June 21, 2020 “Better Hope” – Jeremiah 29:1-14

Jeremiah 29:1-14
“Better Hope”
June 21, 2020 – Third Sunday after Pentecost

When we bought our present home I was excited about living much closer to the church, being in the hills surrounded by trees, having a large extra room to turn into a library, and mowing a much smaller lawn. I focused on those and other favorable qualities of our house. What I didn’t notice or pay much attention to were the problems of dealing with a circular lot surrounded by homeowner association common area, the age of the roof and heating system, the low ceilings and the uneven floor in the upstairs hallway.

It’s called “confirmation bias.” We do it all the time. We favor facts which support the conclusions we want to draw (I wanted to buy this house) and ignore equally objective facts which count against those conclusions and beliefs. Modern psychology and sociology has done many experiments demonstrating how confirmation bias works in almost everyone’s thinking. But it was noticed long ago. The Greek historian Thucydides wrote 400 years before Christ “… for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.”

Confirmation bias is clearly operating on our national scene. If you incline to one side of the political spectrum you will tune into or read on-line one or two media outlets that favor your point of view and ignore other media. If you are on the other side politically, you will listen to those sources which support your own party and pay little attention to news programs or web sites others watch. Even among stories on the web site you do read, you are more likely to click on headlines that confirm what you already think about a politician or a current issue and ignore those which are contrary to your present thinking.

If you are a cautious person who is able to stay home without losing income or going hungry; if you are perhaps in a high-risk group, you are going to favor headlines and articles which highlight the dangers of COVID-19, the fact that numbers of cases are rising, and how important it is to social distance and wear masks. But if you live paycheck to paycheck, and the shutdowns have cost you your job, and you are young and healthy, you may click on stories which highlight how small a percentage of people actually get sick, how important it is for the economy to reopen, and how past epidemics have simply fizzled out.

Suppose you were in the sixth century B.C. Jewish upper class? Your country was invaded by a foreign army, your home was burned to the ground, and you were carried off in captivity to serve a cruel king in a strange land. You might be quite pleased to hear prophets and seers announce dreams and visions of a speedy return home and the restoration of all you’ve lost. You might ignore voices, like Jeremiah’s, to the contrary.

Verse 8 of our text reads, “Do not let the prophets and diviners who are among you deceive you, do not listen to the dreams they dream.” Literally in Hebrew it says something like, “do not listen to your dreams that you cause to dream.” The idea is that the dreams those diviners and prophets are offering come from the people they are telling them to. They are dreaming dreams to order. The NIV translation captures that idea like this, “Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have.”

Jeremiah is talking about confirmation bias in the form of which prophets his people chose to listen to. This whole text is a letter to the first wave of exiles to Babylon. When the Babylonians took over Jerusalem in 597 B.C., they deported the current king, the queen mother, the royal court and other leaders and skilled workers we see listed in verse 2. Jeremiah wrote words of warning to these captives far away in Mesopotamia.

Verse 3 shows us an ongoing diplomatic and client relationship between Judah and Babylon. Zedekiah, Babylon’s appointed Jewish king, rules Judah. He regularly communicates with king Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. The royal messengers named here, Shaphan and Gemariah, took Jeremiah’s message to the exiles along with political communiqués Zedekiah sent to Babylon.

Jeremiah was allowed to use the political postal system because his letter was favorable to Babylon. It counseled against rebellion. It counseled against any idea the rule of Nebuchadnezzar would be defeated or that exiles would come home soon. The Babylonian rulers welcomed a message that would tamp down rebellion in their captives.

This is the period between the two major Babylonian attacks on Jerusalem. After 597 B.C. the city was still intact. Yes, the king and all the leaders had been deported. Yes, Zedekiah was a puppet king on Judah’s throne. But there was still a home to go home to. The final destruction of Jerusalem and deportation of its people was still ten years away in 587 B.C. For this space of time, those in captivity wanted to hope and dream that they might be rescued, that God would come and help them, that they would go home.

The word from God through Jeremiah threw cold water on all those homey dreams. At the very beginning he tells the exiles in verse 5 to “Build houses and live in them…” Make a life there in Babylon. Plant gardens, get married, plan on sons and daughters getting married. Have children and grandchildren, raising your babies far from home.

What’s even worse for those aching to go home, Jeremiah told them to cooperate with and support their enemies. “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,” he says in verse 7. In other words, do good for the enemy. Pray for Babylon in which they were prisoners and strangers, “for in its welfare is your welfare.” If Babylon their cruel enemy prospers, they will prosper. So work and pray for Babylon.

It wasn’t what they wanted to hear. If some foreign power took over our country, how would you and I feel about a religious leader who preached that God wanted us to cooperate with the enemy, to settle down and live with the situation? So there were plenty of other prophets and visionaries who had a different picture to offer those Jewish exiles. There were those who were quite happy to dream dreams made to order, the dreams people wanted them to have, whether they were true or not.

