faith.  A letter that could be written to us right here, right now.  Here’s what we can do; our exile survival guide:

• Live your values out loud — show that your love is stronger than fear, and your mercy more powerful than cruelty.
• Stand with the vulnerable — because our flourishing is bound together.  Which is also true of all those whose values we used to share.  We don’t get through this without each other.
• Imagine beyond this exile — live here.  Live in the moment.  The faith practices of the exiles deepened during the exile.  But also, be ready to rebuild a city and a nation more just and generous than ever before.

• And always, always hold fast to joy — gratitude, song, and celebration that no empire, no matter who, can ever take away.

This is how grief is transformed into hope.  This is how we live faithfully in exile and flourish in a strange land.  So, make your home here – all of us together.