Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
October 14, 2001
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
According to a web company, Hometown Index, one of the best places to live is Sheboygan, Wisconsin. In Sheboygan, people stay on the same bowling teams for decades. Once known
as the “City of 4 Cs” (churches, chairs, children, and cheese) Sheboygan boasts a riverfront boardwalk, state park, county museum, and children’s museum. Local foods include
bratwurst, double brats, brats on a stick, brat gyros, brat tacos, and brat pizza. And you
can almost guarantee that there’s a Chinese restaurant in Sheboygan that probably has a
bratwurst fried rice!
The absolute top-ranking small town in the nation is Greenville, Alabama with a perfect score of 100. Like most Alabama towns, Greenville has broad oak-lined streets and stately houses with shady lawns that are studded with magnolias, in keeping with their old-fashioned elegance. Farms in this county produce cotton and pecans, and Greenville celebrates an annual Watermelon Jubilee in August.
Small towns that are best places to live don’t have to be flashy. But they do have two things in place: people who stay around and people who get involved. This is Podunk Power.
Podunk, Massachusetts was an imaginary typical small town in America. When we say, “Podunk,” we imagine it to be a small, unimportant, and isolated place.
Since arriving in San Francisco, I find myself giving directions to our church all the time. I would say, “We are located at 1 Waverly Place on the corner of Waverly and Sacramento Street. Waverly is between Grant Avenue and Stockton Street. We are across the street from the Chinatown YMCA. Waverly Place is an alley.” After all of these details I give them my cell phone in case they get lost.
Waverly Place is like Podunk. We seem to be a small, unimportant, and out of the way place. Why can’t we be on Stockton Street like the Presbyterians or the Methodists? We are on Waverly Podunk Place!
Jeremiah’s Letter to the Exiles
In today’s text, Jeremiah sends a letter to the homesick Jewish exiles in Babylon in the year 594 BC. After the collapse of the kingdom of David and Solomon and the rival northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the chosen people became subject to centuries of political domination by the Assyrians in the north and the Babylonians in the south.
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Many of Jerusalem’s best and the brightest have been carried off to Babylon, where the Israelite population wasn’t quite sure what to do. They felt stuck in an unfamiliar Podunk, so far from their holy city.
The exiles wanted to go home, but Jeremiah sends an unexpected and unwelcome message: settle down and behave. Jeremiah says, in Babylon where you are now will make a good hometown.
“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…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.”
This is a revolutionary message. The Jews who expect a speedy return to Jerusalem are
told to stay put, establish homes in Babylon, and multiply. Jeremiah is saying that God’s
people shouldn’t resist, resent, or reject their current location. They shouldn’t pack up and
move, nor should they dig foxholes and fight. Instead, they should put down roots in a foreign land, live productive lives in exile, and even pray for the welfare of their new hometown.
For the prophet Jeremiah, Podunk Power means sticking around, putting down roots, and getting involved. It means turning a small, isolated and common community into a City of God.
Resident Aliens
As a church, we too believe in Podunk Power. When we could have packed up and moved on, we decided to stay put and retrofit. Instead of finding a more prestigious and better known address, we believe in Waverly Podunk Place.
We decided to keep on putting down roots and getting involved. Like the Israelites, perhaps we should see ourselves as “resident aliens.” Resident aliens are members of God’s colony in the middle of an alien, earthly culture. A colony is an island of one culture in the middle of another. One Waverly Place is in the middle of Chinatown. In this place, the values of God’s home are reiterated and passed onto the young, a distinctive Christian language and lifestyle of the resident aliens are lovingly nurtured and reinforced.
In the middle of an increasingly secular society, we find ways to nurture distinctive Christian language and lifestyle. We teach our children what it means to follow Jesus, to practice non-violence, to tell God’s story, and to mentor one another. We proclaim that our first pledge of allegiance is to God for Thine is the kingdom, power, and the glory. So as resident aliens, we put down roots and to give only God glory.
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But in Jeremiah’s letter, there’s another revolutionary challenge. Jeremiah says,
“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.”
Jeremiah is saying that the Israelites are to pray for the Babylonians who are their captives because when the Babylonians are well, God will also bless them with well being. This is a revolutionary idea particularly for today.
Welfare of the City
As God’s resident aliens who don’t belong to this world but citizens of God’s kingdom, we are still challenged to care for the welfare of the people and city around us. Seek the welfare of your neighbors who are Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu. Seek the welfare of colleagues in your workplaces who may not share the same religious beliefs that you do. Seek the welfare of people who hold diametrically opposite political and social views from you. Seek the welfare of Arab Americans who are being persecuted because they only look like terrorists.
We are to seek the well-being of a diverse, confusing, and often conflicted culture. Jeremiah says, Become involve in the city you live, don’t pack up your bags and move away. For in its welfare you will find your welfare.
