Absence makes the heart grow fonder!  With some exceptions this is true.   If “Covidtide” has taught us anything, we have experienced this more keenly.  We were not made for social distancing.   Though necessary, we long for what is missing – our people, our places, and our practices.   And if social distancing has made us more loving and grateful then we will be the better for it.

Absence makes our hearts grow fonder, because often we don’t know what we have until it’s gone.   Grief teaches us this.  We so easily take for granted those we see every day, until the day we cannot see them.   Memories of the difficult times fade, leaving remembrance of what was good.   No matter how things were, absence, though painful, makes the heart grow fonder.  Travel teaches this as well.   The excitement of far-away, exotic travel is quickly tempered with a deep soul-ache for the places of home.

How easy it is to take the best things for granted.   The tyranny of the urgent prevents us from treasuring the best life has to offer – more time to listen to the unfolding of a small child’s story or the extra kiss goodbye.  Then we blink and those little windows are closed, gone forever.   Only then do we realize what a gaping hole in our lives has been left vacant, space that can only be filled with our people, places, and practices.   Absence makes the heart ache, but in that aching fondness grows — a fondness we should have had before.

From the moment the Israelites stepped foot into the Promised Land, they began take for granted the blessings of being God’s people– His Word and presence.   A land flowing with milk and honey is a great gift.  But the real treasure was not the gift of land, but the Giver of life.  To know Him was their inheritance, their very great reward.  He had set his love upon them and revealed his gracious ways and promises to them.    The Psalmist captures it well.

He declares his word to Jacob,
    his statutes and rules to Israel.
He has not dealt thus with any other nation;
    they do not know his rules.
Praise the Lord! 

Psalm 147:19-20

But, within a generation of Joshua’s death there “arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.”   Like the prodigal, they filled their lives with every empty thing.  They longed for a king, like the nations around them.   And the Lord tells a dejected Samuel, “they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.”  And at that terrible moment when the kingdom is divided after the death of Solomon, Jeroboam sets up Golden Calves to keep the people from returning to the “place where the Lord put his Name.”   So easily they forgot, who and whose they were. Israel had the world’s greatest treasure in Christ.  Yet, they ran after every vanity the world offered.   They lived with their backs to God.

Prophets warned them, starting with Moses. If they lived with their backs turned to God, he would turn from them.  And everything would be taken away.   But they would not listen.   They said, “it is no use, we love foreign Gods.”  They had more gods than towns and more altars than streets.  They were not inclined, nor willing, to hear God’s word calling them back from the brink.   They chose to experience his words of justice and judgement, rather than heed words of grace and mercy.   Yet judgment is not the last word.  To reclaim them, the Lord sent them away.  He took away everything, that they might see what had truly been lost. 

For forty years, Jeremiah wept for Judah.   But it was not until the exile, that the people learned to weep.  Psalm 137 captures it well.

By the waters of Babylon,
    there we sat down and wept,
    when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
    we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
    required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How shall we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
    let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
    above my highest joy!

Absence makes their hearts tender.   Not just an absence from the land, but from the One who makes the land and its people what they are.  But is it too late?  Will God remember mercy in wrath?  Has God’s steadfast love worn thin?   No doubt, the exiles remembered their northern cousins.   Exiled to Assyria a century before, the ten tribes of the north never returned, lost forever.    God would be perfectly just to treat them the same way.  Is there any kindness left?  Perhaps, you are wondering the same thing.   Have you filled your life with every empty thing?  And left no room for the only One who can fill?   What hope is there for you?  What comfort?  

God instructs Jeremiah to speak words of consolation to fallen Judah.  And not just speak them, but write them down.  Words for them and for us!  Jeremiah spent four decades warning of judgment and exile.   Now, when hope seems lost, he opens a new chapter – the Book of Consolation.  In the midst of the longest, and most sorrowful book in the Bible, we find bright promises of God’s grace.    Jeremiah 30-33 is often called the ‘Book of Consolation.’ 

