Abstract
‘Where has God called you to be – and for what purpose?’
Many years ago, I can remember CMS, one of the Anglican mission agencies, had a poster which read, ‘Has God called you to stay where you are?’ On the face of it, this was a surprising poster for a mission society, whom we would instinctively think would be trying to recruit people to leave where they were and to go somewhere else, in the service of Christ. Perhaps it was an inverted way of making Christians think about whether God was in fact calling them to offer themselves for service overseas, but it seems to me that the poster actually enshrined a deep truth.
That truth is that all Christians should be open to the possibility that the situation in which we find ourselves, the place where we are, the communities and the church we are part of, however difficult we may find any or even all of those, have been given to us by God, for his glory, for our own growth and for the furthering of his purposes and Kingdom. In short, that where we are is where God has called us to be.
Those of us who, like me, draw inspiration from the way of St Benedict will recognise this possibility, for the three Benedictine vows, or promises, are not the familiar monastic ones of poverty, chastity and obedience (though Benedictines are nevertheless meant to be poor, chaste and obedient!). Rather, Benedictines make promises of obedience, yes, but then of stability and of what in Latin is conversatio morum, which is hard to render into English but seems to refer to seeking to grow spiritually throughout one’s life.
It is the middle promise, of stability, that is about staying where you are, for God’s sake. The promise of stability a Benedictine makes is that he or she will remain with and within that particular community – under the Rule and the Abbot – for the rest of his or her life, that he or she will be rooted into that place and into that group of people until death.
In an increasingly restless and mobile society, one in which persistence and perseverance in relationships and in places is more and more rare, we all perhaps need to hear afresh this perspective of God’s call to stay where we are, of being stable, at least as the starting point of our thinking and praying and acting. For it is all too tempting, if a particular relationship or community or place becomes difficult for us, for us to give up on it straightaway and – if we are Christians – to speedily assume that it is God’s call to us to do so.
Don’t get me wrong. There will be and indeed are times when it is right for us to move on, physically or emotionally, from a place or a relationship or a community. God does not necessarily call us to remain for ever, particularly if is seriously damaging us. He can – and indeed sometimes does – call us to go. Then we must ‘shake the dust from our feet’ and depart.
But what I am saying is that we must not leap to that conclusion too readily, that we should start from the position that says that we should remain where we are until or unless God clearly and unambiguously calls us away, rather than that we should only remain if he clearly and unambiguously calls us to do so. For we may still have a role and a purpose and a mission from God and under God to fulfil in that place, that community, that relationship, that congregation.
That seems to me to be what Jeremiah’s letter to the Exiles in Jeremiah 29 is all about. We heard some of the letter as our Old Testament reading today. Jeremiah is still in Judea, but the first deportation to Babylon has taken place, and it is to that first group of deportees that Jeremiah, inspired by the LORD, writes. Life is hard for those in exile, as they seek to ‘sing the Lord’s song in a strange land’ (Psalm 137.1). And they long for early release, and perhaps have even been encouraged by some of their own prophets to believe that such a release is indeed imminent.
But Jeremiah sees all too clearly that the LORD’s call to the Exiles is for them to stay where they are. The release, the permission to return home, will not come soon. For his glory and for their growth, the LORD’s purpose is for them to remain in Babylon for the foreseeable future. And Jeremiah tells them so: ‘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.’ Jer. 29.5-6)
This is stability, staying put, on a grand scale! The Exiles are to settle down, totally, utterly, completely. Later in the chapter we will hear that the time of the Exile will be seventy years – two, or even three, generations. And the Exiles are to accept it and to live into it.
But Jeremiah sees that the Exiles have a positive role to fulfil in Babylon, too. They are not just there to be punished for their sins, to grow spiritually themselves. They have a task to do, for the benefit of the place and the people among whom they are living. ‘Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom’ (Jer. 29.7). I have deliberately not translated the word shalom for it is a difficult one to put adequately into English. Traditionally, we render it ‘peace,’ but our understandings of peace are so limited (‘absence of war,’ generally) that they just don’t do justice to the nuances of this wonderful Hebrew word. Here in Jeremiah 29, various English translations render shalom as, ‘welfare,’ ‘peace and prosperity,’ ‘well-being,’ ‘the good,’ and we need all of those renderings to get the full flavour of what Jeremiah, certainly, meant when he spoke about seeking shalom. The Exiles are to seek the welfare, the prosperity, the well-being, the good, the peace of the pagan places where and the peoples among whom they have found themselves – for if those places and those communities thrive, they too will thrive.
And they are to seek the shalom of wherever it is they are in two ways, two ways that go hand in hand with each other: direct action for the common good of all, and not just for themselves, and intercessory prayer. Those two always go hand in hand. It is, I think a Jesuit saying that goes, ‘Pray as if it all depended upon God; act as if it all depended upon you.’ It is one of those many both/ands with which Christianity is riddled. It is never either/or.
Prayer and direct action in and for the places and the communities where they find themselves. That is what the Exiles are to do in Babylon, alongside atoning for their own sins and seeking to become more godly in their own life and faith.
And what Jeremiah says to the Exiles, I believe he – or, rather, God, through him – says to us, too. That wherever we are, in terms of place, of communities, of relationships, of congregations, until or unless God calls us away from them (and we need to be clear that he is before we do), we must seek shalom, not just for ourselves, but for all those around us, by praying for those around us, and by becoming involved in local life, seeking to care for the poor and needy by acts of loving service, and to transform the unjust structures of society, as the third and the fourth of the Marks of Mission put it.
It is as we live into wherever it is that God has called us to be, as we seek to have stability, as we seek our equivalent of building houses, planting gardens, marrying and having children, as we seek the shalom of that place and those people, by prayer and by action, that we will, I believe, discover the presence of God in Jesus with us and within us, furthering his kingdom in us and through us, and not just despite us.
Where has God called you to be – and for what purpose?