You and I are also taken in by dreams we encourage others to have for us, whether it’s political rhetoric or a sales pitch for a house, whether it’s escape into an on-line world of entertainment or our own daydreams and fantasies about a perfect job, an ideal lover, a healthy body or a dream home. We welcome anyone who will confirm our bias toward believing our pleasant dreams might actually be true.

Confirmation bias may help make us better in some ways. It may make us ready to overlook the faults of a spouse or a friend and to maintain a relationship even when it’s hard. Our bias toward existing convictions may make us extremely loyal, and may help us hold onto faith when it gets tested by hard times. But it also makes it very difficult to let go of false beliefs and dreams once they become fixed in our hearts and minds.

We are like Charles Dickens’ loveable debtor Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield. Despite losing every penny he earns, ending up over and over in debtor’s prison, and bringing his family to destitution, Micawber lives by a dream that, someday soon, “Something will turn up.” He is undaunted by facts to the contrary, failed dreams, prison, the pitiful plight of his family, because of his dream that something better “will turn up.”

I invite us today to take the hard course counseled by Jeremiah. Let him throw cold water on our own Micawberish dreams. God wanted those exiles to put their hope and dreams in him, not in “something” that would turn up soon, whether it was a change of heart in Nebuchadnezzar or a rescuing army from Egypt. God asks us too to trust in Him and not in the dreams we want to have.

It took another invasion and the complete fall and destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C. to ultimately dash the false dreams coming from the prophets. When Nebuchadnezzar’s warriors pulled down the walls of the city and looted, burned and flattened the Temple, it finally became clear the dreams of those prophets were not true. Bryan is going to talk next week about what that means for prophecy. For right now, just note that it sometimes takes a fall for you and I to wake from a false dream.

The science fiction movie “Inception” is a story about entering other people’s dreams. A character uses that technology to steal ideas in the ultimate industrial espionage. But then he is hired to attempt “inception.” Instead of stealing an idea, he is to plant one in another man’s mind. The plot takes us through intricate levels of dreams within dreams, making us think about the way ideas, whether true or not, get planted in our own minds.

In “Inception” the trick was not to get stuck after you’ve entered someone else’s dream. What ensures getting back out is a “kick,” a device rigged to knock over your chair or drop your bed as you lie sleeping or dreaming. That feeling of falling will bring you out of whatever dream you are in.

The kick for the Jewish people in the sixth century was the fall of Jerusalem. Verse 4 has God Himself address the letter “to all the exiles I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.” God sent them to Babylon. God kicked them out of their false dreams. God still continues to kick you and me out of false dreams that hold us captive. He lets us fall in all kinds of ways so that we will turn to Him for true hope and dreams.

God has a true dream for us. He had one for those Jews exiled in Babylon. In verse 10 God says, “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back…” “Seventy years” is not an exact number. The best guess is that it’s a round figure for the 67 years from when Babylon first took over Judah in 605 B.C. until the Persians let some Jews go home in 538 B.C.

However it’s calculated, the symbolic significance of “seventy” for ancient Jews is clear. The expected lifespan in their time was as Psalm 90 verse 10 says, “three score and ten.” Seventy years was the length of a human life. Jeremiah told those exiles that none of them were going home. So settle down, plant a garden, pray for that country, because you will live out your whole life there. Your hope and promise is that your children, or your grandchildren, might go home.

God did not abandon them in Babylon. Verse 11 is a precious promise that we often rip out of context. God told them, “‘For surely I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord, “plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.’” But when we embroider that verse on cloth and frame it and hang it in our homes, we may forget the Lord made that promise to exiles, exiles kicked out of their homes and country, kicked out of all their false dreams of going home again. These were people who lived and died in a foreign country, far from what they wanted and dreamed of most.

The future with hope given those men and women and youth who would grow up and die far from home was a true dream, a dream not of their own land or homes or people, but of knowing and loving and being with God. Verses 12 and 13 are a wonderful promise that when we’ve been kicked out of all those false dreams, God still has something beautiful and good for us. “Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me, if you seek me with all your heart.”

God ruins dreams so He can give us real hope, hope in Him. He ruins dreams so our hearts won’t be divided, split between Him and some fantasy about things in this world. We find Him when we seek Him with all our hearts. That’s the promise. That’s God’s inception, the idea He wanted to plant and grow in Jewish minds and in our minds.

It worked in Babylon. The exile transformed the Jewish people spiritually. Away from the Temple, they sought God where He could be found. They learned that forgiveness and redemption came from repentance and faith rather than from burnt offerings and sacrifices. In Babylon they started gathering to read Scripture and hear it taught. That practice became the synagogue and later Christian worship. Men and women got together to read and listen to God’s Word being explained. They discovered their faith in God was not tied to one country. God is God of the whole world, not just of a little kingdom along the east edge of the Mediterranean. When Jerusalem fell, people fell out of their dreams and into the reality of the vastness and glory of God.

