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.

This week I read a poem, entitled “Dream Teaching” by Edwin Romond who is a retired English teacher, that describes a perfect day for a teacher, filled with eager to learn students, functioning copy machines and contains this great fantasy moment for any teacher:
          When the bell sounds? they stand,
          raise lighted matches
          and chant, "Adverbs! Adverbs!"
          I drive home petting my plan book.

And of course I like it because, in part, I still live with the fantasy that I have spent the last 36 years as an unemployed teacher and coach, just doing this as sort of fill-in until another teaching job comes along for me. Of course I am a Mets fan, so delusions are part of my reality.

But I also like it because so many of my friends and family members are, or have been, teachers and, to paraphrase Willie Nelson, teachers “were always my heroes and they still are it seems”. Especially now as they continue to do their work in a culture that has grown inexplicably hostile, as they learn to live with changes that they don’t agree with or like, as they continue to do their work which they love.

Which fits in so well with the Jeremiah passage.

The leaders of Israel knew all about living in a culture that was hostile, they have been captured and are off in Babylon when Jeremiah writes them this letter telling how to live in a hostile culture, a place where the rules of life that they once knew don’t work anymore.

I think we all, not just teachers, can identify with that these days, can’t we? We all have a vision of what a perfect day – at work, at home, wherever we are - would be like: smiling faces everywhere we turn, no bills to worry over, no threats to our jobs, no unhappy children, no depressed friends, no drifting, shattered marriages, no bad news on TV or from the doctors.

We know what that day would look like because that’s what we signed on for! I doubt that any of us choose our friends or a spouse or a job or a life so that we could be miserable. But the reality is that friends, spouses, jobs and lives change, and if we are not changing with them in some of the same directions, if the dance moves don’t line up, if we are not continuing to find areas of mutuality, then we will be absolutely miserable, we will find ourselves living in an atmosphere that we don’t like and don’t know how to respond to.

And Jeremiah said to them “You need to change, you need to adapt to these new realities, you need to hang on to your faith and let go of your preconceived notions of what life should be like, you need to live your lives and pray for those who have taken charge of life, for as they prosper you will prosper.”

We can only imagine how little the Jews wanted to hear that message, nothing was turning out the way that they had it planned. Oh they still had a vision, they still had a dream but it was a dream that was fed by false prophets who held out a false hope, by those well-meaning people who wanted to be optimistic and who promised a quick return to Palestine. And to them all God said no, put the false dreams and hopes aside.

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.

What would that kind of prayer life look like for you and me?

What are the things around you that you don’t like?

Well let me suggest that it would mean that praying for the welfare of men and women like Tyler Clementi, even if you are troubled or afraid or antagonistic toward gay men and women.

And it would mean praying for men and women like Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei who held Tyler’s life up for public ridicule and scorn as a prank, a joke, and destroyed his sense of worth and value in life, never even considering what it would do to him.

And it would mean praying for a culture like ours that thrives on mocking and demeaning and demonizing those who are different than we are.

And it would mean praying for the bullying, polarizing politicians, on all sides, who feed all of our fears and encourage all of our worst instincts.

And it would mean taking a Christ like approach to people.

One of the things that I have been trying to emphasize the last few years, and I feel like I have been failing at it, is the significance of the NT stories that mention Samaritans. I can’t overstate the animosity that existed between the Jews and the Samaritans. They worshiped and served the same God, but in dramatically different ways, with dramatically different emphasizes and priorities. It was not much different than the differences in the worship and service of Jews and Christians and Muslims in today’s world. And yet scripture is persistently adamant about Jesus view of the Samaritans: everyone else in his Jewish culture looked down upon them, he sat and spoke with and asked a favor of, a promiscuous Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well; everyone else in his Jewish culture hated them, he made a Samaritan the hero of a parable he told about neglecting the opportunities we have to do the right things in life, and the point was so clear that we can’t hear the word “Samaritan” without thinking “Good Samaritan”, even though for most of Jesus’ listeners a “Good Samaritan” was impossible to conceive of, a classic oxymoron; and in today’s story he healed ten lepers and he points out that the only one who thanked him was the Samaritan.

