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Texts —
Jeremiah 29:4-7
Thus says the Lord of
hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile
from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens
and eat what they produce. 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. 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.
For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the
prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not
listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are
prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the Lord.
Luke 4:21-29
Then he began to say to
them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All
spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from
his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them,
‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!”
And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we
have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no
prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. But the truth is, there
were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was
shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine
over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow
at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time
of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the
Syrian.’ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with
rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of
the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off
the cliff.
The Bible is a very rich, multi-layered piece of literature. That goes
without saying, but there I’ve gone ahead and said it anyway. One of the
most important Biblical symbols is a city. Sometimes, a city is just a
location where a lot of people live. But major cities — like Sodom and
Gomorrah, Athens, Rome, and especially Jerusalem and Babylon, represent
a state of mind, a mentality, or a spiritual condition. Jerusalem
represents hope, and God’s promise. Babylon represents captivity,
bondage, loss of hope. It’s the polar opposite of Jerusalem.
With that in mind, it’s striking that the fiery prophet Jeremiah tells
the Jewish exiles in Babylon to work for the welfare of that city. Its
welfare, he says, will be your welfare.
You’d expect Jesus’ hometown to represent comfort, belonging,
acceptance, and security. Well … it doesn’t work out that way. Jesus’
hometown is a hostile place — for Jesus.
So, to put these stories side by side — Babylon represents everything
you don’t want, and Jeremiah says to pray for it. Jesus’ hometown should
represent what you do want, but the people there become enemies of
Jesus.
What kind of relationship do we have with the city? I’m sure we’d all
say that we want a good relationship with the city. We want to be good
neighbors. We want to be in good standing with the city leaders and
businesses. We want to make a contribution to the city’s welfare.
Back in the mid-nineties, we had an advertising campaign in support of
Middletown. At the time downtown Middletown wasn’t looking too great.
There were a lot of empty storefronts. That caused a lot of anxiety. It
felt kind of depressing. We took out a full page ad in the Middletown
Press with a bold headline, “We Love Middletown” and the ad said that we
intended to love our city actively by getting involved in it. And we’ve
done that. We can always do more, but we’ve embodied that spirit in many
ways over the years.
This next point might seem like a contradiction to that statement, but
it isn’t. We can love the city. We can pray for its welfare. But the
city’s mindset, the mentality of the city, its culture, is not the same
thing as our mindset, our spiritual outlook as a Christian community.
Our job as a church isn’t to be a good neighbor by blindly following
wherever the city and its leaders want to take us. Our job as a church
is to follow Jesus, and see where that takes us.
We’re not the Democrat party at prayer. We’re not the Republican Party
at prayer. We’re not the Chamber of Commerce at prayer. We’re a church.
Our job is to shape the culture of the city. It’s not to embrace that
culture uncritically just to be agreeable.
I mentioned the early 90s, when those storefronts were empty. One of the
things going on in the mindset of the city at that time was fear of
people with mental illness.
In 1989, a CVH patient who was AWOL stabbed a killed a young girl,
Jessica Short, on Main St. in 1989 during a sidewalk sale. It was a
terrible, shocking tragedy, no doubt about it. And it stirred up a lot
of fear and outrage at CVH. The whole hospital was locked down for 6
weeks. That turned out to be a massive civil rights violation, and the
patients prevailed in a federal lawsuit that resulted in the formation
of the CT Legal Rights Project to protect the constitutional rights of
patients from out- of-control fear.
Within a few years, not that many years, there were leaders of
Middletown who blamed that CVH patient and CVH itself, the whole
institution, for all the problems on Main Street.
I’ll never forget a meeting of downtown business people — this was in
the mid to late 90s. At this meeting, everyone was asked to name what
they saw as the biggest problem with Main Street. One individual, a
local attorney, who came to hold a significant position in Middletown’s
government, said that the biggest problem was “the presence of people
with mental illness.”
He didn’t say the fear of mental illness. He didn’t say prejudices or
stigmas attached to mental illness. I pushed him on this statement at
the time, and he stuck with his answer. In his mind, the biggest
negative in Middletown was the presence of people with mental illness. I
guess he felt that people with mental illness don’t have a right to
exist, and if they would just go away, or be kept away, our city would
be a better place.
Fortunately, not everyone in the city feels that way. But many people do
have fears about mental illness. We’re not always sure how to act, or we
feel uncomfortable dealing with someone experiencing a disruptive
symptom of mental illness. Feeling anxious is one thing. And we do need
sometimes to be direct and proactive with people who do things that
can’t be tolerated. Finding that line may be tough, but there is a line.
(Here followed an account of some disruptive visitors who came to church
one Sunday morning about 10 years ago, who interrupted the service and
wanted to change the agenda to theirs. These were disciples of the
notorious “Julius Christ”.) I asked them to follow the program or please
leave, and they left. Before they left, they proclaimed loudly: “The
judgment of God is upon you.” I said, “We can live with that.” (One of
my best lines of all time.) I’ll come back to that.
On March 14 we’re going to have a 2nd hour on mental illness, what it
means to welcome people with mental illness, why it’s important to talk
about mental illness, how to deal with our fears, how to deal with
someone you might encounter whose mental illness is causing that person
to be disruptive or frightening.
You shouldn’t feel guilty for feeling anxious. And there are ways to
deal with every situation. But it’s something else to declare that a
whole class of people should be kept away because their presence, their
existence, is a problem. Fear of mental illness and the desire to keep
people who experience away is one example of the culture or mindset of a
city.
The church’s role is to work for and pray for the welfare of the city.
But that doesn’t mean slavishly accepting and adopting and reinforcing
the dominant culture just because it’s dominant. A couple hundred years
ago, the dominant mindset was that African people weren’t fully human.
That mindset needed to change. The dominant culture used to say that
women aren’t rational beings, capable of making decisions and voting
responsibly. That mindset needed to change. Today, there is a mindset
that spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting wars in faraway
mountainous countries is a smart thing to do because it makes us safer
from terrorism. Does it really? How big a threat is terrorism, really?
Is that a better way to spend our money than helping people have clean
water, and medical care, and recover from earthquakes?
The “city” of New Britain wanted to shut down the Food Not Bombs group
up there because they didn’t like the “Not Bombs” part of the name. I’m
not making that up. It’s documented in emails that were obtained by the
Freedom of Information Act. The City of Middletown Health Department
agreed and jumped on the bandwagon under the pretense of protecting
public health. That’s what that controversy was all about.
Jeremiah tells the exiles in Babylon, “… seek the welfare of the city
... in its welfare you will find your welfare.’ Love Middletown. The
world can use more love. But love isn’t always welcome. When Jesus
simply said that God also blesses non-Jews, his neighbors wanted to
throw him off a cliff.
We are not called to follow wherever the dominant culture and mindset
would lead us. We are called to follow Jesus. Our role won’t always be
appreciated. And someone might say, even the Mayor might say, “The
judgment of God is upon you.”
Ah yes, the judgment of God. God will sort it out in the end. We can
live with that.
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