If you’ve ever flown a commercial airline before, no doubt you’ve seen the
in-flight safety demo, a two minute presentation by the flight attendants which
shows how to follow safety procedures in the event of a loss of cabin pressure
or an emergency landing.
I’ve flown dozens of times in my life, probably hundreds, and I’ve seen so many
of those presentations that I’m totally bored with them. In fact, most people
think they’re pretty lame. I try to sleep through them. I’m sure the flight
attendants are also sick to death of doing the same thing over and over.
But people actually do need to know how to put on the oxygen mask and inflate
the life vest if something happens. And it’s a federal requirement for the
airlines to do these demonstrations. So how do you make the best out of a
situation where you have to do something no one really wants to do?
Well, there have been some attempts to make the presentations more interesting.
But none more successful than a Philippine airline called Cebu, who hired a
choreographer to train flight attendants to dance the presentation, somewhat
reminiscent of a pom-pom routine. Look, here’s a short video clip: Slide
If nothing else, I know Emma would go Ga-ga knowing that they were dancing to
Lady Gaga’ music in flight. I guess if you have to do these boring
demonstrations, at least you can make the best of it and try to have some fun.
But what if your situation’s a little more serious than a boring in-flight
demonstration? What if the things you have to put up with is more than a little
boredom? It’s easy to tell someone to just make the best of it when you’re
talking about a temporary annoyance.
But what if it’s serious? What if you’re faced with something “life and death”
serious, and like the safety demo, you can’t get out of it. How do you make the
best of it? Does God want you to make the best of it, or does God want you to
constantly fight against whatever it is that’s trapped you?
The answer to that question is not always clear. But we get some guidance from
the passage we read for this morning. This passage dates back about 2600 years
ago, when the people of Judah were facing the fact that they could no longer
defend themselves against their enemy.
They had been invaded by the Babylonian army a few years earlier, and the
Babylonians took Judah’s king, queen mother, priests, prophets and leaders into
exile, forcing them to live in Babylon while the rest of the Jews stayed behind
in Jerusalem.
The Babylonians placed one of the king’s relatives, Zedekiah, on the throne, but
Zedekiah only ruled at the pleasure of the Babylonians. He was king, but he was
answerable to Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king.
Zedekiah knew he couldn’t resist the Babylonians with his own army. He would be
overpowered. But there were some prophets who were not taken into exile, and
these prophets told Zedekiah that God would fight on Judah’s behalf to liberate
Judah from the rule of the Babylonians.
But Jeremiah the king that those prophets were not really speaking for God, and
that God wanted Zedekiah to take a very different approach toward the Babylonian
king and the exiled leadership.
Jeremiah told the king that he should not try to resist the Babylonians, t hat
Judah was being punished for doing a number of things that God had told them not
to do, and that God would eventually free them from the Babylonians.
As you can imagine, this message didn’t go over too well. Jeremiah was
criticized, put in jail, and called a fraud by the religious leadership. That
didn’t stop him from speaking what he felt was a word from God to the king.
Zedekiah was caught between a rock and a hard place. If he tried to resist the
Babylonians, they might come in and crush him. If he didn’t people would wonder
whether or not he really had faith in Judah’s God. But Jeremiah told him that
not fighting the Babylonians was part of having faith in Judah’s God.
Other people weren’t so happy with that policy. There seems to have been some
kind of rebellion in Judah against the Babylonians. And some of the exiled
Jewish leaders also seem to have resisted their captors.
What we read this morning is part of a letter Jeremiah sent to the exiled Jewish
leaders in Babylon, telling them not to resist. In fact, what Jeremiah says here
is different from anything else in all of Jewish literature form the time.
Jeremiah says, “Hey. You’re stuck in Babylon. Deal with it. Make the best of it.
Build homes, set down roots, have children, let your kids get married; plant
gardens so you have enough food. Do your best to thrive in Babylon.”