Whether or not we like it, it is clear that Christ sought the welfare of everyone around him, everyone he met in his journey, not just his family or tribe or faith group or the people who were doing good and happy things.

We try to limit God’s kingdom, making it sound like a journey to a destination. We talk about struggling our way through this world until we arrive in Zion, City of our God. The New Jerusalem where the streets are paved with gold and God will heal of our illness, restore us and dry the tears from our eyes with his own hands. And all of that is true and good and holy, but we fail to realize that God’s kingdom is a fully present reality, not just a promise of a future possibility. We are not on a journey to the kingdom, the journey is taking place in the Kingdom; the journey and the destination are all part of the Kingdom.

That’s what Christ meant when he said “The Kingdom of God is among you.” Not will “be”, “is” among you.

In distant Babylon and in distant America, God’s kingdom “is” among you.

And whatever else that might mean, it certainly means that God’s people have work to do and the starting point of the work is prayer for the land and people and culture in which we find ourselves.

And let me be clear about what those prayers are not meant to be.

They are not the condemning prayers of that small congregation in Kansas that is so consumed with a hatred of homosexuals that they bring additional suffering upon the families of soldiers who have died.

Could you, in your wildest imagination, see Jesus involved in that?

And they are not the ignorant, fearful prayers of that minister at the small congregation in Florida, who is so consumed with a fear of the Islamic faith that he would threaten to burn their holy book.

Could you, in your wildest imagination, see Jesus involved in that?

No, God calls us to pray for the welfare of the place where we are, the welfare of the people around us, for in their welfare we will find our welfare.

I am occasionally, and perhaps accurately, accused of too much “Happy Talk”, too much of an emphasis on joy and grace and not enough on sin and justice. But the reality is that there is much in our culture that sickens me, there is much that I find distasteful: the increasing ugliness of public debate, the preoccupation with meaningless celebrities, the addictive worship of wealth and so, in my prayers, I pray for our nation and our world, our Church and our state, so that we might see and appreciate the glorious things that are with us on our journey.

And what I have found is that the more I pray those prayers, the more I am able to see those glorious and eternal things, the more I am able to experience the things of joy and grace, the more I am able to look past the ugly and temporary realities and begin to see, more and more clearly, the unfolding plans that God has for us and for me.

For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. And there are moments when it all becomes so very clear, moments when we know that our plans and Gods plans are coming together and overlapping each other in creative and joyous ways.

And those are such good moments that – if we are smart – we spend the other moments trying to figure out how to get our plans closer to God’s. You see, God’s plan doesn’t change, it has the same borders and contours it has always had: Love God, Love your neighbor, Remember the Sabbath, honor your parents, cherish your vows, don’t lie or kill or steal, and don’t waste you time wishing things were different, just take today as it comes, working your way toward God.

We have been through a lot of changes over the last five to ten years and there is no sign of the changes slowing down. And some of them are good, marriages, births, graduations, new jobs, some of them are very good, enjoy them, they are the pieces of the Kingdom that we encounter on the journey.

And some of them are not so good, and some of them are confusing and some of them are disheartening, and some of them just hurt so much. The thing we need to do is to pray about them, get around them, get over them, get beyond them, because they are the things that are blinding you to the joy and love that God is giving to you.

My friend, Jimmy, has a song where he describes what we have always done here, as a Church:
          Walls that won’t come down,
          We can decorate or climb
          Or find some way to get around

And as Russ reminded us today:
          Sometimes it takes so long, to get to the other side
          You can't figure it out, no sense in asking why
          He'll light your fire in the middle of the night
          He'll lift your soul when you got no fight
          Wait upon the Lord It's only a matter of time

That poem about living on a perfect day is a profound reminder to focus on the perfect. Not because we will experience the perfect every minute of every day, but by focusing on the perfect we will stretch closer and closer to the holy, closer and closer to what God wants for us in the day to day of life.

As I wrote to my teacher friends when I sent the poem on to them: the vision of perfection, unobtainable, allows for excellence in the reality!

And then, as for the rest of it, it’s only a matter of time.

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.