Living With Hope in a Time of Exile

                The 2024 Election has come and gone. I waited a day before commenting on an election that featured results that I did not desire. I had hoped that Kamala Harris would win. However, what we witnessed on Tuesday was a free and fair election. Living as I do in one of the “Swing States” I am ready to abandon the Electoral College. We were subject to mind-numbing ads day and night. Besides, it would be good if candidates spent time in other states and not just in seven.

When the next Presidential election takes place, I will be seventy. Thus, I am in the final third of my life span. I have voted in every Presidential election since 1976, when I turned eighteen. I voted for Gerald Ford. I became a Democrat in the early 1980s, after voting for Ronald Reagan in 1980. I have voted for a Democrat in every election since. I’ve voted for winners and losers. But our democracy has held. I live in hope that it will continue to hold. If there is any silver lining for me, it’s that Elissa Slotkin won her Senate race, succeeding Debbie Stabenow as our Senator. She will be an excellent representative of our state in the Senate. As she said in her statement after it became clear she had won, she is a problem solver who isn’t afraid to reach across the aisle. That will be important in the days to come.

                As for my personal feelings about what has transpired, like many who hoped for a different result, I lament the outcome. I also carry with me anxiety about what the next two to four years will bring. People my age focus specifically on Social Security and Medicare.  Others will have different concerns. When it comes to the future, I tend to be an optimist. But this is not the time for optimism. But it is a time to live with hope, which is a spiritual value. Several colleagues and friends have pointed to Jeremiah 29 as having a word for this moment, as it speaks to what it means to live with hope in a time of exile. For many of us, the future looks a bit like a time of exile. Jeremiah writes to the exiles in Babylon and tells them: 

  ¹⁰ For thus says the Lord: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. ¹¹ For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. ¹² Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. ¹³ When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, ¹⁴ I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. (Jer. 29:10-14).

I highlighted Jeremiah’s word about God promising the exiles “a future with hope.” It may take time (hopefully not seventy years), but we can go forward living in hope. It is a hope that is rooted in God’s promise to be with us during this time of disquiet.

                It is the next word that my colleagues have pointed to. It speaks to how we might live in this moment. In the verses prior to the verses I shared above, Jeremiah speaks of a letter sent to the ones God had sent into exile. Now we needn’t believe that God has sent us into exile, but we can affirm the premise that God is with us in our time of exile. This is the word sent to the people living in exile, calling them and us to pursue the common good, even in times of trial. :

⁵ Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. ⁶ 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. ⁷ 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. (Jer 29:5-7).

It is an appropriate response on our part to lament the realities facing us. But we can stay there. We have to continue living, even if we do so with considerable concern for our own families and selves, but also our neighbors whom Jesus calls us to love. By neighbor, Jesus teaches us to have a broad definition. When it comes to the identity of our neighbors, the wrong question is to ask who is my neighbor? Just look around. Therefore, the word Jeremiah delivers to the exiles is an important one that speaks to the way we live in the coming months and years of exile.

                Jeremiah tells the exiles to settle in, build houses, plant gardens, get married, and have children, but most of all, “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile” (Jer. 29:7). This is our mandate, our calling. No matter what happens, we are tasked with seeking the welfare of the city where we live, praying on its behalf, for it is in this context that we find our welfare. When it comes to identifying this city, we really do need to start locally, and then move outward until we cover the nation. From there we seek the welfare of the world itself. The reason we start locally is that if we focus too much on the big picture we may get discouraged and give up. But if we start in our neighborhoods, building relationships and working together to build a better world, then we will fulfill God’s calling.

                This is, of course, the long-term calling. If you need to spend time lamenting and seeking healing of the spirit, then be sure to do that. We can’t move forward if our wounds eat at us. In my estimation, the key to moving forward as we seek the welfare of the cities where we live is that we do so in community. We can’t do this alone, even in partnership with God. That is because God calls us to pursue this life of hope with others. Yes, we need each other more than ever.