He even tells them to pray for Babylon’s welfare. If Babylon does well, they
will do well. Jeremiah says that they will be in exile for about 70 years. After
that, God will bring them back to Jerusalem. Of course if you’re 25 and you hear
that God will bring back the exiled in 70 years, that’s probably not a very
encouraging message.
But remember that this number 70 is a symbolic, not a literal number, and it
just symbolizes that their time of exile completes the time of God’s punishment.
They were actually allowed to return about 55 years later.
God promises to find all the Israelites who have been exiled all over the
eastern Mediterranean and bring them all back to the Promised Land. And Jeremiah
told everyone, both the exiles and the people left in Jerusalem, that any
prophet who tells them otherwise is speaking falsely.
This oracle which Jeremiah speaks on God’s behalf raises some serious questions.
Does God punish people by sending them into exile? Is that fair? Does God really
seek for those who are sent into exile to be restored to their own land, or was
that only for the Jews? If that’s only for the Jews, then how do we understand
this passage to apply to the church?
For most of us, the idea of being forcibly exiled into another country is
entirely foreign. We have no idea what it’s like to be taken from friends and
family and made to live in a place with a different culture, a different
language, different religion, different values, and different food.
But for many people in our own community, this kind of experience rings very
true to their own lives. Sure, we have a history of being a nation of
immigrants, but the vast majority of us are two or three generations removed
from our immigrant ancestors, if not more. So that isn’t our experience.
But that sense of rootedness is a luxury that many people here in Waukesha do
not enjoy. In about forty five minutes this room will be filled with a group of
people who had to leave their native land or suffer death at the hands of
government soldiers in Burma.
They survived starvation, alienation, oppression, racism, and for some of them,
life in a Thai refugee camp. And now they’re here, exiled in a place which is
much safer, but still not their own. Can you see the parallels between their
experience and the experience of the exiled Jews?
How would we want the Babylonians to have treated the Jewish exiles while they
were captive in Babylon? Would we want exiled people in this country to be
treated the same way?
If Jeremiah’s message to these people was to make the best of it, to set down
roots in that foreign land until God moves to bring them back, is it our job as
a church to help them set down those roots, to help them plant their gardens, to
help them establish their families, to embrace them in their exiled status?
If we think that the Babylonians should have treated the exiled Jews with
dignity because they were God’s chosen people, and if God’s chosen status has
been extended to everyone through the death of Jesus, then shouldn’t we treat
our guests with that same dignity, knowing that they too are God’s people?
When we talked about this passage in Bible study on Tuesday morning, some of the
folks remarked that our Mexican brothers and sisters had experienced a similar
kind of exile. But what they didn’t realize is that our own participation in
that experience is significant.
Today, if you’re born into most families in Mexico, you’re faced with a very
difficult choice. You either stay in Mexico and face the very real possibility
that you will not be able to find any meaningful employment.
The unemployment rate in Mexico is actually lower than ours. It went from being
3% before the recession to being about 5.6%, which sounds good since ours is
nearly 10%. But that’s deceiving. The jobs you can find in Mexico pay so little
that you can barely house and feed your family. The average salary is about
$13,500 a year. The average median income in the US was over $50,000 during that
same time.
That kind of poverty breeds corruption, and it drives people to look for other
ways to make money there. Police regularly take bribes because they see bribery
as the only way to make ends meet. Others try to compensate for their poverty by
helping narco traffickers move drugs into the US or weapons from the US into
Mexico.
So do you stay there in that kind of a situation and watch your children grow up
in abject poverty while you do manual labor even if you have a college degree,
or do you go to the US illegally, where we have a different culture, different
language, and where we hire Mexican workers on the cheap to perform menial work
while simultaneously griping about them being here?
If you come here, you have few rights, which means you are vulnerable to being
taken advantage of by employers, and all the time you risk being deported and
losing everything you’ve worked for here.
