Independence Day Sunday, 2011 Immanuel Chapel, Jeremiah 29:4-14
It would have been helpful if Jeremiah had included a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens in his letter to the exiles in Babylon. According to the Lord’s directives, they were to, “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat of their produce.” Jeremiah advised them to seek the welfare of Babylon and “pray to the Lord on its behalf.” These exiles were the Lord’s own chosen people. Moses had predicted centuries before they would provoke the Lord to anger by turning away from their Creator and Savior. Now the result of their action was upon them. God sent his own people far from their homes.
We are all descendants of people who turned away from the Lord. Thus he sent Adam and Eve into exile from their blessed and happy homeland, the Garden of Eden, the perfect Paradise. But God’s blessing of fruitfulness and our responsibility to care for the earth was not withdrawn. Though we now toil to make the soil produce, we have within us the urge to make our patch of planet a pleasant place to live. On the other hand, sin makes us imperfect caretakers of a world which itself groans under the burden of humanity’s rebellion. When you leave today, look to the west where acres of vacant asphalt covered parking lots prevent the earth from producing and reproducing according the blessing of God. On the other hand, east and north we see homes and a striving to gain a bit of Paradise and Eden.
On this Independence Day Sunday we are reminded that the Lord has placed us exiles from Eden in a good and pleasant land. Oh, I know not the land is “America the Beautiful.” I have a photo of my immigrant grandparents standing on either side of a huge boulder which thousands of years ago was deposited by a glacier. There it rested in the middle of a field with countless smaller stones defying the efforts of August and Johanna to farm the land they homesteaded. Nevertheless, others saw our continent as a slice of paradise. Minnesota boasts both Eden Prairie and Eden Valley. Arizona and California each have a Paradise Valley while New Mexico claims Paradise Hills. Seven other states from Maryland to Utah have either a Paradise or an Eden.
Our forebears came to this land in numerous ways for numerous reasons. The forced march which the captives of Judah faced in being driven into exile in Babylon, finds a counterpart in those whose ancestors were forced into exile from home and homeland. Out of that experience the African American spiritual proclaimed that we do believe we shall overcome; therefore we are not afraid, because God is on our side today. So whether we have come as my grandfather did, with six other young men from Berlin, to adventure into their future in a new land, or as my grandmother did to escape a society in Pomerania mired in the middle ages or we are among more recent immigrants to find a life in this country, we celebrate its 235th birthday tomorrow. As we make our home in this blessed land of freedom and opportunity, we are called to seek its welfare, “for in its welfare” is our welfare.
God promised the exiles in Babylon, “I will visit you,… and bring you back to this place.” Later the Lord says, “In those days I will cause a righteous branch to spring up…(you) will be saved… and the name by which it will be called (is) ‘The Lord is my righteousness.’” We hear those words with ears which tell of a hope beyond our earthly life. They are words of a promise of being made right with God, despite our sins placing us on the wrong side of God. We are unable to put ourselves right with God. God, in Jesus Christ, does it for us. In Jesus Christ, God fulfilled his promise given before the founding of our United States, yes, given before the founding of all creation, to come and visit us.
That visitation was set into motion when, God sent an angel to visit a young maiden named Mary and announce to her that through her God was preparing to bring the human race from its exile from paradise. In Jesus, God became flesh and visited his creation. He did not come to inspect our lives to see whether we were living up to the responsibility he had given us to be caretakers of his creation and of one another. Not at all, that inspection had been done through the ages and we came up short of his expectations every time. Rather, he came to put into action the plans he had for us. Not plans to do us evil, for the evil we have done, but a plan to make us whole once again, to give us a hope and a future. “I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.” God’s decision to drive us into exile from paradise is reversed on the cross. There Jesus asks His heavenly Father to forgive our ignorant actions. He says to the repentant thief, “Today you shall be with me in paradise.” He did this for us, that when we pray to him, he hears, when we seek him, he will be found.
While we occupy this blessed land with all its freedoms, we await that time when he will restore us to Paradise again. Then when he has gathered all his scattered believers from around the world, our exile will be over and we will live in the land of the living forever. In the meantime, we make ourselves at home in the land he has given us, where grow amber waves of grain, and purple mountain majesties rise above the fruitful plain.
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