(3/15/26) Jeremiah 31:1-6
If I thought it would be hard to preach Palm Sunday, how much harder to preach Easter! Familiarity breeds contempt, I have heard, and while I'm not sure it is always true I definitely have gotten accustomed to the story. I skipped Holy Week this year - maybe next year I'll be more productive - but the tl;dr is that Jesus was brought before the Roman-appointed king of Jerusalem, was executed, and then, happy Easter, came back from the dead. I am not going to split hairs on whether he rose or was raised, this year, even though that is literally my idea of fun. Instead I am going to pick up this passage, that I have never heard preached on an Easter Sunday - possibly never on any Sunday! - because it is scratching that same itch for me today.
Jeremiah always strikes me as a dismal book, as indeed many of the prophets. So much bad is happening: people are caught up in themselves, spending all their time tearing down the "bad" other people, worshiping money and the government and pride and literal idols. People are coming and going, the kings are getting turned over and completely incompetent, Babylon came and that was a whole thing. And out of this we have this passage.
Now, for a moment of more information than you would like to know, I usually write these at lunch. Usually I take lunch outside, but once or twice a week I grace Hibachi 88 - a quiet little restaurant where the owners tolerate me sitting for an hour, occasionally two, after lunch clears out. I've been coming here since I started graduate school in 2020. So I think it is fair to say, today, I'm not way off the people to whom Jeremiah normally speaks: I was working, needed a break, just doing something else for a little bit. Oh there's that guy gabbing, let's take lunch over there and see what he's on about today.
Today, Jeremiah is on about going home. Well, it's a little dark - "the people who survived the sword" - there's our Jerry. But the rest of it - all about celebration, and dancing, and worshipping God of course, and ... farming? Walking up a hill? Huh, that's what I was going to do when I finished lunch. Where's the drama, man?
For refugees, home is impossible - hence needing the refuge. After work today I am going to go home, and I will walk in the door, and I will greet my son, and I will make dinner, and we will eat dinner, and I will clean up something hopefully, and then my son will brush his teeth and go to bed, and so will I, and then we'll do it all again tomorrow. Every day we do this. Every day I don't notice, or if I do just to say a short prayer at dinner or when I go to sleep or in my morning prayer. But I don't really notice. Not like if, one day, I couldn't do it.
One day, I couldn't do it. The long story isn't relevant, but not very many years ago I was ordered by the government to leave my home and not to be within a certain distance of my children. I was a refugee*, and by grace God provided a temporary home, and it was a wonderful temporary home - seriously, more wonderful than you can possibly imagine, literally the best possible situation. But it wasn't home, and it was never going to be: my home was at my home, with my children, not at this beautiful place where I lived in exile for what turned out to be six months. I waffled between hope and despair, and mostly in the latter.
Home, everything is normal. You can put your books on your bookshelf in whatever order you like, or take them off, or throw them around, or have a big stack next to your bed. You can make your bed or not, you can wash your clothes or stuff them in a basket, you can take a shower or sleep on the sofa. Of course there is some more or less responsibility you might have in them and maybe you are also mitigating your actions because you care about the people who live with you, but it is home: you are in control, and things are as you want them.
Exiled, your home is no longer yours, and you have no ability to keep anyone from making wine in the bathtub or lighting campfires in the kitchen. What's more, you - in merely surviving - are now a refugee, a burden on the people with homes of their own. Now you are subject to their rules, their order, their schedule; and to some extent you are an imposition on them, also, and even if you have the best hosts in the world - which I most certainly did - I can attest that there is always a feeling of unbelongingness. Something inherent to being a refugee feels wrong; it feels incomplete, like the order of the world has been cast aside and everything you done in the past is now lost, and everything you are doing now is vanity. The refugee has but one memory and one hope: home as it was, and home as it will yet be. Oh, Jeremiah.
And, when I was finally restored to home! My instinct was not to party, to go run about town, to go see my friends or even run to visit my church. All I wanted to do, in that moment, was to sit with my children, at home, on the sofa, and make a nice boring dinner in my nice boring pans and serve it on my nice boring table with my nice boring chairs. Then I wanted to play a game on a nice boring chessboard, watch a nice boring show, read a nice boring book, walk along my nice boring road, and sleep in my nice boring bed. Then I went to my nice boring job, and did my nice boring work, and came back to my nice boring house, and did it again the next day and the next and the next. And you know what? It was amazing. The homecoming reminds us how much blessing is in the small things of life - simple work, simple motions, simple sounds. It is no big event, it is nothing to write home about - and yet, it is the best of things.
For a long time I reveled in these simple pleasures - until one day, I forgot. I came home, greeted my children, made dinner, cleaned up, went to bed, with nary a thought. Then it happened again, and again, and again, until I barely anymore noticed the beauty of my simple life. I have no idea if this was a week or a month or a year after, but it happened all the same. The cares and concerns overwhelmed me, and I was exiled once again - this time not by law and violence but by my own ignorance. I was home, but I was not home - I became so preoccupied that I overlooked the overwhelming joy of having a place.
And here comes Jeremiah. We are back to normal. We are planting, and harvesting, and worshiping in the right place, where we should be. Welcome home. Revel! Christ is risen indeed.
--
* I was never an alien refugee as the listeners of Jeremiah were / were about to be / had been, and I do not mean to diminish that specially horrible plight. I still had the recourse of the court, and indeed the only Constitutional rights that were abridged were my rights to my children and to my property. It is a terrible tragedy that the US in my name has abridged such a spectrum of rights for so very many refugees, especially of late, and I urge us all to find ways to ameliorate that.