Summary of the Sermon for the Opening Service

«1 These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. 2 This was after King Jeconiah, and the queen mother, the court officials, the leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the artisans, and the smiths had departed from Jerusalem. 3 The letter was sent by the hand of Elasah son of Shaphan and Gemariah son of Hilkiah, whom King Zedekiah of Judah sent to Babylon to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. It said: 4 Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 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. […] 10 For thus says the LORD: Only when Babylon's seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfil 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.»
(Jeremiah 29: 1 – 7, 10 – 14)

1. ‘Seek the welfare of the city…. For in its welfare you will find your welfare.’ Jeremiah’s letter, sent to the exiles in Babylon after the first deportation (597 B.C.), and before the definitive fall of Jerusalem (586 B.C.), forces us to reflect on the relationship between religions and churches and the welfare of the city (or country, as the Septuagint translates it).

2. Are we today observing what G. Kepel calls ‘the revenge of God’? In many parts of the world, religious fundamentalisms spread their recipes for the welfare of the city, often violently: “Put everyone under the law of God!” Here in Europe, and particularly in Italy, there is mounting pressure from the Roman Catholic Church and from others, insisting that the ‘city’ should recognise itself to be in need of a guide, in order that it might live its life in a healthy way, maintain just laws, understand human rights, defend life…. The city is told: “You who are desperate and confused, allow yourself to be guided by us, who are experts in humanity.”
Often interreligious dialogue seems to be aimed at the creation of a ‘common front’ which will gain more space for God in civic life, so that the city will adopt religious ethics.

How do we, who form a small diaspora of Methodists and Waldensians in Italy, seek the welfare of the city? Do we still have a passion for the wellbeing of this country, through which we spread after 1848, this country which for centuries neither wanted us nor listened to us? Do we know how to take a step beyond the bitterness we feel about the growing strength of clericalism and the state of our politics? Can we beat off a sense of alienation from this ‘city’ which no longer seems to have any sense of ‘the common good’?
It is with these questions and worries in our hearts that we hear the words of Jeremiah, which were not written for us but which still speak to us – and powerfully! – in our democratic ‘city,’ where there are no ‘subjects’ but only free citizens, no longer ‘edicts’ but parliament and laws, seeking (supposedly) to build the ‘common good’ in a place where all have equal liberty and rights.

3. God invites the exiles to seek the welfare of the city, a city in which they now find themselves not because of an accident of history which they may hope to overcome but because of God’s judgment upon Judah and Jerusalem. Babylon is the city ‘to which I have sent you.’ Seeking the welfare of that city and recognising the judgment of God upon us therefore go together. In this view of things, instead of trumpeting the ‘Christian roots’ of European culture, lamenting its secularisation and looking back with sadness to past days of Christendom’s hegemony, we ought to recognise that secularisation has brought an end to the religious intolerance which covered our continent with blood, and today’s diaspora` blocks any one particular absolutist claim from discriminating against anyone. For only a church which knows how to tell its own story as the Israelite prophets knew how to tell Israel’s story – a story of fall and error – is able to contribute to the welfare of the city.

4. “When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me,” says the LORD. These words do not refer to the time when the exiles will have returned home, but to the time of exile itself, which will last for two generations. It is a revolutionary word, for in those days it was believed that the defeat of a nation signified the defeat of its gods, that the destruction of a temple signified the end of a god’s presence with his people. Remember Psalm 137, and the people who couldn’t sing the Lord’s song ‘in a strange land’! They felt separated from the LORD. Here, says the LORD, in that strange land to which I have sent you, I will let you find me. In the place where only tears and regrets seem possible, God allows himself to be found.

Let us receive these words as a promise, but also as an invitation ‘to seek the Lord with all our heart’. Seek God. Do not act in such a way that society will think of you as ‘administrators of the holy.’ Do not believe yourselves called to defend God. Seek Him. Do not present Him to the world as ‘the necessary foundation’ but, rather, seek His face. Seek God, not something else, such as ethics, values or civilisation. Whoever thinks himself to have the truth, for himself and for others, no longer seeks. But whoever has experienced forgiveness and the holiness of God seeks God again. Whoever has met God, seeks Him again, in order to not mistake the Living One with what was previously understood about Him. As Luther once said, The task of our lives is not to posses God but to seek Him. We must always seek Him, and seek Him again, always seek Him anew…. So we go along our path, from strength to strength, with ever increasing clarity of vision. For not he who starts to seek is blessed, but he who perseveres and continues to seek to the end (Matthew 10: 22), always starting again and seeking, and re-seeking that which was found. For whoever does not go forward along God’s paths goes backwards, and whoever does not seek, loses that which was already found, because once on the path of God, one cannot stand still. (Luther, commentary on Romans 3: 11)

5. ‘Pray for the city….’ It may seem a paradox, but it is perhaps the least ‘clerical’ thing we can do for the welfare of the city. To pray for the city does not signify asking God to make our ideas triumphant, to make others like ourselves. It signifies asking God to sustain the city in its search for justice; it means putting our trust in the hope of God’s new world, and not in our own projects and proposals (recipes!).

6. Jeremiah’s letter is addressed ‘to the remaining elders…. and to the priests, to the prophets and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile,’ that is, to the exiled community and its leaders. It is a good image of our Synod! Just like Judah in Babylon, we too, here, seek to walk together (this is the sense of the word “synod”); we are receivers of a word of judgement, of call and of promise. We have all that we need for the road ahead together, which takes us into a future filled with hope. Amen.