As Christians, our challenge is to work and pray for the wholesomeness of the society with which our own well-being is linked. This doesn’t mean that we abandon the spiritual life and fellowship of our congregation and become social service agencies or public policy centers—no, it’s essential that we remain devoted to the nurture of distinctive Christian language and lifestyle. But it does mean that we recommit ourselves to working for the physical, moral, and spiritual welfare of the world around us. It means that we see Waverly Place as a mission field. God called us to this Podunk place to put down roots, grow in faith, and reach out in love.
Many churches are already doing this. Protestant churches like ours are “roughly twice as active,” as other Christians in such things as cooking at the soup kitchen or joining a walk against hunger or AIDS. In addition, 80% of congregations have at least one outside organization that uses space in their buildings, either donated or rented at minimal cost. We do this by renting out our church to City College so that first-generation neighbors may learn English to support themselves in America.
One of the new line items in the 2002 Proposed Budget presented last Sunday is our contribution to the Chinatown YMCA building project. You might say, “Why are we giving to the Y when we still need funds for our own retrofit project?” Last Tuesday night, I received a phone call from Wally Poon, our Night School Coordinator at home. A homeless man came by the church seeking for a place to stay overnight. Since I have been here, I have not encountered the need to find a homeless shelter. Our normal response is to refer homeless people to Cameron House. But at 8:00, they were closed. After searching through the Yellow Pages and finally getting someone on the other end of the line at “A
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Man’s Place,” we discovered that all of the beds have been assigned by lottery at 7:00. We would not know if any of the shelters would have an available bed until midnight.
Wally and I decided that the best thing to do is to rent a room for him at the Y across the street for $35. Our church may not be a social service center or have rooms for homeless people but I “Thank God,” for the fact that we have the Y across the street. When we support the Chinatown Y, we are recommitting ourselves to working for the physical, moral, and spiritual welfare of the world around us.
Jeremiah told the Israelite exiles to “Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat what they produce.” We may not be building rooms for the homeless, but we need to help the Y do this. For when we create a society that is wholesome, we will discover that our well-being is also whole. For in the city’s welfare you will find your welfare.
Waverly Place
The prophet calls us to get involved in the welfare of the city, for the city’s welfare is ours. There’s no way around it. There’s no escaping this connection.
Our church is what I call a “Bay-Area Wide” church. Many of us live some distances from Chinatown. And even those who live in San Francisco live in districts outside of Chinatown. Our image of our hometown is hardly Chinatown but rather simply our church building on Waverly Place on the corner of Sacramento Street, across the street from the Chinatown YMCA. It’s Waverly Podunk Place.
In this small, unimportant, isolated alley, we find our hometown. And in our hometown, there should be no better citizens than we!
A great hometown is a place with deep roots. We have been here in this same location since 1888 built on the same spot of a house of prostitution. From this place, people like us are to work hard to support other houses of worship, build partnerships with our neighbors, and to support locally owned businesses. The best places to live don’t have to be Sheboygan or Greenville, it can be here on Waverly Place, Chinatown. Best places to live don’t have to be small towns, it can be in big cities like San Francisco because its “resident aliens” are putting down roots, building houses, planting gardens, marrying and having families.
Jesus showed us that places as small as Galilee or as big as Jerusalem can be healthy places for God’s glory as long as people settle down and work for their welfare. If Podunk Galilee was good enough for Jesus then Waverly Podunk Place is good enough for us.
Wherever you put down roots, God has plans for you—“plans for your welfare and not for harm,” he promises through Jeremiah, “to give you a future with hope” (v.11). The Lord promises to hear you when you call upon him and pray to him; God pledges to let you find him whenever you search for him and seek him with your heart (vv.12-14).
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Like the exiled Israelites camped along the banks of the Chedar river in Babylon, we are camping on Waverly Podunk Place. We think of our citizenship as located in another kingdom, God’s kingdom not of this world.
But until we see the new Jerusalem, a new heaven and a new earth, God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, then God is calling us to roll up our sleeves and build a better Chinatown, better homes and shelters for the homeless, better schools for the uneducated.
Until we see God’s kingdom of a new heaven and a new earth, then God is calling me to plant seeds of trust between enemies, plant seeds of forgiveness between victims and perpetrators, plant seeds of understanding between people who look different from us.
Until we see God’s kingdom of a new heaven and a new earth, then God is calling us multiply our ministries to reach out to our community children, youth, and adults, multiply our fellowship groups to nurture fellowship and service, multiply our mission giving so that we can extend our arms to hug this precious world.
You see, God wants us to seek the welfare of the city where we have been sent into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, we will find our welfare.
On Waverly Place, God is giving us Podunk Power to proclaim God’s love for all of his creation.
Let us pray.
Dear Lord, we have followed you to this place on Waverly Place and you have told us to build and plant here and to care for the welfare of others. We have come a long way to know that when we trust you, you will bless us. When we are crying and suffering along the rivers of our Babylon, you remind us that soon and very soon, you will come with hope, justice, and peace. Alleluia, Lord, alleluia! Amen.