Fruitfulness at the End of the World

Fruitfulness, Part 6:

May 26, 2024

Trinity Sunday

Pastor Mike 

Jeremiah 29:1-14

O God most kind,

break your bread for this hungering flock,

through my hands indeed if it should please you,

but with an efficacy that is all your own.[1] Amen.

We are in the part of this preaching series on fruitfulness where some of the fears and challenges that we face in the fruit-bearing life are coming into view. Last week we stood with the newly liberated Israelites at the very rim of Canaan. Twelve leaders had just returned from scouting out that good land, and they brought a report of ripe grapes, sweet honey, and flowing milk, but also of enemies that appeared gigantic, and of cities with great fortified walls. “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes” (Num. 13:33), the spies told the people. In essence they were saying, “We are too few, too weak, too ill-equipped to go in and receive what God has already promised to give us.”

They thought there was a problem with those proportions. They were unwilling to accept that situation – grasshoppers standing before giants – as the necessary condition for experiencing God’s power, which is made perfect in our weakness. The Israelite congregation was made to wander in the wilderness for forty years because, in that critical moment of decision, they got hung up on their own smallness when they ought to have embraced it. When God calls us to bear fruit in every good work, what matters are the promises that God has made, not the proportions which we happen to see.

A whole tragic narrative fills the space between that story from the Book of Numbers and this passage from the prophet Jeremiah. By the time Jeremiah had come on the scene, the Israelites had finished those forty years of wandering and gone into the land; they had settled in it and raised up a kingdom. They had briefly known the land to be home, and then they lost it again. The reason they lost the land basically boils down to their failure at keeping the great commandment. Instead of loving God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, they placed their ultimate trust in wealth, political allegiances, and the business of religion. Instead of loving their neighbors as themselves, they oppressed the poor and the foreigners among them, and they neglected to care for widows and orphans. After sending many warnings to the people through other prophets, God permitted first the Assyrian Empire and then, in Jeremiah’s time, the Babylonian Empire to come and conquer the people, carrying many of them into exile. Their downfall culminated with the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple in 587bce.

As I said, some of God’s prophets served before this time, trying to warn and reform the Israelites; a few served afterward. But poor Jeremiah was called by God to serve as the world that he knew was coming to a brutal end. He was God’s mouthpiece during the absolute worst of times, when he and his people suffered the loss of home and culture. Other than Job, Jeremiah is the only other person in the Bible who curses the day of his birth. Some days, he would’ve rather returned to oblivion than borne the words of God among the rubble.

Many of you know what it is like to have the world as you know it come to end. Okay, you weren’t carted off to a foreign land by an enemy army, and maybe you haven’t watched fire engulf every place you’ve ever loved. There are people experiencing that kind of world-ending violence today, and we must remember them. But in this moment, I’d like you to consider the crises and shattering events that have caused, or might cause, everything to crumble around you.

A move that took you far from your roots. The death of a spouse or a child or a friend. The first bounced check. Rejection. Betrayal. Accident. Diagnosis. The loss of faith. We have to be willing to remember the worst of times if we are going to enter into this passage from Jeremiah 29. It is good news that the Bible speaks to us on our worst days as well as on our best.

From the rubble of Jerusalem, Jeremiah wrote a letter to the Israelite exiles who had been taken to Babylon. The letter disclosed to the people that God had set a limit of seventy years to the exile; after seventy years, God would bring them back to their homeland. That’s somewhat hopeful. But seventy years is a long time! Long enough for most of the people receiving the letter to know that they’d never live to see the day of return. But maybe a few, maybe the youngest among them, would get the chance to go back again someday. In the meantime, how were they supposed to live? What were they to do?

Jeremiah offers some surprisingly straightforward instructions.

In the land of Babylon, in a place that is far from everything you’ve ever known, there in the presence of your enemies, I want you to build houses and settle down and plant gardens. Get married, have children, and arrange for your children to be married. Work for peace. Pray for the people around you. ‘Their wellbeing is connected to your wellbeing,’ God says through the prophet. ‘And I want you to increase while you’re there, not decrease.’

To use the words of the sixteenth-century pastor and Bible commentator John Calvin, God was telling the people to live “as though they were at home…as though they were not exiles but natives of that place.”[2] It’s the same call in Babylon, the place of suffering, as it was in Canaan, the place of promise: Be fruitful and multiply. Plant gardens and pray. Bear fruit in every good work.

If the first challenge to fruitfulness is our fear of being too small, then the second challenge is our fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here it is the circumstances, not so much the proportions, that appear completely unsuitable for putting down roots and growing into mature, sacrificial love.

The reasons for our resistance to our place in the world can be petty or profound. Sometimes, we can simply not like or “click” with the people we have to rub shoulders with every day. Our neighbors may be tiresome, the dominant culture not what we’d prefer. It is easy to ask what a place has to offer to us, but harder to ask what we might offer to our place.

