November 8, 2020 “Rest” – Jeremiah 50:1-7

Jeremiah 50:1-7
“Rest”
November 8, 2020 – Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Our new grandson eats a lot, and he eats often, which means our daughter is not getting much rest. When little John finally goes to sleep for an hour or two, it’s a blessed relief for her and her husband. She tries to lie down and close her eyes for at least a while. Rest is a precious commodity in their flat.

Rest is a precious commodity for the whole world right now. It’s seems like planet Earth is in a constant state of agitation and uncertainty. Here in the United States we’ve just experienced a week of unrest around an election we hoped would be over on Tuesday night. But it has dragged out, keeping everyone on edge, and maybe even causing sleepless nights for some of you.

Our reading in the last portion of Jeremiah this past week gives us helpful perspective on the unrest of our times. We may be inclined to say that the division and polarization we’re experiencing is “unprecedented” (a word many of us may wish never to hear again). Yet even a quick glance at history reveals periods when things were worse for much longer. In America we have the racial and political tensions of the 1960s or the deep divide of the Civil War. In world history we need look no deeper than the Thirty Years’ War in Europe in the 17^th century or the fall of Rome in the 5^th century. Those who lived through any of those times must have felt that peace and rest were nowhere to be found.

The chapters that started our reading, 37 to 45, pages 274 to 284 in Prophets, gave us the inside story of the fall of another great capital city, albeit relatively small, on a world scale. As we read that story of the fall of Jerusalem—political and military maneuvering of kings and priests and prophets, a two-and-half-year siege and horrible destruction of walls and civic buildings and homes, the killing and deportation of thousands of citizens—it would be hard to imagine anyone then experiencing much that we might call rest.

Jeremiah’s own story during those last days of Jerusalem is itself full of darkness and suffering, although he tells it matter-of-factly, with not much complaint about his own trials. He goes from incarceration in a dungeon beneath a house, to imprisonment in the royal palace, to being dropped into mud at the bottom of a cistern, then back to the palace prison. He was temporarily released when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem, but in the end was forced to go with a small group of Jewish exiles to Egypt, a place he warned them not to go. The Babylonians would come even there. That’s the last we know of him. By then he was nearly 60 years old. Almost none of it had been a time of peace or rest.

After that dismal narrative of the final years of the holy city, the book of Jeremiah turned its sights on the world, starting with chapter 46, page 285 in Prophets. Our Prophets editors moved a bit from chapter 25 over just before that as an introduction to these “oracles” of God’s wrath on the nations. In chapter 25, moved to page 284 here, God told Jeremiah to make the nations drink the “cup” of the Lord’s anger. Then there is a long list of nations, starting with Judah and Jerusalem, the prophet’s own country. It moves on to Egypt, then various nations and peoples around Judah, then finally Babylon.

God’s anger is poured out beginning with Egypt there on 285. Jeremiah warned his people not to go to trust Egypt for safety: not when the Egyptian army showed up to scare off the Babylonians for a little while and not when it seemed like Egypt would be a good place to run to when the Babylonians came back. You’d think people who started out as slaves in Egypt would know better, but they kept thinking they had a security blanket to their south. But God and the Babylonian army knew better.

Other nations and old enemies of Israel come in for judgment by God through Jeremiah in the pages that follow. The Philistines, the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Edomites, the city of Damascus, and the Elamites all take a verbal licking from Jeremiah before they get literally licked by Babylon.

Babylon, Babylon, Babylon—that nation was constantly on everyone’s minds and lips in Jeremiah’s time. Jeremiah’s message was that Babylon was doing God’s will by bringing His judgment both on His own people and on the rest of the nations. Jeremiah, more than once, told the Jewish people to submit to Babylon, to cooperate, to go into exile there and settle down and raise children and make a new life there.

You would almost think Babylon was God’s new chosen nation, God’s answer to the problems and wickedness of the world. Beth and I have been watching the old science fiction TV series, “Babylon 5.” The opening monologue says “The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace.” One might have been tempted, especially Babylonians back then, to say the same of ancient Babylon. Get all the world under their strong military control and there would be peace. But then we come to our text for today.