Neither one of those choices sounds very good. And sure, the Mexicans weren’t
dragged here against their will, but they were forced to choose what they
thought was the lesser of two evils. And if you’re a child, you really have no
power over the choices your parents make. You’re here illegally by no fault of
your own.
Again, let me raise the question: if Jeremiah told the exiles to set down roots
in Babylon and try to make the best of it, then should we not also affirm the
Mexican community’s efforts to do the same thing here in Waukesha? If God’s
message to them is to seek our welfare, and most of them do, then should we not
also seek their welfare?
One of the other related matters that our bible study group asked me to speak
about was the relationship between the US and Mexico that led to so many
Mexicans becoming exiles, especially in the western US.
Few Americans are aware of the fact that much of the western US was previously
Mexican territory, land they won for themselves when they fought for their
independence from Spain in the early 1820’s.
Not long after that victory, they ended up having to defend those territories
from invasion by the US because our ancestors saw those areas as valuable and
wanted them for the US. The Mexican government allowed American settlers to
immigrate to Texas, but by April of 1836 native Texans and the settlers defeated
the Mexican army and claimed independence.
In December 1845, the U.S. Congress voted to annex the Texas Republic and soon
sent troops led by General Zachary Taylor to the Rio Grande (regarded by
Mexicans as their territory) to protect its border with Mexico. The inevitable
clashes between Mexican troops and U.S. forces provided the rationale for a
Congressional declaration of war on May 13, 1846.
Hostilities continued for the next two years as General Taylor led his troops
through to Monterrey, and General Stephen Kearny and his men went to New Mexico,
Chihuahua, and California.
Mexican officials and Nicholas Trist, President Polk's representative, began
discussions for a peace treaty that August. On February 2, 1848 the Treaty was
signed in Guadalupe Hidalgo, a city north of the capital where the Mexican
government had fled as U.S. troops advanced.
Its provisions called for Mexico to cede 55% of its territory (present-day
Arizona, California, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Nevada and Utah) in
exchange for fifteen million dollars in compensation for war-related damage to
Mexican property. Slide
In other words, ancestors basically took this massive territory from them and
paid them damages for the destruction the Americans had caused on our way to
forcing them to give it over. Millions of Mexicans still lived in those
territories, and they suddenly became exiles in someone else’s land.
Most of the Mexicans lost the land that they owned because the US government
required documents proving that they owned their real estate, whereas the
Mexican government had not. And their land was given to other people who came
into places like California in search of wealth from gold and oil.
Now when you take that background into consideration, it puts the whole question
of how to treat Mexicans who come looking for work in land that was basically
taken by force from their ancestors. How would we have wanted the Babylonians to
treat the exiled Jews? Like captives or with dignity?
If Jeremiah told those exiled Jews to make the best of it and set down roots,
and if he promised someday that they would be able to return, don’t you think
that’s what we would hope for those who have come here for a better life?
We frequently are told that we need to fear these people, that we need to be
suspicious of them. In Arizona the governor recently accused them of beheading
people in the Arizona desert, which she later had to admit was a lie.
They pay almost all the taxes that you and I pay; since many of them use invalid
social security numbers to get work, many of them pay into a social security
system from which they’ll never withdraw, and yet all we hear about is how they
want to come over here and sponge off of us.
Their immigration status is between them and the government. But as for us in
the church, our message to them should be the same as Jeremiah’s: set down
roots, live your lives, seek our welfare and we’ll seek yours, and we hope that
in time God will enable you to go back, if that’s what you want to do.
I’m sure that kind of message is unpopular among some people. But so was
Jeremiah’s message. He got put in jail for saying something like that. We won’t.
We’ll simply be treating our neighbors the way we would want to be treated if we
were in their situation.
Jeremiah goes on to say that God has plans for the exiles, plans for their
welfare, to give them a future and hope. God promises to restore them to their
land. My hope for those displaced people in our own community is the same. But
until that happens, I just hope we can help them make the best of it.