Reading Scripture: refusing the practical

at least in the beginning

I just finished two weeks of a seminary intensive. Every weekday for three hours, we met and talked and learned and discussed and now what’s left for the summer is a lot of reading and writing. One activity we did every day was something the professor called “Dwelling in the Word.” We focused on five different passages, spending two days on each passage, and did some work within some ground rules. Rule number one (and maybe the only firm rule): do not do anything practical with the passage. Instead, you have to notice what catches your attention. Where does your imagination wonder? What questions do you have? How does this remind you of your own life? Every single passage came alive with this exercise, though, reader be warned, I ended with far more questions than I had at the beginning. 

One of the passages we used for this work was Jeremiah 29. If you’ve grown up church circle adjacent, you’re probably familiar with Jeremiah 29:11. We print it on coffee mugs and plaster it on graduation announcements and never once consider the context of that verse. Jeremiah 29 contains a letter that Jeremiah wrote to the exiles who had been taken away from Jerusalem to Babylon. He tells them how to live in exile. We talked about this passage in class for two hours but I only want to look at two aspects today.  For sure, if you can, go and read it a few times. What catches your attention?

The Instructions

Jeremiah gave them very specific instructions. “Build houses and. Live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Find wives for yourselves and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there and do not decrease.” These are foundational instructions that seem to reverberate with “Don’t sit there and wait to be rescued. LIVE.” In class we discussed at how much would go into making this reality. You would have to get to know the people. What kind of houses stand well here? Where do you get supplies? When do you plant crops? What grows well? You have to get to know people before you can arrange marriages.¹ The people had to do a lot of situational work to follow these instructions but they still knew what the aim was. Build houses. Plant gardens. Get married. Grow your families. 

Jeremiah also gave them discerning instructions. “Pursue the well-being of the city I have deported you to. Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for when it thrives, you will thrive.” These have no concrete steps to follow. It’s up to each person to figure out what their contribution is, what it looks like where they are, if anything they have done in their lives is transferrable to this new location. The people had to do a lot of heart work in order to pursue the well-being of people who had inflicted this horrendous exile on them.² But their futures were intertwined. If they were going back to Jerusalem as a people, it would be because they lived among the people where they were. Following this part of the instructions were require constant discernment. There were no easy answers here. No cookie-cutter spots to stick oneself into.

True and False Hopes

Jeremiah goes on to warn the people about listening to false prophets. “For this is what the Lord of Armies, the God of Israel, says: ‘Don’t let your prophets who are among you and your diviners deceive you, and don’t listen to the dreams you elicit from them, for they are prophesying falsely to you in my name. I have not sent them.’ This is the Lord’s declaration. For this is what the Lord says: ‘When seventy years for Babylon are complete, I will attend to you and will confirm my promise concerning you to restore you to this place. For I know the plans I have for you’—this is the Lord’s declaration—‘plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. You will call to me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart. I will be found by you’—this is the Lord’s declaration—‘and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and places where I banished you’—this is the Lord’s declaration. ‘I will restore you to the place from which I deported you.’” If the people listened to false hope from false prophets, my guess is that it would have prevented them from following their instructions. If the false prophets had said, “Don’t worry! God will rescue us in two months!” who would build houses and plant gardens? Who would care about the welfare of the city if a return to Jerusalem seemed imminent? 

Only in realizing God’s promises could the people obey. They needed the hope that they would return to Jerusalem, that God was looking out to for them even now, or they would not be faithful. They also had to accept God’s timeline or there was no reason to do as God told them. A reminder of the truth kept them from believing something false.

Exile is a theme in the Bible from the moment that Adam and Eve were evicted from the garden. They, and all humanity, are now in exile from God’s presence. Brokenness is the stage now. Even as we find the Spirit renewing creation, we find brokenness everywhere. We share similarities with these Jewish exiles.³ We have some concrete instructions that still involve a lot of work. We find even more instructions that involve discernment. When we partner with the Spirit, the Spirit doesn’t just boss us around. We are expected to use our agency in this partnership as well. We need to grow in wisdom. We need to test our ideas. We need to try things. We need space to fail and pick a new course. We need to learn to pay attention. There are many situations where it is fine for us to simply decide and that makes a lot of us uncomfortable. We were taught something else.

We also need to care about the people around us: people who aren’t following Jesus, who don’t share our worldview. Our well-being is caught up in theirs. We are to work toward peace for our cities and we are to pray for the people among which we live. Get we need to get involved. We need to care. This passage really challenges me to consider how Christians live in an increasingly post-Christian society (and my guess is that it’s not how I’ve often seen it modeled). I think this is a model that we are going to need if we are to move forward. It seems the answer is not in shrinking back away from culture and people and society. It seems the answer is not standing up and shrieking about how wrong everyone else is. It’s not even in dealing out condemnation. Instead we participate. We contribute. We care. And in those things we follow some specific instructions and then grow in discernment for the rest. The work we did in class is going to live inside me and hopefully change how I live inside my city. 

Because of what we’ve done in class, I’d love to have a group discussion here. I’d love for us to sit with the passage for a few days, reading and praying, and then come together for a robust discussion on what it means to live this way in our own contexts.⁴ I’m not sure we can replicate our discussion in this online environment unless people want to participate in comments, but I think the conversation would help us learn to contribute where we live without compromising our own faith or expecting everyone else to be like us. Is the place better because we’re there? Are we better because they are there? May both of those things be so.

1. Not to mention the bigger question: were they marrying Babylonians?

2. Depend on the Lord to do the heart work?

3. I’m breaking the rules about the practical work here.

4. I simply cannot emphasize how contextual this type of theological work is.