In the middle of page 297, chapter 50 verse 1, the text makes a very careful, detailed announcement, “The Lord gave Jeremiah the prophet this message concerning Babylon, the land of the Babylonians [in Hebrew that was “Chaldeans”]. This is what the Lord says.” The prophecy starts out,

Tell the whole world,
and keep nothing back.
Raise a signal flag
to tell everyone that Babylon will fall!

In God’s eyes, in God’s plan, Babylon was not the last, best hope of the world. Neither was Egypt. And, we need to be clear about this, neither was the nation of Israel as it existed then in the world, nor really at any other time. All the nations of the world were and are going to be judged by God. That included Babylon and Egypt and Israel. It includes Rome and the United States of America and the present nation of Israel. No, human governments and earthly allegiances are not the last, best hope of humankind. God judges all the nations of the world, just as He did in Jeremiah’s time.

Babylon’s main problem, of course, was that it did not care about the true God. It worshipped idols. Two names are given, Bel and Marduk. They may be different names for the same god. Our translation says those “images and idols will be shattered,” but literally it says the same as for the gods by name, that they will be “shamed” and “disgraced.” The word “images” there may be a rude pun. It sounds like the word for “gods,” but it means “balls of dung,” except maybe with a cruder word than “dung.”

That’s the problem with nations. They almost always have other priorities than the worship of God. As we’ve already noted several times in the prophets, idols are stand-ins for things like power and money and pleasure. When the citizens of a land put things like that above their relationship to God and before their relationships to each other, they are worshipping idols whether they know it are not. And it’s all just balls of you-know-what.

So Jeremiah explains that there will be yet another nation coming down from the north to break Babylon, in the same way Babylon came down from the north upon Judah. Beth showed me a picture from a medieval manuscript of fish all chained together as they swallow each other by the tail. It’s an excellent picture of the nations of the earth. Each is going to get swallowed up in turn. It’s only a matter of time, God’s time.

The message for God’s people then, seventy years after Babylon first appeared on the scene, was that the remnant Bryan talked about a couple weeks ago will be able to go home. The descendants of men and women carried away into exile will be able to go back to their own land. Jeremiah says, “the people of Israel will return home, together with the people of Judah. They will come weeping and seeking the Lord their God.” They will come out of Babylon and come back to the God their leaders had abandoned and forgotten. But they won’t know the way.

There may be literal truth in those next words near the bottom of 297 there, “They will ask the way to Jerusalem…” These will be children, maybe children’s children, of those who left Jerusalem decades before. Their parents or grandparents made that long journey across the top of the Fertile Crescent and over to Babylon. But to those going back it would be a new road, a strange journey. But there is spiritual truth in it as well.

As I said, the road back to Jerusalem was, more importantly, the road back to God, to their true Lord. To return was to do what Jeremiah says here, to “bind themselves to the Lord with an eternal covenant that will never be forgotten.” Back in chapter 31, page 265, Jeremiah prophesied that God would make a new covenant with His people, a law written not on stone or in scrolls but on and in their hearts. One of the prophets we’ll start reading next week, Ezekiel, said the same thing. God will bring them back according to that new covenant. But how? How would they find the spiritual road to that new covenant?

They would have to ask, just as they may have had to ask for literal, geographical directions back to Jerusalem. They would have to ask God to guide them back into relationship with Him.

One early morning forty-five years ago, I walked out the front door of the house where I was staying overnight near Seattle and went for a run. I can’t remember now the name of the community, but it was on a small lake and I took off up the road that circled the shore. I ran for twenty minutes and then turned around and ran back. As I drew near where I started I realized I had a problem. I had no idea which house I’d been in.

It was our college choir tour in January. Our hosts had picked up two or three of us after our concert at a local church. We drove to their house in the dark, sleepy and not paying much attention. That morning I got up before anyone else, put on my Adidas, and hit the road looking straight ahead. Now I couldn’t find my way back. I had a general idea I was on the right block, but that was it.

There was only one option. I made my best guess and went up to a door and knocked. Fortunately, someone was awake by then. It turned out I was only one house off. A friendly neighbor knew the people we were with. They pointed me next door and I sheepishly walked up the steps to the correct and unlocked door. I went in and took a shower and gratefully sat down to breakfast. All was well, but only because I asked.

