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Choose Life!Jeremiah 29:10-14We have been talking, in these weeks since Easter, about the leading causes of life. The things we might choose—the things we need—to fill our lives with so that our faces are turned toward not just avoiding death, but living more life. We’ve talked about connection, action, blessing, hope, coherence (which means having a life-leaning bottom line). We’ve heard remarkable stories of people from this congregation who have chosen life—who have chosen to fill their lives with these causes of life—at moments when they might have been defeated by events and circumstances that sounded to us almost crushing. I have been—and I think perhaps you have been too—moved and encouraged by each of these stories: their courage, their trust in the goodness of life ahead of them, their whole-heartedness about wanting more life. But what about those moments when life is so hard that you’re not so sure about wanting more of it? How do you choose life when the picture of your life as you thought it was supposed to be has slipped away, or has been grabbed out from under you? What do you hold onto when whatever it is that has become your security has disappeared? Jeremiah is the biblical prophet who lets us watch his struggle with faith in the words of the Hebrew Scriptures. Jeremiah lived in Jerusalem at the time of the exile—when Babylonian soldiers came and took from the Israelites the land that they thought God had promised them for forever. The invaders destroyed the Temple, the place of worship the Israelites had built for God to live in, right there, among them. They took the land, which had always been the sign of God’s promise to the people of Israel. And then, to complete their humiliation and defeat, the Babylonian invaders took the Israelites out of their own homes and made them march out of their homes and cities, to live in a strange land, among strange people. They were in exile—from their home, from every part of life as they had known it and loved it. It was in the midst of this utter and complete defeat that God called Jeremiah to speak for him. God called Jeremiah to speak hard truth to the leaders who felt like victims but who, in truth, had been living blindly for a long time. And Jeremiah spoke hope to those who felt like they had lost everything worth living for. These were hard messages for Jeremiah to speak, and an almost impossible message for them to hear. For this time, they had no choice but to live through the destruction of their lives as they had known them and trust that life—not just survival, but good life—would come again. Jeremiah’s message of hope did not include an offer of escape from the hard reality they were in. It offered something else. This is what Jeremiah told the people God wanted to say to them: “I know what I'm doing. I have plans—to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for. When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I'll listen. When you come looking for me, you'll find me. When you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, I'll make sure you won't be disappointed." GOD's Decree is this, Jeremiah said: "I'll turn things around for you. I'll bring you back from all the countries into which I drove you. Bring you home to the place from which I sent you off into exile. You can count on it. The question was: could they believe it? My friend Lynn Dickerson knows a lot about living in exile from the life she loved. Lynn was a part of this worshiping congregation for three years when she lived in Sacramento and worked as a Vice President of the McClatchy Corporation. She and her husband Ron now have moved to Modesto, where Lynn is Executive Director of the Gallo Center for the Performing Arts. But those are not the important parts of her story. I want you to hear from Lynn what it has meant for her to choose life. [Listen to the audio above for the entire sermon, which includes Lynn’s story.] God does not promise to save us from the dangerous realities of life. Faith does not inoculate us against loss or sadness or grief. It does not guarantee a life with no harm in it. But it gives us a home. A home in the God who is with us even in our places of exile, far away from the life we thought we were supposed to live. A God who says, “I will turn things around for you. I'll bring you back from all the countries into which I drove you. You will find your place of home again, even after you have been in exile, even when you have been in exile for a long time. You can count on it.” Can you believe it?
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