Prophets in Babylon

Jeremiah 29:1 These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remainder of the elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, the women, children, and men whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. 2 This was after the departure of King Jeconiah, and the Queen Mother, the court officials, the leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the artisans, and the smiths from Jerusalem.
19 Because they did not heed my words –
a declaration of the Holy One of Sinai – 
when I sent to you my servants the prophets, women and men, in advance, but they did not listen, says the Judge of all the Earth.

Let us pray: In the name of the God who is Life, Love and Liberation. Amen.

Today, in the company of Jeremiah, I would like to offer an alternative metaphor for these 40 days of Lent: exile. Many of us who will observe this holy season are feeling something like exiles right about now, especially in this country. Now, some may want to correct me and say that subjugation in our own country is not exile; exile is deportation to another country. And you are correct. Some may say they experienced no subjugation. And in many cases that is correct too. But when any of us are not free then none of us are free. I submit that we are in exile but for some the conditions are so comfortable and the décor is so familiar that they are unaware that they are in exile until one of the emperor’s executive orders catches up with them.

I submit to you that there are folk who are looking at everything around them and seeing such a profoundly different world that they might as well be in an entirely different country; in exile, because the world around them, before and behind them, above and below them has changed in such catastrophic, consequential and even vicious and violent ways.

Today in speaking to those who find themselves waking up in Babylon every morning alongside Jeremiah’s postmaster, I believe there is a word for us in Jeremiah’s assertion that though he may not be with God’s people in exile, there are yet Prophets in Babylon. Prophets in Babylon. Surely there are profits in Babylon as well, but today we are talking about prophets, the words and word they bear and the One who speaks through them, whose word travels to every place and every circumstance in which we find ourselves. Even in exile. And perhaps the practice of some to look to their profits for wisdom about how to live in this world rather than listen to the prophets may just be how some of us have found ourselves living in Babylon even though we wake up in our own beds every morning.

You see, a nation that saw itself as a gleaming city upon a hill has crumbled due to internal and external fractures, pressures and assaults. Divisions between  groups of people are being etched into the societal fabric, perhaps never to be fully reintegrated again. The power-hungry have overplayed their hand and found themselves mere puppets of one whose astronomical wealth has eclipsed their own.

I’m talking about the United States… of Babylon, where there was a king upon the throne who had been put there by by folk who knew he could have never gotten on the throne on his own. And with that meddling and manipulation came the expectation that his executive orders would support the economic, national and international priorities of those who put him on the throne and could take him off and take him out and, replace him with someone else, someone more cooperative. There is a lesson here for those who would choose the glittering gods of colonizing empires; they will not protect you they have no interest in your well-being; you are just another log for the fire.

In his first 100 days, the plutocrat puppeteer who was pulling the king’s strings issued a whole series of destabilizing initiatives that affected the powerless and to their surprise, the privileged as well; with the result that the people were forcibly divided into those they thought mattered, had value and worth and, those for who they had no use, the poor, those from other nations who did the backbreaking work necessary to support and feed the empire that saw them as the dirt beneath their feet. I’m still talking about the United States of Babylon.

Babylon took captive those for whom they had use and those they didn’t trust to be out of their sight and sent them into exile. There was no one so rich, so cultured, so qualified, so important that they could negotiate survival with the empire on their own terms. They were all carried away into exile whether they secretly admired the tyrant taking them or despised the depot dispossessing them. And Jeremiah was left behind and thus began writing epistles like the one we heard today:

These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remainder of the elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, the women, children, and men whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. This was after the departure of King Jeconiah, and the Queen Mother, the court officials, the leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the artisans, and the smiths from Jerusalem. (in a previous wave of exiles)

Other prophets were counted among the illuminati, the literati and the glitterati. But Jeremiah wasn’t considered good enough, cool enough, or even dangerous enough to be taken captive by Babylon, to be held in exile, to be seduced, to be co-opted and to be colonized. That is what Babylon does. And, there is a lesson here for those outside of the politics and the power struggles, those whom the world deems insignificant those, whose gifts and talents empires discount. All Jeremiah had was words, God’s words in his words. They would prove to be more than enough but the empire didn’t know to tremble at mere words – yet. Some of you may be doubting the power of words right now. Words of resistance, words of protest, words of comfort, words of encouragement. Words have power. Use your words.

What was wrong with Jeremiah perhaps you wonder? Jeremiah was a prophet but an apparently illiterate one, needing Baruch to write and read for him. Jeremiah was a priest but from the wrong clan on the wrong side of the tracks, having ancestors who voted for the losing candidate when there was a choice between David’s sons, Absalom and Solomon, and they chose the one who tried to pave his way to the throne with sexual violence against women. I’m talking about the dis-United States of Judah and the remnants of 2 ½ tribes that survived the Assyrian annihilation.

And, Jeremiah was from the tribe of Benjamin, infamous for another failed candidate, Saul. His tribe also responsible for some of the most grotesque violence in the Scriptures, the gang rape of the Levite’s secondary wife and the protection of the perpetrators to the point of a genocidal civil war that ended with mass abduction of girls forced to bear their children. Nearly 3000 years later forced pregnancies are one of the signs of our exile from a country where the dignity of every single person and their bodily autonomy is respected and protected. Jeremiah and his people did not make the colonizer’s cut. He and Baruch would eventually find their way to Egypt (but that is another sermon).