Jeremiah said God’s people then would all need to come sheepishly asking for direction back to Him. God told him,

My people have been lost sheep.
Their shepherds have led them astray
and turned them loose on the mountains.
They have lost their way
and can’t remember how to get back to the sheepfold.

That’s how it is in any time and in any place when God’s people forget where and to whom they belong. They start imagining that some place on earth is home, is their final resting place. They begin to believe that some country, some earthly project is their last, best hope for peace, for rest. And then they need to stop, turn around and ask their way back.

In this post-election time of anxiety and uncertainty, it’s easy to get angry at someone or something, whether it’s a candidate or election officials or the post office or the electoral college system. And maybe there is some real blame to be laid somewhere, some real wrongs done or said. But in the end, we should listen to what Jeremiah imagines being said by the enemies whom Israel may have blamed for all their suffering:

We did nothing wrong in attacking them,
for they sinned against the Lord,
their true place of rest,
and the hope of their ancestors.

The answer then and the answer now is not so much to identify and hold accountable those who do wrong in this world, but to identify and hold ourselves accountable for the wrong we ourselves have done in forgetting our “true place of rest, the hope of our ancestors,” our ancestors in the faith, like those we remembered last week.

We have even less excuse when we forget our true place of rest and hope than the Israelites did. We know that the Lord Himself came to us to lead us home. When we forget who and what we are and try to make ourselves too much at home in some country or some party or some important project, we have Jeremiah and all of Scripture pointing us directly to the new covenant Jesus gave us with God. It’s a covenant for which He died and rose again, a covenant of God’s grace and forgiveness written on our hearts. But it’s amazing how easily we forget all that, only to worry too much about who is going to be in charge of the earthly nation in which we are living for a while.

That’s why both Jesus and the apostle Paul in our other Scripture readings today from Matthew 25 and I Thessalonians 4 are so insistent that we be alert and ready for our Lord to come back to us. Jesus pictured sleepy bridesmaids caught off guard when the groom showed up. Paul addressed believers anxious about their brothers and sisters who had “fallen asleep,” who had died. In both cases, the answer was to remember what their purpose and hope is, to recall the place and time in which we can truly rest.

So let us be people who constantly ask each other what the way to God is. Yes, of course, the answer is Jesus, but then let us ask ourselves just how well we are following that way, how much we are trusting in His rest and peace rather than in the rest and peace the Babylons of this world offer us. We should not expect the answer will be easy.

Yes, Jeremiah told those exiles in Babylon to settle down there, to make themselves at home. But not too much at home. At the bottom of page 307 and top of page 308 we read that he sent his prophecy of Babylon’s fall there and had it read to the exiles. This judgement on Babylon comes at the end of his book to remind them not to get too comfortable, not to rest in Babylon too comfortably. It’s the same message for us.

Babylon can do some good, as it did in Jeremiah’s time, both in carrying out judgement on wrong and in saving a righteous remnant of God’s people. But don’t trust Babylon too much. It has other priorities, other gods. You heard what Jeremiah said about those. It doesn’t matter if your candidate or party won or not, don’t trust Babylon too much. In the end God is going to judge her like He judges every nation on earth. Trust and rest in the Lord, the Lord Jesus Christ whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.

Yet as we’ve said before in reading the prophets, resting and trusting in the Lord does not mean there’s nothing to do. If we can’t always trust Babylon to do what is right before God, then you and I need to be very busy about doing what is true and good and beautiful ourselves. If your candidate won, think about whatever true good in the world you expect him to do and get busy about doing it yourself. If your candidate lost, the answer is the same. Remember the good work you wanted him to do and work at it yourself.

Babylon may be good or bad for a while, but it will fall. That’s Jeremiah’s message. Babylon by itself will never produce or be the kingdom of God. Only Jesus at work in the people of God will bring true rest and healing and peace to this world. That was the hope of our ancestors, the hope of all those Christians we named and remembered last week. That’s our true place of rest.

Keep asking the way home, keep asking God to show you the way in His Word and in the faith and lives of your brothers and sisters in Christ. Then once you know a bit of that way, once you see some bit of good you can do, some piece of truth you can share, get on the road, head to the country of the King, the holy City, the place of blessed rest. It’s waiting for you. The Lord is waiting there to give you and give our world eternal rest.

Amen.