Gentle Reader,
It’s getting a little hard to keep track of the throwbacks that I share with you, so I’m really hoping you haven’t already read this. But if you have, do let me know.
This is the first sermon I gave for my preaching class during my third year of seminary. We were required to use the process outlined in Paul Scott Wilson’s The Four Pages of the Sermon, a book that has been (and will continue to be) extremely important in my sermon-crafting process. I’d preached a few times before reading this book, but I never quite found my voice, my groove. The sermons never really came together the way I wanted them to. Preaching is different from other forms of public speaking, and it’s certainly different from writing. It took me a good long while to work through that, and this book was so helpful in doing so. If you preach, or think you might preach one day, or if you’re just interested in what it looks like to put a sermon together, I highly recommend reading this.
Anyway, onward.
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In 2016, Netflix debuted a new show. Created by two brothers, Matt and Ross Duffer, the show is set in the seemingly quiet, peaceful town of Hawkins, Indiana. Except…Hawkins is neither quiet, nor peaceful. Just underneath its idyllic surface run currents of danger and mystery. Enter the town’s police chief, Jim Hopper, who is tasked with leading the search for missing middle schooler Will Byers, aided and spurred on by Will’s mother Joyce. Will’s friends – Mike, Dustin, and Lucas – eagerly help in the search, in defiance of the adult’s warnings, and their efforts uncover a much larger conspiracy behind Will’s disappearance, something more far reaching and sinister than a simple, singular kidnapping. The Hawkins National Laboratory, supposedly conducting research for the United States Department of Energy, has created a portal into a parallel dimension.
This parallel dimension is a realm of darkness, populated by monsters. When our heroes encounter elements of this other world, they are horrified. This world is frightening and unfamiliar. This world has no light. No hope.
This is the world of the Upside Down.
Scripture speaks of an Upside Down, though it’s form is not exactly like that of the one found in the popular show Stranger Things. Nevertheless, the people who encounter it are no less shocked and horrified to find themselves inside it. Everything they knew, everything they thought to be true, all of their routines and rhythms, are disrupted as they are thrust into this parallel dimension.
A parallel dimension they inhabited all along.
Let us enter into their experience. Perhaps we might find echoes of ourselves there. But most importantly, perhaps we might find God in this parallel dimension, just as they were invited to.
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 your dreams that you dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the LORD.
For thus says the LORD: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. 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. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the LORD, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the LORD, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
– Jeremiah 29:4-14 (NRSV)
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
It’s important that we establish context for what we’ve just read. Our habit of lifting passages out of the middle of a chapter or a book leads to us drawing some sketchy conclusions about what the words mean. And not sketches that someone like da Vinci would create, but sketches like those of my 3-year-old goddaughter. I don’t think we mean to do that. I think those of us who know and love God want to understand what God has to say to us. But in order for us to understand, we must slow down. Practice that horrible concept that we call patience.
So, what is our context here?
We’ve read a letter.
We’ve read a letter written by a man named Jeremiah.
That man named Jeremiah was a prophet, a person who spoke God’s truth to people.
Jeremiah spoke God’s truth specifically to the people of Judah.
Judah was the southern part of the ancient kingdom of Israel, which had split into two just after the reign of King Solomon.
So we’re in Old Testament times here. Long before Jesus.
But – spoiler alert – pay attention. We find Jesus here.
Jeremiah speaks to God’s people at a time when they’re really not paying attention. His life and ministry take place during the waning days of the kingdom of Judah, as they’re in the process of being conquered by these people called the Babylonians. And this was a process. The Babylonians would invade, kill some people and capture others. They would destroy some property and extract money from whoever was king at the time. Then they’d fall back for a while. But eventually, in 586 B.C.E., Babylon would destroy Judah. They would tear down God’s Temple in Jerusalem. They would set the city on fire. They would kill as many people as they could. And they would take anyone that they thought was useful back to Babylon with them. Ripping them from their homes, their families, everything they knew.
Throwing them into the Upside Down.
Jeremiah writes his letter about 10 years before that final destruction. Jerusalem is still standing, but many people have already been taken to Babylon. Imagine that for a moment. Many families torn apart. Lives utterly disrupted, never to be the same. Beyond that, the Old Testament narratives tell us that God laid out very specific ways for God’s people to engage in worship. For God’s people to be in relationship with God. Now they’re in Babylon, where they can’t do those things. And they’re in Babylon, because they’ve tried to mix those things, God’s ways, with other things, the worship of other gods. Or if not that, then practices and habits that God explicitly tells them, again and again, to avoid and reject – things like economic exploitation, and shoving the vulnerable to the side.
The people that Jeremiah writes to, they are traumatized in every sense of the word.
Faced with the reality of their responsibility. They opened this portal into another dimension.
What are they supposed to do now?
Live?
They’re supposed to live.
Let that knock the wind out of your sails for a second.
They’re supposed to build houses and plant gardens and have families. They’re supposed to be upstanding citizens, to seek the good for Babylon.
Does God not know?
Does God not see or understand their trauma?
Those are valid questions to ask of this text. They’re also valid questions to ask of God for our own selves. Our world seems to have spun increasingly out of control. We seem to suddenly find ourselves surrounded by the Upside Down. What was once taken for granted, understood as the norm, is simply no longer how things are.
How can God tell them to live? And to really live, not just exist. To actively participate in life-giving rhythms in the midst of the death-dealing Upside Down.