Those who had the potential to be holy troublemakers: leaders, elders, prophets, artisans, musicians, crafts persons were all taken into exile along with the woman who could’ve run that country on her own but some folk will always choose an unqualified man over a qualified woman. The Babylonians understood that the resistance is found not just in the megaphones of a street protest but in arts and crafts and the wisdom of our elders. They left the poorest of the people, the people with the fewest marketable skills, behind as a cheap labor force to support the ravenous appetite of the colonizing forces that had just gobbled up Judah and Jerusalem, the yawning mouth and insatiable hunger of Babylon.

Babylon: bright lights and big city, gold plated and jewel encrusted. If you could make it there, you can make it anywhere. Some of the people taken in captivity to Babylon were held hostage in such beautifully gilded cages they may not have realized that they were being held hostage at all; that they were being co-opted, that they were being re-enculturated and re-educated. There would be no Judean history taught in schools; there would be no language and culture of Jerusalem on the state curriculum Israelite; religion and culture would be banned along with DEI, Black history, Asian history, Latino history, Native American history and queer studies. They were slowly but surely being turned into Babylonians – at least that was the plan.

Some surely switched their loyalty on their own upon seeing the shining one sitting upon that gold plated throne. Some will always be captured by wealth and privilege and proximity. But some were just trying to figure out how to survive when the world they knew had been pulled out from under them like a rug and they woke up every morning in a world that was the opposite of everything in which they had been raised to believe but still expected to smile, nod and play along.

During that wilderness season when the people were being pulled apart and set against each other to no small degree, Jeremiah called Baruch to take up an epistolary pen and, wrote a series of pastoral letters [including Jeremiah chapter 29 and the Epistle to Baruch – counted among the scriptures of the Episcopal Church along with our Catholic and orthodox kinfolk.] Jeremiah’s tone is very different from that of the story of the three Hebrew boys, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah given the slave names Shadrack, Meshach and Aved Nego. They are willing to die rather than bow down before the tyrant who had trafficked them.

But Jeremiah knows that miracles are rare and precious things and his people cannot afford to gamble their one precious life at the whim of their dictator. He knew that God does not always show up in the easiest or most miraculous of ways. Sometimes we have to figure out how to live between miracles. And so, Jeremiah has a completely different message, survive! He tells them to marry and have babies and to pray for the wicked place in which they are being held captive in exile.

Build houses and settle in them; plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take women as wives and father sons and daughters; take women as wives for your sons and your daughters, give to men, husbands, that they may give birth to daughters and sons. Multiply there and do not decrease. And seek the well-being of the city where I have sent you all into exile and pray to the God Who Hears on its behalf for, in its well-being will be well-being for all of you.

Wait a minute God, you want us to pray for Babylon? Do you know what they have done? Do you know what they are doing right now? God tells the people to pray for their Babylon because God knows that if the empire crumbles it will crash and burn on top of them. I know there are folk who think our Babylon is beyond the power of prayer. That’s me every other Tuesday and Friday. But God calls us to pray for our Babylon because in its well-being is our well-being. As dangerous as a living Babylon is a dying, flailing Babylon on fire would be catastrophic to everyone in or around it. Jeremiah tells the people to survive so that they will live long enough to one day thrive. One day. But they are going to be there a while, not an easily programmable 40 days. Jeremiah is ticking off generations. [In the Epistle to Baruch he will even go so far as to say, bow down if you have to but just pray in your heart: It is you Holy One and you alone whom I serve.] Jeremiah understands that the people’s captivity is no passing or trifling thing. If they are not careful they will find themselves written out of history as a bloody streak beneath Babylonian feet.

These days I find Babylonian exile to be an apt metaphor for Lent. Even though Lent is a fixed 40 day period and is marked by sets of intentional spiritual practices, reenacting the physical isolation and spiritual communion of Jesus’s time in the wilderness, many of us are going through or have gone through periods of social and spiritual isolation that have no fixed end; that have no liturgical celebration marking their conclusion. Some of us are not just in the wilderness on a 40 day journey. You can count on the transformation of that wilderness. You can mark it in your calendar. Like a liturgical season. But there is also the lifeless wilderness that stands as a seemingly insurmountable obstacle between death and life, enslavement and freedom, bondage and liberation. That is no mere 40 day wilderness; that is a 40 year wilderness. Some of us are in Babylon and don’t know if we shall ever return home or if there will be a home to which to return. Will we ever be able to remove the corruption of Babylon from our shining city on a hill? And it just may be that when these 40 days are over, we will be shouting our Easter hallelujahs in a world that still looks, smells, tastes, hurts and kills like Babylon. For indeed crucifixions did not cease after that terrible Friday. But that is another sermon.