We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP

My father was a letter-writer.   On every birthday, there was a card.  Anytime I was away from home, there were letters.  He always wrote to share news from home and a fatherly exhortation.   While my father was not a very affectionate man. his tenderness shined through in his letters.   Without those letters, much of my father’s heart would have remained concealed.  

Unfortunately, the discipline of letter-writing is fading fast.   Instant communication is more expedient, more practical.   The patient beauty of a thoughtful letter has yielded to the pragmatic expediency of ‘messaging,’ despite its copious downsides.   Commercial clutter invades every exchange.  Intolerance erupts over every opinion expressed.  Nothing is private or secure.   Conversations become threads.  And our interactions become the stage, upon which we are merely players.   Every word is judged, commented upon, and hijacked by unfilterable group-think.  Yet the promise of immediacy seduces us to abandon the time-honored art of letter writing.  

Perhaps, most insidious in this brave new world is the “death of the sentence.”  My sophomore composition teacher, Ms. Sandidge, warned diligently against using sentence fragments, yet this is now the accepted norm.    The stilted, stuttering language of our instant messages, fast becomes the manner of our spoken word.   And the “death of the sentence” kills more than a way of speaking – it takes with it measured, reasoned, critical thinking.   Words describe, express, and instruct in a way that emojis never can. This is why God speaks to us in words, not images and forbids substituting imagery for God’s self-revelation in the Bible.  

To view God’s nature or purposes through the lens of circumstance or speculation, always leads to a distorted view of God, a pagan view, a view that makes a god after our fallen image.   When God desires to communicate his comfort, his purpose, his grace, his mercy, his love for us, he does it through his Word.  As Augustine famously said, “The Holy Scriptures are my ‘Letter from Home.’”

For decades Jeremiah had warned the people of Judah that the judgment of God was unfolding.   And in 597 BC, Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem and carried off the best and the brightest to Babylon. 

He carried away all Jerusalem and all the officials and all the mighty men of valor, 10,000 captives, and all the craftsmen and the smiths. None remained, except the poorest people of the land. And he carried away Jehoiachin to Babylon. The king’s mother, the king’s wives, his officials, and the chief men of the land he took into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon. And the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon all the men of valor, 7,000, and the craftsmen and the metal workers, 1,000, all of them strong and fit for war. 

2 Kings 24:14-16

Imagine how these exiles felt.   Taken from the only places and people they had ever known.   What would happen to them?  Had God forsaken them in his judgement?   How were they to live as refugees, immigrants, and resident aliens?   Would they share the fate of their sister Israel, whose ten tribes were carried off to Assyrian and never heard from again?   But God was not done with them.  He had not washed his hands of them.   God had revealed to Jeremiah that he would set his favor upon them.

Thus, says the Lord, the God of Israel… I will set my eyes on them for good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up, and not tear them down; I will plant them, and not pluck them up. I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart. 

Jeremiah 24:4-7

The Lord instructed Jeremiah to write letters to the exiles instructing them to live patiently as resident aliens.  In these letters, God’s grace shines through his judgment as he speaks comfort and clarity into uncertainty and confusion

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 their 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.

 Jeremiah 29:4-7

Resident aliens have great power to influence and effect society.   They bring their particular cultural strengths to the table, but also foster the distinctives of their homeland.  They are a part of society, without losing their identity. The Church is to be like this – resident aliens, “an island of one culture in the middle of another.” (Phil 3:20)   But it must never be merely an enclave.  For while the Church fosters the culture of its heavenly homeland, its calling is to transform its sphere of influence, not just “coexist.”  The Church is a colony of resident aliens gathered to “name the name, to tell the Story, to sing Zion’s songs in a land that does not know Zion’s God.”

