Between What Was and What Next

Jeremiah 29: 1, 4 – 7 (NRSVUE)

 

Let’s begin with some context about the words you’ve heard from Jeremiah this day.  Jeremiah’s voice, throughout his prophetic work, is often harsh and chastising. At this point in the text, Jeremiah is speaking to the Jews who have been brutally and definitively exiled from Jerusalem, the geographic place they understood God to reside.  

 

Now imagine that. They have spent generations orienting their faith and the resulting practice around a place where God. Having moved from a tent to a temple, they have established traditions and rituals in Jerusalem, and they have built their daily lives around that place where God dwells. 

 

And now amidst land grabs and political wrangling, they have lost that place.

And even worse, they are sent to Babylon – a place full of folks who believe and practice very different things – a place where there are many, many, many gods with a lower case G to whom people sacrifice, for their crops, for their power, for their physical well-being, for their fertility.  Not one God but many.  A place where the food is different – all those food laws the Jews knew are a hardship because the goods for that diet may not be readily available. Maybe there is no priest nearby or no mikvah for ritual cleanliness.

 

Everything is different. Everything they knew is lost. Everything that once was no longer is.

 

As the psalmist writes in the 137^th psalm:

By the rivers of Babylon—
    there we sat down, and there we wept
    when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
    we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
    asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How could we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land?

 

And into that sorrow, here is the prophet Jeremiah saying – buck up, little camper. Built houses. Plant crops. Marry. Reproduce. And pray for your enemy.

 

Let that sink in. 

 

This text is one that I learned and began to understand long before I was connected to my own faith, my own practice, my own call.  Maybe it was really the beginning of my call…the earliest whispering before I could possibly understand.  I was working a fundraising job at the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis, alongside the relatively new rector, Fr. Michael O’Connell. He had come to this urban parish where the historic sanctuary was undergoing $15 million in vital structural repairs, with a dual calling from the Bishop – pay for the new roof and revitalize the urban community this parish occupies.  

 

Cut off from most neighborhoods by the interstate, city sprawl, and a growing community college, the once vibrant three-story parish school on the property was shuttered. The mammoth sanctuary, a co-cathedral in the archdiocese, occupied a city block bordered on one side by I-94 and on the other by a vacated and seedy parking garage. Also on the campus was a very old and majestic rectory built about the same time as the sanctuary and school, and a newer convent building that had a bad case of circa 1965 architecture that complimented none of the surrounding buildings. 

 

I sat in a lot of meetings with Fr. O’Connell discussing fundraising prospects. He used these meetings to practice his pitches to major donors. I learned a lot about fundraising in those meetings as a 23 year old. But I also learned something else.

Fr. O’Connell had a twinkle in his eye – always.  You know how, when someone is super excited about something, super passionate, you can feel it in the way they carry their bodies, the way they use their voice, the way their eyes seek yours to make sure you see what it is they see?

 

Fr. O’Connell felt called to seek the well-being of the city in which he’d been sent. That old parking garage next door? He envisioned housing for single moms who needed help in order to keep a job and go to college.  That shuttered school building? Perhaps daycare and social services, and eventually a return to classrooms full of kids. 

 

Oh, and that dead-end street that ran alongside the interstate? An amazing outdoor music venue, eventually hosting the likes of Natalie Merchant, the Wallflowers, the Cranberries, the Barenaked Ladies, and more recently the Brandi Carlile and Kacey Musgrave. 

 

And by the way, that concert series – known as the Basilica Block Party – had a wicked ad campaign annually including billboards throughout the city that said things like, “Tell your mom you spent the weekend at church,” and “Praise the Loud” and “The end is near and then comes an encore” and “He so loved the world that he sent many bands.”

 

Now… this old and historic parish had a membership that included long-standing members who remembered the “good old days…” They were saddened by the leaking roof of the sanctuary that had, on at least two occasions, dropped chunks of plaster or even limestone from the ceiling and its supports. They were proud of their tradition as a venue for the very best classical music – because the building had AMAZING acoustics.  They were saddened that the shuttering of the school had drained families from their pews. 

 

But Fr. O’Connell was really clear about vision. “The Jeremiah Project” took shape, and while I couldn’t quote a lot of scripture at that point in my life…I knew Jeremiah 29: 7:

 

But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

 

I knew it in my heart, and even now, 28 years later, it is a scripture always close at hand – one I can imagine and dream about right here at 6810 Montrose Rd. And within a couple of years of Fr. O’Connell’s arrival, every person in the parish knew that scripture, knew its context and knew what it meant to that parish and its vision for the future.

 

Fr. O’Connell’s vision about single moms in poverty is now housed in the Jeremiah Program, a national organization with this as their vision:

 

a world where poverty is no longer feminized; where race is not divorced from gender; where career and financial opportunities are not gentrified; and where women who experience poverty not only hold a seat at the table but hold the mic and curate the agenda.

 

While headquartered in Minneapolis, the Jeremiah Program has campuses in seven cities nationwide and is gearing up for more sites – both residential and non-residential.

 

The block party, conceived as one way of generating funds to support the vision for the Jeremiah Program and other justice work, lasted 25 years (and may return, but COVID has caused some work to reimagine it).

 

While I was there, a member committed to hospitality lobbied for donuts and coffee at the back of the sanctuary on Sunday mornings. You would have thought she was recommending belly dancing during worship. But in spite of protests about food and respect for the sanctuary, donuts showed up and so did people seeking sustenance – they still do.

 

And the Basilica has (and never failed to have) a robust classical music series through it all, still hosting at least 30 concerts each year in the sanctuary.  

 

The Basilica School has been refurbished and now houses a robust Montessori program for children from birth to age six. 

 

The membership is diverse and thriving.

 

As I recalled all of this and caught up on what is now, I once again felt the stirring I felt sitting in Fr. O’Connell’s office. And that stirring connects to a stirring that began in my own heart when I sat in the parking lot at 6810 Montrose waiting to meet the SPRC as the newly appointed pastor at Faith.

 

If I had describe stirring, it is things like this:

God is always doing a new thing.

God calls us to join God’s work in the new thing.

God is at the center of what is next.

Scripture points the way.

We can faithfully honor the past and move toward God’s next.

 

I am aware that sometimes, it feels like we are situated in Babylon.

Christianity is being torn apart by misinformation and disinformation and misplaced loyalty.

People don’t go to church the way that they used to, because frankly, Christianity can seem a little hypocritical and irrelevant.

Our neighborhood is different than it was in 1964 when Faith Church was planted – it is full of folks from all over the world who experience God from their own history, context, hope and understanding.

 

Maybe sometimes we weep remembering “the way things were.”

And…into this, the prophet’s words ring:

 

29:5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.

29:6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.

29:7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

 

May it be so.

Amen.