In the Scriptures and the world that interprets them, Babylon is much more than a place. It is the evil of imperialism, the cruelty and corruption of capitalism, the brutality of policing forces, the terrorizing of tyrants and the dehumanization of despots all rolled up into one. From the Revelation of John to Rastafari, Babylon is hell on earth. Yet not even Babylon is devoid of God’s presence and proclamation through God’s servants the prophets.

The Babylonians messed around and brought prophets with the people into exile. Perhaps they thought they could co-op them into proclaiming a word on behalf of them and their gods. There are prophets preaching a Babylonian gospel in some of our churches to make Babylon great again. Perhaps the Babylonians thought they could use the prophets to pacify the people. But it turns out that at least some of the prophets were part of an underground railroad passing messages back-and-forth between the two separated halves of the community so that they would not forget who they were and whose they were.

They were the people of the God who meets her children in exile. They were the people to whom God had provided prophets at every stage of their journey. Miriam and Moses in the wilderness. Deborah to fight their battles in Canaan. Isaiah and his woman prophet birthing and raising their children with prophetic names including, some say, Emmanuel. That’s why God says at the end of our lesson, I sent to you my servants the prophets, women and men, in advance, but they did not listen.

God prepared the people for exile, for the captivity that was inevitable based on the actions of a few invested with power of which they were not worthy, whose self-interest, gluttonous greed and inhumanity to the people around them led them right where they were. God warned them through every prophet, short and tall, curly and ball, woman and man, age and young. But God does not wash God’s hands of God’s people. Even as the people were headed down a path to a place from which they could not return on their own. God packed her bags and came with them into exile. That is the TL/DR of Ezekiel – [but do read it and understand that the horrific violence of Ezekiel is his trauma response that we can understand but not excuse. Through his pain and trauma Ezekiel proclaimed to his people in Babylon that God is Emmanuel – God with us – even in Babylon.]

There are prophets in Babylon. But are they preaching submission to the savior or submission to the system? There are prophets who were taken captive, and there are, the people say, new prophets whom God has raised up in their Babylon and, there is Jeremiah sending Baruch to the post office day after day. There are so many prophets in Babylon, in person, in writing; how are the people to know who is God’s prophet? Who is that next great man in the lineage? You know that’s how we do. Who is the next Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Funny how no one is looking for the next el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm X. And nobody is looking for the next Coretta Scott King or Betty Shabazz. There are all of these prophets in Babylon, some doing God’s work while nobody records their names; others taken captive in body and mind preaching the gospel of Babylon. But there are yet prophets in exile, in Babylon, preaching the gospel of of the God who hears.

That gospel starts with something that looks a whole lot like Lent:

when you all call upon me and you come and you all pray to me, I shall hear you. And when you all seek me, you shall find me; if you all seek me with your whole heart. I will be found by you…

Call upon the God who is waiting to hear from you. Leave the pleasures of Babylon behind and seek the God who is willing to be found. Spend some time in prayer and reflection and meditation and study. And spend some time serving somebody other than yourself even if both of you are in exile. Spend some time in silence. Push away that plate filled with Babylonian delicacies for a while. Take off those Babylonian robes and strip yourself down to the person you were before you got here, the person who you are underneath that new Babylonian name. Find that part of you that can never be taken captive, that can never be taken hostage, that belongs to God and only God. Pray and wait and, whether it is 40 days or 40 years, know that the word of God through her servants the prophets is true.

God shall save. God shall redeem. God shall gather. God shall restore. In the Jerusalem to Babylon pony express, Jeremiah speaks for God who promises:

I shall reverse your captivity and gather you all from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you..

There is no Babylon beyond the reach of God. There is no exile so far that God cannot and will not make the journey. There is no captivity so hard that can erase all of God’s people from the Earth. But Babylon is trying. Certain kinds of people have no value in Babylon; some folk are only useful for what they can do or who their connections are. But God’s  salvation doesn’t make those distinctions. God’s salvation is for those carried away by Babylon and for those left behind, and for those who repent, there is even salvation for Babylonians.

There are prophets in Babylon. But more than that, there is a God in Babylon who has never been taken captive. Who has never lost a battle. There is a God who is not dependent upon her priests and prophets to speak to her people. There is a God calling us out of the Babylon of our own making. There is a God calling us on a sacrificial journey to leave behind the trappings and pleasures that have ensnared us. There is a God who will walk with us on the way to liberation. There is a God who will bear the weight of our burdens and Shepherd us when we wander off the path. There is a God waiting for us to leave Babylon, walking beside us and waiting with open arms at our journeys end. There is a God who will set us free from Babylon while we are yet in exile. There is a God who sets prisoners and captives free inside crumbling empires like Egypt and Babylon and Rome and – if we are not careful – right here at home. There is a God who is greater than Babylon yet condescends to speak to and through it as long as there is even one soul a held captive. There is a God whose word reaches to the ends of the Earth to all of the places her children are held captive or in exile and that is why Jesus came into exile as the incarnation of God in the squat and scholar of our world. Jesus came into an exile that was characterized by sickness and disease, human indifference and brutality, manufactured poverty and subjected himself to captivity, torture and ultimately death. But Jesus transformed his exile. Destroying the Babylon of death when he rose signaling to us that the prophets in Babylon spoke truth when they promised our exile would not be forever. Amen.