These exiles were not merely collateral of war, the Lord sent them into exile.  He had a purpose for them among the Babylonians to reveal His glory and seek the “shalom” of the city where He sent them.  We see in their immigration the paradigm and paradox of the Christian life as they are placed by God’s providence in the midst of pagan Babylon, yet called to remain distinct as God’s covenant children.   Join us this week as we examine Jeremiah 29 and consider its instruction and comfort to us regarding how we are to live faithfully as resident aliens in a land that is not our home.

We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP

Parting words are powerful words.   They live in the lives of recipients long after their sound has died away.   They have power to bless or curse.  Parting words establish new courses and callings for those who heed them.   Small talk has no place in them.   Each word and action matters.   Like words of poetry, though used sparingly, each is full and potent.

We see this in Jesus’ last words to his disciples.   They were contentious, dull, self-serving, self-seeking and consumed with the pecking order.   But on the night before his crucifixion, Jesus prepares them for his departure.  His actions and words command a new pattern.   They are to love and serve one another.   This is how they will be known.

He washed their feet, the duty of a slave, not a Lord, then instructed them.

When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you…  A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

John 13:12-17, 34-35

This is how the world should see the church.   This is how the world expects to see the church.   But what does the world actually see?  Do people know we are Christ’s disciples by our love for one another?   Too often, the world sees irreconcilable conflict in the church.   We are more known for division than unity.   And in a world hopelessly divided, why would anyone look to the church for leadership when pagans seem to manage conflict more graciously and effectively than Christians.

We are commanded to “[bear] with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” and “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”   Yet, more churches are planted through division rather than obedience to the Great Commission.   To be sure, God providentially uses for good what we mean for evil.    Yet, how many have fled from Christ and Christianity, because of the Christians they knew and observed.   How many have fled from Christ because they have observed you?

Once when the missionary E. Stanley Jones met with Mahatma Ghandi he asked him, “Mr. Ghandi, though you quote the words of Christ often, why is that you appear to so adamantly reject becoming his follower?”  Ghandi replied, “Oh, I don’t reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ.”   While Ghandi’s excuse was just that, an excuse, it ought to convict us.   How do we handle conflict in the church?   How gracious and prayerful are we when conflict is unavoidable?   Do others see our love – love for Christ, love for the Word of God, and love for one another in how we respond to conflict?

Jeremiah’s ministry was filled with conflict.   God warned him it would be that way.   Jeremiah had no illusions of picket fences or of honeymoons.   From the get-go, God told Jeremiah he would have conflict “against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and the people of the land. They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, declares the Lord, to deliver you.” 

But Jeremiah’s greatest conflict was with those in the church, with priests and the prophets.   As God’s judgement unfolded against Judah, He sent Jeremiah to warn the people to submit to His discipline through Nebuchadnezzar.   If the people would repent and submit they would live.   To strengthen the message, God told Jeremiah.

“Make yourself straps and yoke-bars, and put them on your neck.… Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel…  I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, my servant, to serve him. All the nations shall serve him and his son and his grandson, until the time of his own land comes.” 

Jeremiah 27:2, 6-7

Nothing provokes conflict in church like a sermon on submission.   Immediately Jeremiah is opposed, called a liar and a false prophet.   Everything he prophesied was contradicted.   And the yoke-bars and straps, were wrenched from his neck and broken.

In that same year, at the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah… Hananiah the son of Azzur, the prophet from Gibeon, spoke to me in the house of the Lord, in the presence of the priests and all the people, saying, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house, which Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon. I will also bring back to this place Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and all the exiles from Judah who went to Babylon” 

Jeremiah 28:1-4

Jeremiah often complains and confronts, but here his response to the false prophet is remarkable.   With gracious, prayerful wisdom the prophet rebuts the false teacher and disarms his false gospel.    Jeremiah’s life is quite literally an open book.   We often see his anger, but here we observe a godly example of how to handle conflict within the church.  An example worthy of imitation.  Join us this coming Lord’s Day as we examine Jeremiah 28 and consider how to respond to conflict within the church.

We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP