Over the Copier

Jeremiah 29 and the God Who Stays Through Change

Over the copier in the office is a passage from Jeremiah that I have been looking at for four and a half years now. It is a deeply familiar text that is so often used as a personal promise of blessing, when in actuality it is a promise of God's presence in catastrophe and change.

The prophet Jeremiah writes in chapter 29, "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope." We have put these words on coffee mugs and graduation cards, bulletin boards and laminated calligraphy over copy machines. We hand them to one another at the edge of new jobs and new houses, and we mean by them something like: it will all work out. But that is not what Jeremiah was telling the people he was writing this message to.

He was writing to exiles. The letter that contains these verses is addressed to people who had been carried off to Babylon after their city was broken open and their temple destroyed. They were living in the place they least wanted to be, among the people who had taken everything from them, and they were not going home any time soon. The verses just before the famous ones say how long they would be gone so plainly: seventy years.

Most of the people reading that letter would die in Babylon. The promise of a future was not a promise that the catastrophe would be reversed in their lifetime. It was spoken directly into a changed reality so total that there was no going back.

But here is where it gets really interesting. God asks them to do something really specific. Before the comforting words God says: Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry, have children, let your children marry. Seek the welfare of the city you were dragged to, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, because in its welfare you will find your own. This is not the language of waiting out a storm with your bags packed by the door. It is the language of putting down roots in soil you did not choose, in circumstances not of your making. God does not tell the exiles to hold their breath until the old life returns. He tells them to live—really live—in that changed place.

That is the part I keep returning to, standing at the copier. We so badly want God's faithfulness to mean that our circumstances will hold still. We want the constancy of God to translate into the constancy of our situation: the same house, the same health, the same people in the same pews, the same shape of a life we have grown accustomed to. And then change happens, as it always does, and we are tempted to read it as God's absence. If things are falling apart, surely God has stepped away.

But Jeremiah will not let us believe that. The whole force of his letter is that God is not less present in Babylon than he was in Jerusalem. The exile is not the place God abandoned them to; it is the place to which God went with them. "When you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart." You will find me—not back where you were, not once everything is restored, but here, now, in the unfamiliar country, in new and strange ways. The seeking is not a search for the way out. It is a turning toward the God who is already standing in the new place, ahead of us, before we even arrive.

This reframes what change is for people of faith. Change is not the thing that happens when God's plan goes wrong. Change is the ordinary medium in which God's faithfulness gets worked out. The future blessings do not bypass the upheaval; they run straight through it. The exiles' descendants did return, generations later, but the people who first read this letter were given something other than escape. They were given a God who would not leave them, and a calling to be faithful in the meantime, even as the meantime turned out to be most of their lives.

This also gives us a more careful way to talk to one another when hard things come. We often reach for "this must be part of God's plan." I've heard a lot of this lately and I know people mean it kindly. But said to someone standing in wreckage, it can land as a claim that God arranged the wreckage on purpose, that the loss was the point. Jeremiah does not say that. He does not tell the exiles that God planned their devastation for their own good. He tells them that God has plans for their welfare even now, in the wreckage and as they pick up the pieces. The distinction matters. "God planned this pain" makes God the author of the harm. "God is present in this, holding a future I cannot yet see" makes God the one who stays. The first tries to explain suffering and usually explains it badly. The second refuses to explain it and promises something better than an explanation: company, and a future, and a God who can be found in the place where the pain resides. When we sit with someone in grief, or anger, or frustration, we can be God's presence—saying not this was meant to be, but God is here, and God is not done with you.

I think that is why this text belongs over a copy machine, of all places—a machine that runs in the middle of the daily, unglamorous work of a church that keeps changing whether we want it to or not. Members come and go. Seasons turn. The familiar arrangements of things we counted on quietly rearrange themselves. And the word over the machine does not promise us that none of this will happen. It promises us that the God who knew us before we were formed knows us still, in every place the changes carry us—and that God can be found there, ahead of us, in the place where we are going.

Let us seek, with all our heart, the God who is already there, ahead of us.

Pastor Robin