Sermon 10/27/24
Jeremiah 31:7-9 and Psalm 126
Remnants and Restoration
I have been thinking about you all in this challenging season. As I reminded you when I first joined the preaching rotation here, this church was the site of my first job during seminary. I was the youth pastor from 2000-2001. As part of my role I also helped lead in worship and preached about once a month, and this was my first job at a church other than my “home” church. I felt nervous and unsure of myself, but I was also excited to be in seminary and to be really “doing it,” this ministry thing I’d felt called to for a long time. I know this is a painful time. I remember the busy congregation of 25 years ago, and I know you’ve seen and mourned a lot of change, and I know the upcoming change of closure will be the hardest yet.
I’ve been thinking about what it feels like to lose a place of deep connection in our lives, in our formation. The first home I ever really lived in, from infancy until I was about 9 years old, is still standing, and from the outside it looks the same. But the family that bought it from us completely tore out the inside. The rooms that were once my bedroom, my playroom, the rooms where my extended family gathered for so many Thanksgivings - they’re not there any more, not in any recognizable way. My grandparents’ home, around the corner from my childhood home, has been vacant for many years now, and is slowly crumbling, not safe for anyone to enter. The place I went to high school was demolished, making way for the district’s athletic offices, and a new high school across town. I can’t go into the halls I once walked as a student, a find my old lunch table or the music and theatre rooms where I spent most of my time. And my childhood church, where attend church with my grandparents and family until we moved twenty minutes away - that church closed many years ago now - a tiny country church that shrunk along with the town, and that has now been converted into a private home.
It’s painful, it fills us with loss, I think, when we feel cut off from a part of our lives, particularly a part, a place, a season, a time that shaped us deeply. Our scripture readings for today both speak to communities who have known this kind of pain on a grand scale. The Ancient Israelites of the scriptures are marked by two major themes: the Exodus story, and Exile. After a season of warnings from the prophets to repent and return to following God, after warnings that they were failing to enact justice for the poor and marginalized, after warnings that their rituals were empty if the people did not truly give their hearts to God, and after warnings that if they did not change, then God would not prevent them from being conquered and controlled by foreign rulers, the Israelites found themselves sent out from their homeland. They were exiled from home. And it was devastating. The scriptures are full of lament and sorrow in the midst of exile. There’s a deep sense of loss. There’s fear, abandonment, grief, a replaying of everything that might have been done another way.
But there’s also always still, even in the midst of what feels like the harshest punishment, God’s presence. God and God’s promises remain with Israel, even in exile. We see these themes in our scripture texts: In Jeremiah, the people are asking God: “Please, save us - the remnant. The leftover bits of your people.” The exile has come at a cost - lives have been lost. People have scattered. The clear identity of God’s people has been dulled. God, save the remnant. And God responds, “With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back.” The Psalm follows a similar pattern: “Restore our fortunes, God,” the people cry. And the Psalmist offers a blessing, imaging how God may answer: “May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.” The remnant is enough. The people are saved. God restores. There’s a homecoming.
Homecoming is certainly a theme in the scriptures - we can think, for example, of the powerful parable of the prodigal son, welcomed home by the loving father, no questions asked. A welcome home is such a powerful thing, isn’t it? As much as I started by sharing with you so many places in my life where I can never “go home” again, I find myself in a strange season in life where I am a student at Drew Theological School again twenty years after I attended here the first time. I graduated with my Master of Divinity in 2003, and in 2020, I started my PhD at Drew. I returned to a very familiar campus. I returned to many of the same faculty who were my wise professors the first time around, and have continued to teach me now, all these years later.
But even though I have returned “home” to Drew, of course, it is not all the same. I don’t have the same classmates. The places I lived twenty years ago have been upgraded into luxury housing I could never afford. Seminary Hall has an addition - for which I’m thankful - but which also changes the building a lot. Many students take classes online, and fewer are on campus, in the building. And I’m different. I started the MDiv at Drew when I was 21 years old, not even five years out of high school. Now I’m a person who is in my 40s and who has spent years in ministry and had so much life experience that I didn’t have the last time at Drew. I’m home at Drew - but home is different, and “me” is different too. And thank goodness for that. I loved Drew then, and I love Drew now, but I’m reminded that being “home” at Drew has more to do with its values, its commitments to justice and love and compassion that I resonate with, its pursuit of diversity and wisdom that inspire me, rather than some unchanging material aspects.
I’ve been thinking about my Drew homecoming as I think about these Exile texts and as I think about you all. I hear you in the voice of the prophets and the voice of Jeremiah - a remnant - the remaining people, perhaps feeling like you are about to be exiled, and perhaps already longing for home. What do God’s promises look like for you? Because I do believe God’s promises are with you. I do believe that God will restore, rebuild, grow new life in and with you. But what does that look like when you can’t come home in the way that you might have hoped?
I mentioned to you that my childhood church is now a private home. I have so many memories of my little childhood church. It is where I learned the stories of the bible, and memorized scriptures in Sunday School. It’s where I was confirmed - it happened a few years earlier than usual there, since we were a small congregation. It was where I first took communion. It was there, as a five year old, that I collected the used bulletins after church each week to save because I was going to be a pastor when I grew up. It was where I made my first request for a favorite hymn at a hymn sing, and where I first made a prayer request out loud on my own. So many precious memories. When we voted on the closure of that church at our Annual Conference, my Uncle, who was a District Superintendent at the time, when to speak at the microphone. And what he said was: this church may be closing, but the impact it has had is not over, because this church produced pastors, and church leaders, and faithful disciples of Jesus Christ who continue to follow Jesus even though it won’t happen from inside those same walls anymore. This church planted seeds, and produced fruit, and the harvest will still continue. This church has a legacy that matters.
Friends, remnants sometimes get treated as a byproduct, waste of something else that was created that is leftover and not worth much. But thankfully, we serve a God who can do a whole lot with a very little. God loves a remnant. God brings life from what is leftover. God work restoration where it seems there was nothing left. God takes the pieces of our broken hearts, and rebuilds. And so even when “home” isn’t here to return to, God builds home within us, and we bear the fruit of all the seeds that have been planted in us along the way.
Some of the details of what is “home” are changing. And we are changing, ever and always. But the constant is God, who is with us at home, and with us in exile, and with us as we find home again. Thanks be to God, our home. Amen.
