In Its Welfare, Our Welfare

Jeremiah 29:4–7; Isaiah 58:6–12

Heading into Tuesday’s elections I was feeling a bit anxious about what was going to happen. Maybe you were as well. I told myself, we have been here before, “snatching defeat out of the hands of victory,” as Robert Reich likes to say. I don’t usually watch election results in real time. It is far too gamified for my taste. And yet, Tuesday night I was enthralled as the results came in: unlikely places electing unlikely candidates. (Check out this 1974 TIME magazine article about the post-Watergate wave.) Doctors and waitresses, scientists and loggers, farmers and ministers.

Listening to their acceptance speeches, I was struck by the “placedness” of them all. Whether first-generation citizens or fifth-generation farmers, they spoke of their place as a source of meaning and of their commitment to its people, regardless of politics. They wanted to build and plant and grow the well-being of their communities. They

know that there is no such thing as private wellness, and the prophet Jeremiah knew this, too.

He wrote to the people of Judah who had been marched off to Babylon in 597 BCE. They wanted to hear that exile would be short. Instead he told them to build houses, plant gardens, raise families, and settle in. Then he said the hardest thing: “Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you, and pray to GOD on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.” (Jer 29:7)

The shalom Jeremiah was thinking about, which many translations render as “welfare,” is bigger than our idea of peace. It means health, wholeness, safety, having enough. Jeremiah did not tell the exiles to keep it as a private possession. He knew their well-being was tied to the well-being of the places they lived, even the places they did not choose, even the places that did them harm. This is still true today. Our own health depends on working for the health of the place where we live. If we simply move between places, never planting and seeking the shalom of any of them, we cannot create health for ourselves or anyone else.

And place is something that congregations are designed to commit to. The little churches that I’ve served over my ministry career are all bound by the health of their place, and those places are all bound by the health of those churches. And each place is bound to the health of the country and the laws our elected officials make to support local economies, schools, hospitals, roads, and environment. Elected leaders need to stay connected to their places, listening to all of the voices that they represent, and they need to understand how their decisions affect our planet, our global neighbors, and our collective common good.

So as I watched the town-by-town results come in for Troy Jackson in Maine, I saw the possibility of a humble man from a town of 240, deep in the Maine woods, unseating a five-term senator. When I watched his acceptance speech, what I saw was the kind of Mainer I grew up with, who sincerely cares about his people and his place, and who understands that we are all in this together.

On this coast, my friend Denise Krause ran for Oregon Senate District 3 and won by more than ten points. Hers was the most expensive legislative race in Oregon, with one Republican political action committee alone giving her opponent more than $1 million. For months the ads, mailers, and radio spots were a constant presence across southern Oregon. Finger-pointing at industrial scale.

And by Denise’s own account, this was a bruising race. She hit back hard. No one came out of that ad war unmarked. But the money was not equal, and the story that won was not the one told on television by out-of-district PAC money.

The story that won was told on doorsteps. She told me they knocked on about 33,000 doors and drew more than 500 individual donors, in a district of 140,000 people spread over nearly 1,000 square miles. Each door was a small covenant of time. Each conversation was a little Grace Margin, a space where a stranger could say what frightened them and be heard. That is gracious leadership. That is relationship. It is being from a place, not just running in it. Denise could speak from her work in health care and her own fight against an insurance company that denied care to her and to thousands of women. She knows health is never only personal. It is about networks of people all impacted by who gets covered, who gets heard, and who is left out.

I am glad she won. And, I know the machinery of contempt is expensive and is not going away. Big PAC money will keep buying up our airwaves and pointing fingers, because outrage is cheaper than listening. Division is easier than making a home among people unlike you.

Isaiah offers another word for this moment. Chapter 58 comes from the generation that came home from Babylon and tried to rebuild. They fasted and prayed hard, and nothing changed. The prophet tells them the fast God wants is to loosen the bonds of injustice, share bread with the hungry, bring the unhoused into their homes, and put away “the pointing of the finger, and the speaking of evil” (58:9). Only then shall “your healing spring up quickly” (58:8). Isaiah would not call the finger-pointing of this season politics-as-usual. He would call it a yoke, something that keeps a people bound to ways that do not allow healing and wholeness to spring up.

Tuesday showed that the yoke can be lifted, and not by matching it dollar for dollar. It can be lifted the way Jeremiah told the exiles to live: by staying, planting, knocking, listening, and seeking the shalom of the whole city, because in our city’s welfare is our personal welfare. In our country’s welfare is our world’s welfare.

Let us celebrate, take a deep breath and let it out with a big sigh, and then return to the good work of bringing shalom to this place that we call home.

From this place,

Pastor Robin