How can God do that?
And does God tell us the same thing?
Our key for unlocking this passage is found in verse four. Yes, God laid this judgment upon God’s people, as God warned them God would do again and again if they did not repent and return to God’s ways. But there is something else going on here. In their commentary on the book of Jeremiah, Alex Varughese and Mitchel Modine write:
Yahweh’s word to the exiles also means that [Yahweh] is committed to
[Yahweh’s] relationship with the exiled people. The judgment of the exile did not sever [Yahweh’s] relationship with them; neither is the judgment Yahweh’s last word to them. (p 88)
Yes, they are in the Upside Down.
Or perhaps are confronted with the truth that they’ve been part of the Upside Down for a long time.
And God is with them.
And God is with them in a way that neither they nor us would expect.
God is with them without the Temple. Without the priests making the sacrifices and singing the songs as the Old Testament tells us was expected of them. God is with them without all of the things that God designed in order for them to have relationship with God. This doesn’t mean that God suddenly deemed those things bad or wrong. It just means that they missed an important piece of being God’s chosen people: God chose them, chose to be with them, before all of that existed. God wouldn’t go back on God’s promise to be their God.
God wouldn’t give up on them.
See, they have misunderstood that element of God’s not giving up on them. They thought, actively or subconsciously, that God would be vengeful on their behalf. And by that I mean these people had this idea that they could kind of do whatever it was they wanted to do and because they belonged to God’s covenant people, all would be well. God would fend off their attackers and they would always be well-off and in a position of power and they could always “sorry, God” and nothing really bad would ever happen. And even if they did have to lose power for a while, and even if they had to journey through the Upside Down, it wouldn’t last that long. They’d get back to business as usual.
They misunderstood God.
They misinterpreted God’s character.
They applied the filter of the Upside Down, of its focus on power and position, to God.
But God chose these people, Israel, not only to be God’s people and to exist in this consequence free bubble, where they’re turned inward, facing each other. God chose these people to be God’s people who would face outward, extending an invitation into relationship with God to the rest of the world. To do that, they had to be different from the rest of the world. They had to base their entire identity and way of navigating the world on God.
So in this consequence, this punishment, they are given a chance to learn to do just that. To remove the filter of the Upside Down from in front of their eyes and begin to see as God sees. Instead of telling them to lobby their Babylonian senators, or post their message of discontent on public walls, or stockpile a bunch of weapons and plot to return destruction for destruction – as is the way of the Upside Down – God directs them to live. And to live in such a way that marks them as clearly different from the rest of the inhabitants of the Upside Down.
In doing so, God does not ignore or downplay their trauma. God knows what they’ve been through, what they will continue to go through, and promises that an end to the disruption will come. But it will not come on their timeline. It will come on God’s. And as they wait, they are given time and space to relearn how to live as God wants them to. This is grace. It is also grace for those among whom they live, who will see this difference, and are meant to be intrigued by it.
Yes, they endure the consequences of their decisions.
And God is with them.
They are not to stay stuck in a defeatist mindset, constantly longing for the time in which they had power and scheming to grasp it in this new place. They are to build life in the middle of the death of the Upside Down, the kind of life that flows and expands and extends only from and in the presence of God. That serves as a reminder to the world that God exists. This was their task all along.
This is a word for our own time, our own selves. As Christians, we are used to being in a position of cultural power in the United States, and when it feels like or seems like or actually is the case that that power is slipping away, we freak out. It feels like we’re in the Upside Down. And that feeling is often so intense that we neglect to notice the real and true Upside Down all around us. The Upside Down of poverty and injustice and loneliness. The Upside Down of pandemics and political upheaval. The Upside Down of fear and hate. We miss the actual Upside Down…because we want to be in power over the Upside Down. We’re somehow so entranced by what is around us, like Will Byers in Stranger Things in a catatonic state, that we’re blinded to its reality. The reality that the Upside Down will not be ruled by us, but must be confronted by us. Not in might, or anger, or violence, but in love.
We can’t keep facing inward, in our little bubbles. We can’t keep thinking that we can kinda do whatever we want and there will be no consequences.
Because we are people of Immanuel. God with us.
People who believe that the Lord of all creation descended and lived among us – just as this passage points to. We believe that God came first as a frail, tiny baby, and then grew into a normal-looking Middle Eastern carpenter. And we believe that that normal-looking Middle Eastern carpenter was anything but normal. He suffered, and died, and rose again, and will return – because He is God.
The Upside Down is not to be conquered by us anymore than the exiles from Judah were to rise up and conquer Babylon. No, we are to live, as they were to live, in such a way that marks us as clearly different. As the Rightside Up People in the Midst of the Upside Down. And not different to condemn other or to feel as though we are above them. And not different as in creating bubbles in which we can huddle, ignoring the trauma of the outside and pretending we have none of our own. But popping the bubbles, facing outward, seeing reality through eyes that’ve had the filter of the Upside Down removed, enlightened by truth, declaring that truth and the presence of the God of grace who has saved us from the ways of the Upside Down, and so transformed us that we can never fit comfortably into those patterns again.
Extending a hand of invitation to the inhabitants of the Upside Down, to cross over from death into life by the grace and mercy of our King, Jesus Christ.
Who is God with us.
GRACE AND PEACE ALONG THE WAY,
MARIE
Image Courtesy of Mathilda Khoo