 The first time we went to the Farmer’s Market, soon after arriving in Pocatello, Sus and I met the potter who brings those grotesque, baby-doll-shaped mugs and bowls to sell. I thought this mug was awesome and had to buy it. We got talking with the artist, and we asked him about his history with Pocatello. Like so many people, he grew up here, moved away for a time thinking he’d never ever come back, and then came back. And he loves his life here.

He said something that was very helpful for us to hear in those fragile first months of grieving the place we’d left and being overwhelmed by the place we’d come to. He said, patting his chest, ‘One thing I’ve learned is that if you’ve got a problem with the place, the problem’s in here.’ And it’s true, much of the time our willful discontentment with the place we happen to be is a fearful defense that keeps us from the vulnerability that leads to belonging, and from the hard-won growth that leads to bearing fruit. By telling us to respond to what has been stripped away by making a life, Jeremiah forces us to ask why we assume that we need certain things around us in order to thrive. Often, we need much less than we believe we do.

However, as with the Israelite exiles, sometimes very serious and devastating things happen to us, and our protests rise much more legitimately: Certainly not here, God. Certainly not now. My world has been unmade, and I am out of place, a stranger to myself and to the people around me. At the moment I’m wishing I’d never been born. Plant gardens in strange soil? Pray for my captors? Fall in love with my enemies? Bring children into this world? Are you crazy? Can’t we wait for this season of my life to be over before we get on with the business of fruitfulness?

But the word of the prophet is emphatic: No. You can’t wait. Move forward “as though they were at home.” The Hebrew word here for garden is gannâ, and the ancient Greek translation of that word, found in the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible that the New Testament writers would have known, is παραδείσος, paradise. Plant little plots of paradise, Jeremiah says, in the place where you think living and growing and thriving is absolutely impossible. Do your part to fill your wrecked world with a little bit of beauty and prayer and love.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” – Jeremiah 29:11. Oh, it’s one of the best-known verses from the Bible, one we put on t-shirts and coffee mugs, and especially on graduation cards this time of year. We love to share these words with people who are doing well and on their way to doing even better. But that’s not who these words are for. These words are for people waking up as strangers and foreigners in their own lives. They are for people who have lost the thread of meaning to their stories. They are not meant for us when we shoot for the stars, but when we kneel in the ashes. Here’s John Calvin again: “Let us know that this sentence is rightly addressed to those in distress, who seem to have God against them and displeased with them.”[3]

Friends, the call and the promise of fruitfulness are not withheld from you when you are in distress, when your world has ended, when you seem to have God against you. You aren’t excluded from the call, but you also don’t get a pass. In the Letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (5:3-4).

All this very much reminds me of the women who came to the tomb on Easter morning. Their world had fallen to pieces; the great love and light of their lives had been crucified. Yet they pressed forward with those burial spices, intent on bringing at least a little beauty, a little dignity into the darkness. And it was because they were there doing something simple, earthy, creative, and loving that they were met by their resurrected Lord. The most essential thing about any of us is not the land we are in but the creative freedom to shape a life of faithfulness, which we receive through God’s Spirit.

Back in North Carolina I used to go birding at a nature preserve near Durham called Johnston Mill. A small river called New Hope Creek runs through that preserve, and all the land is thickly forested. From a point on one of the trails, you can see a small tree that, years ago, fell across the creek when it was quite young, when it’s trunk was no thicker than my arm. The fallen tree had grown up from roots on one bank of the creek, and then it’s young crown had adapted to the fall by becoming a second root ball digging deep into the bank on the other side. Right in the middle of the tree, what must’ve been at first just a branch had become a new trunk shooting straight into the sky, skinny but tall, wasting no time with extraneous branches but waiting to burst out into a leafy canopy at the height of all the surrounding trees.

I think about that tree all the time. I think about how what started as a trunk – the study center, the primary projection, the early effort to climb and lay claim to a spot in the light –failed and fell into completely impossible circumstances. And yet, in nature’s resilient way, that failure became part of the roots. That tree had one thing on its mind; to seek the sun. And it not only sought it; it found it.

“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.” Brothers and sisters, Christ is not ashamed to meet us at the end of the world, in the place that’s just blah, in the time that’s ill-fitting, among the people we are apt to not like. He comes and spreads his table before us in the presence of our enemies. Our Lord is risen and ascended, having made every time his time, and every place his place. Today is the day of salvation, and all the earth is his footstool.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] Bernad of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, trans. Kilian Walsh OCSO, Cistercian Fathers Series: 4 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, Inc, 1977), 3.

[2] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah and the Lamentations, Volume 3, trans. and ed. the Rev. John Owen (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans’s Publishing Company, 1968), 418, 419.

[3] John Calvin, Commentaries on Jeremiah and Lamentations, 437.