When our dreams fail and fall, you and I are invited to fall into that same reality of God’s glory and goodness. The greatest dream God ever planted in this world is the true dream of what He promised in verse 12. He came to us. In Jesus Christ, God came into this world. Anyone who seeks Him with a whole heart will be able to find Him and know Him and be loved by Him.

When I lose the fantasy that I am actually a good person and I fall into the reality of all my sins, my greed and my anger and my pride and all the rest, then I am also ready to fall down at the Cross of Jesus and find His grace and forgiveness. When visions of success and wealth collapse, and I plunge into the cold reality of need and worry and fear, then God is helping me find the Savior who said, “Come to me all who are weary, and I will give you rest.”

Whatever our false dreams are, God wants to save us from them. He asks us not to listen to dreams we want the prophets and preachers and politicians to have. His dreams for us are neither our fantasies nor our fears. They are not terrifying nightmares nor are they delightful daydreams. They are true promises of a hope and a future in and with Him.

Scripture is always kicking us out of false dreams. Jesus spoke to His disciples in our Gospel reading from Matthew 10 to boot them out of the dream that they could get by without being persecuted. Our passage from Romans 6 began with Paul saying a big fat “No!” to the dream that we can just keep on sinning, trusting that there will be plenty of grace to cover it all. And we have more false dreams in relation to God.

One dream about this text is that the “future with hope” here is only a personal, individual promise. I claim it for myself in a “personal relationship with Jesus.” But it’s much more. When God says He will “give you a future with hope,” “you” is plural. It’s a saving work of God people will experience together, not an individual salvation. We need to fall out of our modern evangelical dream that the only thing which matters to God is whether individuals are saved. We need to remember that God cares about the corporate welfare of whole nations. Why else would He tell those Jews to pray for Babylon?

And, speaking of Babylon, you and I may need to fall out of a three or four hundred year old dream of who we are in this particular book and chapter of Scripture. I’ve been talking as if in speaking to those Jewish exiles God was speaking to us, over against the evil powers of this world, nations and ideologies like Babylon.

There is much that is good about America. It was founded on principles of equality and justice which have Christian roots. We enjoy a religious freedom which has furthered the Gospel both here and around the world. But those good principles and much material wealth may give us a confirmation bias. As white American Christians, we may need to look at facts that tell a different story, to ask ourselves some hard questions.

Who was it in our country’s history who, like Babylon, invaded another people’s territory, killed many of them, took their homes and land and made it their own? Who was it in our national history that, like Babylon, went to foreign countries and captured people and brought them back as exiles to be slaves here in this land? Who in the United States of America created, like Babylon, social systems and expectations by which anyone who was different needed to accept the customs and language and religion of this country rather than that of their own native people or nations? Which of us, like Babylon’s king Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel, want to punish those who refuse to properly honor some symbol of national pride?

You may realize that the answer to all those questions I just asked is, unfortunately, white American Christians. One big, false dream is that you and I can easily identify with and appropriate promises God made to Hebrew people here, when our true historical identity is closer to those evil, oppressive, nasty Babylonians. When we as privileged white Americans read the Scriptures and see Babylon crop up over and over, even in the New Testament, we need to quit dreaming, wake up, and say, “Babylon is us.”

Don’t hear me wrong. The point is not wallowing in guilt. The point is real hope for real change. God allowed the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile to Babylon because of His people’s sin. He was calling them to repentance. He let them be punished, but then promised to be there when they repented, turned and started seeking Him again. That same hope and grace can be received by anyone, even “Babylonians” like you and I. If we turn from false dreams about our dominant place in the world, repent of the sins of racism, and seek real justice for our brothers and sisters of color, then we will truly be seeking God, and we will find Him. He will be there for us as He is for the poor and oppressed.

In the meantime, let us humble ourselves and ask those who live like exiles among us to pray for us. We have a long way to go. We’re going to need their help, their witness, their example, if our Babylon is ever going to enter the kingdom of God. Like those Jews who stayed in Babylon even after some went home, our exiles from other lands and from their own land here in this country can teach us a great deal. Let’s listen to them to learn what it means to have a true and better hope than all our silly and sinful dreams.

We may not see it in our own time. Verse 14 promises God will gather and return His people to their land, but it was only the children and grandchildren of those exiles who received that promise in full. Like Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed for his own children, we may have to only dream and hope that children living today might grow up in a world where they are not judged by the color of their skin. But it has to begin now, with us.

May you and I fall out of all our false dreams about easy answers to a pandemic and to racism. Let us fall into the inception of God’s dream and hope and future for us. That dream is to be people of all nations and races, living together in justice and peace in the better hope which we have in Jesus Christ. Let that be our dream. Amen.